by Mon D Rea
“She is the fly in my ointment, the chink in my armor.” He blows a thick and impressive smoke ring that slowly elongates into a tiny Scream mask before it dissolves. “My problem. Yours to solve.”
Even as he started saying these things he had taken on the air of a mafia boss barking out orders, like it has been ingrained in him to expect nothing but blind obedience. But the whole thing’s so unexpected it takes a while for me to digest it: Death, more powerful than all the politicians and tycoons of the world combined – he who can take away the only thing that really matters and send hundreds of billions of people through eternal torment, Death is… in love?
“Yes, that's how you would put it, wouldn't you? Tiny, insignificant, annoying sack of flesh that you are. Love. That silly, pathetic excuse for raging chemicals inside your faulty, substandard bodies. Only childish mortals can invent something as trivial as love. Something your half-baked minds can swallow hook, line and sinker.” He stands up and starts pacing back and forth like a husband outside the delivery room, cigarette smoke trailing behind him as immutable as water on taro leaf. “As blissful as it may be, I can't regress to such ignorance.”
“Oh how shall I put this?” he asks out loud while massaging his temples hard. Seeing the Grim Reaper show human reactions to stress is eerie and thoroughly disorienting. He says: “It’s aggravating that I can't put this predicament into your hollow human words.”
Just when I think I see a point of vulnerability in Death's swagger and bullying, his eyes start to glow like lumps of coal. “I suppose for you to understand you must first see. And for you to see, I need to furnish you with my own eyes. Very well…”
Sephtimus floats inches from the floor, suddenly as light and diaphanous as a ghost ship with parchments for sails. “I hereby lend you the unique privilege of being nowhere…
“… and everywhere all at once…”
Because I’m hanging about a foot from the floor myself, we stand face to face. I don’t feel any relief at all when I glimpse the outline of human eyes within the holes of his mask because their scleras are still glowing and soon flashing as bright as headlamps. More than that, they become exploding suns in a bleeding sky, the last sources of light in a world spinning wildly out of orbit even as it gets incinerated. And it’s like all the hair on my head has gone white in my terror as Sephtimus floats right into me – and through me. Three hundred and sixty degrees around us, all the videos freeze up.
The monitors now show people doing things backwards, chirping like chipmunks and getting noticeably younger and shorter as the days rush by. But the one common thread running through all these scenes, directly or indirectly, is Sephtimus’ object of affection.
The chapters of her life fill every screen. On one she’s crashing a driver’s-ed car over a street island, on another she’s tossing her graduation cap in the air; next, she’s sipping her first bitter taste of beer, being kissed by a guy in the darkness of a movie theater, wincing at the stain of her first period, riding on a swing pushed by her father from behind till finally she’s blowing out ten candles on a birthday cake and right after she’s standing small and alone next to a bed – a deathbed, I figure, of the same man, her father who on a better day would've looked like a jolly, ruddy-cheeked Colonel Sanders with plenty of love handles to go around. But this time he can't put on a brave face for his daughter because there’s something irreversibly broken inside him.
She’s in ponytails and as thin as a reed but there’s no mistaking whose younger version she is because even at such young age she’s already stunning, with her light blue eyes as cool and sparkling as a flash of sea spray and her dark brown hair bringing forth the wonderful contrast.
Now each and every frame focuses on the girl, her eyes flashing a maturity far beyond her years of age. All the videos have flawlessly synced together to bring forth a larger-than-life, segmented recording of that precise moment when a girl chooses to become a woman; the very first time she wills herself never to cry again. For some reason, all the videos end here.
“As a child she wasn't a stranger to death,” Sephtimus suddenly starts narrating in my head yet also from somewhere inside the father’s bedroom. The words themselves sound disembodied and the fact that the personification of death is talking about himself again as a separate incident isn’t lost on me.
