Has The World Ended Yet?

by Peter Darbyshire

I went up the aisle to the cameras and turned them all off, one after the other. I looked into the last one for a second, at whoever was watching, if anyone was watching, but I didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

  When I was done, I went back down the aisle and we stepped over the bodies to go outside. Blood was running down the steps. We walked up the street to the car I’d taken from the parking garage. I got in behind the wheel and Thane sat in the passenger seat again. I started the car and we drove through the night. I turned on the headlights but only the one on the driver’s side worked.

  I didn’t take us anywhere in particular. I just drove around the city. There was nowhere really left to go.

  “Do you think they’ll come back?” Thane asked at one point, and I knew he was talking about Cassandra and Burn.

  “They’ll be someone else’s problem if they do,” I said. But I knew their deaths were on me, no matter what Thane said. Just add them to the list.

  We found our way back to the cemetery, which was accidental. I hadn’t intended to drive there, but sometimes it works out that way. There were no cars parked outside, but there was a girl wandering through the graves. The headlight lit her up but she didn’t seem to notice. She had a backpack and an armful of white chrysanthemums. She laid a single one on each grave she passed. When she ran out of them, she reached into the backpack and pulled out another armful. We watched her until she went out of sight behind a large stone crypt. So that was one mystery solved.

  “Isn’t that something,” Thane said.

  “It most definitely is something,” I said.

  We sat there for a time, watching the cemetery, but I didn’t see the girl again. I checked my side once more and saw blood everywhere. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it through the night.

  “Who is she?” Thane asked, and I shook my head.

  “I’ve never seen her before,” I said. “Maybe she’s another ghost.”

  “I meant the girl in the hospital.”

  “She’s just a girl.”

  “Daughter?” Thane asked. “Distant relative? The child of a friend?”

  “No one I really know.”

  Thane looked over at me. “Then why visit her in the middle of the night? And obviously on a regular basis, if the nurses let you in like that?”

  “She’s someone I’m responsible for,” I said.

  “How are you responsible if you don’t even know her?”

  “Her parents were my first case. This was before I knew what I was. They came back to look after her. They waved me down in the street. I was just driving around after Judgment Day. I didn’t know what to do. They told me about her when we drove. By the time we got to the hospital, they were gone. That’s how I knew I was a ferryman. If it hadn’t been for me, maybe they could have looked after her. So now I look after her for them.”

  He was silent for a time and I thought maybe he’d gone. When I looked over, though, he was still there.

  “The money is in the picture in the bathroom,” he said. He kept on watching the cemetery. “A little emergency fund. It’s the only one, so leave the others alone.”

  “All right,” I said. “I guess I should thank you.”

  “No, you shouldn’t,” he said.

  I got out of the car and went and got a chrysanthemum from Thane’s grave. I thought maybe Emily might like a flower in her room. When I got back in the car, Thane was gone. I had a feeling that he hadn’t just snuck away, but that he was really gone this time.

  I drove away from the cemetery and kept driving. I didn’t know where I was going, which was fine as I didn’t have anywhere to go. I passed another car driving in the other direction. The man driving lifted a few fingers off the wheel in a greeting, and I did the same. I wondered how many of the other lonely cars out there had people like me in them. How many of us were just passing the time until there was no time left for us?

  One day I’ll find out.

  One day we’ll all find out.

  Déjà Yu

  MAKES THE PAIN GO AWAY

  The Trailer

  THE WORST thing about being dead is the pain. I felt like I was being crushed inside for months after the heart attack. Like I was forever frozen in that moment of death.

  The kids tried to help ease it before Tyler, my wife – my ex-wife now, I guess – took them away with her. Samantha, my daughter, told me the pain meant my heart was broken. She said it would feel better if I came home again. Jesse, my son, said maybe being dead is like when you scrape your knee or elbow. You get a scab for a while but then the pain goes away.

  Tyler wouldn’t talk to me after I died. She wouldn’t even see me. She changed the locks after she kicked me out. I tried to come back to visit the kids, but she wouldn’t let me in. I had to talk to them through the door, or on the phone. Samantha said Tyler worried I’d give them whatever it was I had. But I didn’t have anything.

  My doctor said all the dead feel the pain. He said there are different theories about it. The people who think our condition is caused by all the preservatives or modifications in our food say it’s a chemical by-product. The religious people think it’s purgatory, that we’ll be able to die for good once we’ve suffered enough. The medical experts think it’s the body’s memory hanging on to the last seconds of life. My doctor said if I think feeling my heart attack all the time is bad, I should try to imagine what burn victims feel.

  I just wanted it to stop.

  The Willy Loman

  THE SECOND-WORST thing about being dead is you have to keep working. I still had my share of the mortgage payments, even though I didn’t live in the house anymore. And now I also had to pay rent for a new apartment. Gas and insurance for the car. Phone bills. I didn’t have to eat anymore, but I kept the fridge and cupboards stocked with groceries in case Tyler ever let the kids come and stay with me. It was a waste of money but still.

