Death

by Madhuri Pavamani

  Then, like any other couple in the history of coupledom, we headed upstairs to shower, brush teeth, shave, and perform all the other mundane things couples did when getting ready to greet the day.

  I texted Avery while Juma wandered through my closet, amazed I stocked it with stuff for her—“Why would you do that?” “Why wouldn’t I?”—blown away I paid attention to her tiniest details—“How did you know I wear PF Flyers? Gah! I love cheap bras from Target.”—rendered to tears as she pulled on a FEMINIST AS FUCK T-shirt and black cargo pants—“You remembered I hate jeans.” I pulled her off the floor, kissed her, and sent her downstairs with orders to make a pot of coffee while I tried texting Avery again. When I joined her fifteen minutes later, she was tear-free and almost-smiling.

  “I tried calling Avery,” she let me know as I poured myself some coffee and joined her at the bar, “let him know we’re okay. I also talked to my folks, let them know I’m alive.”

  “But not that you died?” I asked as I scrolled through my phone for any new messages. “Rani said all is eerily quiet at the palace.”

  “He knows,” Juma stated, and I knew she meant Khan and the fact I’d killed Veda.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “he knows.”

  I caught her eye and it flashed a little mayhem and murder.

  “I suppose this is when it gets a little interesting.” She flashed a smile that screamed death, and I choked down my breath because anything else would have resulted in all kinds of silly proclamations of falling for her. Again.

  “Because up to this point, shit has been such a goddamned snorefest,” I joked, and lit a smoke and she laughed and sipped her coffee, and minus the kind of twisted conversation, as I said before, we were just like any other couple in the history of coupledom.

  Except.

  “Okay, a real question for you.” I changed the subject. “What happened this time when you died?” I leaned back in my chair and asked because in the game of not-quite-twenty questions, it was still my turn. Juma’s sun-kissed skin paled slightly as my words settled around us and she fidgeted, biting her lower lip in consternation. “You’re on your last life, I cannot imagine the Mistress was too pleased with that fact.”

  “The Mistress is not pleased with much about me these days,” she replied, dancing around the details of my question with her vague response.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I shot back, my words laden with double entendre.

  “Okay,” she said, and sipped her coffee and without doing much more than existing, she looked sexy as fuck with her makeup-free face and still-wet hair. “They’re plotting and planning, and all of it involves me.”

  “You mentioned that back in the forest of doom,” I replied, refusing to become alarmed by any of Death’s antics, knowing a thing or two about the bullshit she liked to engender.

  “Yeah, but I was being dismissive back there, Dutch. Playing it off as if it were nothing because I didn’t want you worried, but the last couple of times I’ve been back, folks who have known me since forever have been real funky around me.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to say because no one is talking to me, they’re all talking around me.”

  “Which is weird in and of itself,” I offered.

  “Exactly,” she agreed. “Couple that with all the shifty looks and odd comments, and I know something is up. I thought they were going to kill me, but realized how stupid that was—they don’t need to do that, they could just keep me there forever, never allow me to cross again.”

  “You make it sound like crossing involves paperwork,” I said with a smirk, and she cocked her head.

  “It kind of does,” she replied, “to the extent there’s a process and it’s rote and if it doesn’t happen, I don’t come back. Plain and simple.”

  “What about your friends?” I asked, and at the same time wondered whether she had any friends over there, Juma seemed so solitary on this side of life. “What do they say?”

  “That’s the beauty of all this and makes me think whatever is going on has been under way since the day the Mistress found my little five-year-old body dying on that gurney in that hospital in Atlanta, lying there with half my throat missing—”

  “Jesus fuck,” I interrupted her without meaning to but couldn’t help myself—I knew she’d suffered something terrible, I just had no idea she was so young when it happened. The words just kind of tumbled out of my mouth.

