by Gabby Noone
“Of course,” Sadie says, pursing her lips. “It’s, uh, Toddcanbenchpressonehundredandfiftypounds.”
“I didn’t catch that,” he says, a note of amusement in his voice.
“Todd. Can. Bench. Press. One. Hundred. And. Fifty. Pounds.”
The door creaks open.
“Thank you for joining us, ladies,” Todd says.
The room is packed with people. Today everyone is wearing orange uniforms and looking supremely bored. Sadie and I file in, standing near the back wall.
“Good morning,” he says, pushing his glasses to the top of his nose. “We have a few newcomers to the MX team this morning, but there is no time for introductions, so if you see a new face, please say hello! Now, for the meat of today’s meeting . . .”
He begins to dramatically pace back and forth.
“Numbers are down, people! Okay? Our rate of sending souls to Heaven has dropped by over forty percent this month. I don’t want to point fingers at them,” he says, gesturing toward the door. “I don’t want to point fingers at us, but, folks, listen, I gotta point my finger somewhere.”
To emphasize this, Todd points his finger out, closes his eyes, and spins around, but nearly falls into a group of people clustered at the front of the room. They have to catch him and hold him upright.
I can’t believe this is my boss, yet given the general unfair order of the universe, I can believe this is my boss.
“Ahem,” he says, clearing his throat. “What I’m saying is . . . we have to point a finger at each and every one of ourselves. No matter how uncooperative people out there might be, no matter how long they take to reveal their truths, it is ultimately up to every individual in this room to get one soul to Heaven at a time.”
He pauses, as if expecting a round of applause, but no one reacts.
“Okay then. Just a heads-up for all you new agents: you will be working in rotating four-hour shifts that start at eight a.m., twelve p.m., and four p.m. It can be hard to keep track of time during your shift, so you will know it’s over when you hear me make an announcement over the PA system. I know. I know. ‘But, Todd, why can’t I work all day long?’ Because there aren’t enough Memstractor 3000s to go around and everyone needs to get their chance with them. ‘But, but, Todd, why can’t we just get more Memstractors?’”
The more times he says Memstractor the more I notice it sounds like menstruation.
“The answer? I don’t know, people. All I can say is, Memstractors don’t grow on trees,” Todd continues. “Any other questions?”
I raise my hand.
“Yes, Beauregard?” Todd asks.
“Beatrice,” I correct, squinting at him. “Yeah, just wondering, do we get any days off?”
I want to get out of here ASAP, but I don’t think I can handle working every single day without a break.
“Days off?” Todd scoffs. “Ha! That’s cute.”
Sadie and some of the other agents in the room smirk at one another.
“No, Beatrice,” Todd says, shaking his head. “There are zero days off at the airport. We are working toward our individual and team goals, each and every day. Actually, that’s the perfect segue to congratulate the team member who moved the most souls this week. For the, well, what feels like millionth week in a row . . .”
Todd pauses and smirks.
“Sadie Robinson! With a whopping seven souls!”
Next to me, Sadie puts her hands to her chest and puts on a face of faux shock, like she’s just been crowned Miss America. All around us, people reluctantly clap while some just roll their eyes at one another.
Great. I got paired with the airport’s biggest ass-kisser.
But I guess if I can move people along as fast as she can, then maybe I can get myself out of here sometime this century.
“May I have your attention, please?” a woman’s robotic-sounding voice suddenly calls from over the intercom. “We will now announce today’s Memory Lottery recipients. Please have your passports ready. Recipient number one: number 09745, number 09745, I repeat, number 09745. . . .”
“All right, you know what that means. Let’s rock ’n’ roll, people!”
Todd opens the door and waves his hand, motioning for everyone to leave.
“Are you ready?” Sadie asks, smiling wide.
“No,” I say, glowering.
“Okay, well, before we head out there, you’re going to need to, like, stand up straight,” she says, pushing my shoulders back. “Most people just don’t trust a slouch. Oh, and always, always smile.”
