Page 15 of Hell and Its Pleasures

It was then that I finally stopped.

Four

Iwas out of the lesser demon’s range—or realm, as I imagined it was. It no longer whipped me, and the fog had moved in a way that once again I had been cut off from everything. Opaque and impenetrable, I could see nothing that would direct me to Asmodeus or my purpose, and instead I had returned to that desolate and solemn loneliness I had first encountered when entering Hell.

In this moment I sat and ruminated. The feelings I had were complex and layered. Shame still drowned me. Every time I thought of Bishop Jonah, I shivered. I couldn’t be sure now about any memory I had of him. Had I always been attracted to him? Had the blasphemy and the corruption of an otherwise sexually innocent relationship been the thing to turn me on?

Itwasthe blasphemy, wasn’t it? I fiddled with my hands and closed my eyes, trying to ignore my nakedness the way Adam and Eve must have tried. In a way, this was my own Genesis. What I was learning of myself now I had never had cause to learn before.

I thought:if you are this person, who enjoys being degraded, who enjoys being filthy, perhaps you have never been a good person.

Why that mattered to me, I couldn’t say, except that I was still struggling to unite my desire with what I had been taught. The reality of who I was still upset a part of me, even when the rest of me could get off on it.

I sat unmoving and unsure of myself for what felt like hours.

That was, until I heard the singing.

For all that I disliked about the institution of the church, I had been raised in it, and moulded by it, and spent altogether too much time amongst it and its community, to the point where the feelings it could elicit in me were inevitable. I didn’t have to be in a gaudy chapel, or some grand cathedral with stained glass iridescent like scales, and incense clogging every corner, to feel God. I didn’t have to prayer or take communion or wait for the Holy Spirit to bless me with His voice. When I was younger especially, I could feel him everywhere.

To thieve as a child and be caught, to have my whole life upended with the promise of my self-reform and eternal salvation, meant that in my youthful innocence, I trusted that God was on my side. I thought he had saved me. In those days I could feel Him in the warmth of the sun on my face, or the peace that might settle my anxiety when amongst the other members of the cloth. I found God wherever I looked, because he hadn’t failed me yet.

Then the years stretched on and on and what had given me joy once now did nothing for my hollow heart.Hehad no interest in saving the soul of a would-be sodomite. He had no interest in releasing me from decades of torturous suffering; my cross to bear was my devotion to men, my love of the human body, my desire to partake in that pleasure. And themore I thought of what Heaven would look like—a place still so devoid of what I wanted, and instead filled with the love of a God who, by His own standards, could not love me truly—the less I wanted to go there.

You know the rest. You know how I got here. Tell me, then, why hearing that choral hymn ring out in the dry heat of Hell, that I thought:

Return to me, and I will return to you

Malachi 3:7

Return to me. Is that what was happening now? One last ditch attempt at saving my soul, a lifeline in Hell, a promise that if I crawled to Him, He would absolve me of everything I had done?

The singing was amorphous but beautiful. No single voice stood out to me. I sat like a petulant child, naked and warm in that foggy circle, waiting to see if I could understand the trick at play.

Because God would not be here. And if I was honest with myself, I did not want Him here. I had made my own path and I was walking it now.

So, as I crawled towards the sound of the choir, I said aloud: “I am not God’s bitch.”

Asmodeus in my ear, just a memory, whispered,“You are mine.”

I crawled through that tunnel with my eyes closed and let the feeling of my righteous betrayal lead me on. Halfway between anxiety and joy, with a touch of rejection; I clenched my jaws and tried to remember what I was doing this for. That I had chosen myself and my own pleasure; that corruption and degeneration of the self suited me far better than piety and eternal, untouched goodness.

What had God ever given me?

Shame! Unrest! Unease of my soul! Guilt that felttumorous in my chest and a rabid urge to tear myself apart just to make it all stop!

And the Devil? What had he given me?

Pleasure. An appreciation for my body. A gravity, an anchor for my soul, a reason to become myself.

Like that, with pleasure a mantra in my head, I crawled.

The song was unlike any I had heard, but it had the familiar high-pitched lilt and the serene call of a young voice echoing throughout a church. As I got closer, I could smell incense. Closer still and it choked me with its intensity, but I pushed through, until the wall of fog around me shifted in its consistency. No longer was I surrounded byfogbut by much incense burning a cloud of haziness around me. I was in a church.

I blinked and in a second the space around me transformed. Rumbling from the ground, columns of stone and marble sprung up in spirals and reached high into the air, dotting the razed earth like giant spears left abandoned after some ancient war. Like a biblical miracle, I bore witness to this great sundering of the earth. Then, from some place beyond the haze, the rest of the church came together. Fragments of stained glass clanked against one another, fusing to form all manner of windows. It was an unfamiliar church, not one I had ever prayed in, and yet homely; it had all the same symbols and trappings of every other holy place I had visited, and by those ideograms, the concept of religion was once again conferred upon me.

My body reacted like I was truly standing in a church of God, naked, with the cum of some lesser demon still staining my mouth. My heart rattled in my chest and nausea flooded me. I cannot describe the intensity of that feeling: of shame and guilt and unnamed fear suddenly pooling in your chest, and no logic or reasoning can do anything to make it go away.God was in my head with His hands around my throat:Return to me!

Return to me, you whore.

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