Riing. Smash the clock. Get up. Coffee. Running late. Mismatched socks. Sprint to the bus stop. Work. Papers. Calculations: pages long. Snappy colleagues. Blonds – distracting. In more than one way. Grumbling bosses. Deadlines – gallows loops. Ticking clocks. Sweating. Yelling. Lunch. Sandwich: rubber. More work. Piles. Night. Last one to leave. Last bus to catch. Home. Beat. TV. Sleep. Riing…
Llud never attempted to break the cycle, even though he was fed up to the brim with it. When he had a free moment to stop still, his mind, despite his zealous protests, lunged into “grading mode”, only to grade his life with an “F”: “far too meaningless”. This, of course, meant an Existential crisis. But what was worse, it meant a headache. That’s why Llud tried his best not to stop to avoid giving his mind opportunities for self-destructive reminiscences. He kept on running like a hamster on its wheel, not spinning, but being spun, until the mechanic thing was not the wheel anymore but the very hamster.
Sometimes he felt as if he was being spied on; he would squint at the inside of his wardrobe, expecting to see a hole and a giant eye peeking through it. He could see it happening: everything around him falling down to the sound of applause or of those ominous scientific utensils in laboratories. Cardboard, ha-ha. When the conductor hunting for ticketless victims catches precisely you out of the entire crowd in the bus, when she walks in precisely at the moment your face is smeared with lunch, when the TV breaks precisely when That news item is on; then all this “precision” amounts to a feeling of an evil conspiracy. During his paranoia fits, Llud felt like a puppet being thrashed about by something BIG, something incomprehensible, something…
“Nonsense,” he would snort, banishing those perilous notions as he comfortably snuggled in the cushiony ignorance inside his hard shell. He liked it in there, unbothered by any painful mental exertions. Whenever there were calls from outside that required him to remind of his existence with some reaction, he would spit out miniscule slimy balls of gray matter that would congeal in the perfect matrix of the outside world’s conventions. Every new theory, every ground-breaking discovery, every original idea, terrified him to the point where he withdrew his blind tentacle even further into the shell. Or it angered him. He would then produce a mouth of sharp teeth, ready to defend himself by biting off every irritating stimuli: everything on two legs, insolent enough to afford liberties in the way it shaped its gray matter.
Like that empty-headed blond newbie whom he had the displeasure of sharing working space with. Every day, she would babble on and on about God and the Devil, about Kabala, about Wicca, about ghosts, about…blah. He could barely stand her yapping. He would rather go on a caffeine-free diet than accept any other opinion than his own. “Own” in this case meant “the copy of the mass conviction”: the notion that nothing existed outside the corporeal, the palpable, the perceptible by the naked eye. No giant eyes beyond the cupboard, no costumed gentlemen with horns, hoofs and a greasy smile; no benign withered oldie with a halo and white beard; no green antennas and self-consuming galaxies; no blindfolded grannies spinning wool. Humans were just organs and tissues accidentally(but rather conveniently) thrown together under a layer of flesh; eventually to get busted and decay. End of story.
……………………….
The sky gaped hungrily: a black abyss luring you right into its depths. The evening was unusually cold for June.
Llud saw the last bus stopping on the other side of the road. If he missed it he would have to walk. The horror.
So he decided to run across the road, swiftly avoiding the cars.
You know that moment in the movies when the character just has to cross the road for an Important and Undelayable reason(to stop his love from leaving; something he manages to do even though the airport is on the other side of town and there are five minutes until her flight.)?
The hero steps on the road, the wind blows in his hair, giving him an air of Resolution, and, magically, the vehement chaos of the traffic suddenly freezes to let him pass like the sea opens before Moses.
Llud took a couple of steps in the racket of the buzzing vehicles…
And blacked out.
This wasn’t a movie.
…………………..
He opened his eyes and realized he was already sitting in the bus. He took a breath of relief and mentally patted himself on the back. Was he fast or what! He didn’t remember actually getting on the bus…which was weird. But then again his temples were pulsing and overheated by the pressure of the day’s work. It wasn’t unlikely for him to have blank spots throughout the day.
B__l_____k
Sp__o___s….
He waited
And waited.
He began to fidget.
What was taking the bus so long?
It was then he started becoming aware of the surroundings little by little. The bus was moving absolutely soundlessly. In silence. Creepy, Steven-King-ish, it-will-jump-out-out-of-from-behind-the-corner silence. Silence that was worse than those thin, nerve wracking tunes that titillate the edges of your sanity at the turning points in crime movies.
