by Liam Card
The crew suggested he could begin whenever he wished.
“I’m standing only a few hundred metres from the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, where hundreds, if not thousands of people have flocked in recent days. The government of Egypt has issued a formal statement inviting the world to come and witness the first and greatest wonder in the world, or as they put it in their tourism campaign, ‘before a year’s time is up.’ Standing here today, I can tell you that it is truly a site to behold, and I encourage all of you make the trip if you can. From Giza, I’m Roger Thornby. Back to you, Sean.”
The camera crew gave thumbs-up once more, and Roger Thornby relaxed his camera face.
The Bookkeeper moved close to me. “I cannot deliver your letter, Luke,” he said.
“You don’t have the ability, or you won’t?” He circled the last option in red marker and sent it back to me.
“Why not?” I said.
“It’s a long story. There’s a lot of history you aren’t aware of.”
“What I’m aware of are serious violations going on here, and worse to come. Don’t you think it’s best to stop it?”
“Best for who?”
“For humanity,” I said.
“What is humanity but a vicious cycle of creation and destruction? Take this pyramid right here. I had already been manning the Post-Death Line for a long while when they erected this masterpiece. The ingenuity, the science, the astronomy involved was astounding for the time. The creativity, equally as impressive. I was there to field the thousands of slave deaths associated with the raising of it. In the end, precision, creativity, time, energy, and the cost of human life had resulted one of the future wonders of the world. A stunning landmark for human accomplishment. A beacon for perseverance. Don’t you agree, Luke?”
“Yes. It’s wonderful.”
“Then you should know that I was also around when humans destroyed it, leaving it the maimed version we see here today. A version that spits on the armies of slaves who built it and the Pharaoh Khufu who commissioned it. No slave died for this version,” he said, and sent me a before and after version of the Great Pyramid. Certainly the difference was astonishing. The smooth sides made from twenty-ton slabs of polished casing stone had long since been stolen, leaving the maimed and jagged version of today. “For me, it’s nothing but the perfect example of creation and destruction — the perfect symbol for the imperfection of the human race. Imperfections, I might add, that before Safia started her work were nowhere near improvement from a biological or generational standpoint. Which brings it all full circle to me and why I cannot send your letter to What’s Next. However, to understand my unwillingness to do so, you need to know my story. A story, I might add, that’s never been shared with anyone in the Line or with a reintegrated ghost. Please, consider yourself the first,” he said.
I sent him a one-thousand-square-foot canvas painted with all ears.
“The story starts with who I really am, which has more to do with who I was before I became the Bookkeeper. If we can agree on anything, we are all a product of our own choices. While alive, I made a terrible one in a fit of rage and turned out to be the first murderer on Earth. Thus, after the murder of my brother, a process had to be created to deal with those who rob the living of their guaranteed time on Earth. Due to my actions, the future of the world was seen. My actions had opened a door to violent thoughts becoming violent crimes, and due to my actions, a process was created whereby the living could cleanse themselves through a return to understanding and regain Required Perspective before passing on to What’s Next. That process, as you know it today, is the Post-Death Line. Due to my infamous crime on Earth, upon my death I was sentenced to man the Line for eternity, or until humanity rids itself of the flaws that are responsible for the violent crimes.
“To me, that meant the full extent of eternity, or until humanity wiped itself out through war or the destruction of their atmosphere or habitat. I must admit, selfishly, it is something I have been cheering for. And on a few occasions, you have no idea how close it’s come. Nonetheless, humanity carries on, and the chains that bind me to the Post-Death Line, remain. You must understand that, for me, there was no end in sight. And then Safia happened. She managed to slip through the cracks. As you well know, Safia is unlike any RDS to return to Earth. Not only was she wild with anger over her own death, but the lives she had experienced in the Line only seemed to compound that anger. For one reason or another, the Line had done nothing to ease her pain. It had simply failed to provide her Required Perspective.
“Due to this rage, her vibration and energy pattern was different from any and all ghosts before her. Luke, what you saw upon delivery was a difficult ghost with anger issues and lofty aspirations. What I saw was a loaded gun. If she had chosen to go on to What’s Next, I couldn’t have sent her. Not in the condition she was in. My only option would have been to force her through the Line over and over again until Perspective had been reached. When she stood before me and asked about the condition of her sister, I told her the truth. She was alive at the time. But I also told her what was required to ensure her decision to return to Earth and to live out her lease as a ghost. In the past, I hadn’t been so cruel when it came to information of that nature. I would always provide Health Status Conditions of the living attached with the statistical analysis of their odds for survival. This would assist in the decision-making process, say, if a loved one was mortally wounded or had a zero or one or five percent chance of survival.
“In Safia’s case, I chose not to attach the statistics or the critical condition of her sister. As I said, I did what was required of me to get her back on Earth. Of course, arriving to witness her sister’s final breath was the icing on the cake. This took her anger to a level whereby it would be a dangerous weapon if used correctly. And, as the world knows all too well, it has certainly proven as such. However, you have to understand, prior to Operation Stopgap, she had the power and the intention but lacked the knowledge to harness it. She was the gun with no ammunition, so to speak.
