“Why hello, Death,” he said, cool as a cucumber.
“Hello, Cain,” I replied. “Sorry about your brother.”
“What brother?” said Cain.
“Abel,” I said pointing at the dead body.
“Oh. My. God!” screamed Cain.
“Yes, darling?” boomed a voice. A blinding light enveloped us.
“There’s been a problem,” I interjected quickly. I didn’t want things to get out of control.
“Me in Heaven above!” boomed God. “What’s happened to Abel?”
“He’s been murdered, God. I’m trying to find out who did it.”
“Hello, God!” said Abel’s soul excitedly from within my cloak. “I’ve missed You. I was in the middle of making You a sacrifice better than any You’d ever had before. Much better than Cain’s.”
“Oh, you…!” screeched Cain, spinning around wildly, trying to locate Abel’s voice. “Your sacrifices are unhealthy, greasy, meaty things, all high in polyunsaturated fat. And God doesn’t want to get fat, do You, God?”
“No,” boomed God bashfully. “No, I don’t. But there are only so many greens you can have sacrificed to you, Cain.”
“What are You saying?” cried Cain. “You don’t like my sacrifices? I knew it, I knew it!”
“That’s not what I said, Cain,” boomed God.
“You’ve always preferred Abel,” continued Cain. “That’s why I…”
“Go on,” I said. This was getting interesting.
“Oh!” cried Cain. “You just don’t understand.”
“I do, Cain,” I said. “I do.”
“Abel said You didn’t love me,” implored Cain as he swung round to face God.
“He doesn’t!” piped up Abel’s soul from the edge of the void.
“I love all things,” boomed God.
“But some things more than others, right, Lord?” said Abel’s soul. His face beamed with smug self-satisfaction. It had been a mistake to bring him along.
“Do you know what this is, Cain?” I held up the club.
“It’s a club,” cried Cain, in tears now. “The club I used to murder my brother, Abel!”
There was a shocked silence. I thought it best to leave so God and Cain could work things out between them and was doing so when I heard Abel’s voice pipe up.
“Hold on, Death, I want to see this. I knew it was him, I just knew it! Hey, where are you going, Death? I said turn around, I said…”
With a shrug of my shoulders I sent his soul cascading into the Darkness.
The Dawn of Time was very much like this. Enmities commencing, relationships forming and breaking, blood spilling. Everyone was a little crazy, and as the years sped by, the holes in Creation began to show. God was a big-picture guy. He had been fine with the light and the darkness and the oceans and sky, but when it came to the details, like individual creatures, He was hopeless.
Take Methuselah, for example. Through some bookkeeping mistake Methuselah had not been given a time to die. For years he followed me around with a pleading look in his eyes. I would find him waiting for me at plague pits pretending to be dead. I’d see him screaming and rolling around on the ground during battles, feigning fatal injuries, but he never had a scratch on him. Even when he threw himself into flaming buildings, he would invariably come out the other side, a little charred, but alive. He would often stare longingly at me as I removed the soul from a body.
“That’s it, my boy,” he’d say, licking his lips. “Ease him out, send him off now. Off to the afterlife.”
The fact was that after a hundred years or so, Methuselah had done everything that a postprehistoric, antediluvian world had to offer. He had walked about, and whittled, contracted innumerable diseases, whittled some more, lost all his teeth, whittled new ones, and finally lost most of his sanity. Without a time to die scheduled, he was invulnerable. He could stand beneath an avalanche, and somehow the boulders would miss him. He could swim far out to sea until he was exhausted, only for the waves to wash him back to shore. He could smear himself in butter and dance in front of the carnivorous animals, but they would not lay a claw on him. Even when he resorted to taunting them, pulling their tails, and slapping their faces, they merely walked away as if he was not there.
Methuselah: “Kill Me.”
After a while he started making running dashes at the Darkness.
