Jason Gypsum eats his cauliflower like a good boy. He does so with a spoon, for a spoon is more like a shovel than is a fork, and the verbs have no less claim to shovel than do the indignant nouns, and so shovel he does, this Jason Gypsum, as good boys must treat cauliflower.

  It is paramount to be a good boy. It is a standard he pursues and protects to the neglect and the ruin of everything else, to good sleep and getting enough sun and shitting once a day. Indeed Jason Gypsum is tired and pale and feels quite urgently the other compulsion just now. But a portion of the cauliflower remains, and so he is not yet good. He is not even good in proportion to the cauliflower he has eaten. He will be good once he’s finished and before then he is wicked.

  Before Jason Gypsum was called Jason Gypsum he was called J.J. and he often went to a place called Fairfield Elementary School. He recoils from the memory whenever it visits him, although visits is not quite the right word for the actions of a man in a mask springing from behind a shrub under the cover of dark, and he recoils from it because what he remembers best and most miserably of that time was how very little attention he paid to the distinction between good boys and wicked ones. Back then he ate cauliflower with a fork or a spork and only when presented to him and then only reluctantly.

  Back then he ate cauliflower as a favor to his father. And then his father died and went to HELL and J.J. died too and went to HELL too and came back Jason Gypsum and ate cauliflower with a spoon.

  Jason Gypsum’s mother died first, part way through his time as J.J.. The implications of that hardly occurred to small naive J.J., too blithe to eternity just then to mourn even to the degree that stupid elephants mourn. Certainly he, like the elephants, hadn’t developed intelligence enough for angst enough to look frankly at the four dimensional box that is eternity, smack his lips, scratch his chin, and stuff sulfur and hydrochloric enemas and bleakness and horny demons inside.

  If it hadn’t occurred to little J.J. that his dead mother might have had a space in that box carved out for her, it was, in big Jason Gypsum’s singular mind, an intractable fact that she had gone to HELL. After all, small inoffensive J.J. had earned his spot, had been ushered along without a ticket or trial. At the time J.J. was a good boy, according to the horrifically permissive standards of before. At the time J.J. was on course toward perfect attendance, of all things, a milestone to be commemorated at a semesterly ceremony in the Fairfield Elementary School’s tan cafeteria, atop a stage at one end of it, amidst the blue tables and the tan walls with the vertical posters that converted words like PERSEVERANCE into longwinded motivational acronyms. He and father had already agreed on the perfect place for the perfect attendance ribbon in an album with a red canvas cover, a tall unused section between two pictures of his mother who’d been alive to smile, to be kept in place by way of glue stick, the kind with orange round bases ribbed for scrolling.

  In one of those photographs mother clung to her son, who was J.J., who was himself smiling, for he had with no great difficulty graduated pre-school. In the other mother’s eyes were glassy, for she had partaken in the drink, the fermented drink, and in that way she had done wrong and been wicked, a bad girl, and bad girls go, Jason Gypsum knew, where J.J. had gone despite his perfect attendance, despite not once initiating contact with his genitals for anything more lascivious than aiming at the good-smelling soap always diminishing between the plastic grates in the urinal. No doubt that had been its own kind of lust.

  So J.J.’s mother was in HELL, in every likelihood, though he had not laid eyes on her there. Such was not the case with father, who was a lovely man according to mortal sensibilities, J.J’s included, but had with little doubt lived long enough by then to yield either to lust and masturbate, or to convenience and spear his cauliflower, or to jam a finger in a drawer and presume to blame God for it. Even if none of those were true, had not come to pass, and even if father stood guiltless of any one of the quadrillion sins turning steadily over, spitted on the rotisserie that had become Jason Gypsum’s mind, certainly he’d done something sufficiently offensive to the righteous judgement of heaven.

  It is not even a guess. Jason Gypsum saw his father in HELL. Touched his hand, brushed his fingertips, maintained that bare minimum of human contact for the whole duration of the first instant of the eternity they’d entered together. And then, from behind, a wave rolled in, for HELL was a version of the sea, and it carried J.J. this way, and father that, and the next wave spun J.J. around, not to see father again, and the next one spilled over the lip of the chest he occupied, filling it part way, making it heavy, and the next one was sufficiently tall, and J.J. in his sinking chest sufficiently low, so as to close the lid, and somehow to lock it, and the next one buffeted him in his little sarcophagus, and the next one he didn’t feel.

  Jason Gypsum sometimes failed to prevent himself from wondering whether the circumstances of his first death pertained at all to the quality of his first damnation. He had been at sea. Much the same looking sort of sea, insofar as one stretch can be distinct from another. There are a few ways, actually. However: In both cases there was no land in sight, nor icebergs, nor was it especially cloudy. There were no breaching whales, no algal blooms, no glint of reflected sunlight, no sinister cartilaginous triangles carving small zipper patterns through the surface. It was not especially stormy, it was not especially calm. It was not bright, nor was it dark, for it wasn’t noon and it wasn’t midnight, and it was hardly nearer one than the other, not in HELL nor at the tapering edge of life.

