Death: A Life (18 page)

“I hear there are some positions opening up in Inuit mythology,” rumbled Yahweh consolingly. “Drop my name if it helps.”

“But it’s freezing in the Aleutians,” said Baal, who was by now the size of a normal human being. “I’m not manifested for it.”

I didn’t give Baal much of a chance in the Arctic. The denizens of the North Pole were incredibly self-absorbed. They thought the world revolved around them. A Baal cult wouldn’t last a decade.

I watched in sadness with Yahweh as Baal continued to shrink. By now he was the size of a large mouse.

“Doesn’t
anyone
believe in me anymore?” he squeaked.

Suddenly, a voice popped up from the desert floor. “I still believe in you,” it said. A small boy walked forward. He was carrying some of the bejeweled icons left by the defeated Baal worshippers. Baal looked at him with tears in his now tiny eyes.

“Well…that’s very kind of you, sonny,” he piped.

“When I saw you best Osiris in that earthquake contest last year,” enthused the boy, “with your Pin-Baal Flying Headlock, I knew you were the best.”

“Well, thank you, thank you. It was a good show, wasn’t it?” Baal had by now stopped shrinking. He was the size of a grasshopper.

“You see, Baal?” rumbled Yahweh. “Don’t get disappointed. Even He didn’t have any worshippers at one point.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” cheeped Baal, blowing his nose noisily and looking at his new, much-reduced size. “Maybe I should go to South America. I’ve always fancied being a beetle god.”

“Yes!” shouted the little boy. “A big black beetle with giant pincers and a taste for guts!” Picking up the great god Baal in the palm of his hand, they walked off together, Baal nodding attentively as the little boy spewed out ideas on human sacrifices and colorful headdresses. I noticed that spindly insect legs were beginning to grow out of the sides of Baal’s body, and he was already attempting to make a rudimentary clicking noise.

Naturally I had cause to see the little boy again some seventy years later, by which time he had become high priest of the new cult of Baal, which claimed some thirty thousand followers along the foothills of the Andes. The boy now had a beard that reached down to his feet, and a tattoo of a beetle covered his face, chest, and stomach. His faith in Baal had never wavered. Baal was by now back to his old size, if not his old shape. He clacked his pincers loudly over the boy’s dead body.

“He was a good boy,” roared Baal when he saw me approach.

“Oh? Well then, just out of curiosity,” I asked, “why did you bite his head off?”

“He wanted me to,” roared Baal. “He said it would instill fear and awe in the others.”

“Has it?”

“Oh yes. They’re thinking of making it an annual tradition.”

I removed the little boy’s soul from the old man’s body. It immediately turned to Baal.

“Did the blood spurt everywhere like we hoped?”

“Oh yes!” roared Baal.

“Excellent. Now, try to remember to be a little crueler. You can’t be kind and gentle all the time, otherwise they’ll lose respect for you.”

“Right-o,” roared Baal, snapping his mandibles happily. “And thank you, little one.”

“It was an honor,” said the priest as he began to disappear into the Darkness. “Oh, one more thing. I left some sacrifices on the altar. It’s your favorite. Virgins.”

“You think of everything,” roared Baal.

The dilemma
of the gods prompted me to think about my own situation. What would happen to me once everything was dead? It seemed improbably far off, even when you considered that I existed outside time, but it was an unsettling thought nonetheless. Would I spend my days vainly scrabbling around the earth, searching carcasses for the odd missed soul? Would I twiddle my thumbs and wait indefinitely for Life to begin again? Or would I in turn be absorbed into the Darkness, folding in upon myself until, with a slight pop, I disappeared into my own ether?

You would have thought that such a vision of utter annihilation would make me happy, but curiously it did not. I found the fact that there would be no one to remember me after I was gone strangely unsettling. Even the thought that I would be sent back to Hell was not as pleasing to me as it had once seemed. I imagined what my own torture might look like, and pictured myself surrounded by the living, unable to extract souls no matter how hard I tried, confronted on all sides by gloating existence and virulent being. It wasn’t so terrifying. In fact, it was strangely thrilling, and after a while I grew confused as to whether I was imagining my Hell or my Heaven.

With the rise
of monotheism in the western parts of Earth, over two thousand Egyptian and Greek gods were left unemployed, surviving solely on the belief of a handful of eccentrics, occultists, and rebellious teenagers trying to irritate their parents. Some gods offered their services for private functions, and among the wealthy and faithful it became de rigueur to have a god or two attending your dinner parties or bar mitzvahs. The majority, however, emigrated. Many found gainful employment in India, whose large population had always been willing to believe in anything as long as it diverted their minds from the abject misery of their day-to-day lives. Being blue and having lots of arms was generally recognized as a fail-safe way of succeeding there.

