Death: A Life (32 page)

Gregory XIII: Thank You for the Days.

“Anyway,” boomed God, looking me up and down, “how are you feeling?”

“Terrific,” I replied.

“Hmmm,” He boomed. “That’s too bad. You haven’t been having any dark thoughts of late, have you? Visions of catastrophe and disaster?”

“No. Sorry, Lord God Sir. I’ve mainly been thinking of the small furry things in Creation. You really did a good job on them, You know.”

“Well,” boomed God, “that’s very kind of you, Death, very kind indeed. But really, you of all people shouldn’t be thinking of such things.”

“Why not?”

“Because it is unnatural!” cried a harsh voice. There was a flutter of wings and the angel Gabriel appeared by God’s side.

“Gabriel has helped pick up the slack, limp and drooping, while you were away. He doesn’t think you should have your old job back, do you, Gabriel?”

“I just don’t think that we should have outsourced such an important role to someone who is, after all, the son of Satan,” he sniffed. Gabriel had changed. His wings were sleek and greased and his robe seemed off-white. He was wearing black eyeliner.

“Between you and Me,” boomed God in as conspiratorial a fashion as one can when one’s voice shakes the heavens, “I think he’s always rather wanted your job. Gabriel never liked the living much.”

“But he’s an angel!” I protested, suddenly feeling rather protective of my role as the dread destroyer of Life. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“If an angel can become lord of Hell, then I can become Death,” cried Gabriel.

“Yes, well, Satan is something of a…special case,” boomed God, as if He was none too keen on discussing the details. But Gabriel was on a roll.

“I am Gabriel, the Angel of Death! Merciless, cruel, avenging. None escape Gabriel’s dread grasp.”

Despite God’s blinding divine light, the clinic seemed to be growing increasingly dark. A black emanation was issuing forth from Gabriel’s body. I felt a chill settle within me, and then a shock of recognition.

“Is that
my
Darkness?” I asked.

It was just as I remembered it, uniquely formless, shapeless, amorphous, and it was reaching out toward me plaintively. I was surprised to find that I had actually missed the Darkness. I tried to touch it, but Gabriel pulled on a leash and jerked it back.

“It is
my
Darkness now,” said Gabriel, slapping the Darkness down as it reared up in anger. It collapsed into a puddle and whimpered silently to itself. Gabriel leered at me. There was nothing behind his eyes.

“But God,” I protested, “You can’t have people ‘falling to their Gabriel,’ or being ‘Put to Gabriel,’ it sounds silly.”

“I know, I know,” boomed God out of the corner of His eminence. “But he’s been pestering Me for eons for the job, and when you went wrong, what else could I do? Now maybe when you get worse again we can talk about having you back. Until then though, I’m afraid the matter is closed. Gabriel is the new Death. Oh, and another thing.”

“Lord God Sir?”

“There was a soul that kept on being reincarnated due to an irregularity within the Department of Reincarnation. I don’t know if you noticed. Name of Mab? Or Mabel? Or Madge?”

“Maud,” I said quickly.

“Yes, well, whatever,” boomed God. “It seems she kept on being reincarnated not through any religious belief, but through the sheer force of her will. There must have been something on Earth that held an irresistible pull for her. I can’t imagine what it was. I mean, I know it’s good and everything, but still…all very irregular. Anyway, We have corrected this error. She will be walking the earth no more.”

I was stunned. A bunch of grapes appeared in my hand.

“Get bad soon,” boomed God, and disappeared.

“No,” I cried. “No! No! No!”

I collapsed to the ground. There was no hope. None whatsoever. Maud was gone and I would never see her again. I looked up.

Gabriel still stood there, smiling.

“You went too far, Death; I warned you. You shouldn’t have spent all that time with that sheep. It was unnatural.”

He leaned close toward me. His breath stank of milk and honey. “She screamed, you know, when I came for her.”

“What?” I said.

“When I uncorked her soul by the river, she seemed to like it.”

He smiled to himself.

“She said I was a much better Death than you.”

I remained silent.

“She said she wanted a real Death to usher her into the void. Well, she got it from me! The whole Earth is going to get it from me. I got rid of Michael, now I can get rid of you.”

I could hold it in no longer.

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” I screamed in his face.

“You make me sick,” shouted back Gabriel. “Life makes me sick. There’s only one solution. Kill it! Kill it all!”

Gabriel laughed, an unpleasant, morbid laugh, the sort of laugh that would once have made me feel all cold and Death-like inside. With a flap of his wings he was gone. I looked at the grapes God had put in my hand. They had withered.

No Maud. No Life. No Death. What was I? What had I become? For the first time since my arrival in the clinic, I wished I was back at my old job. To think that Gabriel had sent my beloved Maud into the Darkness—the poor old Darkness, now shackled to an angel!—it was all too ghastly for words. What other desecrations would Gabriel wreak in my absence? It was daunting to imagine myself returning to Earth, returning to the playground of my love, but the idea of Gabriel taking my place was insufferable…unbearable…unendurable! It was wrong! He was not Death! Only I
could
be Death! Only I
was
Death! Only I…

I heard a sound. I turned around and saw two of the deadly sins, Pride and Envy, trying to hide behind a large spittoon in the garden.

“It wasn’t our idea!” squealed Pride.

“Sorry, Death,” said Envy. “The doctors called us in to try and get you back to your old self again. Did it work? Did you feel me at all?”

