Death: A Life (19 page)

“Keep still or it’ll never be over,” I hissed.

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” spluttered Maud as her face swelled horribly with bites. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

After she died, we spent the rest of the day walking through the forest hand in hand as before. She showed me how all the plants of the forest were filled with life-giving nectars, and I showed her how a piranha could strip a man to the bone in less than a minute. I was enraptured by her company, intoxicated by her presence. All was going well when suddenly I heard a thunderclap and a deafening voice.

“Death!”

I swung around. Maud gave a little squeak and hid behind me in the edges of the Darkness. It was Gabriel.

“Hello, Gabriel,” I said. I hadn’t seen him since the void, before the Beginning of Time, but he looked the same, in that never-changing way that angels have.

“I knew you weren’t a sheep!” roared Gabriel. His eyes flashed left and right. “Where is she?”

“Where’s who?” I replied, trying to exude as much innocence and light as a being of unfathomable blackness could.

“The woman who was meant to be killed by ants. She was due in Heaven three hours ago.”

“How did you know she was missing?” I asked. I was curious. I hadn’t imagined they kept track of souls to this degree.

Gabriel eyed me suspiciously. “When the records don’t balance,” he sniped, “the alarms go off.”

“Alarms?”

“Then we overturn the barracks, check the barbed wire, and set the angelic bloodhounds to trace the missing soul.”

“I thought Heaven was meant to be a pleasant place?” I asked. “You know, clouds and harps.”

“Pah!” spat Gabriel. “That’s how it used to be done, but the system was soft. Michael was soft. Always worried about his hair. I’ve made a lot of changes since he…disappeared.”

“Why?” I asked. “Surely Heaven doesn’t need to be changed?”

“It needed a new direction,” said Gabriel. “God’s not going to live forever, you know.”

“Really? Why not?” I asked. He ignored me.

“Something useful should be done with all that eternal salvation. It shouldn’t be frittered away singing alleluias and combing one’s wings. Something constructive should be done.”

“Like what?” I asked. I was genuinely curious.

“Like roads!” cried Gabriel, his eyes glazing over. “And factories, and power plants! Heaven should not be stagnant, it should progress, it should move forward with the times. It’s not like Hell, where the same old tortures can be dragged out again and again; thumbscrews never go out of fashion. But salvation needs to move with the times. Perceptions of Paradise don’t sit still. Ecstasy must be rationalized.”

“When did you go to Hell?” I asked. It was rare for Hell to get angelic visitors, and even rarer to allow one to escape.

“I instigated a cultural exchange,” said Gabriel, puffing himself up. “The first one of its kind. I taught them the virtues of goodness, charity, and light, and they opened my mind to technology, computers, and microwave ovens. Your father’s been busy since you left. He showed me the wonders of mechanical industry and enforced labor. He’s been creating things you could only dream of.”

Actually I couldn’t dream. It was one of the many things the living had spoken of that intrigued me. It seemed to allow them to travel anywhere, they said, to do anything, to act out their wildest fantasies without any consequence whatsoever. It sounded wonderful.

“Well,” I said, shaking such thoughts from my mind, “if you don’t mind, I’m very busy…”

I made as if to leave, careful to keep Maud hidden in the Darkness, but Gabriel rushed in front of me.

“Don’t try to distract me, Death; I can see through the arch-deceiver in you. Where is she?”

Gabriel: Archangel, Messenger, Killjoy.

“I’ll tell you what, Gabriel. I’ll retrace my steps and see if she slipped out of the void along the way, how’s that?”

“You do that,” said Gabriel, his beauteous face now close against mine. “I knew from the moment I met you that you were a fake. One of the other side. I don’t know how you got the job, but I’ve been watching you. You may be able to get away with the odd raccoon or two, but not with a human soul. We need them to dig the irrigation ditches. You can never have too many.”

“Irrigation ditches?…Are you sure you’re going about this Heaven business in the right way?” I asked.

“Shut it, you spawn of Satan,” snapped Gabriel. I noticed some angelic spittle on his lips. “I know everything about you, Death. Everything!”

“Then how many fingers am I holding up behind my back?” I countered. Maud let out a snarf.

“What?” said Gabriel. “Now?”

“Yes.”

“Right at this very second?” said Gabriel. He had put on an air of absurd calm and was beginning to wander back and forth, attempting to peer behind my back.

“Or don’t you know?”

“Of course I know. I’m all-knowing.”

“I thought only God was all-knowing.”

“I am blessed with His power. I can see through all things.” He put his fingers to his head. Suddenly he stopped.

“Three!” he shouted. His eyes opened. A smile broke onto his face. I lifted up my hand. Only the middle finger was up. Gabriel turned red in the face.

“She’d better be back by twelve or it’s Hell for the both of you!” he cried, and with a flap of his wings he launched himself into space.

