Death: A Life (13 page)

“Can’t we get him to stop?” God boomed. As with so many of His enthusiasms, His affection for Abraham had soon waned. “I mean, I appreciate it and all, but the infinite is only so big.”

I tried to have a word with Abraham, but there was something about the gleam in his eye that troubled me. It spoke of something quite terrifying, not so much a love of dying but a hatred for Life that, while understandable considering Life’s arbitrary nature, made me feel ever so slightly uncomfortable. I remember thinking to myself that even I didn’t mind Life that much. In fact, I found it rather jolly. After all, I could hardly exist without it, and it could hardly exist without me. Of course, I see now that this was the beginning of a fateful codependence that would threaten my very existence, and that of the world, too. Looking back on it, I should have recognized my uneasiness with Abraham as a warning. I had been getting too close to Life. Much too close.

The Age of Myth

B
y now
I had begun to identify a typology of the dying. There were the protesters, who believed their deaths to be a mistake, who’d complain and argue and demand to call their coroners. There were the romantics, who thought they were dreaming and tried in vain to pinch their spectral bodies with their ghostly hands. There were the optimists, who believed they were finally going to be rewarded for a lifetime spent growing their hair in a certain way, and there were the pessimists, who believed they were finally going to be punished for
not
growing their hair in a certain way. But by far the largest proportion of the dead were the confused. A characteristic conversation with one of the recently deceased would go something like this:

“Where am I?” they’d say.

“You are Not at all,” I’d reply mysteriously. I had discovered that a mixture of non sequiturs and melancholic insinuations was the best way to avoid confrontation, and it usually didn’t take too many unfathomable comments for the souls to realize what was going on. Nevertheless, some were very stubborn.

“Who are you?” they’d ask.

“I am the End of All Things.”

“What kind of a name is that?”

“Pardon?”

“What kind of a name is the ‘End of All Things’? What do people call you? Mr. All Things?”

“No. They call me—”

“‘You know who we’re having round tonight, dear?’” they would mock. “‘The End of.’ ‘The End of who, dear?’ ‘The End of All Things, you know, he lives down the road with Mrs. All Things.’ You should change your name, that’s what you should do.”

“My name is Death!” I’d reply.

“Well, why did you say it was Mr. All Things then?”

This went on for some time.

Keeping the dead from jumping back into the world of the living was another serious problem. “Do you mind if I just blow out that candle?” they would ask, as I held their immortal soul in my hands.

“There is no going back,” I’d intone as grimly as possible.

“Oh, I’ll just be a minute. It’s just that it’s an awful waste of wax.”

“No. It is impossible.”

“No, it’s not,” they’d say. “Look, I can almost blow it out from here.” And they’d immediately begin huffing and puffing.

“Stop it!”

“Look,” they’d reply, “I didn’t ask for this, you know. How was I to know that I’d drop dead from a heart attack just after I’d lit it? What’s more, think of the symmetry—I die, the candle goes out, it’s very poetic.”

“Oh, very well,” I’d say, and waft the Darkness at the candle, expelling its light immediately. I was always a sucker for the elegiac.

“Now that wasn’t too hard, was it?”

“No,” I would say. “No, I suppose it wasn’t.”

“Well then, do you mind if we stop off at my sister’s hut? She’s expecting me for supper tonight and I don’t want her waiting around on my behalf.”

The problem was that in my attempts to be nice to the recently departed, they walked all over me. And it wasn’t just me. God had grown so tired of people calling on Him for the most ridiculous things—smaller noses, longer fingers, giant chickens—that He’d begun to grow quite aloof from the world. I hadn’t seen Him in years when suddenly that old familiar orb of dazzling white light appeared before me.

“Death, I need to speak to you,” He boomed. “These people are driving Me crazy. Samson is obsessed with his hair, Solomon is cutting everything in two, and I can barely speak to Job with that persecution complex of his.”

“Well, Lord God Sir,” I said, “You have been rather rough on Job.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, You had the Sabeans kill all his servants.”

“Many suffer misfortune, Death.”

“Yes, but then lightning killed all his sheep.”

“A mere coincidence,” boomed God.