“I’m going home!” he’d whoop as he leapt toward it, but I could normally stop him from slipping through. One time, however, he was so desperate in his charge, and I was so busy dealing with the complicated soul of a dinosaur, that he knocked me over, splashing the Darkness everywhere. By the time I’d pulled myself together, Methuselah had gotten up to his waist in a small puddle of the void and was wriggling from side to side, desperately trying to force his belly through. I pulled him out and told him he had to wait his turn, and he trudged off disconsolately. He eventually died in the year of the Great Flood, when a lot of the loopholes in Creation were closed. By then he was 969 years old, yet curiously he didn’t seem all that excited at the prospect.
“You know it’s funny, Death,” his soul told me as his body grew white and swollen. “When you want it, you can’t get it, and when you’ve got it, you don’t want it.” I thought it was an odd thing to say, but then I was still growing used to the strange inconsistencies of the living. At the time, I remember thinking how lucky I was not to have been born mortal. The traumas of a finite existence were horrific. The glut of emotions one had to endure, the almost certain painful ending. Time and again I saw the living becoming the dead, yet I was always surprised how many showed regret for the passing of that cruel and inhuman punishment called Life. I just could not understand it except as a kind of psychosis in which people grew to like the miseries heaped upon them.
Little did I know then how completely I would change my mind.
Following the Methuselah debacle I was issued the Book of Endings, a large black tome that listed within it the exact time, date, and place of everything’s designated end. It helped immensely in ushering souls into the void, as having one’s name in print seemed to make dying much more official than my appearance ever could. When I met with resistance, I’d point at creatures’ names in the Book and they’d just nod their heads and say, “Oh, I see,” and hop into the Darkness.
But even without the Book I could tell the Great Flood was coming a mile off. God’s mood had been increasingly changeable. Ever since Abel’s murder He had been growing more and more disappointed with Creation, and I could hear Him walking across the earth booming to Himself, “Wrong…quite wrong.” He had always been the uncertain sort, creating hundreds of different types of the same snail with only minor differences, or repeating trees over and over again. Only one thing seemed to make Him happy and that was the antics of Noah, a raving nutjob of the highest order.
I wasn’t quite sure how Noah had got into this state. Some talked about an insatiable appetite for animal dung, others of a wasted youth sniffing tar. Whatever the reason, Noah was so mad he had married a rhubarb plant, whom he named Mrs. Noah. (Mrs. Noah would later claim that it was she who had instigated the interkingdom marriage in an attempt to escape her provincial, bourgeois life.)
Mrs. Noah (right) and Her Cousin, Joyce.
Between them they had three sons, three small pebbles known as Bacon, Sausage, and Ham, whom Noah would arrange in picturesque tableaus of familial bliss within his cave. After a while, however, even Noah’s antics couldn’t change God’s mind.
“Death,” He boomed to me one day, “I have decided I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created—men together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky—for I regret that I made them.”
It wasn’t the first time I had heard such talk—God had a terrible habit of regretting things the mornings after the seven days and nights before—nevertheless, the situation required some delicacy.
“Very good, Lord God Sir, but surely You will save the creepin
g things? You’ve always loved the creeping things.”
“Yes, it is true, I have always liked the things that creep,” boomed God. “Maybe I shall spare the creeping things, but certainly I will destroy the men, and the beasts, and the birds of the sky.”
“But beasts are so difficult to make,” I reminded Him. “Remember all those hours you spent on the hooves and horns and quadruple stomach chambers?”
“Yes, yes, you’re right. It would be a shame to get rid of the beasts. Awfully hard work, the beasts. In that case, I will just rid Creation of the men and the birds of the sky.”
“But who keeps the beasts company if not the birds?” I said. “The beasts would be awfully lonely without the birds twittering above them. I have often heard it said by the beasts of the field that were it not for the birds of the sky Life would hardly be worth living.”
“Which animal said that?” boomed God.
“I believe it was the koala bears, Lord God Sir, and the giraffes have also registered their appreciation for the birds. They do get awfully depressed now that there aren’t any dinosaurs to talk to. ‘Feathered ribbons of the sky’ I believe they called them.”
