Pleasant Hell

275 Pages·2004·47.845 MB·English

by  John Carroll Dolan

PLEASANT
HELL
John Dolan

Copyright © 2005 by John Carroll Dolan
The author wishes to express his gratitude to:
Katherine Dolan (spouse)
and Mark Ames (friend and writer)
.. .for all the personal debt...
All rights reserved under International
and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without the publisher's written
permission, except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Fomnat & Design Copyright © 2005 by
Capricorn Publishing, Inc.
Cover Design by Dasha Mol’
ISBN: 0-9753970-4-4
Published in the United States and Great Britain by
Capricorn Publishing, Inc., in 2005
www.CapricornPublishing.com
f
I
1
My first year here, I used to walk out to the cliffs to visit the
coastal fortifications. Stand inside the gun-emplacements firing
back at where I came from, litde exploding noises out the side of
my mouth.
No one else ever seemed to notice them. There wasn't even
any graffiti. It amazed me, these things lying there unfilmed. If any
coastline in California had been so beautifully sculpted for war,
they'd be filming there every day. But here—nothing. For a long
time I didn't get it. Now I think I understand: this is "Peace."
Ten miles offshore is the war. Unfilmed too, unnoticed. It's
been going on God knows how long, and it doesn't matter to
anyone. Out there where the continental shelf drops off to the
mid-ocean trench, there's an upwelling of "cold, nutrient-rich"
Antarctic water. Every year the squid come to meet it. Squid by
the billion. More squid than God could count. They feed, mate
and die, in that order. For a few weeks the water is paved with
squid, a Sargasso Sea of animate sashimi squirting DNA around in
little clouds of egg and sperm. Then, having donated their genetic
wills to the general fund, the squid just die. And drift slowly down,
falling for days till they settle on the mud, fuzzy with decay,
patiendy lying still until they can be vacuumed up by the grotesque
bottom-feeders of mid-ocean, creatures from Lovecraft's worst
nightmares.
This has been going on for—oh, roughly speaking, "forever."
And nobody films it. Nobody notices it at all, except for a few
2 JOHN DOLAN
local biologists and the Korean fishing boats. The Koreans show
up on schedule every year, like carnies making their annual scam-
visit to a hick town. They're old pros, Barnums who know exactly
how to attract the squid with banks of light so bright that from
our dank little town it looks there's a Vegas-style strip operating
offshore, just over the horizon.
There isn't. Just grimy rusting Korean squid-boats with banks
of searing megawatt lights hung out on either side, and nets to
haul in the galaxies of dying squid sliding around under the lights,
queuing up to get killed. The squid stoically mate and die; the
Koreans glumly harvest the squid; the birds come and eat the dead
and dying squid; the local science-column devotes a paragraph to
the "fascinating" life cycle of "these remarkable animals"—and
that's it.
Last year I actually did the math and figured out that the Otago
Daily Times allots this hecatomb approximately one column-inch
per billion dead squid. And those inches are not exacdy high-rent.
After all, the front pages have to be saved for the big stories, like
"Sheep Injured" or "Local Couple Married 2,000 Years." The
Squids' obit is printed on the back page, alongside the letters to
the editor—a morbidly interesting selection usually featuring
something by this loony Creationist who goes by the valorous
pen-name "Canny Scot," and insists on disputing the fossil record
with a hippie expat in our Biology Department. In his latest,
"Canny Scot" asks how we can fail to see the evidence of God's
plan in "the world of Nature all around us."
I say tie him to the light-rigs of one of the squid boats. Facing
down. With his squinty old "canny" eyes tweezed open like the
guy in Clockwork Orange. Keep him out there all night, while the
sullen Koreans try to process the billions of mindless, eager squid
squirting around under the lights, trying to crowd into the nets:
"Duh . . . me first! Me first!" Let him spend the night looking
down into that squirming mass of eager, gelid protoplasm sliding
and flopping around, gleaming in the milhon-watt lights . . .
animate jelly so thick you could stroll around the boat on it,
bouncing along like kids on those McDonald's PlayZones filled
waist-high with colored ping-pong balls . . . walking on water,
buoyed by several million squid-per-square-foot... bouncing over
PLEASANT HELL 3
slurpy tubes all eager to get closer to the nets, avidly fouling the
water with milt and eggs, all trying for a ticket into the net.
And the Koreans smoking cheap Russian cigarettes to stay
awake, then spitting back in the water—so that some Japanese
office worker a year from now can scowl at his mute wifeling,
"You made the squid taste like cheap Russian cigarettes again,
stupid wife!"
Let "Canny Scot" have a good look at God's plan from the
vantage point of a light-pole off the side of this squid-boat. Let
him look down into that writhing, pulsing water and see in it
God's divine plan for this antipodean Alcatraz. Let him see how
much we matter in the grand scheme. Rope him tight to that light-
pole and keep him out there facing the water all night, drooling
half-frozen ropes of spittle. Let him have a good long look at
God's plan.
In fact, let him stay out there, ten yards out the side of the
boat, while it steams back to harbor here. A little fresh ocean