  “Jesus is going to fuck you up if he ever meets your brown ass,” she pointed at me and joked, then turned serious again. “I don’t talk about it, because it haunts me. It was violent and scary and hurt like the dickens—trust me, getting shot in the throat is not a day at the park.”

  I watched Juma set down her coffee cup and press her hands together, and all of her wanted to be talking about anything besides being five and getting shot and I couldn’t blame her. When I was five, I lived on the beach and had a dog named Sawyer, my mornings were spent learning to surf, and at night I played chess with my grandfather. I sure as fuck wasn’t lying in a hospital somewhere, conversing with Death.

  “You think she picked you purposely?” I pulled her back into our current story and out of the one involving too-young girls, guns, and Death. She smiled and it was a combo of sadness and relief, and for the time being, considering our most fucked-up circumstances, that wasn’t so bad.

  “She’ll deny it, but it makes perfect sense. I’m convinced it’s the reason why I, unlike any of my friends, have intimate relationships with the higher-ups in her organization, for lack of a better way to put it.”

  “Meaning you know people no one else does,” I surmised, then waited for her to continue.

  “Exactly. Kind of,” she fumbled around, “they’re not exactly people, but, yes, I know things no one else does, and I think that was on purpose.”

  “That woman, the curvy one you called that afternoon Death attacked us,” I couldn’t recall if Juma had mentioned her name, but holy shit could I recall her ass.

  “Marina,” Juma replied with a knowing laugh. “She of the fabulous ass. Everyone notices her ass, very few get to touch it.”

  “I take it you are one of the very few?”

  “Oh yes, I am, Dutch, and trust that ass is as squeezable as it looks,” she replied, and we both enjoyed a few seconds of levity. “No other Poocha knows her like I do. We all deal with her, but with everyone else, the relationship is all business: meet with her, she assigns you a Deader, and when you complete your reclamation, she gives you your next one. Then there’s me, the girl who grew up playing in her office, went to the salon with her for pedicures and manicures, chatted late into the night with her about boys and sex. But Marina’s not even the half of it, Dutch.

  “Remember that weapon I used?” she asked, and I wondered how she thought I could ever forget it. That multipointed star ripped Death to shreds, left her a mess of blood and horror on that floor, and made it a goddamn walk in the park for Juma to rip out her heart.

  “Yeah, vaguely,” I joked, and she smirked because we both knew nothing about that scene was vague. It was Technicolor and surround sound ten times over.

  “It’s called an astra and I got it from the Rouxs,” she started to explain. “I don’t even know how to describe them to you except to say they create the magic necessary to be Death. And they’re animate, like you can see them but you can’t touch them, and yet, they’re not ghosts. There’s energy flowing through them, it pops and crackles and hurts if you try to capture it. And they speak but they don’t, like their mouths never move but you know what they’re saying.

  “Being around them is both strange and wonderful and I’ve spent years with them, learning their magic and their ways, becoming so intimate, they gifted me the astra and told me to be ready to use it on the Mistress, that I would need to use it on her and to carry it with me always.”

  “What the fuck, Juma.”

  “Right,” she laughed, but that wasn
’t happiness in the sound. “So goddamned weird. But I had just met you, and the Mistress was being all kinds of nasty and mysterious, and then the shit with my ma and learning the web of lies she wove around me, so their admonition started feeling not so weird. I thought the Rouxs just liked me and maybe wanted someone to let Death know she needed to stop fucking around with folks. So I took that astra and I practiced.”

  “What do you mean ‘practiced’?” I asked.

  “Kash knows,” she replied. “I used it on Keepers, he saw me use it on them. Kind of like test runs until I felt as comfortable with it as I do Simone. But that’s not even the point. The point is after she killed me on the Vineyard that afternoon, and I crossed back and met with Marina, Sayyid—the Rouxs I’ve had the most dealings with throughout my life—I learned that all of what I just told you, every word of it, was orchestrated by her, from the moment I crossed paths with the Rouxs to that fight in my apartment. She planned all of it, every motherfucking step.”

