Ted Chiang - Hell is the Absence of God

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Science Fiction/Fantasy

By Ted Chiang

Hell is the

Absence o

God

Hell is the Absence of God

by Ted Chiang

Fictionwise

www.Fictionwise.com

First published in Starlight 3, ed. Patrick Nielsen

Hayden, July 2001

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Hell is the Absence of God

by Ted Chiang

This is the story of a man named Neil Fisk, and how he

came to love God. The pivotal event in Neil's life was an

occurrence both terrible and ordinary: the death of his wife

Sarah. Neil was consumed with grief after she died, a grief

that was excruciating not only because of its intrinsic

magnitude, but because it also renewed and emphasized the

previous pains of his life. Her death forced him to reexamine

his relationship with God, and in doing so he began a journey

that would change him forever.

Neil was born with a congenital abnormality that caused

his left thigh to be externally rotated and several inches

shorter than his right; the medical term for it was proximal

femoral focus deficiency. Most people he met assumed God

was responsible for this, but Neil's mother hadn't witnessed

any visitations while carrying him; his condition was the

result of improper limb development during the sixth week of

gestation, nothing more. In fact, as far as Neil's mother was

concerned, blame rested with his absent father, whose

income might have made corrective surgery a possibility,

although she never expressed this sentiment aloud.

As a child Neil had occasionally wondered if he was being

punished by God, but most of the time he blamed his

classmates in school for his unhappiness. Their nonchalant

cruelty, their instinctive ability to locate the weaknesses in a

victim's emotional armor, the way their own friendships were

reinforced by their sadism: he recognized these as examples

of human behavior, not divine. And although his classmates

Hell is the Absence of God

by Ted Chiang

often used God's name in their taunts, Neil knew better than

to blame Him for their actions.

But while Neil avoided the pitfall of blaming God, he never

made the jump to loving Him; nothing in his upbringing or his

personality led him to pray to God for strength or for relief.

The assorted trials he faced growing up were accidental or

human in origin, and he relied on strictly human resources to

counter them. He became an adult who—like so many

others—viewed God's actions in the abstract until they

impinged upon his own life. Angelic visitations were events

that befell other people, reaching him only via reports on the

nightly news. His own life was entirely mundane; he worked

as a superintendent for an upscale apartment building,

collecting rent and performing repairs, and as far as he was

concerned, circumstances were fully capable of unfolding,

happily or not, without intervention from above.

This remained his experience until the death of his wife.

It was an unexceptional visitation, smaller in magnitude

than most but no different in kind, bringing blessings to some

and disaster to others. In this instance the angel was

Nathanael, making an appearance in a downtown shopping

district. Four miracle cures were effected: the elimination of

carcinomas in two individuals, the regeneration of the spinal

cord in a paraplegic, and the restoration of sight to a recently

blinded person. There were also two miracles that were not

cures: a delivery van, whose driver had fainted at the sight of

the angel, was halted before it could overrun a busy sidewalk;

another man was caught in a shaft of Heaven's light when the

angel departed, erasing his eyes but ensuring his devotion.

Hell is the Absence of God

by Ted Chiang

Neil's wife Sarah Fisk had been one of the eight casualties.

She was hit by flying glass when the angel's billowing curtain

of flame shattered the storefront window of the café in which

she was eating. She bled to death within minutes, and the

other customers in the café—none of whom suffered even

superficial injuries—could do nothing but listen to her cries of

pain and fear, and eventually witness her soul's ascension

toward Heaven.

Nathanael hadn't delivered any specific message; the

angel's parting words, which had boomed out across the

entire visitation site, were the typical Behold the power of the

Lord. Of the eight casualties that day, three souls were

accepted into Heaven and five were not, a closer ratio than

the average for deaths by all causes. Sixty-two people

received medical treatment for injuries ranging from slight

concussions to ruptured eardrums to burns requiring skin

grafts. Total property damage was estimated at $8.1 million,

all of it excluded by private insurance companies due to the

cause. Scores of people became devout worshipers in the

wake of the visitation, either out of gratitude or terror.

Alas, Neil Fisk was not one of them.

* * * *

After a visitation, it's common for all the witnesses to meet

as a group and discuss how their common experience has

affected their lives. The witnesses of Nathanael's latest

visitation arranged such group meetings, and family members

of those who had died were welcome, so Neil began

attending. The meetings were held once a month in a

basement room of a large church downtown; there were

Hell is the Absence of God

by Ted Chiang

metal folding chairs arranged in rows, and in the back of the

room was a table holding coffee and doughnuts. Everyone

wore adhesive name tags made out in felt-tip pen.

While waiting for the meetings to start, people would stand

around, drinking coffee, talking casually. Most people Neil

spoke to assumed his leg was a result of the visitation, and

he had to explain that he wasn't a witness, but rather the

husband of one of the casualties. This didn't bother him

particularly; he was used to explaining about his leg. What

did bother him was the tone of the meetings themselves,

when participants spoke about their reaction to the visitation:

most of them talked about their newfound devotion to God,

and they tried to persuade the bereaved that they should feel

the same.