“This is where I come in. I called Safia to the surface of the moon and shared with her some bad news. The conversation surrounded the reality that I would be forced to have her pass through the Post-Death Line for another round or two of Required Perspective. She refused, as I had hoped she would. I revealed that due to her rare and unique anger levels, the vibration patterns that were a byproduct of that intense rage posed a great threat to the living. That, in fact, another round in the Line was absolutely required for the safety of those on Earth. Well, didn’t that set her little revolutionary mind to work. Being the precocious ghost that she is, she asked how exactly it was that she could be dangerous. How was she a threat to the living? I replied that that if she were to connect with a living being while enraged, which seemed to charge her vibration pattern, she could potentially harm or kill that individual while attempting to read their thoughts. She promised to do nothing of the sort, that is, if I would change my mind about another journey through the Line. She begged me. Her first experience through the Line, as she described it, was a severe horse-whipping — unbearable and prolonged torture.
“I suggested that perhaps I might be flexible in this regard, so long as she control her anger. So long as she promised to never, ever connect while enraged. She agreed and signed a document to that effect. Contract aside, I knew she would. You see, that was the plan all along. For in that conversation on the surface of the Moon, I spelled out the exact pathway to access her power. I handed her the keys and wished her well. My wish was that she would run wild with the power and act out on her desire to punish and alter humanity. Naturally, it was in my best interest.
“Hours later, the incident in Miami took place. She grew enraged, connected, and ended the assailant’s life just as I desperately hoped she would. Instantly, she flooded with fear, since she had interfered with what was meant to be. She sent me a million apology
letters. I sent her back the specific rule from the Handbook with a further explanation. The truth of the matter is this: the Post-Death Line had been created so that ghosts would not have the desire to change what was meant to be. The Code reads that ghosts are unable to interfere with living things and/or change what was meant to be, but that was written under the assumption that a return to Required Perspective would render them disinterested in doing so. What was lost in translation was that ‘unable’ really meant ‘unwilling.’
“Alas, there has never been another Safia. There has never been someone willing to change what was meant to be. The Line had never produced anything like her, nor was there a mandate to deal with her actions or intentions. Technically, there was no firm rule that was being broken. Technically, I was under no obligation to report what was going on to What’s Next. The system had failed for the first time, and all I had done was to help foster the unique talents of said individual, post-failure. This was my chance to substantially increase the rate at which humanity improved upon itself. This was my opportunity to shave off thousands of years anchored to the Post-Death Line and finally reach What’s Next. Faced with the opportunity, I seized it. Everyone wins. Humanity improves at an accelerated rate, and my sentence as Bookkeeper is dramatically reduced.”
“No, you win. Safia thinks she’s won. And the innocents lose,” I said.
“Innocents die every day. I process the entirety of them.”
“You’re missing the point,” I said.
“You’re missing the big picture.”
“The big picture is your own self-interest.”
“Not according to What’s Next, which is desperate to see humanity right itself. Since the day I struck down my own flesh and blood, releasing hate and violence into the world, What’s Next has been eager for the humans to return to balance and understanding. To peace.”
“I’d like to know why there has been no intervention from What’s Next?”
“That’s a good question. It’s not your fault, but you have little to no perspective on the scope of the Universe. There are simply too many civilizations to monitor, and because of that, there is a process in place. A Messenger is sent by What’s Next to visit and assess the civilizations around the universe and report on their progress. Thus, the Messenger, during his whirlwind tour of space, manages to hit Earth once every hundred years to record humanity’s population, scientific, and moral growth. During The Messenger’s last visit, the world was at war and many millions were dead. The Messenger saw no signs of improvement from the century before and wrote the required briefing to share with What’s Next. I signed it, and away he went. So with regard to speeding things up a tad, time was on my side. Safia could complete her plan, her spirit lease would come to maturity, and off she would go to What’s Next, long before the Messenger was scheduled to return. Ideally, upon the Messenger’s arrival, Safia’s work would have returned the world to a state of balance, restored humanity’s moral compass, and I would be released. Luke, when you attempt to interfere with that plan, when you attempt to interfere with the fast track to balance, you interfere with my situation as well. Which is why this letter of yours will not be making its way to What’s Next. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Will you be assisting Safia with Phase Three?”
He sent me a document with two large boxes, one with the world “yes” underneath it, and one with “no.” Both of the words were pulsing to the beat of the music from Jeopardy, which I thought was both sarcastic and inappropriate given what was required of my decision.
Then the Jeopardy music ran out, as it invariably does.
“Please check one,” he said.
I added a box that read, “I have a year to decide” and checked that one.
“Choose carefully,” he said. “You bought yourself some time to think about it.”