Outside Llud could see… nothing . They were obviously in a tunnel. There were no passengers.
Llud tried to stand up, propping himself against a wall.
He squeaked and drew his hand back, as if dropping a hot potato.
His fingers were sticky.
And red.
The floor and walls were dripping with….
And red.
It smelled of it.
…………
A brief epiphany.
In his mind, a small pebble was slowly falling…
..to unleash the Avalanche.
In his mind, stones, falling, one, the next, bigger, no, monstrous, faster, no, so fast they smeared out of sight.
Llud sprang to his feet and ran to the driver’s seat.
“Excuse me, sir, can you – “
A shocked scream escaped his dry lips and he stumbled back, holding his heart, which threatened to tear his chest apart and bounce off to join the Easter rabbit.
It had turned around and was currently regarding him in a bored, lazy manner, its eyes unblinking.
“Pathetic” , they were saying.
“Tsk, Tsk. The usual reaction. And I thought you would be different.”
It yawned to emphasize its disappointment.
Then it got up and stretched, leaving the wheel to be controlled by some invisible force that kept stirring it.
“Who…What are you?” Llud managed to utter once he had recovered from what had nearly become a heart attack…and a rabbit march.
It was leaning against the wall, watching him with the unimpressed stare of one watching an ant thrash about in a dew drop: observing its pitiful struggling, but showing neither malicious amusement, nor compassion.
Once Llud was sure it wasn’t going to pounce on him, he let his eyes wander.
It rather resembled a tall, lanky human…Except for its ashen skin, its teeth, worthy of Dracula’s envy, hair that gleamed like metal, and eyes that lacked irises.
Oh, and the pair of huge raven wings lazily flapping on its back. It wore a robe which seemed to be sewn out of night itself.
“My name is Azrael,” it offered a cold smile.
“I know you…You are the Bringer of Death!”
(A flash of blond: for once Llud was thankful that her “nonsense” had mysteriously saturated the usually non-absorbing sponge that was his brain.)
“ I prefer to be referred to as Death itself,” it straightened its shoulders with an air of offended dignity.
“But then I am…”
“Yes, you are.”
“But…how…?”
“You decided to be an idiot and run across the road in front of speeding cars.”
Llud was dumbfounded. He fell silent for a few moments and evaluated the situation. He was dead. It was over. The maddening, appalling routine was over…
The cozy, safe routine that he was so used to….
No!
Rejoice: no more alarms, work, neighbors, taxes, blabbering blonds, moody bosses…
…no more coffee, comfy slippers, pretty eyes, patting on the back, dreams of promotion, Sunday shows, a hamburger with extra cheese….
His life wasn’t that appalling. Hadn’t been.
It wasn’t that maddening either. Hadn’t been.
It was actually quite wonderful. Had been.
All it took Llud to realize this was… to lose life entirely.
Suddenly, his rock-solid confidence that afterlife didn’t exist wasn’t so solid any more. In fact it came crumbling down. Hard.
Azrael was standing there, the wolf who had managed with one breath to raze the house of skepticism Little pig Llud had been building his whole adulthood.
It was no use trying to reverse the course of things. That much he knew.
Second chances were cliché.
Endings of eternal damnation and doom were in.
(Who set the contemporary paradigm anyway, an underground organization of masochists or something?)
Still, he could make the most out of the situation…
What? Why? How?
Questions, ideas, visions sprouted in his mind. Death had been a nutritious rainfall; the fertilized soil of his mind was giving birth to …thought. Intrepid, bold, colorful, original, experimental thought.
What if?
Why NOT?
Why negate?
Everything seemed possible. His vision expanded in all directions, unobstructed by the rims of his cynic glasses that used to distort the variety and multi-layered complexity of the rainbow world into a flat, monotonous picture of black and white. A sudden curiosity and thirst for knowledge took possession of his…being(he checked himself before thinking of “body”; he wasn’t sure that term still applied). The URGE to know, no, not simply to know, to UNDERSTAND, to see through, was intense. It was breaking free, making up for all those years he had spend trying to suffocate it. Payback time.
But how should he go about it?
This was Death, the Harvester of Souls, the Bearer of the Scythe….
Good luck trying to sound casual.
“So…what is it like…when we reach the light in the end of the tunnel?”
…He did not just use that line…
“ I mean…I’ve read…People say …you know, there’s Heaven, all divinity, beauty and hymns…and angels… and the souls of good-doers and stuff…”
Curse that stuttering. He sounded like a numbskull. He discovered souls could still blush in embarrassment.
