TW // Death
“So, how do you think you did?” The voice floated above him and he reached for it. He was prodded and then the world awoke.
“Me?” He was himself again, but somewhere else.
“You.” The woman sat before him was tall and broad with a clean posture, and a blank expression that demanded his attention; it was warm and scolding all at once.
“At what?”
She bent her head and scratched its side in a reflex of irritation that she was desperate to suppress. “Life. Living. The thing you’ve been doing non-stop for all of your living memory until about…” she checked a watch, “…two minutes ago.”
It fell into place: the life, the living. His girlfriend of five years, their dog Jasper, their London flat with the absurd rent, his job in marketing he loathed but at which he was somehow great. “I’m dead?” And as those words left his mouth he remembered the bungee cord, the grinning blonde Australian, the snap, the cold, wet rock. “Damn.”
“Okay, it seems we’re all caught up. Better late than never. How do you think you did?”
“Not bad?” He looked around him: he was seemingly inside an office with cold, hard walls that were pinned together, and a hanging, framed picture of a cloudless sky.
“That’s a question?”
“I don’t think I did badly.”
“Hmm.” The woman wrote some words on a piece of paper in front of her and frowned.
“Did I?”
“Well.” She turned over another sheet and glanced through the several paragraphs of dense text. “I’ve seen worse.” She looked at him with raised eyebrows, as though querying if that was sufficient to put his mind at ease.
He shrugged and then shook his head. “Hang on, where are we?”
“You wouldn’t be able to pronounce it.” She said, while writing more notes and not looking up.
“That makes no sense.”
“You would say that.”
“What?”
“That.” She looked up and met his eye, placing her pen down with a sigh. “Look, this is the place before and the place after. You’ve been in the place in between.” Her voice was steady and slow and her hands were demonstrating each element of her speech, as though she were engaging a toddler. “I can’t really make it any clearer than that.”
“No?” This question went unanswered so he exhaled deeply into his hands. “What happens now?”
“We debrief. Then you can go.”
“Go where?”
“Barbados.”
“Barbados?”
“No, sorry.” She laughed and took a moment to compose herself. “That’s just a joke.” She cleared her throat and watched his humourless bafflement rise. “You can sign up for re-entry. Or retire.”
“Retire to where?”
“Bar-”
“-please. Be serious.”
She caught herself and bowed her head, admonished. “The beyond.”
He shook his head and raised his hands in dismayed confusion, opening his mouth to volley another question at his interlocutor.
But she cut him off: “Anyway, let’s get this wrapped up. I have some questions, just answer honestly.”
“Sure.” He slumped back in his chair with his arms folded and a frown on his face.
“What was the best bit?”
“The best bit? Of my entire life?”
“Uh-huh.” She said, distractedly chewing the end of her pen.
“I… I don’t know.”
“Freshly cut grass, falling in love, that time you got four numbers on the lottery…” She placed the back of her hand over the corner of her mouth and raised her eyebrows, “…sex?”
He exhaled into his hands again: his reflexive reaction was disgust at discussing that subject in this sterile environment with a complete stranger, moments after having been informed of his own death. He thought hard for several moments. “Maybe food?”
“Is that a question?”
“No. Food. It was food.”
“All of it?”
“No, just the best bits: bacon; fresh, buttered bread; chocolate.”
“Interesting.”
“How?”
“That’s less common than the others. It’s fine. Well done. Next question: why did you do so little?”
“Excuse me?”
“You amounted to nothing. Why?”
“I did… stuff.”
“Such as?”
“I worked, I had a relationship, friendships. I travelled.”
“You interacted with others. And moved about a bit. You were able to do anything, you know that don’t you?”
“I-”
“It’s quite normal. The doing nothing. I just have to ask the question.” She tapped her chin, waiting for an answer.
“Fear, I guess.”
“Of?”
“Failure. Judgement? Judgement. From others.”
“It’s funny everyone says that. But nobody gives the response that they were too busy judging others.” She considered this for a moment and raised her eyebrows before noting something down. “Next question: how real did it all seem?”
“Seem?”
“Were there any anomalies? Anything too far-fetched? Anything that made you ‘consider the nature of reality’?” She read the last phrase directly off the page.
“Err.” He shook his head as he considered the question. “Ghosts.”
“Ghosts?” She paused, deep in thought for a moment. “What do you mean?”
“Whatever they are, it’s a bit weird. A bit odd.”
“Ghosts were very much real. We can’t get everybody out when they…” she gestured at him with her pen, “cease. There are just some tormented souls knocking about in there.”
