by Claire North
human human human
He stumbled on the words.
rat rat rat
Robinson picked up where Charlie’s words failed, didn’t seem to notice the Harbinger of Death flinching in pain, pressing his head against the cold glass of the car window. “I know what the Confederate flag is. It’s a flag of slavery. It’s the flag of brave free men.”
Charlie nodded at nothing much. “Time changes meaning; history gets rewritten. For a while it was the banner of racists and bigots, sorry for saying it, but that’s just how it reads. Then time changed, and it was again the flag of individuals who died bravely, and that bravery was true whatever their cause. Now murderers who believe that race war is both inevitable and desirable wrap themselves in it, and that’s not the flag, that’s not fabric and colour … it is what people see. It is the idea it becomes. It may not be that for everyone—for Mrs. Walker-Bell I imagine it is still the flag of her people, of their culture, their pride, their history and their fallen men. But elsewhere … it has changed. One world dies. Another is born. The ball goes on.”
One of us comes to mourn, the other to rejoice.
“So … you think Death is coming for a flag?”
“I think Death is coming for an idea.”
Robinson thought about that a long, long time. Then he shrugged. “That’s not so bad, is it? I mean, people live, that’s what we’re saying, right? People will live, those girls will live and if an idea … an idea isn’t life, you know? An idea isn’t people.”
Charlie stared out of the window, and didn’t reply.
Chapter 86
Georgia.
The first thing they saw when they crossed the state line was a giant billboard showing a happy, smiling bear. Beneath it was a warning:
HAPPY BEARS DON’T
START FOREST FIRES!!
The second thing they saw, about a hundred yards later, was a police car, waiting in an obscured turn-off between the two lanes of the interstate, speed gun pressed against the windscreen.
A few seconds after they passed it, it turned on its siren, and went screaming after a sedan that was doing 87 mph and hadn’t killed enough of its speed as it approached the border.
A computer coding class.
Female teacher, female students.
The youngest girl was ten, her dark hair plaited into cornrows, her bright eyes laughing in the reflected light of the screen.
“I been learning HTML and CSS,” she explained, as Charlie sat by her side in the crowded classroom. “But I wanna learn Java next, and when I grow up, I’m gonna make computer games but also programs that make the world better, like tools that people can use in their lives to help them do things and fight poverty and stuff like that.”
On the screen, a tiny animated turtle was drawing an ever-tighter spiral towards the centre point, pausing every now and then to explain how far into its journey it had got, and for its shell to change colour from green to blue.
“On Sundays,” added the girl brightly, “I make robots.”
Charlie gave her a book on web design, and then went outside, to sit on the bonnet of the car with the girl’s mother and grandmother.
To the mother he gave a USB flash drive on a chain, 12GB, to carry her daughter’s work. The daughter didn’t need it, but her mother carried it anyway, because it made her feel close to her, gave her a little piece of her child in her hand.
To the grandmother, he gave a silver brooch shaped like a dove taking wing, and the grandmother said, “My mother was beaten by her husband, because of the drink, and because of the poverty, and because of the shame. My husband, he didn’t beat me, but we weren’t never really in love, and when he left me I think it were a good thing for the both of us. I never got out of the place where I lived, though, never got a proper job, had to raise my daughter so cheap, so tight, like as how you wouldn’t believe—you remember?”
And the mother nodded and said, “I don’t remember much about my dad, but Mom always did the best she could by us. It was hard, you know, hard, but we had some times, didn’t we, we always found something to laugh at, and me … well I got pregnant when I was fifteen. They told us at school that abstinence, it was the way you kept yourself safe and all, but you tell a teenage girl to be abstinent, you make her do that, and of course they didn’t tell us about condoms or anything like that, and now my daughter …”
She shook her head, smiling at the squat classroom, dropped between sushi bar and rib joint off the rushing highway.
“For her, the world will be different. For her, the stories we tell will just be funny stories, and she won’t have to laugh to take the sadness away.”
Charlie smiled, and chatted to them a while longer, about the things they’d seen and the lives they’d lived, and Robinson watched too, and as the women laughed and their daughter worked, even he began to smile.
“Death,” said Charlie, as they drove away, “sometimes he comes for a change in history. Sometimes he comes for the end of something that you never thought would stop.”
Robinson nodded, and that night they had Cajun chicken and spicy rice, and for the first time Robinson chatted, gossiped even, about people he’d seen and places he’d known, about politics and his love of baseball, and about how, if you hung on in there another twenty-something years, the Chicago Cubs would get over that time they were cursed by a man with a goat, and win every season coming, just you wait and see.
