by Jason Purdy
Heaven is a place where your little brother is still whining at you to let him play Sonic the Hedgehog. Heaven is a place where your parents still speak to you.
“Pearly gates,” Alex said. “Saint Peter with a list of names. Clouds, interruptions from low flying aircraft. No Hitler.”
The man made a face at him. Alex has the feeling that he knows he is lying. He can see right through him. He suddenly felt that if someone tried to touch him, their hand might just pass right the way through too.
“Forget all that,” the man said.
“Done,” Alex replied.
“Imagine instead, a giant sorting office. Like a post office. In this place, every single piece of mail is one of you folk. There are quotas to be filled; to get so many delivered every minute, hour, and day, whatever. Just like any sort of job. We’ve gotta make the numbers right.”
“That sounds horrible,” Alex said.
“Sometime, you go over quota, sometimes you go under. You have leftover, spare mail with no home to go to. Now, we could just throw the spare mail in the incinerator, right? Then no one will ever know where it went. Maybe there are birthday cards in there, maybe an important cheque, but fuck that, it’s gone. If anyone asks, it was lost in the post.”
He made finger quotes, and grinned at Alex.
“I don’t follow you,” Alex said.
“You got lost in the post,” the stranger said. “You were leftover, bound for the incinerator. We made the quota, and you were left on the floor.”
“Story of my life,” Alex said.
“So you get a grace period,” the man said. “Twenty four hours before we strike you dead.”
“Well that sucks,” Alex said.
“Yeah, but most people get no notice at all… so silver linings and all that.”
“So I’m dying, because of a clerical error?” Alex said.
“Sort of,” the man said. “This happens very rarely, but when it does, there’s nothing we can do about it. X amount of people need to live every day, X amount need to die. You fell from one mail cart and didn’t make it into another.”
The scowling waitress returned. She thrust the coffee at Alex and shoved the fry towards the stranger. Her plastic heels are clacking away from them on the dirty tiles before they can say a word.
“I love that,” the main said. “The complete lack of manners or human empathy is so refreshing.”
He passed the tomato sauce across to Alex as he snatched the fry, sliding the coffee into its place. He coated his fry in enough tomato sauce to give Thierry Henry a brain haemorrhage.
The stranger looked into his coffee. It seemed strangely greasy, and there might have been a dollop of spit added to the top of it for good measure. He sipped it anyway.
“So?” he said, setting the cup down.
“So what?” Alex said.
He shovels the fry into his face like it might be taken away from him at any moment.
“Should I stay or should I go?” the stranger sang.
“Stay,” Alex said, waving his fork. “Tell me why you’re here.”
Alex is hoping he can get the guy to pay for his breakfast.
“It’s my day off,” the man said. “Any time this happens, one of us gets sent out to make sure everything goes smoothly.”
“I don’t see how this can ever go smoothly,” Alex said, thinking about the leap from his bedroom window.
“That’s the point. Besides, it sure as hell beats sorting dirty letter in a stuffy office all day,” he paused. “No offense.”
“Should I be offended?”
“Well… it’s just a metaphor, but, you’re a dirty letter.”
“Fuck you very much,” Alex said.
The man’s coffee spilled onto the chair, dripping onto the old tiles below them as he drank.
“So what, these letters, they’re souls, right?” Alex said. “You’re talking about my soul.”
“It’s not like that,” the man said. “There are no souls.”
“What?” Alex said, dropping his fork with a clatter.
“Poor choice of words,” the man said. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“Why do you care?” he said. “You’re an atheist, right?”
“I still care about my immortal soul,” Alex said, adding the appropriate gravitas to the term.
“Listen Alex,” the stranger said, “I’ve done this a lot, right? You can debate spirituality with me all day until you die in your seat, face down in your crap breakfast. You’ll get nothing from me. I have done this a thousand times over. There are rules I need to stick to. I won’t break them. I’ll answer every single one of your questions without saying anything at all.”
Alex set his fork down, and pushed the plate away. He’d lost his appetite. It was a feeling he was not familiar with, and he didn’t particularly care for it.
“Anyway,” the stranger said, “the rules.”
He pulled a piece of paper from his shirt. It was clearly blank. He smoothed it out, and cleared his throat.
“I can move through time, just me. Not you, but I can’t control it. I can move forwards, backwards, side to side, every which way through it, but I can’t change or rewind events. You have twenty four hours. There is no wiggle room.”
Alex nodded.
“At the end of your time, you disappear,” the stranger continued. “I disappear, and everyone remembers you and what you did.”
“How do I die?” Alex said.
The stranger looked at him. The kid was pale and shaking. It was starting to sink in. He was tactful enough to take a softer approach.
“You just drop dead,” he said. “An autopsy would show a brain haemorrhage. If you’ve ever heard of someone dying of one of those… it’s usually us.”
He stirred his coffee with long of his long, pale fingers.
“It was all so much easier before autopsies, to be honest.”