I stare at her.
“Can you just give me one smile, Bea?”
“No. I can’t smile on command.”
“Of course you can!”
“No . . . I . . . I don’t know how.”
I can smile when I want something from someone, but anytime I try to smile when someone tells me to, it looks all wrong. Maybe it’s some deep, unnameable force of darkness that has been inside me since I was born, but I look like an animal baring its teeth in every school picture I’ve had taken.
“Fine,” Sadie says. “Put your tongue behind your front teeth.”
Reluctantly, I do, like an idiot.
“And lift your cheek muscles like so . . .” she says, reaching out to pull up the sides of my face with her fingers. “There. You’re smiling!”
“Okay!” I say, pushing her hands away. “Can you stop pageant-mom-ing me?
As we file out of the room, Todd hands Sadie a ticket, then skips me.
“Why don’t I get one?” I ask.
“It’s our assignment for the day,” Sadie explains, pulling me into the hall. “You’ll get your own after I’ve trained you. We’ll work together until we get this soul through to Heaven, then you’ll be on your own.
“I don’t want to put too much pressure on you,” she says as we’re about to turn the corner back to the public airport atrium. “But this is the last soul of my quota. Once we move this person along, I’m free. Well, technically, after we move this person and then you move two more people on your own, for a grand total of three souls that prove I sufficiently trained you for the job, I’m free.”
“Right, got it. Don’t mess this up or you never get to Heaven. Sounds easy enough.”
But as we come upon the sight of an enormous waiting area, I’m not so sure it is easy enough. Hundreds of people sit around listlessly on rows of connected orange plastic seats, staring at a departures board covered in teeny, tiny letters. It’s just an overwhelming mass of bodies desperately waiting for their chance to move on.
Behind the board are floor-to-ceiling windows that show off an expansive view of the side of the airport I landed on. A voice continues to call numbers out of the PA system, and every minute or so someone jumps out of their seat and runs to a desk below the departures board to check in and verify their number has been called. To the side of the desk, a bunch of people stand in line in a roped-off area, clutching their passports tight.
“Good morning!” Sadie says to the group. “I’m looking for a number . . .”
She glances at her ticket.
“08744? Anyone?”
A gray-haired woman wearing a denim jacket embroidered with tiny autumn leaves and matching pants steps forward. I wonder which is worse: wearing my uniform or having to dress like it’s harvest season forever.
“Hello! My name is Sadie and this is Beatrice. I hope you don’t mind if she joins us today? I’m just giving her some training so she can take over my job after me. See, today is a very special day. You are my last and final soul I have to guide before I hit my quota. Which means once you reach an emotional conclusion, not only do you get to move on to Heaven, but so do I!”
The woman makes nervous eye contact with us. If she had a purse, I’m almost certain she’d be clutching it for fear that we were
about to rob her.
“What’s your name?” Sadie asks, gesturing for the woman’s passport.
“Wendy,” she mutters.
“So lovely to meet you, Wendy. Let’s all head out to the hangar, shall we?”
Sadie unlocks a door leading to the tarmac. We follow her outside and to a row of parked golf carts underneath a covered walkway. The weather report wasn’t wrong; it’s just cold enough out here to make me uncomfortable.
Sadie hops into the driver’s seat of a cart and beckons for us to join her. Somehow Wendy beats me to the passenger’s side, so I slide into the back seat that faces the opposite direction.
“All set?” Sadie asks us both, as if we’re about to embark on a trip to the mall and not some existential reckoning. Before I can respond, she’s speeding away and I’m clutching on to the cart for dear life, or dear whatever stage of existence it is that I’m in right now.
She pulls up in front of a huge airplane hangar and screeches the tires to a halt.
“Here we are! My second home,” she jokes, waving her hand out toward the ugly, boxlike structure. “Stay put for a minute.”
