Death

by George Pendle

  Eventually Maud was caught trying to poison the chief of her tribe and was buried up to her neck in sand to be eaten alive by ants. I had little doubt that she had allowed herself to be caught; this time she didn’t want any mistakes. Seeing her name in the Book one morning, I cleared out my schedule to watch.

  The sun beat down on Maud’s face, which had been liberally covered in honey, and thousands of red ants crawled all over her, into her nose, under her eyelids, into her ears. She had never looked so full of Life.

  “Oh!” she screamed, “arrrgh!” before winking at me and hissing, “It tickles something awful, though!”

  Who was this woman who had no fear of dying? Who seized me with both hands? Who longed to be with me? The remaining Amazons looked at one another confused. Her head was coated in ants by now, but Maud was giggling uncontrollably, causing the ants to fall from her face.

  “Keep still or it’ll never be over,” I hissed.

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” spluttered Maud as her face swelled horribly with bites. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

  After she died, we spent the rest of the day walking through the forest hand in hand as before. She showed me how all the plants of the forest were filled with life-giving nectars, and I showed her how a piranha could strip a man to the bone in less than a minute. I was enraptured by her company, intoxicated by her presence. All was going well when suddenly I heard a thunderclap and a deafening voice.

  “Death!”

  I swung around. Maud gave a little squeak and hid behind me in the edges of the Darkness. It was Gabriel.

  “Hello, Gabriel,” I said. I hadn’t seen him since the void, before the Beginning of Time, but he looked the same, in that never-changing way that angels have.

  “I knew you weren’t a sheep!” roared Gabriel. His eyes flashed left and right. “Where is she?”

  “Where’s who?” I replied, trying to exude as much innocence and light as a being of unfathomable blackness could.

  “The woman who was meant to be killed by ants. She was due in Heaven three hours ago.”

  “How did you know she was missing?” I asked. I was curious. I hadn’t imagined they kept track of souls to this degree.

  Gabriel eyed me suspiciously. “When the records don’t balance,” he sniped, “the alarms go off.”

  “Alarms?”

  “Then we overturn the barracks, check the barbed wire, and set the angelic bloodhounds to trace the missing soul.”

  “I thought Heaven was meant to be a pleasant place?” I asked. “You know, clouds and harps.”

  “Pah!” spat Gabriel. “That’s how it used to be done, but the system was soft. Michael was soft. Always worried about his hair. I’ve made a lot of changes since he…disappeared.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Surely Heaven doesn’t need to be changed?”

  “It needed a new direction,” said Gabriel. “God’s not going to live forever, you know.”

  “Really? Why not?” I asked. He ignored me.

  “Something useful should be done with all that eternal salvation. It shouldn’t be frittered away singing alleluias and combing one’s wings. Something constructive should be done.”

  “Like what?” I asked. I was genuinely curious.

  “Like roads!” cried Gabriel, his eyes glazing over. “And factories, and power plants! Heaven should not be stagnant, it should progress, it should move forward with the times. It’s not like Hell, where the same old tortures can be dragged out again and again; thumbscrews never go out of fashion. But salvation needs to move with the times. Perceptions of Paradise don’t sit still. Ecstasy must be rationalized.”

  “When did you go to Hell?” I asked. It was rare for Hell to get angelic visitors, and even rarer to allow one to escape.

  “I instigated a cultural exchange,” said Gabriel, puffing himself up. “The first one of its kind. I taught them the virtues of goodness, charity, and light, and they opened my mind to technology, computers, and microwave ovens. Your father’s been busy since you left. He showed me the wonders of mechanical industry and enforced labor. He’s been creating things you could only dream of.”

  Actually I couldn’t dream. It was one of the many things the living had spoken of that intrigued me. It seemed to allow them to travel anywhere, they said, to do anything, to act out their wildest fantasies without any consequence whatsoever. It sounded wonderful.