“Will it hurt?” Alex said.
“Not even a little,” the stranger said. “Like getting into a warm bath.”
“Alright,” Alex said. He let out a long, shuddering sigh. “Are there more rules?”
The man glanced at the blank paper.
“I’m not allowed to alter the perceptions of other people. You can do all the dumb stuff you want, but everyone will remember it after you’re gone.”
He folded the paper away.
“There’s a whole bunch of smaller things, but they don’t usually come up, so I think we’re good for now. Any questions?”
Alex laced his hands under his bearded chin.
“So… do you have superpowers?” he asked.
“Define superpowers.”
“Can you teleport?”
“How I get around is my own business,” the man replied.
“Can you make shit appear out of thin air? Like that piece of paper?”
He pulled the paper out of his shirt again.
“No, this is just folded up in here, jeez,” he said, rolling his eyes and then stopping them again. “But I can make things appear, yeah, but it has to be things that I already have lying around in my basement at home. Nothing that I don’t already own.”
He pulled a ceremonial sword, hilt adorned with jewels, from the depths of his shirt. He slid it back in. Alex gaped at him.
“So that’s it kid,” he said. “Those are the rules. Sometime I bend them, but only if I like the person.”
“Do you like me?” Alex asked.
“The jury is still out.”
22:28:05
Alex and the stranger were still in the café.
“Can I tweet about this?” Alex said, staring at his phone.
“Can you what?”
“Never mind,” Alex replied, while tweeting about it.
“Get your nose out of that freaking phone,” the man said. “Time is a wasting. Life is for the living. Do some.”
The stranger tapped his pen against the notepad with
obvious frustration. The page currently read Things to Do Before I die in neat, tight hand writing. The rest of the page was blank.
It had been empty for the last twenty minutes.
“Focus, Alex,” the man said. “What do you want to do before you die?”
“Don’t say die,” Alex said, not looking up from his phone. “It makes it sound scary.”
“It is scary,” the man replied. “So think big. But not too big, travel seriously eats into your hours. Don’t get me started on the Scottish guy who wanted to travel to Australia to see his lost love before he died.”
“What happened?” Alex asked.
“He didn’t see his lost love in Australia before he died,” the stranger said, sighing. “He would have barely made it anyway, but his flight was delayed for eight hours in Singapore. He dropped dead and fell onto the luggage carousel. He went around in circles for about half an hour before someone noticed the body.”
Alex slumped forward, banging his head slowly off the table.
“Think,” the man said, tapping him on the back of his skull. “Think, think, think.”
“My plans for today were to go to work; smoke some weed, masturbate, and then play a bit of Xbox. Maybe drink a few beers. That was it.”
Alex’s voice was muffled by the table. The stranger looked at him with something close to pity.
“Come on,” he pleaded. “This gets harder every single time. Are you all that dull now?”
“Yes,” Alex said slowly.
“Maybe we should stop giving you notice,” he said. “I want an adventure, Alex. I don’t want to watch while you lose at Call of Duty and beat off to Japanese animation.”
“I don’t do anything of that,” Alex said, raising his head. His cheeks were burning red.
“You do,” he said. “I’ve read your file.”
The man pulled the file in question from his shirt. It was several inches thick, world worn, covered in coffee rings, sauce stains, and strange crusty build ups.
“Quite a read, really,” he said, starting to flick through it.
Alex grasped for it.
“Can I read it?” he said.
“Why?” he said, lifting out of Alex’s reach.
“I want to see what you all think of me.”
“No you don’t,” he said. “You want to skip to the last page and see how it ends. You’re one of those idiots that read the plot on Wikipedia before they go see the movie.”
“No I’m not.”
The man hits the back of his hand off the file.
“It’s all in here, kiddo.”
“Well tell me how it ends then.”
He slipped the file back into his shirt.
“I can’t,” he said. “The pages are blank. They’re written as we go along. Right now it’s probably writing Alex wastes his time arguing semantics with Stephen in a café that is developing a new super bacteria in its grease trap.”
Alex hits his hands off the table.
“So that’s your name,” Alex said.
“What did I say?” Stephen said.
“Stephen.”
“Oh, yeah let’s go with that,” he replied.
Alex looked crestfallen.
“Isn’t that your real name?” Alex said.
The waitress appeared beside them, as if she rose from the depths of hell, summoned by a wicked ritual.
“Anything else?” she said, her eyes drilling through their very souls.
“We’re fine, thank you,” Stephen said.
She smiled at them. It was as warm as the cold, dead void of space.
“Then please, get the fuck out,” she said.
In a much nicer part of London, Kate lay in her double bed, staring at the ceiling. Her eyes were bruised and ringed black, like an insomniac raccoon. She looked like she hadn’t slept once in her entire life. She felt that way, too.
Her curtains were thick, obscuring the light from outside. Her pale skin and dark eyes would have been pretty, if she didn’t look like she had been dredged from the Thames after two weeks.