“Yes…”
This sounded… hopeful…
“…And then there is Hell, which is ruled by Satan and the wrong doers are tortured in the boiling cauldrons…”
That went more smoothly…
“Yes…”
Oh, boy, the enthusiasm.
“..And there is a sort of test, or Judgment that I must go through in order to be sent to one of those places…”
“Yes…”
Sweat – souls could do that.
“So what kind of test is it?” Llud burst out, waving his hands about in helpless anxiety.
Azrael shrugged
“’Dunno.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? If Paradise and Hell exist you must surely know about them!”
More frantic hand waving.
“First, I’m only the delivery-guy, I don’t mess with the Boss…or Bosses. Second, I never said they existed.”
Llud was fuming. Was that guy mocking him?
“But you just kept saying yes!”
“I said yes, people do say so. I didn’t say yes, that is the truth.”
Llud dropped on a saddle miserably.
He wanted to cry. Why? Had he expected anything else?
His mind was eating itself.
Having witnessed Llud’s exasperating state of confusion, Azrael sighed and took pity of the mortal.
“Look…My job is to bring the dead to the Portal. From then on, whether there is the Eden of Jesus or the Infernal of Lucifer, or Olymp of Zeus, or the Tartars of Hades, or a galaxy of aliens, or a collective consciousness of minds, or ghosts roaming the earth for unfinished deeds, or reincarnations in different bodies, or something else entirely – I don’t care. It is your problem not mine. I’m immortal, dude.”
And he flashed a smile. Celebrities had so much to learn about pose.
Llud stood there, his pupils dilated as if he was a cat at night. He was trying to imagine the scenarios. It was difficult: after all those years of treating such notions with disdain he was now experiencing a backlash of elevated reverence that allowed him only to marvel at them in a piousness, not dissect them for the sake of his curiosity. He was trying to grasp at least one of the abstract images Azrael had just showered him with, to make it work, to translate it into a perception…
It was time-consuming, challenging and strenuous, what he was beginning to undertake. For him, it was life…after-life-changing.
He felt glorious doing it.
He triumphed.
He was rising.
A whole new universe of possibilities was trembling on the tip of his conscience’s tongue, he could foretaste the endless plethora of tastes: secrets, hypothesis, discoveries…It was fascinating to reflect and wonder which one was it , to search for it again and again.
…Fascinating but over.
Llud felt a jolt: regret, the poison of the unaccomplished. He had missed out on all of this. He had not embraced the multifaceted surface of the Universal diamond. And now it was going to be no fun – he was going to find it out without having any expectations. He would not have the chance to be excited, to hope, to fear, to dig out, to delve into; he would not have the chance to live again. He would not have the chance to build his own eclectic model so he could then compare it with what was; he would not have the chance to be disappointed or pleasantly surprised.
Death was right. He really was an idiot.
Azrael grinned, as if having read his thoughts.
“You know, you humans are so ridiculous. It doesn’t matter what lies beyond. Something does, anyway. How you call it doesn’t change the fact of its existence. When no human knows for certain what afterlife is, the truth remains in shadow. It’s the only way all of the existing theories can be considered as equally true or equally false. All have a chance. But nooo, you guys don’t realize this…”
Azrael sniggered and continued:
“ You carry on creating religions that proclaim new “absolute truths” and you argue with each other and start wars and destroy each other because you can’t accept the different names of the same thing.”
Azrael’s tone had lost the tint of bemusement, it was scanting, vicious, iron.
Llud felt little.
The angel felt his discomfort and waved it off with a smirk, his acrimony evaporating.
“Don’t mind my rant; I forget you guys are supposed to be lambs by design…”
The new Llud did not like being called a lamb.
Self defense?
“It is not always the same thing that we humans are squabbling over….sometimes there really are many things, distinct and even contrasting…Sometimes the theories are too different ….or completely opposite.”
Llud noted feeling smart. That was a new feeling.
Azrael was not stirred.
“Even so…Opposites don’t exclude each other…There is white and there is black too right…? “
“And also there are all the intermediate colors and shades…,” Llud murmured philosophically.
“Exactly. Yet they are one thing: color. They belong to the same unifying category.”
Touché.
Llud sighed. He had lost the verbal duel; humans were indeed to blame. It had taken him a lifetime(literally) to cure his color blindness. Thousands of groups remained, each accepting to see only one color.