We sit in the cart while Sadie unlocks a normal-size door within the garage-size door, walks through, then shuts it behind her. The next thing I know, the entire garage door is lifting itself with a creaking noise.
“Ta-da!” she calls out from under it. “Come in!”
Wendy and I both reluctantly slide out of the cart and walk on the tarmac to the hangar.
In the middle of the huge concrete-floored room sits the Memstractor 3000 boasted about in my training video. It looks even more underwhelming in person. A clunky white machine that’s caked with dust sits on a table between three chairs with attached helmets.
“This is it?” I ask.
“Yep,” Sadie says, tenderly patting the machine.
“Why does it need this whole building? Why not just, like, an office?”
“The Memstractor is far too powerful. It’d blow out the airport’s generator. Anyway, enough with the boring stuff. Wendy!” she exclaims. “How long have you been here, Wendy?”
“Oh. I dunno. I’ve lost count of the days,” she says in a heavy Midwest accent.
Sadie walks over and hands me Wendy’s passport. I look over the little information it offers.
Name: Wendy Thomas
Date of Birth: 3/6/1935
Date of Death: 10/20/2019
Time of Death: 11:38 a.m. CDT
Location of Death: Harmon’s Pumpkin Farm, Bismarck, North Dakota, United States
Cause of Death: Heart Attack
“Almost two months,” Sadie says, like this is for some reason impressive. “How about we all take a seat and get comfortable? Wendy, you take the seat with the red helmet.”
As I settle in, “comfortable” feels impossible. Below me, some kind of spring creaks and the old vinyl covering the chair makes a squeaking noise.
“Next, let’s all lower our helmets,” Sadie instructs, taking off her pillbox hat and placing it on the table, then pulling the dome of plastic over her head. I do the same.
“In a moment I’m going to turn on a switch, and when I do, we will all be inside Wendy’s brain.”
“Hm. Seems fake, but okay,” I say.
Sadie stares at me with wide eyes, then nods at Wendy. I sigh, push back my shoulders, and plaster on another fake smile.
“Now, Wendy,” Sadie continues. “Have you given any thought to what might be holding you back from Heaven?”
“I don’t know,” she answers defensively. “What kind of question is that?”
“Ohhhhkay,” Sadie says. “Why don’t we start from the day you died and work backward then? Everyone ready?”
Wendy just nods once.
“I’ll keep my left hand on this switch, so if you start to feel uncomfortable, just let me know and I’ll turn off the machine and we’ll be back to reality. Sound good?” Sadie asks, but doesn’t wait for a response. “Here we go!”
I’m looking at her hand turning the switch and then, suddenly, I’m not.
There’s no helmet, no chair, no airplane hangar. I’m in the open air of a pumpkin patch and my body is free. It smells like hay, and I see small children running through the tangle of pale-colored vines on the ground around me.
“Whaaaat?” I gasp. “Sadie, why didn’t you just tell me that it’s a virtual reality machine?”
“Because it’s not,” she says, suddenly standing next to me, Wendy right next to her. “And . . . because I don’t know what that is.”
I reach out to pick up a pumpkin on the ground, but when I do, my fingers pixelate and disappear before my eyes. I yank my hand back.
“We can’t touch or interact with anything or anyone. It’s just a memory,” Sadie explains. “We can only watch.”
“So we’re just floating around and showing people their past lives like . . . like . . . the Ghosts of Christmas Past?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Okay, you don’t get a pass for that. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was written and turned into a movie way before either of us were born.”
Wendy waves for our attention and points across the patch, where there’s another version of her in the same exact outfit. She lifts a pumpkin from the ground and then drops it, falling over and clutching her chest.
“Grandma!” a woman holding a child’s hand calls over to her.
Then we’re in complete darkness, floating in absolutely nothing. Without thinking, I clutch on to Sadie’s arm, which, like the pumpkin, is just thin air.