“There were many departures around her, as there are around each and every meat always. First, Granny’s stroke. Next, Uncle Tony’s lung cancer. Then her mother was the victim of a traffic accident. It was difficult enough watching the people who make up your world leave one by one, the constant fear of being left all by yourself, but it was even harder not to understand what was going on and not to be able to talk about it with anyone. It was all the grownups' fault thinking they could hide death by not mentioning it, when death was in every drop of water they drank, every breath of air they took, every wisp of dream they dreamt.
“She watched her father as she had watched her uncle leave little by little, day by day. Slowly and painfully learning to give up the fight. The young girl could smell sickness inside the room, between the sheets and under the leaves of the potted plants where no medicine or prayer could reach. She knew the smell all too well; so well in fact that when it came time for me to severe her comatose father's umballicus, out of the blue she raised her head and whispered. By all appearances to an empty room, she spoke: ‘Take me.’
“She had just lifted her head from the fold of her arms. She had been crying by her father's side and her eyes as she looked up to vacant space were red and swollen but all wrung out of tears. Inside them were blue circles of such awareness and concentration that they had me frozen to the spot. She looked about a hundred years older in the bottomless pits of those irises. And in spite of those silly ponytails and pink floral dress, she was ethereal. Ethereal, I tell you, not beautiful or lovely or whatever it is you call those who simply fall short. She was at that moment a glimpse, an apparition of the exquisite creature she was to become. Death could do that to a mortal. Take away everything from her. Eat her down to the bone, so to speak. Until there was nothing left except sheer will and the most basic instinct to survive. Shining like a diamond shaped by great forces under the earth.
“I was standing to her left and she was looking in the opposite direction, but for some reason she had her head cocked slightly like a deer on the scent of a predator. All this from a nine-year-old was enough to make me wonder if my presence had indeed been felt, which would be quite the feat.
“Humans can never see us reapers except if we allow them to. We stand inches from your faces, poke our finger in your food, in your eye, in your nose, but you never once feel a breeze. We stalk behind cash registers at a store robbery, inside ambulances on their way to the ER, in steamy bathrooms where you die naked all alone; but nobody ever realizes we are there. Thirteen years ago in front of this nine-year-old was the closest I’ve ever come to being discovered by a mortal.
“She was delirious from grief. So much emotion caged inside that small chest. She rose. Then, realizing that one point in the air was the same as any other, she focused her eyes, bent all her spirit and will to it and repeated the words in her native tongue: ‘Take me. Let my Papino live and I shall freely give myself to you.’
“I chose to stand in front of her and bend down to her height to meet her gaze. And for a moment it did appear like she was looking me in the eye. She said: ‘Yes, I'm young. I'm only nine and I don’t know anything. It's easy for me to speak of these things because my life doesn't mean anything to me.’
“I nodded somberly while holding her gaze.
“ ‘Then you should wait till I'm older’,” she continued without any encouragement. She said: 'Til I've started enjoying my life, to the peak as you so desire, then take me at that time. When it shall be the sweetest for you to rob me of something truly precious.’
“I couldn't believe it. What an intriguing concept! To have the opportunity to raise your lamb, feed
her, watch her grow, and then lead her to slaughter. It was novel and perfect in its simplicity. What I would’ve simply brushed aside as frivolous amusement was at that moment wisdom coming from the mouth of a child! I guess being around dying people does have a peculiar effect on humans. She was no longer an ordinary child but a being much, much more aware. I was dumbfounded, tickled. It was a funny sight: Death stopped cold by a nine-year-old girl. You can say I was rejuvenated, for the first time in my existence spanning eons. From the ultimate knowledge of everything comes the insignificance of life and the eternal boredom of it all. Out of nowhere came this flash of a challenge, this whisper of a thrill, and I was totally smitten.
“ ‘On this exact hour thirteen years from now,’ she went on, ‘at three in the morning of October 31st, come and visit me. I shall be waiting for you.’
“I indulged her macabre game. I touched her tiny fist clenched at her side and held it in the semblance of a handshake. I made her sense me like a cold draft too, in that dark, shut room, while her whole bare arm broke out in goose bumps as big as when men still shuffled forth on their knuckles. Then I went to work.