26
Catherine Seymour, dressed in nothing but a diaphanous floral dressing gown and worn house slippers, poured herself a cup of tea. This was the teacup with the chip in the rim where traces of gold paint could be found. Throughout the main floor of the house, all of the blinds were drawn tight, but despite that, Catherine could still make out the swarm of media that had set up camp shortly after her historic announcement. She could see the blur that was the city of tents where they had all been living for the past several weeks. Catherine opened a childproof bottle of prescription cough medicine and stirred an ounce or so into her cup of tea. The spoon skipped every time it passed the chip in the rim. Maybe this teacup is me, she thought. Maybe there’s a chunk missing of me now. Maybe this spirit, this Safia, maybe she took a chip out of my soul — the good part, where gold used to be.
She stirred and stirred the prescription cough medicine into the tea as if having concocted a witch’s brew of sorts. She wondered if the addition of a dragon scale, eye of newt, and pubic hair of a virgin stirred into the mix might allow her to sleep uninterrupted until the world forgot about Catherine Seymour and her exclusive communication line to the most notorious killer in history. That infamous television appearance — was it a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand? Wouldn’t that be nice, she thought, to wake up and be a nobody again.
She sipped her pain tea.
The clock read 8:59 a.m.
Someone outside, a thirtysomething male with a bullhorn, asked Catherine if she would come out this morning to speak; if she had any more messages to deliver. Seconds passed. Then he asked if she been in touch with the ghost again and if there were any updates to report. Catherine imagined an old Second World War Lancaster flying by her little cottage and dropping a massive payload on the scads of newspeople camped outside. She felt the blast and opened up her blinds to see their bodies disassembled. She imagined the crater on her front lawn and what kind of creative landscaping she might do with that kind of mess. She thought a pond might be nice, since the digging had been done for her. Perhaps with some goldfish in there. Can’t think like that anymore, she thought. Not once the year is up. So she switched up her thinking and went back to the goldfish and how much she liked them.
More than people, these days.
Becoming the most famous person on the planet was not the byproduct she had envisioned. How was she to know that news channels would begin dedicating daily segments geared to everything and anything Catherine Seymour? How was she to predict what it might feel like to see her face on every channel — to be picked apart as an angel and devil and everything in between. Catherine looked over to her television and wondered if she should remove the seven iron sticking out of the screen and vacuum up the shards of glass.
It had been three days now since the BBC had insisted on using the most unflattering image of her she had ever seen. The tube had been permanently turned off, and there was nothing she could do about the sharks circling her house. One had even chewed through the phone line in an attempt to force her out into the world for snapshots, even if just to yell and shake a fist. But this cheap tactic did nothing. Catherine wasn’t coming out, maybe ever again. She finished her pain tea and felt a half shade of improvement. The courage was once again flowing through her veins, and it was time to get back to writing. Catherine was in the middle of what had the bones to be the greatest trick ever played on humanity. This is what she had written:
It is with great pleasure that I come to you with another message from the spirit in charge. Given how impressed she is with all of your rigorous efforts to rid your mind of what will constitute Thought Crimes in the near future, she is willing to retool her operation that was set to commence in approximately one year’s time. The new rules are as follows: After a Thought Crime enters the mind, every man, woman, and child (over the age of five) is to behave like a barnyard animal to the best of their ability, in public, for one full hour after a Thought Crime violation. The approved barnyard animals are as follows: chickens, cats, dogs, pigs, asses, cows, and ducks.
Failure to wholeheartedly emulate one of the approved barnyard animals for the duration of exactly one hour post-Thought Crime is punishable by death. That is all. Now fuck off.
Catherine’s unbridled tears of laughter fell to the page and caused the words and letters they hit to become out of focus. She imagined people in all countries of the world burying fists in armpits to form makeshift chicken wings and clucking about wildly, scratching with their feet and pecking at the ground for imaginary seeds. She imagined CEOs of Fortune 500 companies having to kick and bray like donkeys in front of an executive assembly. She saw streets chock full of human cats meowing, licking their hands, and then cleaning behind their ears, or batting furiously at a piece of trash being thrown around by the wind. Politicians quacking and waddling around legislative buildings. Policemen barking at one another, sniffing assholes, and dragging their rear ends through city parks so as to clean what couldn’t be licked.
Based on her suffering with celebrity and the media, this was the kind of joke she wanted to play on Safia and the world. To note, this document also marked the first time she had ever written such a vulgar four-letter word. What a word, she thought. What a glorious word. Sure, she had thought the word in moments of quiet frustration, but to write it was such a treat. To imagine saying it before a crowd of salivating journalists was electrifying. That’s not like me to say such things, she thought and blamed it on the codeine, which now had strongly taken hold.
Catherine Seymour held her finished document up in the air, as if it were the Magna Carta or Declaration of Independence. Certainly, it felt like a declaration of her independence, ever since Safia had made a hand puppet of her. Catherine was in the process of taking back the reins, and if this kind of announcement wasn’t going to get Safia back in a room with her, she didn’t know what would.
“I swear I’ll do it!” she cried out toward the ceiling. “You little tart, I’ll read it aloud to the nest of vipers out there if you don’t come back here and answer some questions! I want to talk to you! How in God’s name could you ask something of that nature and never come back?”