  All the bills meant I had to keep on with the life I had despite being dead. I got dressed in my work clothes in the morning and went into the office along with everyone else. That was actually easier to do thanks to the fact I didn’t need to sleep anymore now that I was dead. I went to the food court with my co-workers for lunch and watched them order the same meals I used to order and eat. I looked at the images on the video menus, of the men in suits with hamburgers, the children with fish sticks and fries, the women with salads, but I couldn’t make myself hungry. I went to the bar after work with my co-workers and ordered drinks I didn’t drink. I did everything but play minigolf with them.

  That’s because I had my heart attack on the seventh hole of Maximum Mini Golf in the Evergreen Mall during a game with two of my co-workers, Dylan and Hakim. I was ahead for the first time ever against those two. I was leaning on my club, watching Hakim tap a putt into the Wheel of Vegas when suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I knew he was aiming for the Free Massage at House of Pleasure, but he hit the Free Gym Pass at House of Pain instead. That’s when everything froze inside me and I fell to the fake turf.

  I have to give Dylan and Hakim credit – they did what they could for me. Dylan performed his best impression of the CPR he’d seen in movies, while Hakim called 911 before taking photos of the scene with his phone. One of those photos – me with my tongue sticking out and my shirt torn open as the paramedics worked on me – went around the office mail afterward. I forced a laugh and a shrug when I saw it on people’s computers and tried not to think about what was happening to me in that photo. But I couldn’t forget staring up at the monitor over the hole as I lay there, unable to move, unable to do anything but watch the different images it flashed: a flag waving in the wind, a set of Nike minigolf clubs and balls, a smiling woman who promised to make me a millionaire off my accident lawsuit. When the paramedics rolled me away on the stretcher, the monitor showed a beach on a tropical island somewhere, with the caption Your Ad Could Be Here.

  The paramedics did their best to save me, too, but I was already gone by the time they arrived. That’
s what the driver told me later in the hospital after the emergency-room doctor pronounced me officially dead. “Tough break,” the doctor said, putting away the paddles he’d been shocking me with and handing me a release form to sign.

  “Are you sure?” I asked him. “Can I get a second opinion?”

  He looked at the paramedics. The driver nodded and said, “Dead.” The other one was playing a game on his phone and didn’t even look up.

  I signed the release – it took several attempts because I still wasn’t used to the numbness that comes with being dead. But sometimes now I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t signed it – if I wasn’t officially dead.

  Anyway, the paramedics drove me home in their ambulance. I lay on the stretcher in the back. There was no room for me to sit anywhere. The driver said the living dead were turning into a real epidemic. He offered to take me to Maximum so I could finish the game with Hakim and Dylan but I said no, they were probably too far ahead of me now to catch up. Then he offered to tell my wife so I wouldn’t have to, but I said no to that, too. I said there were some things a man had to do himself.

  In all honesty, I was planning on keeping it from Tyler, but she knew from the moment I walked in the door. She looked up at me from her yoga mat in the living room, and then leaped to her feet and ran screaming for the bedroom, where she locked herself in.

  I knocked and knocked on the door, but she wouldn’t let me in. “Go away,” she screamed. “I’m in mourning!”

  I went back to the living room and watched a few minutes of a yoga show on her tablet. A man was twisted into an impossible position. “Just hold it,” he said. “Keep holding it.”

  Tyler threw all my clothes out the bedroom window and then called me on my phone to tell me to get out. I was glad we’d sent the kids to urban survival camp for the week. But I didn’t know then that I’d never see them again.

  “I’ll sleep on the couch for a while,” I told Tyler. “Until you get used to the new me.”

  “Until death do us part,” she said and disconnected.

  I went out and picked up my clothes. My neighbours were having a barbecue and everyone stood there with drinks and hamburgers in hand, watching me gather my shirts and ties, but no one said anything.

  I called a taxi and waited in the front driveway. All the houses on the street looked the same. When we’d first moved here, I’d gone home to the place across the street by accident and didn’t realize it until I was at the front door. It was for sale now. I wondered if having a dead neighbour was bad for property value.

  I took the taxi to my car in the Evergreen Mall’s parking garage. I sat in the car for most of the night because I couldn’t sleep. I thought at first it was because of the shock of being dead and what had happened with Tyler. And trying to figure out how to explain it to the kids when they got home. I didn’t know back then that I’d never be able to sleep again. That’s why you see so many people like me working the night shift at convenience stores.

  Eventually a security guard driving around the garage stopped and shone his flashlight on me without getting out of his car. He told me I had to move on. There was a lineup of cars at the exit. Each one had a lone man inside. I drove to the office and got to work paying my bills. And that’s been my life ever since.

  The Hollywood

  NOT LONG after I died, I got promoted.

  In fact, I got promoted because I was dead. I was put in charge of the Déjà Yu beauty products account. The next-worst thing about being dead is people can tell we’re dead. We have the tint to our skin, the smell, the stillness when we’re thinking about what happened to us. The Déjà Yu beauty products are supposed to make us look alive again. Creams to put colour back in our skin. Aftershave and perfume to mask the smell. Balms to make our lips look warm. Eye drops to sting our eyes and remind us to blink. Shock pads for our chests to remind us to breathe.