“What?” she says, smiling. “Afraid of the dark?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Sadie says. “Wendy, that was your death? Can you show us some of your life? What did you do for a living?”
In the blink of an eye, we’re in the back of a classroom full of children. A slightly younger version of Wendy sits at the front, taking attendance.
“A teacher?”
“More or less,” she says.
“Substitute teacher?” I interject.
She nods.
“I’m sure teaching was so rewarding,” Sadie says. “Do you have any strong memories of helping to change students’ lives? Or if not . . . maybe some regrets of . . . not changing students’ lives?”
The room changes just slightly a few times in a row, Wendy becoming slightly younger each time. But in every version, all Wendy can conjure is the memory of taking attendance.
“What about your love life?” Sadie presses. “You had a granddaughter, so I’m guessing you had kids. Did you have a husband? Or boyfriend? Or . . .”
Now we’re all huddled in a tiny kitchen that smells like Palmolive dish soap and coffee. At the table, a skinny old man in a blue bathrobe sits reading the paper. The microwave on the counter dings.
A younger Wendy emerges into the kitchen, opens the microwave, takes out a bowl of instant oatmeal, and places it on the table in front of the old man. He grunts in what I guess is his form of thanks.
“This is your husband?” Sadie presses.
Wendy nods.
“Were you happy in your marriage? Did you two ever have any arguments?”
Wendy just shrugs again, totally uncaring, her face a closed book.
“Well, what was your passion in life?” I interject.
The room shifts just slightly. The old man is gone. A few plates on the drying rack move around, there are fewer pieces of paper taped to the fridge, and the color of the kettle on the stove switches from blue to red, but otherwise everything remains the same. Now Wendy stands mopping her floors and listening to some doo-wop music on the radio, looking livelier than we’ve seen her this whole time.
“Are you kidding me?” I ask. “Your passion in life was cleaning your house? Wh
at is the point of us using this machine if all you’re going to show us are memories that are as interesting as watching paint dry?”
“Bea,” Sadie interjects sternly.
Wendy just stares down at the floor.
“Hold on,” I say, putting my hand out and turning to Wendy. “Look, you gotta give us something. You and I both know you were sent here for a reason. The longer you drag us through the mud, the longer it will take for you to get to Heaven. And don’t you want that? To go to Heaven? Think about it. Once you’re there, I bet you’ll have your pick of all the coordinating seasonal separates you want. Easter egg–covered jumpers. Christmas tree turtlenecks. Maybe even a T-shirt that commemorates a fifth season that doesn’t even exist for us mortals. You’re hiding something from us. I can tell. It’s why you’re being all cagey and showing us this filler memory of you Swiffering around.”
“Okay,” she grunts finally, crossing her leaf-covered arms. “Fine.”
Her memory switches. Now we’re all squished into the back of a car driving down a long stretch of desert highway. The dashboard of the car looks old, like it’s from the 1950s or ’60s, but new for its time. Past Wendy’s hands are young and unwrinkled. A doo-wop song, like the one she was listening to in her kitchen, where a bunch of girls are singing about being in love with their mailman or something, plays out of the staticky radio.
As she drives on, two figures come into her vision standing on the side of road. Unlike everything else in her memory, they are blurry and indistinct blobs of color.
“Who are they?” Sadie asks.
Wendy just stares down at her lap.
“They look like ghosts or something,” I say.
“Can you, like, stop bringing up ghosts?” Sadie whispers almost inaudibly in my ear. “It freaks people out.
“Sometimes, Wendy,” she continues, in her Fake Nice voice at a normal volume, “when you can’t remember someone or something or don’t want to remember someone or something, it appears in your memories as a blur. Now, you’re showing us this memory for a reason, remember? I need you to focus, Wendy!”
Wendy tightens her lips into a hard line, breathes once through her nose, then closes her eyes. Our point of view shifts just slightly. We’re back about a quarter mile in the road, where the memory started.