“Hmmm,” boomed God. “Well, all right then, I shall save the birds and the beasts and the creeping things, but the men will certainly be destroyed. All except Noah. He does make me chuckle so.”
There was an immaculately conceived pause.
“Unless,” boomed God, “you should have some reason for Me not destroying all the men?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s just that it’s going to be a lot of work for me. I’ve told You about the finger and toe problem before and with every man and woman dying all at once….”
“Oh, very well,” boomed God, “I’ll call the whole thing off. But what about Noah?”
“What about him,” I asked.
“Well, when I told him the Deluge was coming and that he alone would survive, he seemed so happy. He kept on saying that finally he’d be rid of Mrs. Noah and his ungrateful sons.”
“I see.”
“When’s he due to die?”
I looked in the Book of Endings.
“Not for a few years yet.”
“Can’t we make an exception?”
“Well, You’re the one, O Lord God Sir, who said that the Book should be immutable.”
“Did I?” boomed God. “What a stupid thing to say.”
“Perhaps,” I said, as inspiration hit, “we could pretend the flood was coming. What do you think?”
“I think it’s a marvelous idea,” boomed God, “and I’m glad I thought of it.”
So, for the next few weeks, as Noah built the giant wooden ark he believed was necessary for his survival, Urizel and a few other angelic helpers and I carefully stowed every living creature out of sight. God conjured up a few raindrops, and at the first sign of them, Noah leapt into his ark, leaving his wife and sons behind him, but bringing along a harem of potatoes. We slowly pushed the ark into a small pond, and Noah ran around it naked for forty days while a light drizzle fell. At the end of the “Flood,” Noah’s ark beached itself on the pond’s shore, where he was amazed to be reunited with his wife and children whom, he grumbled, he never knew were such strong swimmers.
The “Deluge”: Nothing Like This.
Many of God’s favorites in the early days straddled the border between sanity and shoe-eating lunacy. The stupid creatures—those who had to concentrate extremely hard just to chew—rarely went mad. But when even a modicum of intelligence was bestowed on something or other, it usually sent them off their rocker. Take cockles, for instance, to whom God had gifted an inordinately high IQ and who—having perceived as intolerable their situation as one-footed hermaphroditic bivalves—had gone immediately out of their minds and had begun to pretend they were mussels. Fortunately this hadn’t stirred things up too much.
Which Is the Cockle and Which Is the Mussel? Wrong.
The humans were another matter altogether. Take Abraham, for example, who soon succeeded Noah as God’s favorite. If you’d have passed him in the fields, you’d have thought he was quite normal. But behind that genial bearded countenance was a man addicted to sacrifice. Abraham couldn’t lay his eyes on something without wanting to lay his hands on it, tie it to an altar, and stab it repeatedly with a knife. Not a day went by without some small bird or lizard falling victim to Abraham’s strange, insatiable lust. No sooner would Mrs. Abraham, a peaceable sort, come home from the market than that day’s supper would be immediately hacked to pieces and offered up to the divine. Mrs. Abraham didn’t mind this so much. It was rare, she said, for a man to help with the cooking. Nevertheless, she often confided in me that she could feel her husband’s eyes on her, sizing up how much rope he would need to truss her down and how many buckets would be required to catch her blood. It was little wonder that Isaac, their only son, was something of a neurotic.
“He’s going to kill me,” Isaac would weep to me. “I just know he will. He keeps telling me to prepare myself for the greatest gift a father could give a son. And I know he doesn’t mean a bicycle because they haven’t been invented yet.”
Nevertheless, I knew I shouldn’t be angry with the man. During slow periods, Abraham was a constant provider of work for me. I always knew that at some point in my day I’d be drawn to his incessant slicing and dicing.
Abraham: Devout Patriarch, or Serial Killer?
