Death

by George Pendle

  “You’re fine for now, but I think you’ll start to feel some more extreme things soon. Moments of euphoria, inexplicable instances of elation.”

  He was right. I felt happy. Despite my strange surroundings I felt very, very happy.

  “What have you been doing in the last few days?”

  “Oh,” I said, and tried to recollect. “I’ve been playing with my kitten and with my puppy. I’ve been going for long walks, breathing in the air, waving at all the little birds.”

  “And what did you do before that?”

  “I was with someone. Someone who I liked very, very much. But I can’t remember who…”

  “No. I mean before all this happiness. What do you remember?”

  I thought back. All I could remember was blackness, emptiness, nothing.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “That’s very good. Hold that image. What would you like to be doing now?”

  I thought, and slowly the answer swelled within me, building in size, growing and growing until it was a gargantuan wave about to break with indescribable force.

  “I want to skip and live and be happy.” I gasped. “I want to see and speak and climb trees and never come down. I want to paint my existence on the map. Straight onto the map. In glitter paint.” I took a deep breath. “And I want to fly kites. Fly kites high into the rainbows. Ride unicorns wildly through the…”

  I paused. Something was scratching at the back of my mind. But the feeling was submerged as the swell rose again. I jumped up on the bed.

  “Control yourself, Death,” cried the doctor, but I was too busy bouncing up and down to heed his calls.

  “I want a room of feathers, and bright balls, and soft, squeezy objects that never hurt if you drop them on your foot. I want whimsical stories and joyful operettas, I want lightness, and happiness, and love. I want…I want…I want…Maud?”

  Suddenly it all came flooding back.

  “Where is Maud?” I asked frantically. “What have you done with Maud? Where is her body? Where is her soul?”

  “Nurse!” the doctor called, and a burly Black Wraith materialized in front of me and knocked me onto the bed and held me there. I cried out for Maud. Desperately, hungrily, insatiably. I thought of Puppy, and then Maud. O Maud! Not again. You were meant to live this time. We were meant to live this time! Suddenly bluebirds sprung up in front of my vision. I tried to grab them but I couldn’t quite reach them. They perched on my body and twittered away, singing such sweet, sweet songs. I never felt the needle.

  All the doctors at the clinic were white-coated, faceless beings who carried stethoscopes around their necks despite having no ears in which to wear them. They were indistinguishable from one another and seemingly interchangeable. All carried a certain disinterested air about them that filled one with an immense sense of dissatisfaction. This, I gathered, was part of the healing process.

  Dr. Faustus, Founder of the Clinic, Had Been Disbarred for Malpractice, Malfeasance, and Malevolence.

  At my second interview, the doctor assigned to me told me that my record showed that I was thoroughly selfish, undisciplined, and immature and that he would not tolerate any misbehavior on my part at all during my stay. My kitten had been taken away from me. He said that I was there to become enthusiastic about dying again. The pangs of misery I had previously felt about Maud had been replaced by a quite unjustifiable optimism. It seemed to me that no sooner would I leave the clinic than we could begin things again, just as they had been before. Sitting in the doctor’s study, I was perversely happy with the thought of a new start.

  “You’ve been spending a lot of time in the company of humans, haven’t you?” he said, flicking through my file.

  “Yes,” I replied. “That’s my job.”

  “But have you or have you not been fraternizing with humans on an extracurricular basis?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “If you’re not honest with us, Death, we can’t help you.”

  “Perhaps I don’t want to be helped.”

  “Oh, I think you want to be helped, even if you don’t know it. How often have you been carousing with humans, talking with them, spending excessive amounts of time with them?”

  “Once or twice a century.”

  “Be honest now.”

  “Four or five times a century.”

  “Death…”

  “A decade.”

  “Death…”

  “A day.”

  “You do know humans are highly toxic?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Life,” said the doctor coldly. “Humans are positively teeming with it.”