Fail-Safe Steps to Divine Popularity: Trunk, Tusks, Tutu.

India had always proved troublesome for me due to the widespread belief in reincarnation. “I want to be a bee,” I remember one soul demanding of me after another mass trampling at the Kumbha Mela. “A little honeybee, buzz, buzz, buzzing all around and collecting honey, and if someone tries to stop me, I sting!”

I tried to explain that returns were outside my jurisdiction, but before I could, another one of the dead chimed in, “I want to be a strawberry. Juicy, firm, red! So delicious. The perfect fruit! Make me a strawberry, please!”

And so it went in India—within seconds there would be a cacophony of souls all pleading me to bring them back as their favorite thing. I later found out that most of these souls found themselves being reincarnated into beings that didn’t believe in reincarnation at all, which tended to make my bookkeeping easier.

It was a matter of curious timing that, just as my hands were full with the first wave of Hindus, I saw Maud again. She was much changed—taller, darker skinned, not hanging upside down—but I recognized her in an instant. She was one of a tribe of fearsome Amazons who were slowly torturing a rival tribesman. I did not speak, but watched her from a distance, drinking in her every movement. To begin with, Maud caught the tribesman’s left hand in her grip, and planting her foot upon her victim’s chest, tore the shoulder from its socket. Then she and the others went to work rending his flesh, and slowly but surely his ribs were stripped clean by the Amazons’ fingernails. The women began tossing his limbs about with blood-soaked hands, and the screams from the tribesman grew louder and louder until Maud chopped off his head and affixed it to a spear. A knowing smile played across her lips.

I hurried forward to the tribesman’s mangled body to uncap his soul, and I felt her eyes on me throughout. As I set the soul free, I suddenly felt her hand touch mine. An onlooker, if one could have seen me, might have thought it no more than an accidental caress, but I knew what it was. I looked up from the dead body, and Maud was staring directly at me.

“Oh, the torture continues, does it?” interjected the soul of the dead tribesman.

“What?” I said, turning to look at him. The spell was broken, but Maud’s touch had left me vibrating with excitement.

“I mean, it’s not enough to have been tortured in life, I now have to watch this filth when I’m dead?” His soul rolled its lustrous eyes at me.

“What filth?” I asked defensively.

“You know exactly what I mean. All those lovey-dovey eyes between you and her.”

“I can assure you that I never so much as…”

“Yeah, yeah,” snorted the tribesman. “I may come from a stone-age jungle tribe that doesn’t have a word for tomorrow, but I wasn’t born the day before today.”

I blushed. He was right. I turned to see if Maud had overheard, but she and her Amazonian colleagues had smeared one another in the tribesman’s viscera and melted back into the forest.

Soon, however, Maud’s tribe began to die one by one, poisoned by their food. Some of the Amazons blamed the gods, but since I found Maud waiting by the dead bodies on each occasion, I had a sneaking suspicion she was the one responsible.

“Thanks for the dead,” I would bashfully say as I went to work.

“Oh, it wasn’t me,” she’d reply, fluttering her eyelids in a pretense at innocence.

“I just wanted to see you again,” she admitted the next time. “Amazons are so boring. They’re always going on about women’s oppression and men being awful, and they insist on chopping off their own breasts, which I don’t think really helps their cause. I wanted to talk to you.”

Amazons: Boring.

“You’ll see me eventually,” I said, tapping the
Book.
“Everyone does.”

“I know,” she said, blushing. “But can’t you stay for a moment? Leave her.” She gestured at the soul of the poisoned Amazon who glistened in my hands.

“Don’t you lay a finger on her,” snapped the soul, “unless you want to be eating your meals through a thin, hollow paper tube. Which reminds me, don’t eat her soup.”

So I left the soul there, and Maud and I walked through the jungle together, ducking under creepers and clambering over fallen trees, she alive, me Death. I cannot recall our conversation now, so light-headed was I, but it ranged across space and time, taking in the dying fashions of the day, and the new and up-and-coming viruses.

“When was the last time you took a day off?” said Maud, her eyes dark in the jungle light.

“Well,” I said, “never. Something has always been dying, you know. That’s what defines the earth, the fact that everything is always dying.”

“And living,” said Maud. “Don’t forget, we’re all living, too. Maybe you should try living one of these days.”

I laughed, thinking it a joke, but she seemed serious, and so I imagined how strange it must be to have a soul, to be a part of the union of the living. How odd it must be to live within time and be beholden to a body. How curious to have a finite duration and a vulnerability to sharp objects. But this was mere fantasy. I sighed. Yes, I could console myself with the fact that I was immortal. But I didn’t have a Life.

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.