As with all living things, the day came when Donald Trump died.
I won’t dwell on the details of his death, since his family officially suppressed them and provided only boilerplate bromides about his last moments. No autopsy was performed either, so he became probably the most known person of recent times whose physical condition will remain a mystery. There were rumors, and sensationalized claims in tell-all books of legitimately questionable reliability, but I will pass over them since my story begins after his death.
Of course, he did not end up in Heaven.
Funny thing about finding yourself in Hell: there is no denial of the fact. You know it. You and countless millions milling about you, who know where they are too, who want someone to complain to about it but also know there is not one sympathetic ear nearby. This realization is also very devastating: people cry upon finding themselves there, call out for mercy, beg for forgiveness, while a very few know they deserve being there, and prepare for the inevitable.
But he did none of this. He simply looked at all the others and thought, “This must be some mistake. I can’t be here. Only losers go to Hell, and I am not a loser. There is something I can do, someone I can convince to get me out of this.”
So he stood silently, watching. As he did so, he saw that others came to the crowd of the recently dead. Each spoke to one of the dead, then lead that person away. He tried to see where they went, but after taking a few steps the pair vanished. The crowd pressed forward, as each of the crowd was led off into nothingness. This would have been creepy, but after having died there is little left to make one feel creepy.
After a while, a dweebish, dumpy looking woman holding a clip board approached him. She reminded him of a meter maid who once had the audacity to ticket his car for parking in a handicapped space. He never bothered to pay the ticket. The memory surprised him: he had never thought of the incident after he handed the summons to appear in court for the ticket to one of his lawyers with the instructions to “handle this.”
She looked at the clipboard, then at him. “Come with me,” she said.
The tone of the voice lacked all emotion. It was not angry; it was not evil; it was not sadistically delighted. It was the tone someone who was tired and hated their job would use to address someone they had absolutely no interest about; he was just one more monotonous duty she had to perform before she could clock out and go home.
While he had been waiting there, he had convinced himself he would fight all of the demons of Hell, that he would prevail and show everyone how he had been underestimated his entire life. Maybe convince whoever was in charge that he should be hired on to torture these losers instead, and maybe find a way to take over the place. But her complete lack of affect demoralized him. He knew then and there no matter what he did, he could change nothing.
She turned away and started walking. He followed.
“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked. She said nothing. Then he shouted, “Why don’t you answer me?”
She stopped and looked at him. “You people have no idea how the afterlife works,” she said. “One of the tortures inflicted on theologians who were bad people is to show them just how much bullshit their ideas of Heaven and Hell were. This idea that the Devil inspired evil, yet he also tortures evil people… It’s a clear contradiction, and anyone who thought it through would see that it doesn’t work that way. Just bullshit.” She looked at her clipboard once again. “If I weren’t being punished for a mistake I made centuries ago, I wouldn’t have to be here with you.”
“With me?” he asked.
She continued to look at her clipboard. “Once I take you where you’re going, my punishment will be complete. After all these centuries I won’t have to deal with the lowest of the cowardly slimeballs. I’ll be back to dealing with more respectable sinners.” She turned and continued walking.
For a moment he stood there. He realized that she wasn’t trying to make him come with her; she obviously didn’t care if he did. He could sneak away and possibly avoid whatever punishment was intended for him; anything would have to be better than that. Then he looked around, to see he stood on a grey, featureless plain with a sky the color of a soiled napkin. Except for the meter maid, he was utterly alone. The crowds of the recently dead were nowhere to be seen; if he had the least inclination to reflection, he would have wondered where they had gone.
Faced with the prospect of being alone for eternity, he ran after the meter maid.
After a while she stopped, turned and looked at him. She looked down at the clipboard, then back at him.
“You realize this is all a projection of your mind, don’t you?” she began. “The reason I look as I do is because of your thinking. I look like this meter maid — whatever a meter maid is — because of something you once thought or believed. I’m telling you this because what happens to you from here forward all depends on what is in your mind.”
She paused a moment, tired of talking. She was painfully bored at her duties. She had given this speech tens of thousands of times, with very little variation, so one could understand her boredom. The reactions to her speech had been much the same in every case: this class of sinners were uniformly unimaginative. The results were almost always the same: only one in a thousand bothered to actually listen and understand what she was about to say, and even fewer act on it. Then she remembered the quicker she finished with him the quicker her punishment was completed, and she could return to dealing with “more respectable sinners.”
“All of those people you saw when you arrived here, you saw how they reacted to their fate. Some denied they had done wrong. Some begged for a lighter punishment. Yet a few – a very few – accepted they had done wrong, and deserved coming here. Now the truth is that there is no punishment: only purification. One suffers, and through suffering is released from sin, and goes on. But until you accept that you deserve coming here, it is not purification. It is punishment, which will continue until you acknowledge you did wrong.”
“Punished for how long?” he asked.
“As long as it takes.”
“A million years?”
“Or longer,” she answered. “No one knows, and none of us had the morbid curiosity to find out. But I’ve told you enough. You’ll find out the rest.”
And with that, she opened the door, walked through it, and left him.
That surprised him. A moment before there was only an endless plain around him, and now there was a door to somewhere else. He ran to the door, pulled and turned the doorknob, but the door would not open. He pulled and turned the doorknob some more. The door still did not open. He continued to try to open it for a long time.
