Death: A Life (30 page)

It was Eddie who first showed me around the grounds. I ran into him as I was being pursued by a swarm of carnivorous bats as part of my treatment (to Happiness they would have looked like a flock of gentle doves). He grabbed hold of my arm and we ran into a forest of electrical pylons, where my shock therapy usually occurred. We stood back and watched as the bats flew shrieking into the high voltage lines and burst into pretty orange flames.

Eddie had been at the clinic, on and off, for most of his existence, he told me. He had been there so long, in fact, that he was now able to see all the different ways in which the clinic appeared to the other patients.

“Don’t like
your
clinic much,” he told me. “Bit gloomy for old Eddie.”

Eddie had originally been named Bad Flute Playing, but had swiftly found out that the role he had been given in Creation was a completely unviable proposition. He had changed his name to Eddie because he thought it sounded better. Eddie was doomed.

“I mean, why, Death? Why would there need to be a personification of Bad Flute Playing? Look at you. Someone’s always dying; it makes sense to have a Death. But Bad Flute Playing? It’s hardly one of the great archetypes of experience now, is it? Sure, I’ve plugged up a few blowholes in my time, loosened some embrasures, weakened some diaphragms. It’s actually quite difficult to make someone sound bad on a bone pipe or a tin whistle—they practically play themselves—but increasingly I began to ask myself what the point was. There’s only so much tuneless puffing you can take pleasure in before you start looking for a challenge.”

It was said that shortly before Eddie was dragged to the clinic, he had been directly responsible for the formation of Genghis Khan’s historic 550-piece recorder orchestra, whose ethereally precise and immaculately played music had mesmerized Khan and waylaid him from subjugating the Russian steppes, in direct contravention of the Great Scheme of Things. When the powers-that-be found out, Eddie was packed off to the clinic. Without his assistance, Khan soon tired of the orchestra and proceeded to crush every member to death, alongside their instruments.

“You should have heard those Mongols,” said Eddie dreamily. “It takes a real barbarian to bring out the sensuousness that lurks within a flute.”

There was no hope for Eddie, no hope at all. He had come to love the sound of a well-played flute. He could not bring himself to know dissonance, tunelessness, or atonality ever again.

The clinic was filled with people like me and Eddie—embodiments gone wrong, personifications with minds of their own. Everyone in the clinic had strayed in some way from their intended role. Life had inveigled its way into our beings with its infinite variety and shiny bright colors. It had found out the empty hollows of our existence and flooded them with the thrill of being. We had become overpersonified, growing personalities where there should have been none, and had begun to see our simple roles as increasingly pointless and reductive. Immersed in the gamut of Life, we could no longer be beholden to just one simple action. We had started as personifications, but we wanted to be
persons.

Genghis Khan: Recorder Record-Breaker Breaker.

Eddie and I used to spend many hours discussing what we would like to do on our return to Earth. I told him about my wish to live with Maud, and he told me how he wanted to create a society based purely on the diatonic scale.

We weren’t the only ones doing this. Some patients sat on the benches deep in concentration, trying to remember their proper roles in Creation. But the slight, sly smiles that would slowly break out on their faces signaled they had gone back to dreaming of the exact opposite.

The entity in the next room to me was Ritual. He had been sent here after it had been discovered that he had been encouraging modernization and innovation and persuading people to abandon their age-old practices.

“How can people affirm their membership in the collective if you keep changing what they’re doing?” I heard a doctor ask him.

“Maybe,” squeaked Ritual, “they shouldn’t be part of the collective.” He let out a high-pitched laugh. “Maybe they should try something new instead of the same old boring things day after day after day?”

“But you can’t get a cathartic emotional discharge if it’s new. New is no good.”

“Maybe people should stop having filthy emotional discharges and think with their brains once in a while,” cried Ritual. “It’s always incense and chicken blood and national anthems and ‘you-did-this-to-my-forefathers-so-I’m-going-to-do-this-to-your-grandchildren.’ It’s always doing the things your ancestors did. As if they were so big and clever. Ritual! Pah! It’s just a way of saying you don’t want to learn from your mistakes.”

His voice was rising. Throughout the clinic, patients suddenly broke with their prescribed daily routines and ran wildly through the building. In the operating theater, doctors put aside tried and tested surgical techniques and decided to improvise.

“People like doing the same things over and over again because then they don’t have to think,” cried Ritual. “It’s brainless! Be new! Change! Develop! Mature!”

The Black Wraiths swept in to subdue him.

Another of the inhabitants of the clinic, and one of the oldest, was Lachesis. She had once been one of the original three Fates, whose job it had been to spin, measure, and cut the thread of men’s lives. It was the Fates who had been responsible for compiling the
Book of Endings.
Lachesis, however, had grown uncertain and indecisive. She had been found by her sisters in the cellar of the Castle of Destiny, surrounded by thousands of miles of thread that she had been making into cat’s cradles. Her much publicized fall into the addiction of autonomy did not dissuade the other patients from asking her about their own fates.

“Well, it may or it mayn’t happen, mightn’t it?” she would say.

