(Fish Supremacists thought that anything that was not a cold-blooded aquatic vertebrate with two sets of paired fins and a body covered in scales was an inferior being. They had become a political movement around the time of the Great Transition, when some fish decided to leave the water for the land. There had been much talk of “quitters” and “degenerates” among the still-fish population, and the annual floods were seen as a settling of scores with the earthbound.)
Fish of Intolerance.
It was while extricating the soul of a well-known fisherman from a gang of rowdy carp that I heard a scream from above. I had, of course, heard many screams in my existence, and one grows used to their character, but this was different. Some screams are emphatic, challenging, precursors to a deadly action. Others are resigned, tired, bored, a by-rote shake of the fist at the characteristic remorselessness of the Universe. But this scream was delicate, graceful, a bloodcurdling shriek of pure unadulterated beauty ringing clear through the thunder and rain. It seemed to be emanating from the peak of the Great Ziggurat of Ur.
I looked in the Book but there were no fatal plunges scheduled from the Great Ziggurat of Ur until the following week, when the temple priests would be hurled from the summit in order that their entrails be studied. Nevertheless, this scream commanded my attention so much that I had no choice but to explore its source.
The Great Ziggurat of Ur: Twinned with Angkor Wat?
Arriving at the top, I saw that the screamer was a woman. She was dangling upside down from the peak of the Ziggurat, her robes and hair fluttering in the wind, her left sandal fortuitously snagged on a spur in the rock.
“This is peculiar,” I remember thinking. “How is she going to survive this?” As I walked from side to side contemplating the strangeness of the situation, something even more peculiar happened; I noticed her eyes were following me.
During the Biblical Age I had decided to make myself invisible to the living. The reason for this wasn’t misanthropy, far from it; rather, it was because my reputation had grown to such an extent that whenever I appeared in front of a group, the very sight of me caused panicked stampedes. Of course, I had only been drawn to the group to collect the souls of those crushed in the mad dash away from me. This made my head hurt when I thought about it, so to make things simpler I had grown imperceptible to all things. Except, it seemed, this woman.
I ducked into a stairwell, but still her eyes followed me. I ran from one end of the Ziggurat’s terrace to the other, but still she watched me. I started leaping in the air, making large star-jumps, to make sure her eyes were not following my course by chance, but this only started her giggling.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Um…” I hesitated.
“Ur, actually,” she replied, eyeing me carefully. She spoke very calmly despite her precipitous position. “I’m Maud.”
“You can see me?” I asked, checking over my shoulder to ensure there was no one standing behind me.
“No.” She sighed, flicking her hair nonchalantly out of her eyes. “But I do find the only state in which I can bear to talk to myself is while hanging upside down from the Great Ziggurat.”
She flashed a smile at me. Even upside down she seemed to be an unusually pretty human.
“Now look,” she said quite abruptly, “why not just unhook my little sandal from this tedious brick and let me smash my body to pieces on the stones below?”
I didn’t know what to say. Of course, many things had taken their lives before. In fact, suicide was a way of life for many creatures. I knew hundreds of unhappy radishes who had uprooted themselves in despair at their allotment in life. But never had I been directly asked for assistance in ending things. Life was usually fragile enough not to require my help.
“I don’t think I can do that.”
“I’d really much rather be dead, you know.”
“But it’s against the regulations,” I said. I flicked through the Book. “You’re not due to die for another twenty-three years.”
“You are Death though, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
I wasn’t quite sure of that myself. In fact, I wasn’t sure of anything when I looked into those deep brown eyes of hers.
“Look,” I said, pulling myself together, “yes, I am Death, but I don’t interfere. You’ve got to do that yourself.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound much like Death to me,” she said. “And you’re a little shorter than I expected, although it’s hard to tell with you being upside down. Maybe, in fact, you’re taller than I expected. You know, my soothsayer said I’d meet a tall, dark stranger one day…”
I should have walked away. It was not as if I was lacking for work. Yet I couldn’t tear myself away from this woman, poised between life and me.
“…but I said, ‘Enheduanna’—Enheduanna’s my soothsayer’s name—I said, ‘Enheduanna, we’re in the middle of Mesopotamia, of course he’s going to be dark, and as for tall, you think tall is anything over four feet.’”
What was she talking about? What was I doing listening to her? Why did I not walk away? Looking back on it, I realized my fate was sealed from the moment she said her next words: “Pretty please?”
And so, feeling as if my body was being controlled by some mischievous power (I checked with Father later and he said he had nothing to do with it), I walked over to her and, looking both ways in case anyone was watching, delicately flicked her sandal over the edge. I watched as she plummeted to her doom.
“Thank youuuu…,” she cried. There was the sound of a small thump. I hurried down the Ziggurat.
“Thanks again,” she said, as I bent over to scoop her soul out of her bloodied and broken body. It was more radiant than any other I’d ever seen before. “That is a relief, I can tell you.”
“Why did you want to die so much?” I asked.