  “Well,” I said, shaking such thoughts from my mind, “if you don’t mind, I’m very busy…”

  I made as if to leave, careful to keep Maud hidden in the Darkness, but Gabriel rushed in front of me.

  “Don’t try to distract me, Death; I can see through the arch-deceiver in you. Where is she?”

  Gabriel: Archangel, Messenger, Killjoy.

  “I’ll tell you what, Gabriel. I’ll retrace my steps and see if she slipped out of the void along the way, how’s that?”

  “You do that,” said Gabriel, his beauteous face now close against mine. “I knew from the moment I met you that you were a fake. One of the other side. I don’t know how you got the job, but I’ve been watching you. You may be able to get away with the odd raccoon or two, but not with a human soul. We need them to dig the irrigation ditches. You can never have too many.”

  “Irrigation ditches?…Are you sure you’re going about this Heaven business in the right way?” I asked.

  “Shut it, you spawn of Satan,” snapped Gabriel. I noticed some angelic spittle on his lips. “I know everything about you, Death. Everything!”

  “Then how many fingers am I holding up behind my back?” I countered. Maud let out a snarf.

  “What?” said Gabriel. “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right at this very second?” said Gabriel. He had put on an air of absurd calm and was beginning to wander back and forth, attempting to peer behind my back.

  “Or don’t you know?”

  “Of course I know. I’m all-knowing.”

  “I thought only God was all-knowing.”

  “I am blessed with His power. I can see through all things.” He put his fingers to his head. Suddenly he stopped.

  “Three!” he shouted. His eyes opened. A smile broke onto his face. I lifted up my hand. Only the middle finger was up. Gabriel turned red in the face.

  “She’d better be back by twelve or it’s Hell for the both of you!” he cried, and with a flap of his wings he launched himself into space.

  Despite my bravado I was somewhat flustered. The moment with Maud had been ruined. We both knew she had to go. A funny thing happened, though. Just as I was spreading the Darkness around her she reached up and kissed me on the cheek, and suddenly vast waves of longing filled my body. I looked down and saw her disappearing, a smile on her face, and tried to drag her back out. But it was hopeless. She was gone.

  I stood there motionless, but it felt as if great seas were crashing within my body. I felt unsteady on my feet. What was the meaning of this? I thought. But at the back of my mind I began to think that I knew.

  I had heard it said by many of the souls I conveyed into the Darkness that at some point in their lives they had been struck down by an illness that seemed to be endemic in all living things. It was a form of nausea that led to extreme irrationality and a loss of composure. It was an infection both mental and physical, both emotional and chemical. When the souls spoke of it, it was in tones both hated and adored, as if this sickness held them even then in the twilight of their existence, compelling their attention even beyond the confines of Life. It was a plague and a pleasure, a virus and a virtue, a statement and an act.

  The souls, they called it “love.”

  Maudness

  It was sometime in the fifth century B.C., and Maud was hanging from the edge of a cliff by a withered tree root.

  “I’m going to li-ive,” she trilled as she heaved herself upward, hand over bloodied hand. The root trembled under her weight, but it did not break.

  “Just…one…more…inch�
�.”

  She looked up at me expectantly.

  I wasn’t quite sure how, but Maud seemed to be appearing on Earth more and more often. Every few years, it seemed, I would find her throwing herself from high things, or placing herself beneath heavy things, or eating poisonous things, or saying rude things to violent angry things, anything, it seemed, to try to get my attention. Sometimes she was a queen, sometimes a peasant. Sometimes she was a blonde, sometimes she was a brunette. Her name changed constantly, but she was always the same, irreducible Maud. She had human companions, of course, but I was the only one who stuck with her to the very end, and beyond. When Maud tried to dash out her own brains on a rock, and only knocked herself unconscious, it was I who was there to deliver the illicit coup de grâce, pounding her skull in until her face was a bloody, broken shell. When Maud failed to ingest enough poison to kill herself, it was I who smeared more on her lips, held fast her gnashing jaws, and forced her to swallow. When her partners failed to honor their end of a suicide pact, creeping away terrified as she repeatedly stabbed herself in the chest with a dagger, it was I who consoled her.