  “Well, yes, that’s why I like spending time with them,” I said. “What’s wrong with a little Life now and then?”

  “A social life often precedes a biological life.”

  I didn’t understand, and the doctor didn’t bother to explain but beckoned me to lie down on the table in the room. He put on his stethoscope, clipping it where his ears should have been, and began listening to my chest.

  “Now, I want you to think about Life,” he said, his head still close to my chest. And so I did. I thought of fresh air; and green trees; and bounding, leaping creatures; and above all someone to share it with. Maud, Maud, Maud. Suddenly the creature in my chest returned. The creature that wanted to escape.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” the doctor said to himself. “This is not good at all.”

  “What?” I asked, shaken from my reverie.

  “You’ve developed a severe physical dependency on Life. It’s progressed further than I’ve ever seen. You’re very lucky to still be Death.”

  “But that’s preposterous,” I spluttered when suddenly the doctor, in one swift motion, thrust both his hands into my chest. There was some wrenching and twisting, a squelching sound, and a strange feeling of butterflies fluttering in my stomach. The doctor grunted and strained, and eventually, there was a loud pop, and he fell backward. His hands were clutching a still-beating heart.

  “I bet you didn’t know you’d grown this, did you?” His empty face leered triumphantly.

  I stared at the heart. It was beating in and out. Blood spurted from its severed arteries. So that’s where the thumping noise had been coming from. That’s what had been trying to escape into my mouth.

  Heart: In the Wrong Place.

  “First you’ll grow a heart, then a nervous system, and, if you’re not careful, flesh and blood too.”

  He peered at my forehead.

  “It already looks like you’ve developed sweat glands. Is that what you want, Death? To be able to sweat?”

  I reached out to the heart, but as soon as my fingers touched it, it went into a spasm and stopped beating.

  I allowed myself to be taken to a small black room in which lay a mountain of soft toys. There were teddy bears, and elephants, and dolphins, and baby humans, all made from the softest, plushest fur. The doctor told me that I wasn’t allowed to leave the room until all the animals had been torn apart. The door slammed shut and I was left alone. The hours passed. I did not rip the toys apart. Instead I arranged them in order of size, gender, and likelihood of compatibility. When the doctor came to check on me, he shook his head in disappointment, and when he later discovered that the number of stuffed animals in the room had in fact increased, I was locked in my room under close observation.

  The clinic sat on a lonely promontory located in the shadow of the mountain of Purgatory. I was told that it had been specifically designed to appear in a different way to each patient, as an aid to his or her rehabilitation. For instance, if the personification of Happiness arrived at the clinic suffering from a melancholy ailment, he might see himself attending a beautiful marble building bathed in sunlight and warmth, in an attempt to lift his spirits. For me, however, the clinic was quite different.

  To my eyes, the clinic’s main building was black and wretched and caved in on itself like a collapsed lung. The grounds seemed to have been carefully de
vastated to promote thoughts of maximum wickedness. There were stony ravines and dense bushes of thorns, two small churning lakes of fire that belched out molten rock, several wide pastures of rusty nails, and a swamp full of loathsome creatures with needle-sharp teeth into which I was encouraged to push things. It was hoped that this would inspire within me the longing for pain and suffering that I had lost.

  It was Eddie who first showed me around the grounds. I ran into him as I was being pursued by a swarm of carnivorous bats as part of my treatment (to Happiness they would have looked like a flock of gentle doves). He grabbed hold of my arm and we ran into a forest of electrical pylons, where my shock therapy usually occurred. We stood back and watched as the bats flew shrieking into the high voltage lines and burst into pretty orange flames.

  Eddie had been at the clinic, on and off, for most of his existence, he told me. He had been there so long, in fact, that he was now able to see all the different ways in which the clinic appeared to the other patients.

  “Don’t like your clinic much,” he told me. “Bit gloomy for old Eddie.”

  Eddie had originally been named Bad Flute Playing, but had swiftly found out that the role he had been given in Creation was a completely unviable proposition. He had changed his name to Eddie because he thought it sounded better. Eddie was doomed.

