Death: A Life (16 page)

“I would be delighted!” she replied, smiling, and took my arm.

So it was that for the next few hours we gamboled happily through the flooded palace grounds, paddling through the diseased floodwaters, ignoring the cries of dozens of souls still stuck in their bodies. She told me that she had been the only daughter of the Grand Vizier of Ur, and that she had been a very independent child, somewhat fascinated with dying. She said she had pulled the legs off hundreds of insects in her youth and asked if I could recall any of them. I pretended that I could.

Maud didn’t seem to mind the corpses that littered our way. In fact, she was fascinated by the grimaces of the deceased. I pointed out the first signs of decomposition in bodies and showed her how to pull the soul out of a small dead child, which she did with surprising ease, popping it out, brushing it down, and sending it off into the Darkness with a pat on its behind. As the storm passed and the sun set, we climbed the Great Ziggurat once more and looked at the blood-red sky together.

“What happens after this?” she asked.

“I’m not sure, Maud,” I said. I had never been so open and unguarded in my thoughts on the afterlife before. “I think it depends on what you believe in.”

“So if you believe in an afterlife populated with flamingos, you’ll end up in it?”

“Quite possibly, although only if you’ve been very bad.”

“How so?”

“Well, flamingos are very antisocial. Nobody would want to spend all eternity with flamingos.”

“What if you really, really liked flamingos?” she asked, resting her chin on her hand. “What if your idea of Paradise was being surrounded by thousands of antisocial flamingos?”

“Well, in that case, I imagine you could have your flamingos,” I said. “But don’t expect them to thank you for it.”

Flamingos: Ungrateful, Bad-Tempered, Pink.

She laughed, and I laughed too. It had been a long time since I had had any company. My last companion had been Phillip, an amiable raccoon, whose soul followed me around for years trying to consume the spirits of dead frogs. Maud turned toward me.

“What if I wanted to see you again?” she said. She didn’t seem to be joking.

“Well, the one thing you can be sure of,” I told her, “is that I’ll always be around.”

“I might well hold you to that, Mr. Death,” she said, smiling.

The only time she grew morose was when she saw that her father, the Grand Vizier, had survived the flood. He was engaged in an argument with Maud’s fiancé over a drowned camel.

“Oh, look at them,” said Maud with contempt. “They care more about that bloody camel than me.”

I was so intent on making Maud happy that I picked up a stone and threw it at the Grand Vizier as hard as I could. It knocked his hat clean off, and he and the fiancé ran away in a panic. How she laughed. I was about to repeat the gesture when she grabbed my arm and told me no, I shouldn’t, I’d get in trouble.

She was right. Already I could hear the moaning of all the souls that still needed to be packed off into the void. But at that moment I didn’t care. I had discovered the most fascinating creature in existence—even more fascinating than the unconscious newt—and one who seemed to understand me too.

The Unconscious Newt Lives Its Entire Life in a Comatose State, Waking Only to Mate, Go Back to Sleep, and Die.

She had to go, of course. It was almost sunset when we said our good-byes. I wasn’t quite sure how to end things so we ended up shaking hands—a grim formality clung to the process. But at the last minute, as the Darkness slowly enveloped her, she ran toward me and hugged me. I was so shocked that I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, Maud was gone. I noticed the Darkness looking at me in a peculiar way.

“What?” I demanded. It shrugged. I took out the
Book
and scribbled her name in the margin and tried to go about my business. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not put her out of my mind. She lived on in my memory tenaciously, hanging upside down from the Great Ziggurat.

Once all the drowned souls had been dealt with, I thought I would try reaching into the Darkness to see if any trace of Maud remained. But the blackness was total, the emptiness unfathomable, the absence absolute. For the first time in my existence I felt angered by it. Why couldn’t it have kept just a trace of her? Of her dark brown eyes? Of her sparkling laugh? Why did the Darkness always have to overwhelm and subsume everything?

Oh yes. It was with Maud that all my misfortunes began.

 
II
 

Odd Gods

T
he rest of
the epoch passed with alarming speed. The Tin Age rushed into the Copper Age, forging the dazzling Bronze Age. The over-the-hill Sumerians and the diminutive Akkadians merged to become the all-powerful Babylonians. Continents shifted, mountains grew, and fashions in dying came and went—to be killed by an arrow was particularly à la mode, by a blunt instrument oh-so-passé—but the souls I was collecting remained essentially the same: aggrieved, curious, bewildered.

You would think that I would have tired of the dead by now as a clerk tires of his invoices, or a poet of his rhymes. But despite spending eons in the company of the nevermore I was not bored. In fact, I felt quite the opposite. Whereas in the past I had rushed to foist the souls into the Darkness with only a modicum of small talk, I had by now become so proficient at my job that I could easily afford to press the dead on aspects of their past lives. An infinitesimal change had occurred within me, a tiny recalibration of the scales, a quarter turn of the screw. I found myself wanting to know the most bizarre minutiae of the deads’ lives—what had been their favorite colors? What had been their favorite foods? What had they liked to do on hot summer days? Did they prefer puppies or kittens?

I must ask the reader to bear in mind that I wasn’t taking any liberties I didn’t think I deserved. After all, I had a right to relaxation and conversation as much as any other being. But what was it that drove me into this habitual interest with Life? What led me to embrace Life in such a reckless manner? It was not dissatisfaction or boredom. No, rather it was my natural surfeit of gloom, the settled and abiding darkness within me that drew me intrinsically to the light of Life, like a candle snuffer is drawn toward a candle flame. It was not long before I developed an insatiable appetite for the joys of the once-alive.

I reflected that this emboldened sociability had started after my meeting with Maud. I could still see her plummeting so gracefully from the Great Ziggurat. I felt a spring in my step whenever I thought of her body smashing into the ground, bones splintered and ears bleeding, vital organs ruptured, bile filling her lungs, surrounded by a billowing petticoat of blood. Then again, it was hard not to be sociable in the company of the Egyptians. Finally, here was a culture that knew how to die well.

The Egyptians were so obsessed with me it almost became embarrassing. From the moment they were born, it seemed as if they were preparing themselves to die, which, given the high infant mortality rate, was probably just as well. Instead of playing doctor and nurse, Egyptian children played grave digger and embalmer. Instead of building toy forts, they built toy tombs. The most popular answer to questionnaires asking teenagers what they would like to be when they grew up was “Dead,” shortly followed by “Pharaoh,” with “Scourge of the Jews” and “Professional Charioteer” tying for third place.

And how they met me in style! By asp bites and poisoning, with slit throats and brains pulled out of noses. It was all so refined. The pharaohs, in particular, were a hoot. They’d turn up dead along with their dead servants, dead horses, dead cats, and hundreds of different dead birds and insects. Usually I insisted that souls went into the Darkness unaccompanied, but I confess to feeling not a little flattered by the construction of the pyramids. It was nice to be appreciated, nice to feel wanted, especially after the miserable Sumerians. So I let the Egyptians take it with them. I’d pluck out the pharaoh’s soul and those of his entourage and then let them range about their tombs for a few hours, galloping on the souls of their dead horses, and ordering the souls of dead servants to feed them the souls of dead grapes. It was quite something to see.

And I admit, I shamelessly played up to my role. I knew how the Egyptians loved their animals so I began dressing in different costumes. If I knew they liked birds, I’d put on a falcon mask when I popped out their soul; if they liked dogs, I’d wear a jackal mask, and so on. I called it my
Mort Couture
period.