“First, I froze the Sands of the Horologium. Next, I plucked out the rotting, almost dissolved kidneys wrapped in layers of pustules, what had been withering her father from the inside right before her eyes. So he’d live a whole decade more. I breathed the sweet breath of cherubs down the parched mouth, the sandpapery throat until he awoke with a gasp. They embraced each other and, as you fleshies are wont to say…
“They all lived happily ever after,” Sephtimus finishes with a smirk that I see inches from my face.
Chapter VI: Cry of the Fershee
“Does she remember?” I blurt out. Completely spellbound by the story, I forget who I’m speaking to; at the same time there’s a kind of split-second delay and it feels like I’m jolted back into Death’s office. “… the promise that she made?”
“What do you think? Humans are Janus-faced creatures. At times of need they shall call upon the names of all the saints and then take back whatever they promised as soon as they're out of harm’s way. Even more so with Death. Naturally no one remembers me. I’m the Ever Uninvited Guest; the one thing no mortal thinks of unless it's absolutely certain and can no longer be postponed. Never mind that I'm the closest friend you have, at least second to your shadow.”
Sephtimus finally puts out his cigarette in the most unlikely ash tray. Another skeletal arm, this one sort of elongated, bursts upward out of the floor and opens bony fingers like petals. The osseous ash tray then sinks away in the same manner it has emerged and leaves no sign whatsoever that it was ever there.
“But when I signed off her father’s extension,” Sephtimus continues, “I no longer cared how long I made it for. From that day she stood up to me, I thought of claiming only one thing: her own fragrant soul. And the appointment she set on that fateful day thirteen years ago is drawing near. The appointment of October 31st falls on the hour barely two weeks from now.”
Two weeks before another light is snuffed out, I think to myself. “But what if she was meant to live out all the days of her life? You can't take anyone's life short of its natural span, can you?”
“This is true. I cannot. Which leads to your repulsive presence here and the only need I have of you. Which explains why you’re still holding on to a shred of your sanity and not dribbling down your chin...” Sephtimus drifts backward then does an about-face like the ghost of a bullet-riddled military officer. Instead of heels to turn around on, the coat’s skirt which is the bottom tip of him spins and flaps daintily, almost touching the floor.
“There's nothing in the Book of Life and Death that gives me the power to do just that, answer someone's death wish or influence another person to take a life. I'm bound to practice non-interference, all to preserve the autonomy and freedom of choice that was granted to insects like you. I was relegated to sneak around in the shadows like some whipped mongrel waiting to be thrown table scraps by its master.”
This makes sense. The idea of Death being no more than an executor of things has been around in some folklore. He’s an agent, an enforcer who simply does what he’s told and carries out fates that have already been set. But how to explain the reprieve that he gave the woman's father?
“Yes, it's a fucked-up, ironic business when you think about it. Death being a mere bagman,” Sephtimus continues. “As a bagman, I can choose to be lenient and award a grace period, extend man’s sojourn in his world but not hasten it. Life isn’t for me to give or to take.
“In fact,” he says after a long pause, “in the natural order of things, the responsibility of taking lives falls into the very capable but violent talons of the Crows.”
“The what?”
“Crows. Don’t you believe in angels, meatball? Storks for the entry of innocent cherubs and for the departure of other pure spirits. Crows for the arrest of the illegal, overstaying ones. These two forces are the original immigration police of the world. The Great Duality. One for continuity and propagation, the other for control and stoppage. One for existence, the other for perpetual cancellation. It’s very dangerous business to get involved when it’s not yet your proper time. Like if you were love-ripe and next to a troll, or if you were at death’s door and still vacillating.”
For a second I’m reminded of those pointy, birdlike things that swooped down on me in the fisherman’s boat and delivered me to this Land of the Eternal Dead. I shudder at the memory.
“Why’s that?” I venture, sensing Sephtimus is a chest brimming with secrets, even bursting to reveal all.