“Oh.”
“Indeed. Anything else?”
He frowned, deep in thought, then it occurred to him, “I took mushrooms once and saw Anubis… it felt so real. What was that?”
She thought deeply, “Anubis…” and a smile formed as she joined the dots. “That’s Geoff, one of our junior developers. Some lines of communication get confused and route straight to him. We hear that a lot.” She made another note and let out a short, bright laugh.
“Geoff?”
“Geoff.”
“Huh.”
“Nothing else strike you as odd? You’re happy that aeroplanes can just fly, and that the moon just happens to be the perfect distance away from Earth to allow for life, and the pyramids were built prior to any serious technological developments? None of that seem odd to you?”
“No, I guess not.”
“You know, for a paranoid bunch, your race can be particularly trusting.” She made several notes and there was a silence between them for a while.
“Are those things not real?”
“Next question,” she ploughed on, ignoring him. “You chose not to believe in God, why was that?”
“I guess the problem of evil was a big part of it. How can there be any evil in a world created by God?”
“Okay.” She made more notes.
“Is there a God?”
“There’s a creator.” She said as she wrote, flippantly. “But they’re not, you know, big-bearded-man-that-knows-everything-and-is-inherently-good.” She looked up, palms facing him, “I mean, they’re not bad. They give to charity and hold open the door for you. But they’re not perfectly good. And they know a lot, but only if people submit their weekly reports on time, you know?” Another laugh, more notes.
“Why allow for evil at all then? In there.” He gestured over his shoulder, not knowing where the place he had been before was in relation to their location.
She crossed her legs and exhaled deeply, leaning forward for composure. It was clear this was something she got asked a lot and she was jaded by it. “Well, free will’s a bitch, right? If we give you none of it, what’s the point? You just tick some boxes, rinse and repeat. I’d certainly be out of a job!” Her laugh came and went in a second, the earnestness returned. “So we let you do what you want, and that’s not - always - yielded great results.”
“Can’t you make us… better?”
“You know what good looks like!” She snapped, losing some composure. “You have empathy. You know what it feels like when bad things happen to you and you know, therefore, how others feel when it's done to them.” She took a breath and sat back, before continuing in a softer tone: “we have tried limiting your capacity for evil, but that had mixed results.”
“Mixed, how?”
“If we impose a glass ceiling, you’re more inclined to try to break it. Things got messy.” A faraway look found her eye. “Some scenarios seem better balanced where we impede progress, but that skirts very close to interference.”
“There are other scenarios?” He said, after a moment’s hesitation.
Her eyes widened then narrowed. “Some.”
“And they’re better?”
“No.” She laughed. “Some are much, much worse. There might be one or two better, but no, the majority are dreadful.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, shame you left so soon, I guess.”
“Yeah.” He stared at his hands in the silence that grew to contain them.
“There’s one last question.” She said brightly, trying to distract him from his sadness. “If you could change one thing, what would it be?”
“Anything?”
“Anything.” She tapped her pen expectantly while he thought. And then a door opened that he had not noticed before. In walked a short man with a round stomach and a bushy beard. He approached his interviewer and whispered in her ear. Her eyes grew wide once more and then the man turned and left. “Well.” She said, pausing to gulp. “This is new.”
“What.”
“I guess we’ll finish this another time.”
The floor fell away and he was tumbling. He watched the woman’s eyes follow him as he disappeared into the enveloping ground and a blackness consumed him.
“Fella, are you alright?” A thick Australian accent entered his head. “You took a big old bump on ya head there.”
“What.” He opened his eyes and blinked into the clear blue sky overhead. A smiling man with long blonde hair came into view.
“I think I got the measurements a bit off, eh? You feeling alright?”
“Yeah.” He rubbed the side of his head and it was humming from the impact with rock far below. “Yeah, fine.”
“Get some ice on that, would ya?”
“Sure.” He managed as he sat up.
“You were out for a few minutes there, fella. I thought you was dead.”
“You’re not the only one.” He said, smiling as his girlfriend approached, tears streaming down her face.
“You’re okay!” She hugged him tightly and helped him to his feet.
“Yeah, fine.” He managed a short laugh. “A bit shaken up.”
She grabbed his face and checked him over, scanning the lump on the side of his head and checked his pupils. “What, what’s the matter?” She asked, noticing his distant, frowned look.
He watched the plane in the distance, thundering through the sky with a vague hum, the sunlight glancing off its slightly banked, majestic wings. “Nothing.” He blinked a thought away and they exchanged a smile.