  They were similar, HELL and the place he’d been just before it, but then, most of the world was the sea, so it hardly seemed unrepresentative, hardly stretched incredulity that it should be a coincidence. Most of the world was the sea, and most of the twenty-four hours of most days in most places featured some but not terrifically much sunlight, and mostly it doesn’t storm, and also most skies are not pristine, and few places have icebergs, fewer all the time, apparently, and any given point on any ocean was likelier than not to exist above and indeed vastly above a horizon’s measure from a grain of dry sand or a blade of grass, and he could not see the bottom from the surface, either, not mud or seagrass or coral heads or oyster beds or swarming molting crabs, not on Earth and not in HELL, but then most parts of the sea are deep, deep enough to freeze the light of the sun, hold light by the neck, especially in HELL, especially there, oh my God please God please, especially there.

  Before J.J. died and went to HELL and was revived as Jason Gypsum by a business associate of his father, he had met a business associate of his father. Somehow even as small tiny little J.J. he’d thought of the gentleman in those terms, BUSINESS ASSOCIATE, and no doubt those words in that order had been introduced to him on that day and for that purpose, and although he’d only just learned them they seemed fitting and he’d used them, and they did fit, definitely they fit, far better than friend, according to his memory, although he was inclined to admit that saving a man’s son from HELL was a friendly thing to do.

  They’d met his father’s business associate in a place called Kingston and accompanied him to an anchored thirty-eight foot catamaran called Caledonia via a decrepit little launch called Mercury 25hp according the crumbling paint on the sputtering motor. On the wet grimy stinking bench of the wet grimy stinking launch Jason Gypsum recalled that his feet were continually tangled in things like rusty leaders with lead weights on one end and orange crusty hooks on the other, and by some kind of very thin mesh material, ever wet, perhaps the essence of a chum bag, repurposed in tatters for some or another maritime purpose, but definitely once a chum bag according to the smell and the scales and the brown stains nearer where J.J. had supposed had been the bottom of what he supposed had been the chum bag.

  Father and his business associate did not talk much during their jaunt on the Mercury 25hp between Kingston, which was a city, and Caledonia, which was a catamaran, but father did often make faces that J.J. found unfamiliar on and unsuited to a decent man like father, and the business associate did say things J.J. found strange and out of place, unsolicited things floating in vacuum like shards off a comet’s tail, things like It’ll be fine, Sid, and she’s got no family, and think of your’s, and five-hundred-thousand for a few days of your life and a few nights of sleep, and these guys are billionaires, not barbarians, they’ll treat her fine and the kid will thank you one day and HELL, she might, too—you saw what Kingston’s like.

  And now Jason Gypsum blinks and in his mind he is J.J. mounting Caledonia via a retractable ladder at the stern. There is nobody aboard but for he and his father and his father’s business associate and the ghost that haunts the belly of Caledonia. He is not to go belowdecks, says father above the howling wailing specter of the place between the pontoons, and J.J. obliges. He is old enough already to question the premise, for doubt to form over so overt an intersection between the real and ectoplasmic planes, but he abstains from saying so and, largely, from further entertaining the hunch. He did not believe himself to be abstaining for reasons of sloth, for he was young such that energy was freely had and flippantly spent. His just then was a greedy, almost lusty sort of abstinence. More the glutton and the adulterer than the sloth. J.J. was old enough to recognize that he’d been young enough to blame ignorance and perhaps this is his sin.

  They set sail at the break of day and retire with the splash of the anchor and the rattle of the chain and the whirr of the rope and a jerk against the cleat just as that day died. Sleep was easy with cotton from a pillow in his ears and deniability from the devil in his heart. The ghost must be well attended to, he had mulled when he was J.J., and even then just for the few moments it presumed to bother him, for she has such energy to scream and beg and plead and ultimately describe her plight in rather complete detail. A thirsty throat could not produce such noises; a hungry mind wasn’t half so thorough.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  The next day passed the same except that J.J. learned to fish and even caught one. A yellowtail snapper, according to father’s business associate. Below the legal limit of twelve inches to the tips of the tail when pinched helpfully together, but then, who was watching? J.J. was watching. J.J. insisted and with vigor and venom that they return this eleven-and-two-thirds-inch yellowtail snapper to its residence, forthwith. The fish had been inconvenienced quite enough, thank you, and J.J. concocted a nasty scowl with which to proclaim that he would field no objections. Father did not object, but instead he welled up and then cried and cried and cried, and J.J. did not know why he cried but Jason Gypsum does, and the fish lived to tell of it, and to grow to eighteen-and-three-fifths inches to the pinched-together fork before it was finally maimed by a barracuda and caught, wriggling, in the cavitation formed by the supersonic parting of a goliath grouper’s fat silly lips.

