“And...that’s a bad thing?”
She flapped some papers, and in that moment, I knew she had made it to heaven. Exasperation was her favorite mode, and she had been rewarded with an eternity of it. “Well, I can work with it. But it depends on what you want.”
She was making it sound like I had a choice, here, now, dead. So much for living right on the mortal coil. I briefly regretted the sinful opportunities that I had let pass unsavored. Not that there were many. “Why does it depend on me?”
She put her glasses back on so she could glare at me over them. “Do you want to go to heaven or go to hell?”
“Heaven, of course.”
“That’s what they all say, but think about it a little. Hell is easy, and your friends will be there. You’ll get a decoder sheet to Led Zeppelin’s backwards recordings. There are lots of cats, and plenty of Hollywood agents around to pick up your lunch tab. But getting to heaven takes sacrifice. And a hell of a lot of faith.”
Now, sacrifices I could make, but faith was one of my weak points. Back in the land of the living that I had so recently departed, half the world was getting ready to celebrate the birth of their savior, though I’d bet most of them would go into shock if they opened the door to find Jesus Christ standing there. I’d never taken the dude’s birthday personally myself, but I did go in for candy canes and eggnog a little. And I had a weak spot for “Silent Night.”
Getting to heaven was probably a long shot, but I’m the kind of guy who likes challenges. A self-motivator. Before my death, I wouldn’t have given two seconds of reflection toward religion and virgin births and God and schmoozing my way toward an eternity of further servitude. But dying changes things. Some day you’ll find that out for yourself.
I folded my hands in my lap, like an undertaker who is feigning solemnity for the sake of business. “Well, I guess you can sermonize me the Gospel and I’ll believe it, if that’s what it takes.”
She slammed her fist down on the desk, causing the paper stacks to tremble precariously, threatening an avalanche. “It’s not about God or the Devil, Mister Steele, or even good or evil. It’s about faith, a belief in right and wrong and justice and hope and love. Love, as in caring about something bigger than your own sorry ass. And, based on what I see, I don’t think you’ve got the equipment for it.”
I thought of Lee, I thought of her face, and how I ached to touch it one more time. Then I thought of Diana.
If Diana was in heaven, I could finally clear the decks with her. While alive, I had stared down the barrel of a .38 Colt Python, I had left the road airborne doing ninety, I had fallen three stories and bounced off the railing of a metal fire escape, and apparently capped it all off by taking four bullets from an unknown murderer. Yet nothing had ever frightened me as much as those words that sometimes came from Diana’s luscious lips: “We need to talk.”
I somehow avoided talking for three whole years, through two affairs and countless bottles of Scotch. I may have talked to her when she was in her coffin, but the lid was closed, so she probably hadn’t heard me. Carbon monoxide poisoning does ugly things even to a beautiful face.
“A moral dilemma?” the clerk said, lifting one corner of her mouth. “Unfinished business?”
Maybe she was a mind reader. I didn’t know what sort of job qualifications were needed to get you hired as one of the afterlife’s gatekeepers. If she already knew everything, then why the torture? Then I realized it was just like with the God thing. God understood, but which of us are strong enough to own up to our failures?
Hell offered booze, casual sex, an obligation-free Sunday, and, best of all, rock’n’roll cranked up to eleven. Who wanted to hang around someplace hearing fruity harp music all the time? But heaven offered second chances. I could make amends to Diana, or at least tell her how sorry I was. And Lee would eventually arrive, and we’d have forever to fulfill that “Love you forever” promise.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
The clerk’s face was as cold as that of the clock on the wall, another whose hands spun in different directions.
“Sure,” she said. “I’m here to serve, like a Hooters waitress but with saggier boobs.”
“What’s your religious belief?” I figured she was wiser in these matters than one freshly dead.
“Jewish, of course.”
“And how does that work in with heaven? It’s not like you guys believe the Savior has arrived or anything.”