“When I get to New York, I’m gonna start again,” he exclaimed, as they shuffled, dozy and full of food, towards the hotel. “I thought my life was over, but it ain’t, it ain’t at all, this is something perfect, this is something good, this is the new beginning I always needed. You know how you sometimes feel like your life is just playing a part, being who you need to be, because you think that’s what you oughta? It’s like my whole life I been pretending, pretending to be this guy with this house in Florida, and now … now I’m me. Now I’m something new. Will Death come soon? I wanna talk to him, I wanna know how he sees the world.”
Charlie shrugged, a little tipsy. “I guess … Death will come when he’s called. I think … sometimes it’s that too.”
“What is Death? What’s he like?”
“He’s different for everyone.”
“But everybody dies.”
“Yes.”
“So how can Death be different?”
“He’s … sometimes he’s … sometimes he’s a storm, and sometimes he’s a kindness and sometimes he’s … sometimes he is pain without end and sometimes he is … As a child, there is a moment when we see him for the very first time, and he has always been there but finally we know, but as an adult, we never believe, we close our eyes because we are too afraid and he is … I’m very tired. I’m sorry. There’s this …”
Tick tick tick tick …
“I think I need an early night.”
“Good night, Charlie.”
“Good night, Robinson.”
They swayed their separate ways to bed.
Charlie drove.
He gave a gift of fresh flower seeds to the last engineer left in the coal plant as it closed its doors, and the man shook his head and said, “What am I gonna do with this? I’m out of work now, my boys, we’re all out of work, it’s over, it’s all over for us …”
And it was, and Death came to wave them off as they headed into an uncertain future, and stayed a little while longer as the men in hard hats came to pull the coal plant down, never to be rebuilt, because on the hills a little to the west, there was now a field full of solar panels instead; and in the torn-up desert of their lives, fresh flowers grew.
And Charlie drove.
In a town on the edge of the Georgia–South Carolina border, a man behind the counter exclaimed, “Bicycle helmets kill you, why you giving me a bicycle helmet, my friend, he wore one of these and he’s now paraplegic, I mean, you should see him, he can’t even feed himself, he can’t even … like bicycle helmets destroy lives, I’m tel
ling you!”
But on the way home that night, he didn’t have enough space in his bag to put the helmet, and it was from Death, and it wasn’t in his nature to leave these things behind, so he put it on his head and cycled home, and was hit by a speeding car driven by a fifteen-year-old, and spent the rest of his life with a limp and a pain in his leg, and lived.
He lived. In pain, struggling with mundane tasks, he lived and he loved and the man he loved loved him back just as much, such an intensity of commitment that sometimes he couldn’t believe that the human brain had such strength within it to love so hard, and he lived.
And Death, heading the other way in his four-wheel drive, passed him by.
Chapter 87
A bar, in a seaside resort in South Carolina.
The Ferris wheel was motionless outside, but on the crazy golf courses the children putted their balls into the gaping mouths of crocodiles, down the side of plastic volcanoes, and on the sand the bathers stretched their pasty bodies out beneath the sun, and drank cold beer from the cooler box, and listened to the roar of the ocean.
Charlie and Robinson walked along the seashore, and it was beautiful; the smell, said Robinson, the smell from the Atlantic is nothing like the smell back home, it’s a different sea, going to a different place, you can tell, you can feel it in the air.
Returning to the hotel, there were two men waiting for them by the reception desk, rolled-up shirt sleeves, black trousers, one greying and friendly, one young, blonde, stiff and tight, thick wrists and bulging arms, a body bordering on comically, inhumanly buffed.
They stepped forward as Charlie approached, said, “Excuse me? Are you the Harbinger of Death?”
“Yes,” he replied politely, causing the hotel receptionist—to whom this was new information—to flinch away. “Can I help you?”
“We’d like to buy you a drink.”
“Thank you, but I’m …”
The younger man pulled a leather pouch from his pocket, opened it up, revealed a badge. “Sir,” he repeated. “We’d like to buy you a drink.”
Charlie hesitated, running his tongue round his lower lip, the good spirits of the evening slowly dissolving. Robinson murmured, “Want me to stick around?”
The man answered before Charlie could. “Sir, we’d like to talk to the Harbinger alone, thank you.”
“It’ll be fine,” Charlie replied, half turning his head towards Robinson, a little grateful nod. “It’ll be fine.”
“I’ll knock on your door in an hour,” grunted Robinson, and pushed—a little too close, a little too hard—between the two men, stomping towards the lifts that went up to the guest rooms.
They had a drink.
Charlie had orange juice, which turned out to be mostly orange acid with sugar in it.
The older man had a Bloody Mary, the younger, soda water.
They sat in the low, warm lights of the bar, as the traffic trundled by outside, headlight, headlight, great lorries heading to far-off places, huge family growlers high off the ground, kangaroo bars on the front, children watching TV in the back.