  “You know something, Death?” she’d often say. “You just can’t depend on the living.”

  In this life she was a Vestal Virgin and had gleefully let the perpetual fire in the Temple of Vesta go out. As a punishment she had been thrown off this cliff, only to be plucked from my embrace by a pernicious tree root.

  “I think,” she grunted as she pulled herself up the cliff face, “that I will live to be very, very old.” Once again her eyes flicked up to meet mine. She was such a tease. I leaned down and tenderly loosened her fingers one by one.

  “You mean to kill me?” she cried seductively. “Help! Help! You swine! You pig! You…” She started giggling and, raising a hand to her mouth, lost her grip. A look of mock horror and real excitement played across her face, and then she was gone, plummeting once more to her doom, bouncing off the rocky outcrops, her bones splintering, her skin ripping, her laugh ringing out ecstatically all the way down. Call it foreplay.

  We spent the rest of the day haunting the priests who had tried to kill her.

  “Call that a sacrifice!” she shouted at them from deep within the Darkness.

  “Almighty Vesta!” cried the priests. “We did not mean to anger you.”

  “You have angered me!” she thundered. “Now you must die.”

  The priests swallowed hard.

  “How shall we die, O Great Vesta?”

  “Um…,” said Maud, before intoning deeply, “by eating the excrement of animals.”

  I had to clamp my hand over her mouth to prevent the giggles from being heard.

  “What?” said the priests.

  “You heard me,” said Maud, barely able to contain her giggles. “It’s animal shit for you. Until you die.”

  The priests looked at one another.

  “But…,” said the head priest, “but that’s disgusting!”

  “Do not question the will of the gods.”

  “But…”

  “Not another word now.”

  The priests shifted around uncomfortably, and a few of them started halfheartedly scanning the ground, while Maud and I, hardly able to suppress our laughter, ran away hand in hand.

  Why was it that at these, our happiest moments, a lament sounded deep within me? Was it a premonition of what was to come, or was it, as I thought then, merely a side effect of this strange emotion of love?

  I had initially thought love to be just another agitation of the human mind, one of the myriad neurochemical activities that seemed to prompt people’s passing. Nevertheless, I grew curious about it in a way that I had not with similar human emotions such as faith and hope, anger and fear. Perhaps it was the sheer number of times that love was listed as a contributing cause in the Book of Endings. People would kill for more of it, waste away from a want of it, or sacrifice themselves due to a surfeit of it. Love seemed intrinsically linked to all human ends; there was so much of it about, it was no wonder that I worried I had caught a dose of it.

  I remember asking Father what love was.

  “Sex,” he replied.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, scratching his horns, “sex and long walks.”

  I asked Mother the same question. She blushed. “Well, when two people like each other very much…”

  “Yes,” I said eagerly. This sounded more promising.

  “They have sex.”

  When I bumped into Urizel, my old angel friend, who was still guarding the muddy remnants of Eden, I asked him the same question. He pulled out a guidebook entitled The Only Planet Guide, and after flicking through a few pages declared, “Love is, on the one hand, a mechanism for surveying and thereby rendering problematic particular relationships between bodies, and on the other the creation of a reflexive consciousness of self-identity involving manipulation of symbolic representations of the self.”

  “You mean…,” I asked, as Urizel flicked to the glossary section at the back.

  “Sex, apparently.”

  What Is This “Love”?

  I remember I had even asked God about it, back when He had still been around.

  “Why do humans ‘love,’ Lord God Sir?”

  “Aside from the sex?” He boomed.

  “Yes.”

  “And the long walks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there are as many reasons for love as there are stars in the sky.” God gestured as if to look at the sun. “Is that the time? I really must be off.”

  There was a pause, but the divine light remained.

  “God?” I asked.

  The light didn’t answer.

  “God? I can still see You. You’re still here.”