Her alarm went off, and she listlessly rolled over, turning it off. At the time she did this, Alex was still sleeping, and Stephen was standing in his bedroom, going through his CD and video games collection, and lamenting that the man-child didn’t seem to own a single book.
Kate’s bathroom was her own private pharmacy. There were pills and empty boxes scattered across the sink and counter top. Rarely used make up brushes, eyeliner, lipstick, and more, were all over the place.
She opened the cupboard above the sink, after glancing at herself in the mirror for a moment.
She picks up a few of the boxes of pills. They’re antidepressants, with a range of increasingly terrifying sounding names. Doxepin, Estazolam, Eszopiclone.
“Can’t any of you gentlemen help a lady out?” she said, in a small, listless voice.
She knocked a clatter of boxes and containers to the floor, putting her head in her hands. She pulled at her hair, moaning with frustration.
Downstairs, her family were having breakfast. She joined them, still in her old pyjamas. Her sister, her mum, and her dad were all getting ready for work. Her mum was in a pants suit, and her dad had a tasteful navy grey three piece on. Her sister, June, had a doctor’s coat strewn over the back of her chair.
She was living here to save money to buy a house with Jeremy, her long term boyfriend. With the prices of property in London, she’d be living here until she was five thousand years old.
There was a bowl of porridge waiting for her at her seat. God only knew how long it had been waiting for her. They were all finishing up, and didn’t bother to wait for her, or even wake her.
“What are you doing today, Kate?” her mum asked. A good morning would have been nice.
“Job hunting,” Kate said.
She looked down at her lumpy breakfast and lifted her spoon. It almost felt too heavy to manage. She felt the eyes of her family crawl over her, like she was covered in spiders.
“And how’s that going?” her father asked.
She remembered that he used to want to take her fishing and threatened to beat up her boyfriends, in that joking way that good dads do. That was years ago now. Now he mostly ignored her.
“Good,” she said.
Her mother and father shared the look across the table. June glanced at her sister with a look halfway between pity and compassion.
“There might be a receptionist job opening up soon at our practice…” she said, tentatively.
Kate’s parents beamed at the golden child.
“I’ll send my CV,” Kate said, raising her head. She tries for her best, most chipper tone of voice.
“I could drop it in myself today?” June said.
She smiles at Kate, who gives her a small smile back.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll print it and leave it in later today.”
There is a moment of kindness between the two of them that might have been enough for Kate, that day, but her mother promptly ruins it.
“Make sure you do,” she said, in a clipped voice.
Kate dropped her spoon with a clatter. It was loud in the silence at the breakfast table. She put her hands under the table, squeezing them into tight fists. Her knuckles were white, and her long nails drew small crescent moons of blood on the palms of her hands.
“Better get going,” Kate’s dad said, putting down his newspaper.
Kate opened her mouth to speak, but she couldn’t find the words. Her mum pushed her chair back with a loud scrape, turning to her.
“Could you please clear the breakfast table? If you do nothing else today? It’s bad enough you live here rent free. I’m not running a B&B.”
Jane made a face at her mother, but didn’t say anything. Kate’s dad seemed very much done with the whole thing altogether. They left without another word, gathering their things and leaving Kate sitting at the table alone.
The front door slammed behind them.
“Have a nice day,” Kate said, to the empty kitchen.
She reached into the waist band of her pyjama bottoms, and pulled out a carefully folded piece of paper. On it, it said To Mum, Dad, and Jane.
She weighed it down with a tea spoon and started to clear the table.
21:58:03
Alex wished he was dead already. He wished that he didn’t know today was his last day, so he could carry on working, eating pizza, and getting high. That would have been enough before today. Suddenly, it felt like the last thing in the world he wanted to do.
They walked down the street in silence. It was a warm, smoggy London summer day. Alex had discarded his hoody and was wearing an old t-shirt for a band that had been defunct for nearly a decade.
Stephen ruffled his hair. It felt like static electricity from a balloon.
“What now, champ?” he said. “It’s your special day, after all.”
Alex simply stared at his natty old shoes as they walked.
“The possibilities are endless,” Stephen said, “up to whatever you have in your bank account, and if you have a valid passport.”
“Forty quid,” Alex said, “and no, I don’t.”
“Well,” said Stephen, “the possibilities are decidedly more limited then. Still, London has everything you need. London is fun, right?”
A passing businessman bumps into Stephen, passing through him. He doesn’t even seem to notice, he’s too busy.
“Watch where you’re going,” the man said, “…Fucking tourists.”
Stephen turned back to his bearded and miserable companion.
“What’s on your bucket list, kiddo?” he said. “Come on. Any burning desires? Any flames of passion that you’d like to re-ignite before you kick the bucket?”
“No,” Alex said, sighing.
“Didn’t you ever want to do something with your life?” Stephen said.
“I used to, yeah.”