“The raw forces that they are, they tend to be unthinking. Like fifty-foot babies they’re unstoppable once they get started. The Storks, for instance, are pure love and creation. If they had their way, promiscuity would be the way of the world and you’d all be fucking like jackrabbits and flooding the earth with your bastard children. The Crows, on the other hand, are the embodiment of rage and destruction. They’d rip you to shreds in their blind fury, devour everyone and everything in their path and never stop their feeding frenzy.”
“Where do you fit in?”
“Death is the one who unleashes and points the Crows in the right direction. Mass-scale in times of war and disaster. On ordinary days, everything’s pretty much automatic so I just sit back and watch them at work. In a few rare cases, I can stop them to grant an extension like what I did with the woman’s father or if I ever wanted to pick a random soul up in person. But most of the time even if I want to, I just think, To hell with it. To me, a person alive a little longer isn’t any different from one who’s already stiff. So once your appointment comes up on the Interweave, that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing that can change that except my… Presidential Pardon, if you wish to call it that.
“But it’s all a matter of perspective, naturally. To the Crows, I’m the unnecessary bureaucrat of Necro City and they’re always this –” he makes the equivalent gesture with his thumb and index finger – “close to booting me out.
“Especially now that I have a flaw growing inside me. This… love,” he hisses. “This human emotion that’s been nesting inside my chest, little by little overrunning the space where there was once nothing but dust and swirls of abysmal matter. I was a fool not to notice that the more I hid it, the more it blazed and consumed me. Now here I am burning feverishly with it. I cannot allow this. Not with the Crows watching me at every turn, smelling something different in me, peering at my thoughts and guessing my weakness.”
I can sense it in Death's voice, the truth of it all. The Angel of Death sounds hunted, like a graying alpha lion now feeling the weight of leading its pride.
“And so, I have sought the counsel of every seer, warlock and witch in all the territories of Necro City. Privately of course. They were all baffled by this malady except one. An ancient creature like Death itself. She whose many eyes pierce the intricate network of Wyrm-tunnels, from the pettiness of human lives to t
he grand sweep of the universes. She whose nature it is to spin and to plot: the Fate Weaver, the Spin Doctor Spinstra.
“She instructed me that, because it is a human condition it should be treated following the ways of humans. And so I have labored to understand a little of your world – the world of my inferior and prey, can you imagine? Like a monk I pored over tome after tomes in huge mausoleums of paper (after I gave up on the World Wide Web) till I came upon the most promising solution to my troubles.”
An unmistakably human sigh.
“Instead of keeping this feeling secret, I must confess it to no less than the source. Only then shall I be released and cured of this insanity.”
At first, nothing makes sense. Then it comes to me with the flung weight of a bullet train.
“What are you saying? You want to... propose to her?”
“Yes. This you will help me do,” he speaks matter-of-factly. “Since the only way to conquer love is to yield to it, I shall allow myself to be swallowed by it whole. Isn’t that what your philosophers say? I have to face my fear of rejection and walk through the fire. If I come back unscathed, then I will be twice as strong as I was. And nothing can touch me. I used to bask in the scent of human fear. As corny as it is now, in order for Death to continue existing, Death must also be loved. And theoretically, a lover who makes a human fall shall have a claim on both her heart and soul. Yes, there’s this tiny clause in the Book of Life and Death that speaks of this.”
I can't believe it. Here I am surrounded by the crackling fires of hell thousands of kilometers below surface and this demon-lord who holds the key to my cell, all he can talk about is his sick, preposterous love!
“I have a better idea...” I look at him from the top of my eyes and through a malicious smirk scrunching my face. “How about I just sit back and watch those fucked-up bird monsters of yours tear you to fucking pieces?!!”
I spit the words out in boiling anger. I myself am taken aback by this outburst. It’s like I’m so full of rage I could just strangle someone to the last shuddering breath. I guess this place does that to a person. But it’s Death who raises one hand in the air and arranges his fingers as though they were squeezing something in them. At the same time I feel pressure mounting around my neck, my windpipe being crushed like a drinking straw.