"To hell with them all," Abby announced, toasting Dan with her mug of tea.
"That's what I said," Dan affirmed. He slam-dunked the ball of sandwich wrappings and then walked back to snatch Abby's off the end table. He sat himself at her desk so he could smooth it out. From here he could set up a nice three-pointer.
"Except Rebecca, obviously."
Dan was puzzled for a second; he actually had some trouble remembering what he'd said in the heat of the moment. Thank goodness for Abby; she'd never let him forget a single detail. "Right. Hell would not agree with Rebecca. Although, you know, I'm told that it's a state of being and not an actual, like, geographical location…"
Abby shrugged, "I'm still partial to the Dantean model, myself."
Dan was now creating something complicated and origami-like out of the deli paper that had once held her sandwich. "Well," he conceded, "they say you never forget the one you meet in high school."
Abby raised her eyebrows, "I thought that's what they said about girls."
"Eh, girls, eternal torment, same difference. Of course, my high school bore some distinct similarities to hell, particularly the tenth grade English class in which I first read Dante, so my associations may be a little skewed."
"I take it that Casey would be spared, too?"
"Hmm?" While Dan had been trying to remember how to make a paper flower, they had somehow gotten into this conversation. He didn't mean to talk about high school at all. He'd actually been going to say what a good thing it was that Abby had gone for the sandwich without the mayonnaise. Otherwise the paper would have gotten all soggy.
"I mean, if Rebecca is exempt from the hell-bound Steve Sisco Fan Club, then I imagine Casey would be pardoned for the sin of loving Lisa?"
"Yeah."
Oh, that short answer again. Abby really wanted to see what Danny was doing with that paper—more specifically, she wanted to see if his hands were steady—but she decided to give him some space. "You know," she said idly, "I don't know quite how I feel about classifying love as a sin."
"It was good enough for Dante," Dan said quietly.
"Was it? Yeah, I guess so—Paolo and what's-her-name, stuck in the whirlwind forever. Only their sin wasn't actually love, was it?"
"Nah, it was…lust or something. Quite a hair-splitter, that Dante. You do know," Dan looked up from his work, not quite sure how to derail this joke and beginning to feel very much out of his depth, "that I'm not interested in sending anyone to hell, I mean, even if I could?"
"You mean, even if you had the power? Or even if it existed?"
"Either. Both." Dan said petulantly; he hated these dumb hypothetical conversations. He was sorry they'd even gotten into it. "I don't have that power—I wouldn't want it. And I don't think hell exists, anyway. Why should there be some mythical brimstone-y place where devils with pitchforks make us miserable when we manage to do a perfectly good job of it right here on Earth?"
"What is the Jewish version of hell? Anything like the obsession that I remember from my Catholic school days? Man, those nuns would just not leave it alone." Abby went on, ignoring his last sentence for the red herring it was.
"Look, if you want to talk Torah, Jeremy's your man. I never paid all that much attention to it."
Abby noticed his strident tone, but didn't really believe it. Sure enough, when she looked over at him, Dan was staring at his little art project like a kid who hopes that he won't be called on if he just doesn't meet the teacher's eye. "I guess Hebrew school is not all that much like Sunday school, then. 'Cause there's arcane stuff from catechism class that I still remember. " When he didn't say anything, she continued, more gently. "You understand, Danny, that you don't have that kind of power, right? It's not like you can jinx people into hell, no matter how upset you are. Nothing bad is going to happen if you talk about them here. There's not some personalized demon who is going to take particular notice of people you complain about and single them out for retribution."
"I don't believe in hell," Dan said fiercely.
"Okay."
For about thirty seconds, the only sound in the room was the rattling heating duct and the sound of Danny folding paper. When he spoke again, he sounded as thought he didn't quite trust his voice. "The, uh, the Midrash says that hell—Gehenna, it's called—was created on the second day. That's the bit in Genesis where the waters are separated into heaven and earth. And God does not say that it is good. He doesn't say anything; it's just, boom, onto day three. Did you know that? Every other day in Genesis gets God's approval: the light, the seas, the animals, the whole nine yards. God sees them all, that they are good. But not the second day."
"I never noticed that," Abby said simply, willing to let this go where it went.
"Yeah, well, it's true. I mean, it's in the Torah, I don't know whether…anyway, the point is, on the second day, 'the waters are separated from the waters.' Something is split into separate parts and that break, that schism, that is hell. On the first day, it was light and dark, remember? And apparently those things are different enough that they can be separated with no hard feelings. They were never meant to be one thing. But the water is different, because it's one thing to begin with and then it's not any more, it's not whole, it's broken and the, uh, dissention is how hell enters the world."
Without looking at her, Dan began to arrange the items on her desktop, building a straight little barrier across the center. "That always got me, how the world is perfect for just one day. After that, it's ruined forever." He shifted her stapler a millimeter to the right. "I mean, it doesn't really make any sense 'cause it's only, you know, water. But then a little further on, you get Cain and Abel, and it's the same: they're two of the same thing, and not even God can love them equally, so one gets slighted, and he gets angry. In Hebrew, you know, the name Abel means 'nothingness'?"