  “Damn this omnipresence!” He boomed.

  But if love was simply about sex, why did I feel it was about so much more?

  Maud’s increasingly frequent visits provided welcome breaks amid the frantic Classical period. It was an era of great innovation among humans, which always meant plenty of work for me.

  In England, the Druids had finally perfected the art of human sacrifice, tenderizing their subjects with a combination of ritual torture and atonal folk singing, and seasoning them with just the right amount of parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Indeed, the Druids greatly popularized sacrificing and were credited with taking it off the altar and into the home.

  Druids: Loved to Barbecue.

  Elsewhere, legal reforms swept society, such as those instigated by the Greek lawgiver Draco, who devised the “one strike and you’re out” judicial system, calling for execution as the punishment for all crimes. Upon seeing the reoffending statistics plummet, Draco came to the conclusion that since all crimes were committed by the living, the only crime-free society would be one consisting solely of the dead. It was an idea way ahead of its time and would have succeeded if only his advisers had not suggested that he lead the way into this peaceful crime-free future. The collective sigh of relief upon his death sank ships as far away as Crete.

  Meanwhile an economic revolution was taking place under the guidance of Croesus, the king of Lydia, who had invented coinage and thus made property much easier to steal. I remember overhearing the argument as he tried to persuade his minions to implement the radical changes.

  “But this isn’t the same as a cow,” exclaimed the Master of Barter looking at one of Croesus’s gold coins. “Where are its udders?”

  “No, it’s not actually a cow,” explained Croesus. “It’s worth the same as a cow. This way you don’t have to run away with a whole cow when you’re raiding the Scythians.”

  “How can it be worth the same as a cow if it doesn’t have any udders?”

  “Well, it’s like this…”

  “It doesn’t taste like a cow either,” grimaced the Master of Barter, biting into the coin. He winced. “It tastes much more painful than a cow.”

  “No, look…,” said Croesus, but t
he Master of Barter was on a roll.

  “And where’s its tail? No one’s going to think this is a cow if it doesn’t have a tail.”

  “Guards!” cried Croesus, whose patience did not extend as far as his credit. The Master of Barter was swiftly garroted, the first of many fiscal tightenings to occur in Lydia that year.

  Not far away, artistic developments were being furthered by the insatiably bloodthirsty Assyrian Empire (which had been voted “Best Empire of the Year” for 103 years in a row by subscribers to the Assyrian Supplicant, a hung, drawn, and quarterly). Their greatest ruler, Ashurnasirpal II, had become obsessed with the relationship between the artwork and the viewer in his chosen medium of expression—impaling. Working months at a time, in campaigns ranging far into Asia, he displayed a remarkable aptitude for compositional effects that reduced the distance between spectacle and spectator until one was hard to differentiate from the other.

  His finest piece, Untitled # 65422 (Impaling), showed a remarkable sharpness of line and sag of body. It was praised for its figurative suggestiveness and remarkable lack of ambiguity by the Kassites, the Elamites, and the Cimmerians, whose long-preferred oeuvre of “not bleeding” and “avoiding conflict” Ashurnasirpal overthrew during his masterful “red” period.

  Dominated by Verticality, Ashurnasirpal’s Unique Visual Rhetoric Was Interformative, Transfictive, and Very, Very Painful.

  Nevertheless, it was the Greeks who best personified this new age of scientific invention and theoretical research. Nowhere was this more the case than at Plato’s Academy. Plato was the author of a plethora of popular tracts. On the Soul, On Sensation, On Respiration, On Top of Old Smokey, and On and On with Plato had all been bestsellers in both slate and papyrus editions. With the profits he had set up his Academy, a safe haven for the philosophically inclined, whom the general populace thought louche, hairy, and prone to saying awkward things at dinner parties. Indeed, Plato’s belief that it was only through the method of dialectic that pure reason could operate was openly criticized as being “girlie” by the rival monologist school of Isocrates, who propounded the dictum that the only intelligent conversation one could have was with oneself.