I lunged toward them. Pride ran away screaming (he still needed a lot of work), but Envy stood rooted to the spot. I grabbed him by the throat.

“Honestly, Death, I didn’t want to. But they said if I didn’t do it, I’d be stuck here for good.”

I tightened my grip.

“The thing is, I’m never happier than when someone else does well. I just want to slap them on the back and say, ‘Congratulations!’ But I can’t. I’ve got to get everybody to feel resentful, as if they didn’t deserve it. ‘Envy by name,’ they say, ‘Envy by nature.’ And now here I am. Quite happy, too. I don’t regret not being back on Earth one bit, even though my old pal Jealousy is still there. Good luck to him I say.”

I lifted him up into the air. He began to talk more quickly.

“I mean, it’s not as if I’m all that good as a sin in the first place. Some people go through their entire lives without feeling me. But I like to be felt. Getting felt is one of the most attractive things about the job. It’s not like I’m like you, Death. I mean, I’m hardly common to all. I wish I was.”

He was starting to turn green in the face.

“In fact, sometimes I’ve lain down at night and wished I was you, Death. You have it easy. Respect, admiration, a definite presence. You affect every single person individually! Not like me. Sometimes people don’t know whether they’re feeling me or Jealousy and that’s very annoying because we both have quotas to fill, you know?”

His voice was now a strangled gasp.

“And sometimes I just wish Jealousy had an accident, you know? Nothing too bad. Just having his eyes sewn shut with wire or something. I mean I’m a sin, after all, one of the original seven, and he’s more of an emotion, the little sod.”

“That’s very good, Envy,” said a voice. It was one of the doctors. “You’re coming along nicely. You too, Death. I think these patient-on-patient sessions are really helping.”

I dropped Envy to the ground.

“You see, Death,” said the doctor, “you can’t deny yourself. No matter what you think. It’s all still there, just waiting for you to return. There’s a tunnel at the end of the light, and it’s growing darker and darker.”

I turned away from him and took in the devastation around me. The broken carapaces of the hideous many-legged insects crunched beneath my feet, the black sun above offered no heat, the vultures screamed as they landed on limed branches. Hopelessness, obliteration, and discordance were everywhere. A sharp breeze brought a cloud of choking fumes up from one of the lakes. It was growing harder to remain happy here, harder to remain hopeful. That was, after all, its point.

I must have
cried in my sleep that night, for the following morning my pillow was cold and damp. I tried to hide it from the nurses, saying I had eaten it in a rage, but when they saw the salty tear tracks on my cheeks, they informed the doctor. He immediately sat me down and proceeded to rip out my newly grown tear ducts.

“How could you let yourself get into this state?” he grunted, slowly extracting the long, rubbery tubes from my eye sockets.

I didn’t have an answer. All I could think of was how virulent life was, how insatiable its appetite, how tenacious its hold had become. And yet I hadn’t felt bad being in its thrall. I hadn’t felt bad at all. How strange to suffer from a disease that made one feel
better.
In such cases was the cure as much an ailment as the disease?

The last of the ducts came out with a snap, spattering me with saline, and the doctor checked for any further growths. It was there, sitting in a pool of spilled tears, that I realized what I must do. If I was ever to see Life again, I would have to return to being my old self. But if I returned to my old self, I would have to renounce all chances of living, all chances of Life. It would be a supreme sacrifice.

So I began to keep apart from the other patients. I had to remain aloof. Company brought out the best in me. I didn’t like doing it, I had so many friends, but I had no choice. One day Sympathy grabbed me by the arm in the cafeteria.

“You can talk to me if you want, Death,” she said. “If you’ve got to get something off your chest, I’ll listen to you.” She had improved, but I just put my head down and walked away, leading her to begin screaming, “Too good for me now, eh? Well, fuck you, Death, and your inability to transport people to the afterlife! You’re a big girl’s blouse, that’s what you are, a big girl’s blouse!”

I began to concentrate on my treatments. When placed in a room with a crying baby, I did not pick up the rattle and make goo-goo sounds but remained impassive. Upon seeing a kitten playing with a ball of string I suppressed my smiles, and when that kitten accidentally tied itself up, I stood by as it mewed pathetically.

Shock Therapy.

I forced myself to smile while watching torture and shrank away from the color pink. I showed no interest in the sound of a babbling brook, only pricking up my ears when that babbling grew into a full-blown flood. On the clinic’s practice killing fields I moved like wildfire, uncorking dummy souls and flinging them into a synthetic Darkness. The doctors nodded their heads in approval. I began to seek out the shadows and bask in their emptiness. I felt the joy and spontaneity leaking from my existence. In group therapy sessions, when asked a question, on any subject, I would invariably state, “Death is the only answer,” and would note the tick on my interlocutor’s clipboard.

Weeks went by, months went by, but I didn’t swerve from my task. Slowly the Joy was squeezed from my body like toothpaste from a tube. I was relentless, unstoppable, like a force of nature once more. No one dared approach me. My old friends whispered to each other as I swooped past them. I was eventually called into my doctor’s office.

“You’ve done very well,” he said, “very well indeed. Your test scores have all come back negative, you haven’t had a new organ growth since the tear ducts, and you killed the hamster we left for you in your room.”

“Its time had come,” I said.

“Yes, yes it had. But we’re still not convinced that you really
believe
it, Death. Some of us worry that you’re just pretending to be better so you can go back to Earth. You can understand our concerns, can’t you?”