No wonder humanity could not witness a real rainbow.
Azrael slid on a pair of sunglasses
“Show off …,” Llud muttered.
He didn’t feel like he was talking to Death at all; even if he was, what did it matter?
The lack of prospects made him bold.
Azrael chuckled and flipped his hair.
Something in that motion mesmerized Llud. Flip. Away. Discard. Completely.
The light bulb flickered on and his eyes gleamed with satisfaction.
“You know…someone does turn out wrong at the end. Not all options are viable after all…”
Llud felt smug, watching the effect his words produced on Azrael. Despite the sunglasses he could see the brow rising and the angel leaning closer(Llud noticed the creature was emanating a chilly graveyard whiff).
It was time to strike.
“The atheists! Because they state that there is no afterlife. I can see there is, I’m not that idiotic to ignore Death incarnate towering over me. An atheist would tell me that I was dreaming and all of this was an illusion. So, not all opinions can be considered as true,” Llud concluded haughtily.
Azrael’s glasses glistened.
“Who says atheists are wrong?”
“B-b-but you said it earlier: something does exist beyond in any case!”
“ I did ….But you can only believe me if I exist objectively…if this(Azrael motioned at the surroundings) exists objectively in the first place. If it’s a dream though…”
“The atheists would turn out right and everything you said will turn out to be a figment from the start….” Llud muttered in a trance.
He shook his head vigorously, stomping his foot like a mulish kid.
“It does exist ! It’s happening to me, it feels real”
Eyebrow rising.
“ ‘Feels real’? Is that an eligible criterion?”
Llud’s self-importance shattered to pieces and his jaw dropped.
His mind spun forcefully.
“But how can they be right?”
“Well…”
And in a sudden explosion of noise, Llud felt something heavy fall on his head.
Piano keys.
Do-re-mi.
………………………………………………
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing!
“Grrrr stupid clock! Can’t even stand upright!!”
Llud quickly realized he had condemned the clock too soon, since he himself tumbled down to the floor, head first and feet in the air.
It hurt.
He was alive.
It had been a dream.
(Yay for the atheists!)
Or maybe…?
Somehow, he couldn’t force Azrael’s omniscient grin out of his mind. It was as if he was watching him right now, as if he had transported him back and had then woken him up to have a few laughs….
He felt ridiculous, as if he was juggling under the spotlight of the circus stage…walking along a very thin rope, very high up…
Don’t look down…
Llud got up and drew the curtains back. It had rained last night. The air smelled of freshness and novelty.
So second chances were not completely outdated yet.
He wasn’t going to let this chance slide! He was given an opportunity to wake up and he was going to wake up! Heck, he was never going to fall asleep again! Life was too short and too full of miracles to pretend not to notice them.
Llud’s optimistic mood lasted exactly 3 seconds. Then he noticed the time. He was late.
……………………………
Her name was Efil. Not only wasn’t her head empty, he sometimes wondered how was that she bore the heaviness of all its contents on her neck. Her blond hair and pretty eyes were hardly the most impressive thing in her(although they remained just as distracting for him as in the beginning, if not more). Llud couldn’t imagine a more enlightening girlfriend. This was a paradox, since it was the darkness and fog of universal enigmas that were her favorite pass-time. His too. They would conduct researches in the library archives(it wasn’t the only thing they conducted in the secluded compartments; who knew dust and paper could be that arousing). They went on strolls under the stars between the graves and talked. They snuck into haunted mentions where lips would meet lips to exchange adrenaline. Llud and Efil had a rule: they never judged any mystery on the plausibility scale, they never dismissed anything as unfeasible: they gave every religion and every hypothesis an equal chance of being…or not being. “What If”. It was a game, as playful as fingertips touching under the working desk, and as somber as death crawling in the creases of the mummies’ parched skin, clattering in the symphony of forgotten bones, or clanking in unison with the shackles of Marley’s ghost.
Llud was happy. Even if what he had experienced had been a dream, even if atheists were right and there was nothing but worms and hummus beyond, he still enjoyed life a great deal more now, when he was open to new perceptions. He often joked with Efil that by opening up to death he had accepted life. And he would kiss her passionately in the dead of night to prove it.
He felt prepared for the existence of something on the other side. Even if there turned out to be nothing in the end, Llud would not be sorry for the efforts. Because while on this quest outside the shell, he had began enhancing his “here and now”. Even if there was nothing beyond Life to find, by simply searching he had found something in Life. Someone….
Just in case, however, he never got on a bus again.
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