  I leaned back into the counter, blown away by the enormity of what she was saying, if what she was saying was true.

  “Let’s say you’re right,” I began collecting my thoughts out loud.

  “I am right!” she exclaimed, her face a mask of righteous indignation.

  “Sorry,” I corrected myself. “I’m playing devil’s advocate, not doubting you,” I explained, and she waited to hear what more I had to say. “What’s the end game? What’s she trying to get out of all of this?”

  Juma crossed her arms and shook her head, watching me as I lit a smoke. “That’s what I can’t for the life of me figure out. I know she’s up to something, she’s always up to something, but nothing makes sense.”

  “Unless she’s setting you up to be Death,” I said, but as the words left my mouth, I knew they were foolish. Juma’s laughter suggested she agreed.

  “You have met her, correct?” she asked, and I knew every word of her question was rhetorical. “Because then you would know there is no way that power-hungry beast is giving up any of her domain to anyone, and sure as fuck not me. She lives for being Death.”

  “But maybe the Rouxs are the real ones in control?” I suggested.

  “No sweetness,” Juma disagreed, “that was my first mistake, thinking they were pulling the strings. They are as powerful as she allows them to be—no more, no less. I’m telling you, Dutch, it’s all her, she controls everything. But there’s more.”

  I ran my hands through my hair, smoked, and grabbed a glass to pour some Scout because I couldn’t imagine what was coming next.

  “And it’s not good,” she added, and twisted her fingers and fuck. Just fuck.

  “You say that as if up to this point it’s been all farting unicorns and pretty rainbows.”

  She snorted and I couldn’t help but smile. I loved Juma snorts.

  “It’s about you,” she began, then corrected. “Not you per se, but your kind. Keepers. And I don’t know if this is true, because she was ranting and screaming and threatening to slit my throat with her goddamned fingernail and I was trying to stay small because of the whole one-life-left thing.”

  “Oh yeah, that thing,” I teased, and appreciated that here and there we could joke about the devastating end of us. Then she grew tense and all of her was serious and I braced myself for the worst. Funny thing was, even when you thought you’d heard it all and you were ready for some bad shit, you hadn’t and you weren’t, and nothing could really prepare you for whatever was coming next.

  “When you die, Dutch, I know what happens.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: JUMA

  I want to greet death

  with laughter

  a filthy joke

  whiskey neat

  and a smoke

  I’d learned over years of reclamating Deaders that people fell into two camps: those who feared death and those who did not. Both tended to hold the same ideals, follow similar belief systems, conduct themselves in a mostly moral fashion. The main difference I’d discerned was an ability to maintain a sense of humor and levity when discussing all things end-of-life, something the latter camp did quite well, the former not so much.

  Speak to both camps, and what you’d quickly learn was a similar distaste for the state of Purgatory.

  Limbo.

  Abeyance.

  No matter what they called it, no one wanted to be left hanging, unable ever to achieve some rest for their weary soul, forever wandering, no place to curl up, breathe deep, and be at peace.

  The unknown-ness of it terrified, it was like the black hole of death and no one wanted any part of it.

  Keepers were no different.

  Those deadly assassins who lived breathed bled death, over and over, nine times and then, why yes, please, let’s do it all again. Even they wanted finality. All of us did.

  “What happens, Juma?” Dutch asked, and because I knew him as I knew my own breath, I could tell he was trying to prepare himself for whatever was lingering on the tip of my tongue.

  “Nothing,” I replied, and it might have sounded as if I were trying to be all mysterious and cute, but I wasn’t. Nothing fucking happened.

  And he relaxed some of the tension in his shoulders eased he breathed a little deeper because he didn’t know the blank spaces that existed within nothingness, the dark that could exist within light, the terror of uncertainty.

  Until.