“But you’re one of the Fates,” the patients would cry. “You have to know.”

“Who knows anything, dearie?” she would reply. “So much potential, so many ends, so many futures all possible but unknown. On the one hand…” And she would shuffle off, talking to herself.

“She’s developed a taste for the infinite possibilities of Life,” one of the doctors told me. “Her treatment is simple; we’re going to try to wean her onto the I-Ching. That’ll cut her choices down to sixty-four. Then we’ll see if she can handle the major arcana of the Tarot deck, which will give her twenty-two different possibilities to choose from. From there we’ll go to a pair of dice, and with any luck we’ll work her down to the flipping of a coin. Once her horizons have been suitably diminished she’ll be ready to decide the fate of men again.”

“But isn’t she better like this?” I asked. “At least now she has a full choice ahead of her instead of just blindly following one future. She’s gained independence from her own fate.”

“That’s not what she’s for,” said the doctor, looking at me with a stern eye.

“But why can’t we be something other than what we were made to be?” I said. “We didn’t ask to be created after all.”

“Look, Death, let me tell you a story,” said the doctor. “A frog and a scorpion are standing on one side of a river, and the scorpion says, ‘The only way I can get to the other side is if you carry me on your back.’ Well, the frog looks suspicious and says, ‘Why should I carry you? You’ll just sting me.’ But the scorpion says, ‘Why would I sting you? If I sting you, we both drown.’ So the scorpion gets on the frog’s back and the frog starts swimming; halfway across the river, the frog feels a sharp pain in his back. With his dying breath he croaks, ‘Why did you sting me? Now we’re both going to drown.’ And the scorpion replies, ‘I’m a
scorpion,
it’s in my nature.’ It’s in Lachesis’s nature to be decisive; it’s in your nature to deal with the dead. Somehow or other you’ve both forgotten this.”

Frogs: Naturally Gullible.

“I don’t remember that happening,” I said.

“Remember what happening?” said the doctor.

“The scorpion killing the frog. It doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Well, I don’t believe that it’s…”

“And you’d think I would remember that, as it’s quite unusual.”

“No, it’s a…”

“I mean, I’ve seen some pretty weird things, but a scorpion riding on a frog’s back I have not.”

“Death, listen to me…”

“I mean, could a frog even do that?”

“Death…”

“I love frogs, you know. I like their little ribbits and tiny hops and big bulging cheeks. I like the way they always look so content with themselves. You never see an anxious frog. Well, except when they’re being stung by scorpions, I imagine. And another thing—”

“Nurse!” cried the doctor.

And so it went. I would show the slightest attraction to Life and suddenly I’d be surrounded by a horde of Black Wraiths who’d drag me back to my room, where Banshees would wail at me for hours on end and I would be forced to watch as jackbooted doctors stamped on my flower arrangements.

One of the clinic’s
most famed treatments was patient-on-patient therapy, in which inmates were paired off with each other in the hopes that some type of restorative reaction might occur. My first partner was Sympathy, who had been withdrawn from her role in Creation for obvious reasons.

“Oh boo hoo hoo!” she mocked. “Mr. Death can’t go on killing things! Mr. Death doesn’t want to get his hands dirty! Big fucking deal, sunshine. You think you’ve got problems? You don’t know the meaning of problems! Look at me! I’m meant to be kind and concerned, I’m meant to feel your pain. But if the truth be told, I couldn’t give a flying fuck! I’m sick of pretending to care about other people. What about me?”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “There were times on Earth when I thought—”

“Who gives a shit, Death? Really. I mean, who gives a shit?”

“Well quite, I mean, that’s what I thought as well, but—”

“You’re not listening to me, Death, and I’m certainly not listening to you. You are the dullest being I have ever spoken to in my entire life. What did you used to do, bore people into the afterlife?”

“Now, look—”

“No! Don’t say it! The sound of your voice makes me sick!” She stormed off, shaking her head in irritation. Eddie passed her on the way.

“Hi, Sympathy,” said Eddie. “Still only feeling sorry for yourself?”

“Fuck off, you breathy freak,” she spat, before stopping and looking him up and down with disgust. “I mean, Bad Flute Playing? What the fuck? You shouldn’t even exist. You’re a joke. A bad one. One that doesn’t make people laugh. One that people wish had never been said. One that makes people uncomfortable just remembering it. That’s the kind of joke you are.”

Eddie shrugged his shoulders. He had been in the clinic long enough not to take offense at such outbursts. He told me there was a time when Meekness had gone on a rampage, and Eddie had only just avoided being crushed in his mammoth serrated jaws by disguising himself as a nearsighted mouse with emphysema. Meekness had been so stunned by this incredibly diffident vision that he had immediately shrunk back to his normal size, apologized to everyone, and gone back to Earth the next day.

One day, on our way back from a long walk in the forest of burning tires, Eddie and I came back to the main building to find a huge commotion taking place. There on the top of the building stood a figure I recognized as Misfortune. He was old and haggard and bent double, and his nightgown was ripped in the most awkward places. He wore a noose around his neck, the other end of which was tied to the clinic’s flagpole, from which a black flag flew at half-mast.