That is why it took him so long to realize he was in a room. It was just a room, four walls, a ceiling, a floor, and a locked door. There was no window or source of light, yet he could see everything. The six surfaces had the same color, but it was a nondescript color he could not think of a name to give it. The room was large enough for him to lie down in, but not large enough for him to walk around in, unless he fancied walking around in a tiny circle. Nevertheless, he walked around the room a few times, looking for something, anything, that might help him get out of the room.
There was nothing in the room that would help him leave it. He would have known that if he hadn’t tried so hard to deny the fact. And when he stopped looking, he knew the meter maid had told him everything he needed in order to leave the room: admit that he had done wrong, that he deserved to be punished. But he believed that only losers and suckers admitted they had done wrong, so he refused to do so, even though he was in a room in some distant corner of Hell where they would forget about him. And he knew, with undeniable certainty, that they would.
That didn’t mean he was isolated from what happened back on Earth. In this room he was aware of how everyone on Earth remembered him — and how they forgot about him. First was his own family: each of them changed their last names, and within a few years of his death no one related to him had the same last name. The businesses he had created changed their names, were bought out by other businesses, or dissolved. The buildings he had built all changed their names, or were demolished.
People who knew him gradually forced him out of their memories. Some denied knowing him because they wanted to escape the crimes they had committed on his behalf. Some forgot about him as a means to handle the harm he had done to them, either to confront the pain and remove the power it had over them, or to suppress it because it was so harmful. His enemies vilified him for a while, until new distractions came along, and they moved on. For a while his name was associated with all sorts of evilness and unethical behavior, and for a while he was infamous as the worst president of the US. But time passed, and the facts of his crimes became less relevant as the Constitution was amended and laws were passed so his crimes could not be repeated in the same way.
It was about this time he discovered he changed inside that room. Occasionally he would take off his shoes because, even in spiritual form, they would pinch his feet after he wore them too long. Then one time after taking them off, he reached over to them, only to find they were gone. He spent a long time searching that empty room for them, perplexed and angry that they had vanished, cursing and swearing at enemies real and imaged for having played some role in their disappearance. It was only when he stopped looking for the vanished shoes the truth was undeniable as a kick in the groin: the longer he remained in that room, the less there would be of him.
“But I will always exist!” he shouted where no one heard him. “I was a president! I will be in the history books forever!”
Now an interesting thing about history is that it is kept alive by those with an interest in it. Even if events and people are recorded, someone has to read those records, and perpetuate those events and people in living memory. Further, history is long and lives are short: historians aren’t interested in every facet of the historical record, only selected parts of it. After consensus formed he was the worst president in US history, after a number of measures had been taken to ensure no one like him would ever become president again, and after a number of people had inflicted crimes on people in new but dispiriting ways, interest in him gradually but steadily faded. That he had been president meant he would be mentioned in history books, but that space dwindled to a paragraph. His son Don Smith received twice as much space in those books: his divorce trial from a tv celebrity known for her footwear was notorious for allegations of bizarre activities.
For a while, an occasional historian would try to incite some interest from the public about him, but the books and articles failed to attract much attention, even from the lunatic fringe: his term as president was marked with countless examples of failure, and no one wants to be associated with failure. Requests for funds to study his career were denied, and at best he would be mentioned in passing in books on more prominent personages of that time like Alexandria Occasio-Cortez or Michael Cohen. What books about him as the primary subject that had been published about him went out of print, were discarded from libraries, were pulped by used booksellers as unsellable, or sat forgotten in dusty corners of research library storage crates.
His oblivion culminated in a paper where one historian, born centuries after Trump had died, argued that over all these years his name had been recorded incorrectly: this historian argued the correct name of the 45th president was “Dan J. Trapp”. Although that historian’s reasoning was faulty, and a number of other experts of this period produced numerous primary documents showing his name had been reported correctly over all of these centuries, in the end the general consensus was that this historian was right. Thus it came to pass all the history books recorded that Dan J. Trapp was the man who succeeded Barrack Obama as president.
Needless to say, in his forgotten room, a very angry and forgotten soul wailed and shrieked for a long time. At one point it seemed that the walls might shake loose and he could escape, but too obsessed with injuries real or imagined he never noticed.
He also never noticed how his form further dwindled. His clothes faded to faded colors painted on a manikin-like figure; his hair attenuated to worn felt over his doll-like head. Even that part he was most vain about, it had withered away to leave no trace its mushroom shape ever existed. Had there been anyone to look at him, he would have appeared to be a badly-sculpted caricature of a man. But there was no one there to look at him, and no one who cared to remember him.
At any moment he could have stopped this. He could have left this room simply by admitting that he had done wrong and deserved to be punished for the harm he had done to others. But every time he remembered this option, he would tell himself, “Only losers and suckers admit to their mistakes. People who win, who win so much they get tired of winning, they never admit to mistakes.”
After more time passed, even the caricature form dwindled away. All that was left in that forgotten room in Hell was barely a personality: a thread-bare bundle of memories of how countless people were hurt in countless different ways, and a belief that admitting he was responsible for any of those injuries would be a sign of weakness. Nothing that could be purified and permitted to go on to a better place.