Despite my bravado I was somewhat flustered. The moment with Maud had been ruined. We both knew she had to go. A funny thing happened, though. Just as I was spreading the Darkness around her she reached up and kissed me on the cheek, and suddenly vast waves of longing filled my body. I looked down and saw her disappearing, a smile on her face, and tried to drag her back out. But it was hopeless. She was gone.

I stood there motionless, but it felt as if great seas were crashing within my body. I felt unsteady on my feet. What was the meaning of this? I thought. But at the back of my mind I began to think that I knew.

I had heard it said by many of the souls I conveyed into the Darkness that at some point in their lives they had been struck down by an illness that seemed to be endemic in all living things. It was a form of nausea that led to extreme irrationality and a loss of composure. It was an infection both mental and physical, both emotional and chemical. When the souls spoke of it, it was in tones both hated and adored, as if this sickness held them even then in the twilight of their existence, compelling their attention even beyond the confines of Life. It was a plague and a pleasure, a virus and a virtue, a statement and an act.

The souls, they called it “love.”

Maudness

I
t was sometime
in the fifth century
B.C.,
and Maud was hanging from the edge of a cliff by a withered tree root.

“I’m going to li-ive,” she trilled as she heaved herself upward, hand over bloodied hand. The root trembled under her weight, but it did not break.

“Just…one…more…inch….”

She looked up at me expectantly.

I wasn’t quite sure how, but Maud seemed to be appearing on Earth more and more often. Every few years, it seemed, I would find her throwing herself from high things, or placing herself beneath heavy things, or eating poisonous things, or saying rude things to violent angry things, anything, it seemed, to try to get my attention. Sometimes she was a queen, sometimes a peasant. Sometimes she was a blonde, sometimes she was a brunette. Her name changed constantly, but she was always the same, irreducible Maud. She had human companions, of course, but I was the only one who stuck with her to the very end, and beyond. When Maud tried to dash out her own brains on a rock, and only knocked herself unconscious, it was I who was there to deliver the illicit coup de grâce, pounding her skull in until her face was a bloody, broken shell. When Maud failed to ingest enough poison to kill herself, it was I who smeared more on her lips, held fast her gnashing jaws, and forced her to swallow. When her partners failed to honor their end of a suicide pact, creeping away terrified as she repeatedly stabbed herself in the chest with a dagger, it was I who consoled her.

“You know something, Death?” she’d often say. “You just can’t depend on the living.”

In this life she was a Vestal Virgin and had gleefully let the perpetual fire in the Temple of Vesta go out. As a punishment she had been thrown off this cliff, only to be plucked from my embrace by a pernicious tree root.

“I think,” she grunted as she pulled herself up the cliff face, “that I will live to be very, very old.” Once again her eyes flicked up to meet mine. She was such a tease. I leaned down and tenderly loosened her fingers one by one.

“You mean to kill me?” she cried seductively. “Help! Help! You swine! You pig! You…” She started giggling and, raising a hand to her mouth, lost her grip. A look of mock horror and real excitement played across her face, and then she was gone, plummeting once more to her doom, bouncing off the rocky outcrops, her bones splintering, her skin ripping, her laugh ringing out ecstatically all the way down. Call it foreplay.

We spent the rest of the day haunting the priests who had tried to kill her.

“Call that a sacrifice!” she shouted at them from deep within the Darkness.

“Almighty Vesta!” cried the priests. “We did not mean to anger you.”

“You have angered me!” she thundered. “Now you must die.”

The priests swallowed hard.

“How shall we die, O Great Vesta?”

“Um…,” said Maud, before intoning deeply, “by eating the excrement of animals.”

I had to clamp my hand over her mouth to prevent the giggles from being heard.

“What?” said the priests.

“You heard me,” said Maud, barely able to contain her giggles. “It’s animal shit for you. Until you die.”

The priests looked at one another.

“But…,” said the head priest, “but that’s disgusting!”

“Do not question the will of the gods.”

“But…”

“Not another word now.”

The priests shifted around uncomfortably, and a few of them started halfheartedly scanning the ground, while Maud and I, hardly able to suppress our laughter, ran away hand in hand.

Why was it that at these, our happiest moments, a lament sounded deep within me? Was it a premonition of what was to come, or was it, as I thought then, merely a side effect of this strange emotion of love?

I had initially thought love to be just another agitation of the human mind, one of the myriad neurochemical activities that seemed to prompt people’s passing. Nevertheless, I grew curious about it in a way that I had not with similar human emotions such as faith and hope, anger and fear. Perhaps it was the sheer number of times that love was listed as a contributing cause in the
Book of Endings.
People would kill for more of it, waste away from a want of it, or sacrifice themselves due to a surfeit of it. Love seemed intrinsically linked to all human ends; there was so much of it about, it was no wonder that I worried I had caught a dose of it.

I remember asking Father what love was.

“Sex,” he replied.