“And the Chaldeans ran off with his camels.”

“Who can answer for the Chaldeans?”

“Well, who can answer for the mighty wind that blew down his house and killed all his children?”

“Do you have a problem with My ways, Death?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, O Lord, I don’t mind. It’s all grist to the mill. But were the boils really necessary?”

“The man should have washed.”

“And the all-over body rash, that was a bit nasty, wasn’t it? I mean, he was scraping himself with shards of crockery. Crockery that had been broken when a mysterious earthquake destroyed the cave he was hiding in.”

“Look,” boomed God, “Job was such a goody-goody. Always praising My name or sacrificing in My honor. I couldn’t stand it. Besides, your father said…oh.” The orb drooped.

I put an arm around the most shoulderlike part of the divine light. “Perhaps You should take some time off, Lord God Sir,” I suggested.

“Maybe you’re right,” boomed God. “I just feel like everything’s rushing out of My control, that I’m not connecting with people anymore. I used to be able to spot evil a mile off, but I’m losing My touch. Perhaps Creation needs a whole new direction, something less primeval, more ancient. Something the youth can relate to.”

Job: “You Should See the Other Guy!”

And with that the divine light turned and slowly disappeared. “I’ll be back in an era or two,” boomed His voice. I noticed that pinned to His back was a note that read
TAKE MY NAME IN VAIN
. Father had indeed been busy.

So the Biblical
Age ended and was replaced by the Age of Myth, an era of fearful monsters and ironic demises. Sons slew their fathers and married their mothers, wives slew their husbands and were in turn slain by their daughters, uncles killed nieces, nephews murdered aunts, brothers married sisters, and so on and so on. Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanied such moments, I was happy to be kept so busy. Transmuting souls into the Darkness calmed me and made me feel part of Creation. My unconventional upbringing had left me with low self-esteem and needy for the approval of others. Now I had the chance to get the approval of every living being that ever existed! By the Age of Myth even the most begrudging of the dead had to admit I was good at my job. Plus it kept me in great shape. One being’s ultimate tragedy is another being’s extreme calisthenics.

Before He had departed, God had subcontracted His divinity out to a host of minor gods. Interviews had been held in which prospective deities put forward their plans for their respective fields of expertise, and before long a whole new pantheon was created.

It was confusing at first. There were now gods of love, of war, of rivers, and of trees. There were gods of the hearth, of the threshold, of the alcove, and of the niche. There were even gods for things that had yet to exist. Velocipede, god of the bicycle, spent most of his time causing horses to bolt and carts to overturn in a vain attempt to prompt the development of his chosen phenomena. What’s more, many of the gods had demanded a contractual rider that allowed them to create new beings, and God, being in such a rush to quit the earth, had agreed. I thought these new creations were lacking somewhat. Minotaurs and Centaurs, Sphinxes and Mermaids…they were little more than jumbled-up versions of already existing animals. I wasn’t the only one to feel aggrieved. Disappointment among humans at these new chimerical beasts saw the formation of a reactionary group who yearned for the simplicity of the first Creation and sought to rectify the problem by wiping these new creatures off the face of the planet. This group called themselves “Heroes.”

Minotaur: Derivative.

To the Heroes, any beast of mixed progeny was fit only for the slaughter. Such radical originalist creationists as Hercules, Perseus, and Theseus were soon laying down trails of sugar cubes with which to lure Centaurs into ambushes, while Minotaurs were tricked into entering china shops, where their human interest in tableware conflicted with their bullish urge for demolition, leaving the animal confused and easy to slay.

The budding monster conservationist movement was appalled. But no matter how hard they tried to humanize these new, unfamiliar creatures, there was something about Harpies, the hideous foul-smelling birds with women’s faces, razor-sharp teeth, and earsplitting shrieks that made them distinctly unsympathetic to the general populace. Soon the monster population had been all but decimated, and the Heroes began to broaden their horizons.

The duck-billed platypus’s strange combination of ducklike snout, webbed feet, beaverlike tail, and egg-laying capabilities was considered exceedingly unnatural, and it soon found itself besieged by legions of underemployed Heroes.