Dan looked up at her, then, from where he'd been staring fixedly at the desktop, so Abby didn't say have to say anything, she could just shake her head. No, she hadn't known that, he hadn't really expected her to. He wanted her to divine what he wasn't saying, but she couldn't quite…she shook her head again.
"So Cain is jealous, literally, of nothing?" she asked.
"He's jealous…he's jealous of the nothing he can't have," Dan said, and this time she could definitely hear the tears in his throat.
Abby was flailing: she had gone too far from what she knew, she couldn't guess what was coming next. Religion had never even made it on to her radar screen where Dan was concerned. Of all the many, many areas in which he felt inadequate, religion had never seemed to crack the top twenty. His family hadn't been particularly devout; they celebrated the High Holidays, Passover for the kids, but it had never been a major thing. When he'd filled out the insurance paperwork for her office, he'd written "International Brotherhood of the Fallen Away" in the blank for religion. Abby had chalked it up as another manifestation of Danny's off-kilter humor. As an adult, his observances were kind of like his tastes in carry-out: all-encompassing and constantly changing, best if it was something exotic, something you couldn't make at home. He would celebrate occasionally with guys at work—Abby recalled them building a sukkah over the catering table last year. But he was just as likely to try red Easter eggs and one of Abby's celebrity-stalking clients claimed to have seen him standing in the back of St. John the Divine on Christmas Eve.
As a therapist, Abby had always been a little wary of matching real cases to archetypes: no one really thought of themselves or their clients as Oedipus or Elektra, right? That was just clinical shorthand. Unless you were someone who saw the world in terms of narratives. If you spent your days finding parallels across a range of sports, putting like with like to craft stories for public consumption, maybe you saw things differently. If you thought about the world as a series of stories, and if you believe that your story centered around the death of your brother, then maybe the character you identified with was the disenfranchised Biblical son who killed his younger and more-favored brother.
Dan propped his elbows on the desk and let his head drop into his hands. Abby watched his shoulders move with quick, unsteady gasps, but only when she got close did she see how tense he really was. He'd pulled his fingers into fists so tight that she thought the bones might burst through the taut skin along his knuckles. She knelt down on the other side of her desk, moving stuff out of the way. A pencil cup, a little calendar, paper clips in the dish her friend Bethany had made—Abby wanted to give Dan time to get used to her presence. He had once admitted to "some, uh, initial consonant problems, mostly with confusing 'sad' and 'mad'." She wanted to gauge where on the spectrum he was now.
Finally, Abby reached up to pull on hand away from his face. "Danny? Dan, let me see…move your hand…." He jumped when her hand closed on his wrist but let her coax one fist free: his face was blotched, red and pale, and he actually seemed to have bruised himself with the force of his fingers. She could tell from his eyes that all of the 'mad' generated by Steve Sisco had pretty much burnt out.
"What is it, Dan?" she asked quietly, "What is the nothing that you want so badly?" Abby tried to unclench his fist since he seemed incapable of relaxing on his own. It took real effort to pry apart his fingers and he just watched her like it was someone else's hand entirely. She smoothed out his right hand, then went to work on the left.
"I just, I, I—I don't understand, Abby." The bewilderment in his voice was about a million heartbreaking miles from the confident tones of the CSC Sports Night anchor he would have to be in four hours.
"What don't you understand?" Abby rested her chin on her hands and looked over at him; if she didn't keep prompting him, he would just shut down.
"It's…it was, he. He was so…" Dan couldn't breathe; he couldn't get air past the burning lump in his throat. He rubbed fiercely at his eyes, knotting his hands up again, undoing all of Abby's work. "He was just crazy about her, Abby. I mean, like, high on her, not in his right mind. He wanted her to be happy more than he wanted his next breath."
"Who?"
"Casey," Dan said, surprised, like who else would they be talking about?
"And Lisa?"
"Yeah. I—I've never seen anything like it. And the thing is, the thing…" this part had always mystified Dan, "Why them? They're just…normal people. I mean, Casey's hardly Doctor Zhivago or anything. Nothing star-crossed. Nobody got swept off their feet. They met at the college newspaper: he wrote a sports column and she was the advertising editor."
"Not everyone is Romeo and Juliet, Dan. Or Zhivago. Or Paolo and Francesca, for that matter."
"But why how could they…?" Dan's eyes were pleading with Abby to explain this mystery of the universe, but his voice was hard. "Abby, she had it, Lisa had all that…love and loyalty, respect, just total devotion, Casey would have supported her in anything—and she gave it up."
"Oh…oh, Danny." Abby was speechless, for once. Dan who could never, ever have enough affection—who couldn't even conceive of such a thing—imagined that Lisa and Casey had burned through a lifetime supply. No wonder he was angry: it would be like a starving man watching a whole banquet thrown away. And no wonder that anger confused him, since Dan knew full well that Casey and Lisa's relationship had been pretty unhealthy.
Abby tried to formulate her next question carefully. She didn't want Dan going off the deep end, storming out in his current condition. Dan was an open-minded guy, but he worked in sports media, for crying out loud. He had his career to consider, had to avoid even the appearance of... "Danny. Look at me. Do you think…are you in love with Casey?"