The General Assembly hall was quiet enough to hear a flag wrinkle when the former president informed Europe it was going to Hell, as if he had personally booked the group rate. He said it like a cruise director who lost the ocean but kept the microphone, narrating a disaster drill over a buffet of shrugging diplomats.

I followed the speech the way I follow container ships, noting where policy became weather and where rumor outran the official forecast. The words moved faster than the translation headsets, leaving a contrail of adjectives and hand gestures the size of small countries.

The French ambassador sipped coffee with the dignity of a guillotine and asked which arrondissement of Hell he meant. Germany produced a spreadsheet that calculated their estimated time of damnation with a confidence interval and two types of umlaut.

Britain requested to queue for Hell in an orderly fashion, preferably with a velvet rope and a laminated exit plan. Italy shrugged in luxuriant italics and packed sunglasses, because if you must descend, one descends seasonally.

Backstage, a logistics memo clarified that Hell was a metaphor, a destination, and also a polling strategy wearing a necktie made of smoke. The US delegation distributed maps that looked suspiciously like treasure hunts but all the X marks were toll booths.

To synchronize the narrative with applause, staff attempted to install an automatic applause light box, which flashed bravely whenever the room was most silent. It soon began applauding itself in a tragic loop, a small Las Vegas headlining nothing.

Shifting into travel agent mode, the speaker promised that America would not be making the trip because the buses were late and also socialism. He then demanded a refund on an alliance purchased in 1949, claiming it came with no cup holders and only continental breakfast.

The European Union formed a task force to assess the thermal gradients of the underworld and immediately released a white paper printed on black paper. It included a rights charter for pitchforks and a tariff exemption for irony.

For visual aids, a staffer produced an inflatable desktop globe with volcano light, which hissed like a shy dragon whenever anyone asked a follow-up question. The demonstration ended when the globe struck Luxembourg and declared it the warmest place on earth by default.

Translators struggled heroically as going to hell pinballed through headsets into going to the spa, then going to the mall, and finally going to a very bad mall. Finland nodded solemnly, because in Finland a sauna is both heaven and weather.

From my seat where policy becomes barometric pressure, I watched diplomats file paperwork for imaginary borders while rumor ran diesel through a pipeline labeled certainty. Somewhere, a customs officer stamped a passport that said citizen of smoke and waved a container ship toward a canal guarded by a three-headed accountant.

By the end, everyone agreed Europe has already been to Hell, bought bread there, and came back with recipes and a functioning train schedule. The speech departed the runway without luggage, circled bureaucracy, and landed in baggage claim marked Lost and Profound, where even Hell asked for a second opinion.