She waved her hands at the paperwork piled around her, at the Labrador retriever calendar on the wall whose days went unnumbered, at the empty can of generic cola on her desk. “The answer’s in here somewhere. Jews believe in living right on Earth for the sake of righteousness, not for eventual reward. And it doesn’t change in this world.”
I wondered if maybe it was all a karmic wheel, an endless reincarnation, going through the same stupid motions again and again. Yet that couldn’t be right. Because she had offered me a choice. I don’t know upon whose authority she was acting, but she obviously had no ulterior motives, or she would have shuttled me toward whatever corridor was most convenient to her. Her sincerity was as pure as my stupidity.
I pointed to my file opened before her. “Umm, I assume the thing with Diana’s in there.”
She snapped the file closed, creating a breeze that rushed through the holes in my chest. “It’s all in here. You can lie to yourself until you’re blue in the face, but we have it down in black and white. We know the truth.”
I’d always thought of the truth as a flexible thing, something tapped when convenient and avoided when it carried consequences. In other words, I expected honesty from other people but was always amazed when people expected it from me. But up here (or down here, because I still couldn’t shake that Protestant idea of the afterlife as a “place” in physical relation to Earth), the truth was apparently universal.
Bummer.
“So what do I do about her?”
“She was only your wife. The woman you promised to cherish and love until death did you part. And you sure as fuck kept that promise, didn’t you?”
I blinked. Truth be told, I was batting my eyes because, just maybe, a couple of tears were collecting. Sometimes if you act like a gnat flew between your eyelids, you can get away with squeezing off a few without anyone noticing. “Mistakes were made,” I said.
“Passive voice,” she said, as if she were a former grammar teacher. “That way, it’s not your fault. It’s the fault of the big old uncaring Cosmos, and all of it was out of your control. God dealt you a bad hand. Fate took its whoop-ass stick to your life while you stood by helpless. You couldn’t lift a finger to stop it.”
“That’s right,” I said, blinking faster.
She almost grinned. “But you can lift a finger now.”
The door to the room slammed open, the same door I had walked through minutes or hours before. Except the corridor had changed; it was no longer drab, with gray industrial carpet and the occasional vapid nature print on the wall. Instead, tendrils of flame curled forth like the tongues of a hundred snakes, whispering, sibilant, seductive. In the midst of those flames I saw Diana’s face, as beautiful and lusty as it had ever been, but the lust had taken an ugly turn. She was Eve after the first apple’s bite, wicked and knowing, bloated with the Devil’s spunk and utterly unapologetic. Her amorphous eyes fixed on me in that familiar glare, the one of simultaneous accusation and self-loathing.
“Mistakes were made,” came her voice in a rush of volcanic wind. “Mistakes were made.”
I swallowed what felt like a fistful of ground glass. Volleys of agony sluiced through my chest as if someone had poured battery acid in my bullet holes. My eyes were dry as shriveled grapes. You’d think the dead don’t feel pain, but we do. It’s a different kind of hurt, and it runs graveyard cold and soul deep and there are no aspirins for it.
“Diana?” I said, as her face coalesced into the flames. Figures undulated in the red-and-yellow chaos,
performing a hateful war dance. Occasionally an arm or knee would pop out, changing to black bones and ash, a puff of gray smoke marking the transformation. Diana’s laughter flickered and crackled.
I turned toward the clerk, expecting an answer, or maybe some help. The room was empty except for the clock on the wall. Now its hands drooped like Dali’s mustache, the clock face soft and sagging. Four dirty impressions the size of quarters marked the floor where the desk had been.
I backed away from the well-lighted door and its whirling dervishes. The Diana face emerged again, leering against the border of the fire. “Till death do us part, huh? Did you really think you’d get off that easily?”
I wished it were only the bright licking of the flames, but it was her voice. Her words. Her anger.
I wanted to back away some more, but the room had gotten smaller. It seemed the size of a coffin. I couldn’t breathe, then remembered I no longer had to.
“You’re going back, but I’ll be with you,” she whispered. “Because you owe me.”