spray will do him good. Taste God's cold pickled water. Smell
God's cheap diesel fumes. Watch God's choppy waves for ten
hours, spewing God's fish-and-chips into the chop at intervals.
Then when the boat reaches harbor, untie him and let him drop to
the smelly concrete dock. Let him commune with the old stains of
fish-blood around the gutting table. See if those stinking old stains
form a grand pattern in the concrete. Pry his mouth open—knock
some of the rime off it—and jam his false teeth back into place,
then ask him about God's plan for this place.
I can tell you God's plan for this place very concisely: God
created this place as a critique of me.
A week ago I found out that they're actually making t-shirts
against me. I was minding my own business, walking across
campus innocendy whispering "It's not my fault, It's not my
fault!"—a nice normal day, in other words—when I was grabbed
and pulled into a doorway by this litde neo-medieval nerd I
vaguely recognized from last year's course. I gave him a B-minus,
if I remember correcdy—which means I probably destroyed his
lifelong dream of becoming a doctor. (They need an A in my
course or they don't get to go on to the second year of med
school.) So I didn't blame him for savoring this opportunity to tell
4 JOHN DOLAN
me bad news. I don't blame him, or for that matter any of them;
I'd just rather they didn't exist.
He pulls me into this doorway and warns me in a
conspiratorial whisper, "Uh-h . . ."—looks around for eaves­
droppers—"I thought I'd better warn you: they're making t-shirts
against you ... against English 124!"
English 124 is the compulsory "Communication" course I was
imported to teach to 700 unwilling med students from all over the
Commonwealth. They hate it. They hate me. They hate the whole
package. You can actually calculate the amount of hatred focused
on me if you set it up as a story-problem:
If an imported Communications professor teaches 700 students pery ear,
and eveiy one of them hates his guts, how many students mil hate his guts
after threey ears?
Yes? You, with your hand raised: how many?
That's right, "2100": At the end of three years on this rock in a
freezing ocean, he will be hated by 2100 students.
Not counting this year's crop. Include them and I'm inching
up toward the 3,000 mark. If (X) equals the amount of hate a
single student generates, staring down at me when I teach in the
pit of that huge auditorium, then my life equals (X) times 700,
times four years.
No matter how little value you assign to (X), you get a pretty
substantial figure. It was almost big enough to finish me off, that
first year. That one was close. I keep trying to tell myself it's not
so bad any more, that they don't really hate it or me so much. But
every time I convince myself, another little bomb goes off,
another Indian arrow thwacks into the wall two inches from my
head. Like this little news item, the voodoo t-shirts directed
against me. Rebellion by t-shirt. What next, the Black Spot shoved
in my hand by a passing pirate? Two pounds of semtex wired to
the ignition of my Subaru?
I started groaning when the little informer told me about the t-
shirts. Mistake! His smile got instantly broader and happier when
he saw my terror. They can smell fear.
I tried to get details from him: "—Where?—What shirts?
Who?"
PLEASANT HELL 5
He looked very solemn, very self-consciously honorable, and
said, "I can’t tell you who. Just—in the student hostels. A lot of
people . ..”
"Oh God ..."
He stared up at me solemnly, a litde Titus Oates, so proud of
having this inside info about The Papist T-Shirt Plot. A hint of his
pleasure in giving me the bad news shone in his face. He was
enjoying this moment in all kinds of ways: savoring my guilty
terror; feeling noble for warning me; and glorying in the notion of
himself as secret courier. He thinks he’s in some Jacobite
conspiracy, whispering secret intelligence to Bonnie Prince Charlie
i.e. Bonnie Prince Me.
I know those nerd dreams of valor and intrigue so well! This
guy's about five-eight, with cokebotde glasses and buck teeth—
but I know that he has superimposed on this ludicrous encounter
a scene from some medieval war film, where the rebels whisper
secret information in dark doorways before storming the town. I
bet he believes with all his heart that he would've done well at
Agincourt. . . well, so would I, litde fool! Litde kinsman . . . But
we don't get Agincourt anymore, kid, we get this: this career
anxiety, this unlovely terror at the podium, this humming voodoo-
death-ray generated by 700 crazed adolescents.
And for that matter, the career-terrors are way harder to
endure than Agincourt could've been. Since facing the med
students, I've decided that the knights were wimps. The arrow
cloud at Agincourt was nothing compared to the voodoo-death-
stares every Monday evening!—And not just once but twice,
because I have to repeat the 5:00 lecture for another shift of
paranoid adolescents at 7:00. Let's see the flower of French
chivalry do two Agincourts in one day! And each of my lectures
lasts 50 minutes, which adds up to a total of 100 minutes per week
being subjected to the arrow-cloud of angry med students' death-
stares. Let's see Roland or Richard the Lion-Hearted face that!
Then they can talk about how lion-hearted diey are.
But in the meantime there was this litde snitch to deal with.
Couldn't stand there too long with the foot traffic passing
between the library and my office building. Too many people
drawing a bead on me. I thanked die litde nerd-conspirator,
detached his hand from my coat, and fled.