The men introduced themselves. The older was Stanczak; the younger Nelson.
The younger did all the talking, while the elder leant back into the curved couch of their booth, one leg crossed over the other, smiling.
“Mr. Harbinger of Death …”
“My name is Charlie.”
“I saw your passport.”
Charlie half shrugged. “So that’s my name.”
“Why do you have a name, may I ask?”
“You know, you’re the second person to ask me that in the last week. I have a name because I’m a person. I come from Birmingham.”
“Alabama?”
“England.”
“Is that the place with Sharia law?”
“No.”
“But you are employed by Death, as his Harbinger?”
“Yes.”
“So you are, as well as a British citizen, a person?”
“Yes.” Charlie has been in this business too long to take offence at this sort of thing.
“Mr. Harbinger …”
“Charlie.”
Nelson’s mouth twisted with distaste, but reluctantly: “Charlie. What is the nature of your business in South Carolina?”
“I go where I’m sent.”
“And where is that?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Why not?”
“Lawyers and doctors have confidentiality. My employer considers that his work, being often so pertinent to theirs, should also have a degree of professional discretion about it.”
“His work is Death.”
“No. He is Death.”
“Do you know the location of Death at this time?”
“Everywhere.”
“Are you being obstructive?”
“No. Death is everywhere.”
“I think you and I both know that I was referring to the individual known as the reaper, the bringer of darkness, the rider of the Apocalypse.”
“You want to know where my employer’s current physical incarnation is?”
“Yes.”
“Somewhere behind.”
“Behind?”
“On the road behind me. That’s how it works. I go before … he follows behind.”
“But he tells you where to go.”
“Yes.”
“So if you were to deviate from that path—if you were to, for example, return to Georgia …”
“Death would still come to South Carolina, but would perhaps be annoyed that I had not fulfilled my function.”
“And what is your function?”
“To go before … Gentlemen,” Charlie leant forward suddenly, folding his fingers together between his knees, still smiling, without humour, “I have been asked these questions a thousand times before. So have my predecessors. In the time of the revolution, when Death and War both stalked these lands, I imagine the Harbingers that were then sent to America were also asked these questions, and also gave the same replies, which have been documented for all to see. You are asking questions you could find the answers to in your local library, or Wikipedia. This is … this is nothing. Death comes, and the world turns, and that is how it always has been, and always will be. So forgive me for asking: why do you want to have this drink?”
The younger man sat back, impatient perhaps, or maybe only huffing to hide his uncertainty. For a moment, the three sat there, looking at each other, reading each other’s waiting eyes, before the older man, putting his glass down, said, “Does Death barter?”
Charlie eased deeper into his chair, relaxed, another familiar question. “No. Not really.”
“Not really?”
“I’m told there was once a queen … and once a mother of a very ill child … and once a soldier somewhere in the south … but that was a long time ago. The last Harbinger told me that Death was once challenged to a battle at Laser Quest, and the idea was so delightful that he took the bet—but that might just have been my predecessor’s sense of humour, she’s a bit like that, you see. She’s got a name, and comes from a place too. I don’t know who won the battle, if it was real.”
He waited. The older man, his question asked, resumed drinking, casual as a sunbathing lion, his belly full, his work done.
The younger glanced at the older, then leant forward again, shaking his head a little, impatient with both his colleague and Charlie.
“America can offer—”
“No.”
“The people of America demand—”
“No.”
“Are you authorised to speak for—”
“No, but I know how this works. Everyone knows how this works.”
“You’ve been tracked, as you say, you’re human and we can—”
“You can’t manipulate Death. Threatening me, turning me out of your country won’t stop him coming.”
“There are things we can offer.”
Charlie shrugg
ed.
“I’m told that Death will come for ideas, as well as people.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“There are ideas we could preserve, there are concepts that are—”
“No. The world changes, and that is all.”
“You say that everyone knows how this works, but your boss—”
“Everyone does. You do. Even as you sit here talking to me, you know that it’s meaningless. You’ve known your whole life.”
Nelson, leaning a little further now, sitting right on the edge of the couch. “What is Death?”
Charlie nearly laughed, glanced over at Stanczak to see if the question was a joke. The old man’s eyes sparkled with mischief, but he said nothing.
“You know the answer to that,” Charlie chuckled. “Everyone knows the answer to that.”
“Do I? They say that Death stalks the earth, but what is he? What is Death, what does it mean, why does he come, why does he choose who he chooses? Is it luck? Is it fate? Can we choose, or is our time just ticking down? Is there … is there God? Is Death God?”
“Death is Death,” replied Charlie with a shrug. “That’s all there really is to say.”