“Owe you?” Anyone who has ever been married can tell you the arguments tend to run in circles, and each spouse falls into old, painful patterns. Shameful patterns.
“You loved me, or at least you said you did.”
“That’s right, I did.” I had loved her. I think. Who could ever know such things except God? Even dead, I wasn’t sure God existed. After all, He had yet to show His holy face, and a merciful God would have spared us this post-suicide encounter. And if God was love, then both of them shared the same lack of existence.
“When you love somebody, you owe them,” she said. “Forever and ever. Amen.”
The word “love” was delivered with a nasty edge, as if every broken heart throughout human history had been my fault. Maybe all lovers are star-crossed. After all, there can be no perfectly happy ending, unless you believe in life after death and both partners are lucky enough to end up in the same place. Love could cook up its own kettle of hell. But love could allegedly douse the flames, soothe the fevered brow, chill the hot and strange ardor that drove people to insane acts. Or maybe I’d listened to too many pop songs.
“I’m sorry for…you know, back then,” I said. Talking feels weird when you’re dead. The words come out of your throat without any air behind them. It gives you the feeling that the words have no substance. Maybe being dead wasn’t going to change my communication style, at least with Diana.
She wasn’t buying my brand of baloney. “You think you can make up for it now.”
She coalesced into a more solid thing, and the fire dimmed behind her. Her eyes were hot sparks of hurt, both hoarding and projecting pain. The flames crawled along her bare skin like the fingers of a hundred rapists. Then they evaporated, as if she had soaked the fire into her soul. She stood before me naked, the hallway dark and endless behind her. The bloated, gray pallor that marked her death was gone, and her skin was flushed pink by some obscene ardor.
She was beautiful, damn her.
“You can’t turn back the clock,” I said, the cliché lame as it left my lips and the contradictory clock on the wall mocking me.
“What’s done is done,” she said in near sarcasm.
I shrugged. “I did love you.”
“Did.” She smiled, and I remembered that smile from a hundred candlelit nights, her hair splayed against the pillows, the bedsprings singing and the headboard like a castanet against the wall. “What’s stopping you now?”
Lots of things. Diana was dead. Lee was alive. I hadn’t yet accepted my own death, and somehow believed I still had more in common with Lee. Not that I made a habit of comparing women. Each has her virtues and flaws, each of them are utterly beguiling and beyond understanding, and I never understood why love was supposed to be a mutually exclusive condition. Love was a big thing, as wide and strange and complex as God, and who was I to attempt to explain it or contain it?
“You deserve someone better than me.” There. The perfect distancing mechanism. Throw the fault back on myself, so she could feel good about rejection.
“I thought you were the best,” she said. The hallway and the room had both grown cold, the lingering heat from the flames now faded. Funny how hot and cold, pain and anxiety, lust and disgust still affected me. You’d think the lack of a heartbeat would strip all those hollow, mortal things. Yet in a way, they seemed more vivid and intense, as if their ephemeral nature painted them in brighter colors, like dying leaves in autumn.
“I was maybe the best once,” I said. “The best for you. But people change.”
“People change even when they’re dead.” The smile came again, but this time it flickered. Fire crawled between her teeth. “But you’ll learn about that the hard way.”
The hard way. Wasn’t death difficult enough without an extra round of trials and tribulations? How cruel was this invisible God? “Look, Diana. I cared about you. I mean, care...”
“I still love you. I’ve always loved you.”
Shit. I hate it when that happens.
“I don’t think we have much in common anymore,” I said.
“We’re both dead.” She sounded almost pleased, as if now I had no door to walk through, no competing lips to kiss, no warm bed on the other side of town to share with someone who asked fewer questions and demanded less attention. As if now we were the only two dead people in the world, and so were meant to be together.
I wondered if Diana knew about Lee. I didn’t even meet my one true love until two years after my original one true love had straight-piped herself into a casket. This was an awkward moment.