“Ah, Mr. Death,” he’d say jovially, as I came to pick up the lamb, badger, or apple he had just sacrificed. “Am I not your greatest benefactor? Do I not send more into the void in the praise of our Lord than anyone else?” I concurred, and thanked him, and went about my business, but he was sacrificing so abundantly that eventually God came and had a word with me.
“Can’t we get him to stop?” God boomed. As with so many of His enthusiasms, His affection for Abraham had soon waned. “I mean, I appreciate it and all, but the infinite is only so big.”
I tried to have a word with Abraham, but there was something about the gleam in his eye that troubled me. It spoke of something quite terrifying, not so much a love of dying but a hatred for Life that, while understandable considering Life’s arbitrary nature, made me feel ever so slightly uncomfortable. I remember thinking to myself that even I didn’t mind Life that much. In fact, I found it rather jolly. After all, I could hardly exist without it, and it could hardly exist without me. Of course, I see now that this was the beginning of a fateful codependence that would threaten my very existence, and that of the world, too. Looking back on it, I should have recognized my uneasiness with Abraham as a warning. I had been getting too close to Life. Much too close.
The Age of Myth
By now I had begun to identify a typology of the dying. There were the protesters, who believed their deaths to be a mistake, who’d complain and argue and demand to call their coroners. There were the romantics, who thought they were dreaming and tried in vain to pinch their spectral bodies with their ghostly hands. There were the optimists, who believed they were finally going to be rewarded for a lifetime spent growing their hair in a certain way, and there were the pessimists, who believed they were finally going to be punished for not growing their hair in a certain way. But by far the largest proportion of the dead were the confused. A characteristic conversation with one of the recently deceased would go something like this:
“Where am I?” they’d say.
“You are Not at all,” I’d reply mysteriously. I had discovered that a mixture of non sequiturs and melancholic insinuations was the best way to avoid confrontation, and it usually didn’t take too many unfathomable comments for the souls to realize what was going on. Nevertheless, some were very stubborn.
“Who are you?” they’d ask.
“I am the End of All Things.”
“What kind of a name is that?”
“Pardon?”
“What kind of a name is the ‘End of All Things’? What do people call you? Mr. All Things?”
&n
bsp; “No. They call me—”
“‘You know who we’re having round tonight, dear?’” they would mock. “‘The End of.’ ‘The End of who, dear?’ ‘The End of All Things, you know, he lives down the road with Mrs. All Things.’ You should change your name, that’s what you should do.”
“My name is Death!” I’d reply.
“Well, why did you say it was Mr. All Things then?”
This went on for some time.
Keeping the dead from jumping back into the world of the living was another serious problem. “Do you mind if I just blow out that candle?” they would ask, as I held their immortal soul in my hands.
“There is no going back,” I’d intone as grimly as possible.
“Oh, I’ll just be a minute. It’s just that it’s an awful waste of wax.”
“No. It is impossible.”
“No, it’s not,” they’d say. “Look, I can almost blow it out from here.” And they’d immediately begin huffing and puffing.
“Stop it!”
“Look,” they’d reply, “I didn’t ask for this, you know. How was I to know that I’d drop dead from a heart attack just after I’d lit it? What’s more, think of the symmetry—I die, the candle goes out, it’s very poetic.”
“Oh, very well,” I’d say, and waft the Darkness at the candle, expelling its light immediately. I was always a sucker for the elegiac.
“Now that wasn’t too hard, was it?”
“No,” I would say. “No, I suppose it wasn’t.”
“Well then, do you mind if we stop off at my sister’s hut? She’s expecting me for supper tonight and I don’t want her waiting around on my behalf.”
The problem was that in my attempts to be nice to the recently departed, they walked all over me. And it wasn’t just me. God had grown so tired of people calling on Him for the most ridiculous things—smaller noses, longer fingers, giant chickens—that He’d begun to grow quite aloof from the world. I hadn’t seen Him in years when suddenly that old familiar orb of dazzling white light appeared before me.
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