  Just like any other beauty product, they don’t really work. My team’s job was to make people think they do.

  Before I died, I was junior member of the development team, which mainly meant I made runs to Starbucks for coffee and to Kinko’s for the mock-ups of the ads. But the email the partners sent around the office a few weeks after my death said I was now in charge of the team because of my unique circumstances. I was the only dead person in the office, the email said. Congratulations, the email said.

  My co-workers all sent me their own emails saying I looked good. They said they could barely notice the difference from when I was alive.

  I could tell from the looks that Dylan and Hakim gave each other over the cubicle walls that they wished they’d tried harder to save me.

  I didn’t really want to be in charge of the Déjà Yu account. I didn’t really know what I was doing.

  The day of my promotion, I moved my monitor around in my cubicle so no one could see the screen. I opened one of the company’s Screenplay for Success™ templates and studied its rules.

  The Trailer: Set the scene.

  The Willy Loman: Make the audience identify.

  The Hollywood: Give the audience some drama to keep them entertained.

  The Pitch: The product.

  The Punchline: Leave the audience happy and willing to buy.

  There were large spaces in between each rule where I was supposed to add my notes. I couldn’t think of anything to fill the spaces. I closed the file and logged on to Facebook instead. I watched videos of Tyler and me and the kids at the local Disney Time. I wanted to cry at the shot of Jesse and Samantha holding hands with the Goofy in the army uniform, but my tear ducts didn’t work anymore. I phoned my old number to talk to the kids again, but there was no answer. I tried to leave a message but the voice mail was full.

  The day after I was promoted, Hakim wandered over and asked if we were going to have a meeting about the Déjà Yu account. He said everyone had run out of spam to read.

  I told the office manager I had to hold a meeting and she put us in the Coke room, which is a sign of how seriously the partners took the Déjà Yu account. I’d only been allowed in the Pepsi room before. The Pepsi room is just a standard meeting space with Ikea chairs and a table, but the Coke room has Herman Miller chairs and a video screen.

  My team consisted of three people: Hakim, Dylan and Phoenix, an intern from the university marketing program. I wasn’t sure if Phoenix was her real name or not. When I sat beside her, she pushed her chair farther away from me.

  We all stared at the blank video screen for a while. It took me a moment to realize they were waiting for me to say something.

  “Does anyone have any ideas?” I asked.

  No one said anything. They all looked from the screen to me. I looked back at the screen. The only thing I could think of was my family at the Disney Time.

  “Home video,” I said. “We’re going to make a home video.”

  They kept looking at me.

  “We’ll show them want they want,” I said. “Life like it used to be.”

  I put Dylan in charge of finding us a set, Hakim of putting together a film crew from our regulars. Phoenix said she could get actors for free from the university’s drama program.

  “We need older people,” I told her. “People with kids.”

  “Half the people in university now are older than you,” she said. “The place is full of people who’ve lost their jobs to zombies.”

  I said that would be fine and let’s not use the word zombie. I went back to my cubicle and called home again. Still no answer. The voice mail was still full.

  Dylan found us a house to shoot in a few days later. It was in a subdivision on the outer edge of the city. River Spring or River Canyon or River Valley or something like that. It was an area of scrubland, near an incineration plant. I didn’t see a river anywhere.

  The house had a mortgage foreclosure notice on the door, but there was still furniture inside. It was nicer than the furniture in my old house.

  “Why didn’t they take all this stu
ff?” I asked. “They could have got this out before the locks were changed.”

  “The bank guy told me they owed money on everything inside the house, too,” Dylan said.

  “I still would have taken it,” I said.

  The director and cameraman Hakim hired both wore T-shirts with the Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle on them. They stood outside the house and talked about how many African families would fit inside it while they smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. When I went out to say hello to them, they just stared at me and didn’t answer.

  I went back inside and found Hakim. He was in the kitchen, going through the cupboards, inspecting the glasses and plates.

  “Where did you find these guys?” I asked him.

  “We couldn’t go with the usual union guys,” Hakim said. “On account of you.”

  “What’s wrong with me?” I asked.

  “Union crews can’t work with zombies. They’ve got concerns about outsourcing and seniority.”

  “Can we not use that word?” I said.

  Hakim shrugged and dropped some shot glasses into his shoulder bag.

  I looked out the window at our film guys again. They were unloading their gear from their van now. “But communists are okay working with me?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Hakim said and walked away.

  But the real problem was the actors.

  When Phoenix drove up with them, I could see they were dead. All of them – the man, the woman, even the little girl. They stood outside, a little apart from each other, and stared at the house without blinking.

  I pulled Phoenix aside, around the corner of the house. “What is this?” I asked her. “I thought you were getting me students.”

  “They are students,” she said. “They came back to school after they died and lost their jobs. Except the girl. She still has a job.”

  I looked around the corner of the house, at the girl. She was brushing the hair of a doll.

  “She’s been dead for decades,” Phoenix told me. “She was one of the first, back before anyone knew it was happening. She’s actually a drama prof at the university. Revelatory hiring practices.”