“We’re here, now, you and me, and that’s as good as it gets,” I said, and it sounded like a crappy come-on line even to me. The desperation ploy. We’re doomed so let’s sleep together. Or, we’re doomed, so let’s not bother.
“You don’t even know where ‘here’ is,” she said.
She was still naked, and I had trouble keeping my eyes on hers. My moist orbs wanted to wander, to make sure physical glories were untouched by the stain of passage. I had to remind myself that she had first manifested as a ball of indignant hellfire, not as a succulent sex kitten. This could all be a front. I knew how women were when they thought they wanted something.
Besides, the forms that had frolicked behind her in the flames had suggested well-oiled masculine muscles. She wasn’t the type to go without company for too long. Perhaps the afterlife was like closing time at the meat market, when no one went home alone. Maybe she had recruited an army of admirers in the land where sin inspired no hesitation, promised no punishment, and perhaps offered the most eternal of rewards.
“Like you said, we’re both dead.” Repetition did not make the idea any easier to swallow.
“Except I’ve been dead longer,” she said. “I’ve had time to wait for you. Plenty of time to think and plan.”
I thought time no longer existed in the afterlife, or at least not in any progressive sense, as evidenced by the contradictory clock. On Earth, you were always fed the company line that the afterlife was a fixed, unchanging state. A place where it was too late to repent. I’d always accepted that with some relief. After a few decades and a few ounces of lead in your chest, you get tired of saying “Sorry.”
Yet here I was again. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“You’re still an arrogant asshole even dead,” she said, the corners of her lips tucked up in a smirk. “You think my suicide was all about you.”
The walls continued to close in, though now so slowly I no longer paid attention. I suppose I thought they were insubstantial, some sort of hallucination. After all, the fire had faded, the clerk and her desk had disappeared, and even the clock had taken a vacation. But the wall behind me bumped my ass and nudged me forward. Closer to Diana and those flames of hellfire she courted.
She was naked, all right, but somehow she produced some pages from nowhere, as if she had hidden pockets in the delightful folds of her flesh. The paper was immune to the flames, th
in clay tablets etched with a familiar hand. Mine.
“Remember this classic?” She cleared her throat with a belch of sulfur and quoted my own words back to me. “‘I’m tired of saying I’m sorry. The failure is mine, but it’s a failure that haunts both of us. Cut me out of your heart, wipe my memory from your mind. Burn everything I ever touched. Change your goddamned sheets. I love you, but we can’t have each other.’“
My words, hurled back at me via that flickering and wicked tongue, became the pathetic poetry of a serial loser. In my youth, I’d discovered that words had an effect on females. A few scribbles on ragged notepaper could make a sneaky circumference of the classroom and find the right pair of soft hands. The brightest of women could fall victim to some carefully chosen sentences. It didn’t matter how outrageous the lies were, all that mattered was the presentation. Something poets, players, and politicians all learned very early in their respective games.
“The first time we broke up,” I said.
“We got better with practice.”
“In everything.” There was an old song that said breaking up was hard to do, but I’d found the third time was the charm. Even poets go for the cliché once in a while.
“You know what happens to suicides here?”
I figured they probably carried their pain with them forever, but I was beginning to suspect we all did. At least until we reached that better land hinted at by my dead Jewish caseworker. If only I could find the door to the rapidly shrinking room, because Diana’s heat was making me sweat. When you’re dead, your sweat smells like gone-over goat cheese and has the consistency of tar. Besides, I couldn’t think with Diana crowding my space. Some things never change, all right.
“Suicides need special redemption,” I guessed. “Because it’s the most selfish of sins.”
“Coming from the world’s most self-centered prick, that means a lot.” Her inflamed face flickered into a smirk.
“I already said I’m sorry. If there’s anything else I can do to…help you cross over, pray for your absolution, whatever, let me know.”
“Yes,” she said. “You’ll get your own mission. But my mission is to make your death as miserable as possible. I’ll be haunting your every step. I’ll follow you to Hell and back.”
Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Page 93