“Oh, you know—boy comes of age, boy meets girl’s family, girl’s family draws up marriage pact with boy, boy complains girl’s dowry is too small, girl’s family says it is more than enough, boy says girl will die an old maid, girl’s father throws in an extra camel, boy says that’ll do nicely, father tells girl to cheer up and sprinkle herself with aromatic cedar oil, boy meets girl.”
It was an age-old tale. But one thing still troubled me.
“How could you see me?”
“Well, you were just standing there.”
“But people aren’t meant to see me.”
“Why ever not?”
I tried to explain the panics I had caused, and she nodded her head in sympathy. I had a strange urge to keep talking, but already the Darkness was starting to encircle her. I slapped it back.
“Would you care…,” I asked her shining, lustrous soul, as a strange wave of nervousness rushed over me, “to go for a walk?”
“I would be delighted!” she replied, smiling, and took my arm.
So it was that for the next few hours we gamboled happily through the flooded palace grounds, paddling through the diseased floodwaters, ignoring the cries of dozens of souls still stuck in their bodies. She told me that she had been the only daughter of the Grand Vizier of Ur, and that she had been a very independent child, somewhat fascinated with dying. She said she had pulled the legs off hundreds of insects in her youth and asked if I could recall any of them. I pretended that I could.
Maud didn’t seem to mind the corpses that littered our way. In fact, she was fascinated by the grimaces of the deceased. I pointed out the first signs of decomposition in bodies and showed her how to pull the soul out of a small dead child, which she did with surprising ease, popping it out, brushing it down, and sending it off into the Darkness with a pat on its behind. As the storm passed and the sun set, we climbed the Great Ziggurat once more and looked at the blood-red sky together.
“What happens after this?” she asked.
“I’m not sure, Maud,” I said. I had never been so open and ungua
rded in my thoughts on the afterlife before. “I think it depends on what you believe in.”
“So if you believe in an afterlife populated with flamingos, you’ll end up in it?”
“Quite possibly, although only if you’ve been very bad.”
“How so?”
“Well, flamingos are very antisocial. Nobody would want to spend all eternity with flamingos.”
“What if you really, really liked flamingos?” she asked, resting her chin on her hand. “What if your idea of Paradise was being surrounded by thousands of antisocial flamingos?”
“Well, in that case, I imagine you could have your flamingos,” I said. “But don’t expect them to thank you for it.”
Flamingos: Ungrateful, Bad-Tempered, Pink.
She laughed, and I laughed too. It had been a long time since I had had any company. My last companion had been Phillip, an amiable raccoon, whose soul followed me around for years trying to consume the spirits of dead frogs. Maud turned toward me.
“What if I wanted to see you again?” she said. She didn’t seem to be joking.
“Well, the one thing you can be sure of,” I told her, “is that I’ll always be around.”
“I might well hold you to that, Mr. Death,” she said, smiling.
The only time she grew morose was when she saw that her father, the Grand Vizier, had survived the flood. He was engaged in an argument with Maud’s fiancé over a drowned camel.
“Oh, look at them,” said Maud with contempt. “They care more about that bloody camel than me.”
I was so intent on making Maud happy that I picked up a stone and threw it at the Grand Vizier as hard as I could. It knocked his hat clean off, and he and the fiancé ran away in a panic. How she laughed. I was about to repeat the gesture when she grabbed my arm and told me no, I shouldn’t, I’d get in trouble.
She was right. Already I could hear the moaning of all the souls that still needed to be packed off into the void. But at that moment I didn’t care. I had discovered the most fascinating creature in existence—even more fascinating than the unconscious newt—and one who seemed to understand me too.
The Unconscious Newt Lives Its Entire Life in a Comatose State, Waking Only to Mate, Go Back to Sleep, and Die.
She had to go, of course. It was almost sunset when we said our good-byes. I wasn’t quite sure how to end things so we ended up shaking hands—a grim formality clung to the process. But at the last minute, as the Darkness slowly enveloped her, she ran toward me and hugged me. I was so shocked that I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, Maud was gone. I noticed the Darkness looking at me in a peculiar way.
“What?” I demanded. It shrugged. I took out the Book and scribbled her name in the margin and tried to go about my business. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not put her out of my mind. She lived on in my memory tenaciously, hanging upside down from the Great Ziggurat.
Once all the drowned souls had been dealt with, I thought I would try reaching into the Darkness to see if any trace of Maud remained. But the blackness was total, the emptiness unfathomable, the absence absolute. For the first time in my existence I felt angered by it. Why couldn’t it have kept just a trace of her? Of her dark brown eyes? Of her sparkling laugh? Why did the Darkness always have to overwhelm and subsume everything?
Oh yes. It was with Maud that all my misfortunes began.
II
Odd Gods
The rest of the epoch passed with alarming speed. The Tin Age rushed into the Copper Age, forging the dazzling Bronze Age. The over-the-hill Sumerians and the diminutive Akkadians merged to become the all-powerful Babylonians. Continents shifted, mountains grew, and fashions in dying came and went—to be killed by an arrow was particularly à la mode, by a blunt instrument oh-so-passé—but the souls I was collecting remained essentially the same: aggrieved, curious, bewildered.