  “There’s a room, but it’s not really a room because it’s a construct of her mind and dependent upon what whim has tickled her fancy that day,” I started to explain, and in my mind it made sense but I could tell my words were landing around his feet all scattered and illogical and either I needed to try to explain her to him or I just needed to lay it all bare and let him pick over the bones of another one of her disastrous masterpieces.

  I chose the latter.

  “Let me back up and start again,” I offered, and he agreed.

  “Yes, please do that.”

  “When Keepers die, unlike the Deaders I reclamate or those folks who stay behind and construct their own afterlife, you all are relegated to a kind of no-man’s-land, a place in between, a room where you just walk in circles.”

  “What?” He sucked on his smoke and shook his head in disbelief.

  I ignored his question and posed my own. “What did you think happened?”

  “What did you think happened?” he shot back, and because I loved him and swore never to play with his emotions, I answered him.

  “I thought you were treated like anyone who’s unable to cross back,” I admitted. “You were given a talking-to by Marina and Death about what was expected of you in terms of conduct and morality—not much—and the parameters of your afterlife—pretty much anything but reclamation.”

  “But instead?” he asked.

  “Instead—” I twisted my rings and bothered my lower lip. “—it’s just a white room that feels enormous and confining, too bright in the deepest dark, bodies never-ending.”

  “In other words, hell,” Dutch deadpanned.

  “Her version of hell,” I corrected, “which might change every hour on the hour or never at all.”

  “Because she’s in control,” he repeated my words from earlier.

  “Always.”

  “How’d you learn this?” he tapped an unlit cigarette on the table and asked, and I knew he would hate the answer but we’d come this far, I wasn’t about to start lying to him now.

  “Because she likes to use you in any way possible to torture me.” I held his gaze as my truths landed between us, the ways she invoked his name in an effort to destroy me, “and so this time around, she wanted me to know where you would wind up.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to speak the rest.

  “When I die,” he finished my sentence for me, putting out there the very phrase I could not. “Fuck her, Juma. It’s this kind of nonsense she and Khan go back and forth about and all of us wind up collateral damage to their bullshit. You yourself agree, she is in c
ontrol, it’s her rules, she curates everything.”

  “Yeah, I did say that,” I said, “because it’s true. It’s all her.”

  “So that room is all her, too.” Dutch pointed at the table and seethed. “She made that room for her own shits and giggles.”

  I sensed he was about to go off on a rant and then his phone rang out, the sound startling both of us back into the modern world of emails and text messages and all things beep. He slid his finger across the screen and let the call go to voice mail, silenced his notifications, and then turned back to me.

  “You know what I think, gorgeous?” He stood and put out his smoke, then held out his hand to me and pulled me up from my chair. “I think first we finish with that motherfucker Khan, then we turn our attentions to your cunt-faced boss, and handle her, too.”

  “A little murder and mayhem, Dutch and Juma style,” I stated aloud. “I like it. So Mickey and Mallory Knox of us.”

  “Ha!” he laughed, his head tossed back and all of him full of light and I thought back to that morning I awoke alone in the awful white room on the slab of cold marble with just his photo to convince me it was worth it, that all the madness had some reason. He looked so beautiful in that shot, much like now—loose happy relaxed—and I wanted to capture it in a jar with some holes poked in the lid and keep it on a shelf for me when that moment came and the two of us were no longer one.

  Instead.

  “DUTCH! DUTCH! You there?! DUTCH!”

  I looked around in shock as the voice coughed and crackled and came through the walls via some radio frequency that wreaked havoc on my newly crossed bones and blood and all of me felt ready to rip it out of the walls, if only I knew its origin.

  “Shit. Hold on.” Dutch squeezed my shoulder and walked toward an ancient-looking hand-carved box on the wall, turned the knob, pushed a button, and spoke.

  “Where’s the fire, Riz?”

  “Turn your phone back on. Frist has been trying to reach you all morning,” the voice replied, but Dutch was already dialing her up on his phone.

  “Frist . . . hey, hey, hey—stop crying and slow down.”