  “I mean, why, Death? Why would there need to be a personification of Bad Flute Playing? Look at you. Someone’s always dying; it makes sense to have a Death. But Bad Flute Playing? It’s hardly one of the great archetypes of experience now, is it? Sure, I’ve plugged up a few blowholes in my time, loosened some embrasures, weakened some diaphragms. It’s actually quite difficult to make someone sound bad on a bone pipe or a tin whistle—they practically play themselves—but increasingly I began to ask myself what the point was. There’s only so much tuneless puffing you can take pleasure in before you start looking for a challenge.”

  It was said that shortly before Eddie was dragged to the clinic, he had been directly responsible for the formation of Genghis Khan’s historic 550-piece recorder orchestra, whose ethereally precise and immaculately played music had mesmerized Khan and waylaid him from subjugating the Russian steppes, in direct contravention of the Great Scheme of Things. When the powers-that-be found out, Eddie was packed off to the clinic. Without his assistance, Khan soon tired of the orchestra and proceeded to crush every member to death, alongside their instruments.

  “You should have heard those Mongols,” said Eddie dreamily. “It takes a real barbarian to bring out the sensuousness that lurks within a flute.”

  There was no hope for Eddie, no hope at all. He had come to love the sound of a well-played flute. He could not bring himself to know dissonance, tunelessness, or atonality ever again.

  The clinic was filled with people like me and Eddie—embodiments gone wrong, personifications with minds of their own. Everyone in the clinic had strayed in some way from their intended role. Life had inveigled its way into our beings with its infinite variety and shiny bright colors. It had found out the empty hollows of our existence and flooded them with the thrill of being. We had become overpersonified, growing personalities where there should have been none, and had begun to see our simple roles as increasingly pointless and reductive. Immersed in the gamut of Life, we could no longer be beholden to just one simple action. We had started as personifications, but we wanted to be persons.

  Genghis Khan: Recorder Record-Breaker Breaker.

  Eddie and I used to spend many hours discussing what we would like to do on our return to Earth. I told him about my wish to live with Maud, and he told me how he wanted to create a society based purely on the diatonic scale.

  We weren’t the only ones doing this. Some patients sat on the benches deep in concentration, trying to remember their proper roles in Creation. But the slight, sly smiles that would slowly break out on their faces signaled they had gone back to dreaming of the exact opposite.

  The entity in the next room to me was Ritual. He had been sent here after it had been discovered that he had been encouraging modernization and innovation and persuading people to abandon their age-old practices.

  “How can people affirm their membership in the collective if you keep changing what they’re doing?” I heard a doctor ask him.

  “Maybe,” squeaked Ritual, “they shouldn’t be part of the collective.” He let out a high-pitched laugh. “Maybe they should try something new instead of the same old boring things day after day after day?”

  “But you can’t get a cathartic emotional discharge if it’s new. New is no good.”

  “Maybe people should stop having filthy emotional discharges and think with their brains once in a while,” cried Ritual. “It’s always incense and chicken blood and national anthems and ‘you-did-this-to-my-forefathers-so-I’m-going-to-do-this-to-your-grandchildren.’ It’s always doing the things your ancestors did. As if they were so big and clever. Ritual! Pah! It’s just a way of saying you don’t want to learn from your mistakes.”

  His voice was rising. Throughout the clinic, patients suddenly broke with their prescribed daily routines and ran wildly through the building. In the operating theater, doctors put aside tried and tested surgical techniques and decided to improvise.

  “People like doing the same things over and over again because then they don’t have to think,” cried Ritual. “It’s brainless! Be new! Change! Develop! Mature!”

  The Black Wraiths swept in to subdue him.