You would think that I would have tired of the dead by now as a clerk tires of his invoices, or a poet of his rhymes. But despite spending eons in the company of the nevermore I was not bored. In fact, I felt quite the opposite. Whereas in the past I had rushed to foist the souls into the Darkness with only a modicum of small talk, I had by now become so proficient at my job that I could easily afford to press the dead on aspects of their past lives. An infinitesimal change had occurred within me, a tiny recalibration of the scales, a quarter turn of the screw. I found myself wanting to know the most bizarre minutiae of the deads’ lives—what had been their favorite colors? What had been their favorite foods? What had they liked to do on hot summer days? Did they prefer puppies or kittens?
I must ask the reader to bear in mind that I wasn’t taking any liberties I didn’t think I deserved. After all, I had a right to relaxation and conversation as much as any other being. But what was it that drove me into this habitual interest with Life? What led me to embrace Life in such a reckless manner? It was not dissatisfaction or boredom. No, rather it was my natural surfeit of gloom, the settled and abiding darkness within me that drew me intrinsically to the light of Life, like a candle snuffer is drawn toward a candle flame. It was not long before I developed an insatiable appetite for the joys of the once-alive.
I reflected that this emboldened sociability had started after my meeting with Maud. I could still see her plummeting so gracefully from the Great Ziggurat. I felt a spring in my step whenever I thought of her body smashing into the ground, bones splintered and ears bleeding, vital organs ruptured, bile filling her lungs, surrounded by a billowing petticoat of blood. Then again, it was hard not to be sociable in the company of the Egyptians. Finally, here was a culture that knew how to die well.
The Egyptians were so obsessed with me it almost became embarrassing. From the moment they were born, it seemed as if they were preparing themselves to die, which, given the high infant mortality rate, was probably just as well. Instead of playing doctor and nurse, Egyptian children played grave digger and embalmer. Instead of building toy forts, they built toy tombs. The most popular answer to questionnaires asking teenagers what they would like to be when they grew up was “Dead,” shortly followed by “Pharaoh,” with “Scourge of the Jews” and “Professional Charioteer” tying for third place.
And how they met me in style! By asp bites and poisoning, with slit throats and brains pulled out of noses. It was all so refined. The pharaohs, in particular, were a hoot. They’d turn up dead along with their dead servants, dead horses, dead cats, and hundreds of different dead birds and insects. Usually I insisted that souls went into the Darkness unaccompanied, but I confess to feeling not a little flattered by the construction of the pyramids. It was nice to be appreciated, nice to feel wanted, especially after the miserable Sumerians. So I let the Egyptians take it with them. I’d pluck out the pharaoh’s soul and those of his entourage and then let them range about their tombs for a few hours, galloping on the souls of their dead horses, and ordering the souls of dead servants to feed them the souls of dead grapes. It was quite something to see.
And I admit, I shamelessly played up to my role. I knew how the Egyptians loved their animals so I began dressing in different costumes. If I knew they liked birds, I’d put on a falcon mask when I popped out their soul; if they liked dogs, I’d wear a jackal mask, and so on. I called it my Mort Couture period.
Me on the Nile.
Yes, I thought, the Egyptians really understood me, and themselves. But of course there were misunderstandings. I remember the soul of Tutankhamen laughing and laughing at one of my jokes until the ethereal tears ran from his incorporeal eyes.
“I will always remember you when I become a god,” he said.
“When you become a what?” I responded.
“A god, Death,” he said. “As I was in life, so shall I be in death.”
I just nodded my head and let the Darkness take him. I couldn’t bear to tell the poor kid the truth.
Of course, not everyone was pleased with the special treatment I gave the pharaohs. Many of the slaves who died during t
he construction of the pyramids felt particularly aggrieved. They always had chips on their shoulders when I came to spirit them away.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be taking the soul of a pharaoh?” a few would sneer as I shucked out their souls. “Why no animal masks for us?” It was very awkward.
Of course, the slaves had good reason to be angry, since so many of them had been tricked into slavery. They had been told that if they enrolled to build the pharaohs’ tombs, and got six of their friends to do likewise, they would in turn have a pyramid built for them. In Ancient Egypt, obsessed with dying as it was, a pyramid was the height of desirability. Well, as long as the number of slaves kept growing, everyone worked happily, but inevitably the number of new slaves signing on simply dried up, and only a few pyramids ended up being built before the ruse was discovered.
A slave revolt ensued. The slave leaders decreed that rather than just one pharaoh being buried per pyramid, thousands of workers should be entombed therein. These inverted pyramids, carefully balanced on their tips, represented the pinnacle (or pedestal) of the slave rights movement in Ancient Egypt. They were, however, highly susceptible to strong winds, and the vast majority of them were sent whirling into the desert like spinning tops, never to be seen again.
The Great Inverted Pyramid of Giza (right).
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