Neil's reaction to such attempts at persuasion depended on

who was making it. When it was an ordinary witness, he

found it merely irritating. When someone who'd received a

miracle cure told him to love God, he had to restrain an

impulse to strangle the person. But what he found most

disquieting of all was hearing the same suggestion from a

man named Tony Crane; Tony's wife had died in the visitation

too, and he now projected an air of groveling with his every

movement. In hushed, tearful tones he explained how he had

accepted his role as one of God's subjects, and he advised

Neil to do likewise.

Neil didn't stop attending the meetings—he felt that he

somehow owed it to Sarah to stick with them—but he found

another group to go to as well, one more compatible with his

own feelings: a support group devoted to those who'd lost a

Hell is the Absence of God

by Ted Chiang

loved one during a visitation, and were angry at God because

of it. They met every other week in a room at the local

community center, and talked about the grief and rage that

boiled inside of them.

All the attendees were generally sympathetic to one

another, despite differences in their various attitudes toward

God. Of those who'd been devout before their loss, some

struggled with the task of remaining so, while others gave up

their devotion without a second glance. Of those who'd never

been devout, some felt their position had been validated,

while others were faced with the near impossible task of

becoming devout now. Neil found himself, to his

consternation, in this last category.

Like every other non-devout person, Neil had never

expended much energy on where his soul would end up; he'd

always assumed his destination was Hell, and he accepted

that. That was the way of things, and Hell, after all, was not

physically worse than the mortal plane.

It meant permanent exile from God, no more and no less;

the truth of this was plain for anyone to see on those

occasions when Hell manifested itself. These happened on a

regular basis; the ground seemed to become transparent, and

you could see Hell as if you were looking through a hole in the

floor. The lost souls looked no different than the living, their

eternal bodies resembling mortal ones. You couldn't

communicate with them—their exile from God meant that

they couldn't apprehend the mortal plane where His actions

were still felt—but as long as the manifestation lasted you

Hell is the Absence of God

by Ted Chiang

could hear them talk, laugh, or cry, just as they had when

they were alive.

People varied widely in their reactions to these

manifestations. Most devout people were galvanized, not by

the sight of anything frightening, but at being reminded that

eternity outside paradise was a possibility. Neil, by contrast,

was one of those who were unmoved; as far as he could tell,

the lost souls as a group were no unhappier than he was,

their existence no worse than his in the mortal plane, and in

some ways better: his eternal body would be unhampered by

congenital abnormalities.

Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably

superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to

consider, like wealth or fame or glamour. For people like him,

Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point

in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that. And since

God hadn't previously played a role in Neil's life, he wasn't

afraid of being exiled from God. The prospect of living without

interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes

were never by design, held no terror for him.

Now that Sarah was in Heaven, his situation had changed.

Neil wanted more than anything to be reunited with her, and

the only way to get to Heaven was to love God with all his

heart.

* * * *

This is Neil's story, but telling it properly requires telling

the stories of two other individuals whose paths became

entwined with his. The first of these is Janice Reilly.

Hell is the Absence of God

by Ted Chiang

What people assumed about Neil had in fact happened to

Janice. When Janice's mother was eight months pregnant with

her, she lost control of the car she was driving and collided

with a telephone pole during a sudden hailstorm, fists of ice

dropping out of a clear blue sky and littering the road like a

spill of giant ball bearings. She was sitting in her car, shaken

but unhurt, when she saw a knot of silver flames—later

identified as the angel Bardiel—float across the sky. The sight

petrified her, but not so much that she didn't notice the

peculiar settling sensation in her womb. A subsequent

ultrasound revealed that the unborn Janice Reilly no longer

had legs; flipper-like feet grew directly from her hip sockets.

Janice's life might have gone the way of Neil's, if not for

what happened two days after the ultrasound. Janice's

parents were sitting at their kitchen table, crying and asking

what they had done to deserve this, when they received a

vision: the saved souls of four deceased relatives appeared

before them, suffusing the kitchen with a golden glow. The

saved never spoke, but their beatific smiles induced a feeling

of serenity in whoever saw them. From that moment on, the

Reillys were certain that their daughter's condition was not a

punishment.

As a result, Janice grew up thinking of her legless condition

as a gift; her parents explained that God had given her a

special assignment because He considered her equal to the

task, and she vowed that she would not let Him down.

Without pride or defiance, she saw it as her responsibility to

show others that her condition did not indicate weakness, but

rather strength.

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ScienceFiction/FantasyByTedChiangHellistheAbsenceofGodHellistheAbsenceofGodbyTedChiang2Fictionwisewww.Fictionwise.comCopyright©2001byTedChiangFirstpublishedinStarlight3,ed.PatrickNielsenHayden,July2001NOTICE:Thisebookislicensedtotheoriginalpurchaseronly.Duplicationordistributiontoanypersonviaemail,f...

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