  Another of the inhabitants of the clinic, and one of the oldest, was Lachesis. She had once been one of the original three Fates, whose job it had been to spin, measure, and cut the thread of men’s lives. It was the Fates who had been responsible for compiling the Book of Endings. Lachesis, however, had grown uncertain and indecisive. She had been found by her sisters in the cellar of the Castle of Destiny, surrounded by thousands of miles of thread that she had been making into cat’s cradles. Her much publicized fall into the addiction of autonomy did not dissuade the other patients from asking her about their own fates.

  “Well, it may or it mayn’t happen, mightn’t it?” she would say.

  “But you’re one of the Fates,” the patients would cry. “You have to know.”

  “Who knows anything, dearie?” she would reply. “So much potential, so many ends, so many futures all possible but unknown. On the one hand…” And she would shuffle off, talking to herself.

  “She’s developed a taste for the infinite possibilities of Life,” one of the doctors told me. “Her treatment is simple; we’re going to try to wean her onto the I-Ching. That’ll cut her choices down to sixty-four. Then we’ll see if she can handle the major arcana of the Tarot deck, which will give her twenty-two different possibilities to choose from. From there we’ll go to a pair of dice, and with any luck we’ll work her down to the flipping of a coin. Once her horizons have been suitably diminished she’ll be ready to decide the fate of men again.”

  “But isn’t she better like this?” I asked. “At least now she has a full choice ahead of her instead of just blindly following one future. She’s gained independence from her own fate.”

  “That’s not what she’s for,” said the doctor, looking at me with a stern eye.

  “But why can’t we be something other than what we were made to be?” I said. “We didn’t ask to be created after all.”

  “Look, Death, let me tell you a story,” said the doctor. “A frog and a scorpion are standing on one side of a river, and the scorpion says, ‘The only way I can get to the other side is if you carry me on your back.’ Well, the frog looks suspicious and says, ‘Why should I carry you? You’ll just sting me.’ But the scorpion says, ‘Why would I sting you? If I sting you, we both drown.’ So the scorpion gets on the frog’s back and the frog starts swimming; halfway across the river, the frog feels a sharp pain in his back. With his dying breath he croaks, ‘Why did you sting me? Now we’re both going to drown.’ And the scorpion replies, ‘I’m a scorpion,
it’s in my nature.’ It’s in Lachesis’s nature to be decisive; it’s in your nature to deal with the dead. Somehow or other you’ve both forgotten this.”

  Frogs: Naturally Gullible.

  “I don’t remember that happening,” I said.

  “Remember what happening?” said the doctor.

  “The scorpion killing the frog. It doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Well, I don’t believe that it’s…”

  “And you’d think I would remember that, as it’s quite unusual.”

  “No, it’s a…”

  “I mean, I’ve seen some pretty weird things, but a scorpion riding on a frog’s back I have not.”

  “Death, listen to me…”

  “I mean, could a frog even do that?”

  “Death…”

  “I love frogs, you know. I like their little ribbits and tiny hops and big bulging cheeks. I like the way they always look so content with themselves. You never see an anxious frog. Well, except when they’re being stung by scorpions, I imagine. And another thing—”

  “Nurse!” cried the doctor.

  And so it went. I would show the slightest attraction to Life and suddenly I’d be surrounded by a horde of Black Wraiths who’d drag me back to my room, where Banshees would wail at me for hours on end and I would be forced to watch as jackbooted doctors stamped on my flower arrangements.

  One of the clinic’s most famed treatments was patient-on-patient therapy, in which inmates were paired off with each other in the hopes that some type of restorative reaction might occur. My first partner was Sympathy, who had been withdrawn from her role in Creation for obvious reasons.

  “Oh boo hoo hoo!” she mocked. “Mr. Death can’t go on killing things! Mr. Death doesn’t want to get his hands dirty! Big fucking deal, sunshine. You think you’ve got problems? You don’t know the meaning of problems! Look at me! I’m meant to be kind and concerned, I’m meant to feel your pain. But if the truth be told, I couldn’t give a flying fuck! I’m sick of pretending to care about other people. What about me?”