  Night fell and there was no moon by which to see or seabed by which to anchor. They on Caledonia drifted where the waves and winds and currents and devils conspired to take them, them taken to mean J.J., father, father’s business associate, and the ghost. When they woke in turn they found from their respective bunks through their respective portholes an image not unlike the one that had bid the previous day goodbye, the sea—unbroken by land or ice, too deep for light to guide the human eye toward any satisfactory conclusion, to say nothing of an anchor line—below a sky—not immaculate, no menace, some clouds to speak of, none much grey or thick or gurgly. And the day proceeded much like that, until mid afternoon, Jason Gypsum supposes as he chokes down a head of cauliflower, not early morning nor conspicuous night, but something in the middle, a middle in the middle of which the howling stopped.

  Father in spite of his cautioning proceeded straight down into the forbidden gullet of Caledonia, down there where silence didn’t belong. He emerged in reverse some seconds later with a filet knife in his eye. Shortly thereafter, so afflicted, father tumbled sputtering toward the stern, where he tripped on a length of anchor line which J.J. had neglected to stow away, and hurtled over the retractable ladder which J.J. had failed to retract, and it occurred to J.J. then that perhaps ignorance was no defense at all, especially when it was contrived, or otherwise insincere, for J.J. as he had poked the cotton into his ears the previous night had suddenly recalled his duties with the unspooled anchor line and the un-retracted retractable ladder and waved them off, resolving in the inarticulate space of a single instant to explain his failure away as innocent forgetfulness when the morning came and father scorned him. Sloth is only GLUTTONY by a shorter path, J.J. came to realize once he was Jason Gypsum, and sloth is LUST as articulated by a skilled attorney, and it’s GREED for a very particular species of convenience—quiet peace, restorative rest—and sloth is every bit PRIDE, for a humble man weighs his wants and his duties honestly and then acts in that accordance, and sloth is latent, bubbling WRATH poised like a cobra toward a sound behind the door, poised to strike and spit at even the implication that sloth exists this side of it, and sloth is the careful nurturing of an endless state of ENVY wherein the envier is oneself and the envied is oneself in a slightly more comfortable configuration.

  Perhaps all of this had already dawned on Jason Gypsum during his waning seconds as J.J., and perhaps it had been these realizations that catalyzed the change. According to the awful sweaty night terrors Jason Gypsum calls retrospect, though, his time in HELL seems the likelier candidate. He needn’t wait long to begin drawing comparisons, either, for the ghost who was a girl emerged from the cabin that was her prison and struck small little J.J. with a balled fist in the socket of his eye.

  In that eye he saw stars, in the other he saw the deck, which passed beneath him, the anchor line, which ensnared him about the ankle, the ladder, which he reached for, the surface, which he broke, the depth, which broke him, and last of all the toes of light which would freeze before they fulfilled any aspiration of touching the bottom with their fingertips, just as J.J.’s lungs would freeze, in a sense, just as father’s heart had done.

  And very suddenly J.J. was in a familiar HELL, bobbing in a picture of the sea too plain for budget postcards. He was relatively dry, for the moment, in particular the moment his fingers touched father’s fingers. He was dry because he was in a chest, the kind of chest that pirates use to bury plunder with some expectation of recovering it, the kind his father was in, too. Father’s was slightly smaller, it seemed to J.J., or it wasn’t, and it was just father’s misfortune to be so very large in comparison to J.J., in comparison to the chest. And then the wave came, and parted him from father, and then the wave came, and he was wet, and then the wave came, and he was sinking, and then the wave came, and it was dark, and then who knows?

  Jason Gypsum had only a brief first encounter with HELL, supposing time worked the same there. He seemed to have been confined to that chest for some four or five minutes, sinking, sinking, and five minutes aligned well enough with the account of father’s business associate, who had observed the tautness of the anchor line and reeled J.J. in as J.J. had reeled in a yellowtail snapper. Jason Gypsum should have been interested to know whether the girl who was a ghost would corroborate the details, but upon his return from HELL he found Caledonia to be conspicuously free of phantoms, though the specter of her well enough remained and the silence was nothing if not haunting.

  The worst thing about HELL was the bleakness. It was pristinely black in his chest and so he could not observe the environment beyond its volume, but part and parcel of the experience was evidently the injection of certain knowledge, like a brochure read aloud to you by a concierge. Chief among that knowledge that Jason Gypsum knew, as if remembering, upon his admission to HELL were the following:

  One: The chest would not break, bulge, deform, crack, leak, narrow, widen, grow, shrink or become oblate;

  Two: Certain of the rules of the mortal plane still applied, such as those natural laws governing thirst and hunger, and though Jason Gypsum would not die from either in the terrestrial sense, nor physically diminish, his thirst would grow until he drank, and his appetite until he ate, and there would be no sip to take nor crumb to harvest, until;

  Three: Jason Gypsum’s sentence in HELL was to be served over the period of time required for his chest to reach the bottom of the sea through which it sank;

  Four: In HELL, there is no bottom.

  Jason Gypsum had only been little J.J. for his first stint in HELL. Little J.J., confined to a pirate’s chest with volume enough for only a small fortune in anything but platinum or paper checks. He recalled with goosebumps on his nipples the splintery texture of its lid on the parts of his skin where the vertebrae probed. He recalled trying and failing to adjust his position from fetal to anything else at all. He recalled having recalled with extreme horror the simple joy of extending his legs into open space, waggling his arms like a bird, taking a step, an uninhibited breath, glimpsing the sun, turning half a degree in the direction of his choice. In HELL, all these things were deprived to him.

  The worst thing about HELL was the bleakness. And confinement was the bleakest part. But he’d hardly had time to get thirsty. Perhaps that would’ve been worse. What caliber of torture is thirst a thousand years past the point it would have killed you? What caliber is the memory of an un-parched throat? A full belly? Jason Gypsum has read much about the ends to which starving people have gone. In Leningrad, for instance. What depravity was there beyond cannibalism? Surely a man or child a billion years past the point of starvation will have contemplated them all, would be prepared to eat God or his own child, alive and unsalted.

  The worst thing about returning from HELL is the knowledge that his father is experiencing even now that which was merely torments Jason Gypsum as he sleeps and blinks. For the moment Jason Gypsum enjoys small moments of reprieve. At the moment father is in a chest vastly smaller in proportion to his body than had been J.J.’s to him, and no doubt he is fighting to remember the taste of fresh water, and no doubt his memory is failing him.

  There is nothing Jason Gypsum can do to help father. Perhaps that knowledge was engrained in him, too, right off the brochure when his stint in eternity commenced. But there is something Jason Gypsum believes he can do for himself.

  He can eat cauliflower, in stupendous volume, with a spoon, like a good boy.

  Much has been said about the importance of vegetables for growing boys. As it turns out, though, vegetables eaten to the exclusion of everything else have much the opposite effect. Jason Gypsum has hardly grown at all from the time he was J.J., from the time his diet was varied. He is stunted, in effect, and so malnourished as to hardly be alive. Perhaps his damnation will come sooner as a result, but the ten years he spends will amount to nothing beside the inches to maneuver he gains in the trillion decades he’ll spend starved in the chest.

  Ideally his height and weight and the date of his demise will be immaterial. Ideally he as Jason Gypsum has separated himself adequately from he as J.J. so as to earn a clean slate. If it is impossible to strike one’s name from the record, perhaps it is enough to change one’s name.

  But a new identity was only the beginning. A wicked boy is not a good boy simply because his pock marked permanent record has been lost in the mail. Jason Gypsum is a good boy according to the very strictest standards, accrued over some two decades of sheer and abject expectation. Fortunately for Jason Gypsum his station is such that there is not much he can do wrong.

  I explained to Jason that cauliflower is the stuff good boys are made of, and ever since, his face turns green at the thought or, God forbid, the passing scent of anything sweeter, or richer, or different. I place vitamins on his tongue and he relishes them. I collar him about the neck at night and remind him it is the best protection from his own baser instincts, and he hardly need be told, in fact he nestles, satisfied, into his bed on the floor, circling like a dog and stretching like a cat while he may.

  He is thin and small such that he fits in a suitcase. At first it was the most horrifying thing in the world to Jason Gypsum, to travel internationally in this way, but then after reminding him that good boys follow instructions, he took the plunge, and found to his delight that the luggage was plush and rather roomy in comparison to his chest in HELL, and he has taken to it quickly, and that’s just as well, for I can hardly allow my pet to accompany me in the cabin, certainly not when I am entertaining other prominent men, although I well suspect they would not be surprised by our arrangement, mine with Jason Gypsum, and in fact I don’t doubt at all they’ve their own such pets, their own such arrangements, their own such suitcases. It is nearly an unspoken rule. Sometimes we do speak of it, though, as I speak of it now.

  In summary, Jason Gypsum is not the girl I requisitioned. In any case I paid J.J.’s father’s business associate half the original rate, far surpassing the consolation stipulated in the terms of our agreement. In retrospect, I’d have gladly paid more. Why?

  If ever there was a good boy, his name is Jason Gypsum.