(After) Life is
What You Make It
Richard
Brown
Abdul-Ghafar arrives early
to the gate. There
is only one person waiting; an elderly woman, sleeping in a wheelchair parked
at the end of a row of seats. Abdul-Ghafar takes the seat next to her, glances
around, and switches his luggage with hers. Luckily for him, they are
identical. He begins to silently weep.
George Clemency approaches
the gate’s waiting area with minutes to spare. Many of the seats are taken, and
there is a line forming at the desk. He joins the line, checks in, and makes
sure he’s about to board the right flight. He finds a seat across from a
disabled elderly woman and a man with tears in his eyes. George thinks he looks
middle-Eastern, then chides himself for stereotyping. He puts his earbuds in
his ears and looks at the airplane parked at the gate through the windows. His
playlist starts in with ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’. Dylan, not Guns N Roses.
He thinks of himself as a traditionalist.
The airline employee makes
the announcements, and the passengers get in line to board. The sleeping woman
is wheeled onto the boarding ramp, along with her luggage. If anyone notices
that Abdul-Ghafar does not join the line, they don’t care. Fresh tears fill his
eyes as he looks at his watch. He sets the timer for 50:00 and presses Start. All
this planning… the deceptions and trickery… and when it comes to it, I can’t
make the sacrifice to see the bomb onto the plane myself! Something nags at
him; some small detail, but he is too caught up in self-chastisement to pay it
heed. The luck! Somehow getting the components through security… then the
woman with identical luggage… Allah forgive me! I should be on that plane! He
doesn’t move from his seat, though. His tears spill onto the thin airport
carpeting.
Four minutes later, George
Clemency is stowing his carry-on into the luggage compartment across from his
seat, and Abdul-Ghafar finally pays attention to the detail that keeps nagging
him. He remembers his eyes filling with tears as he started the timer, and the
display was seen through double-vision. He checks the timer again… 0:02. He
jumps to his feet, and all noise stops. A soft whump! Comes from outside
the windows, followed by the windows exploding into the terminal. Flames bloom
in the air around Abdul-Ghafar, and then… nothing.
…
George pushes himself up
onto his elbows and looks around. He is in some kind of hospital room, laid on
a table. Not a bed, he thinks, and looks ahead in dawning horror. There
is another table, with another body prone on it. There is a sheet covering the
body, but it appears to also be in the act of sitting up. As George watches in
mute terror, the body sits up through the sheet. No, George sees, not
the body! He can see plainly that the body is still under the sheet, but he
can also see the appearance of the person who must be under that sheet.
A young man, probably in
his mid-twenties, with short, spiky hair and a scruffy jawline, swings his legs
off the side of the table and hops to the floor. “Hi. Looks like we’re dead,
don’t it? I thought there’d be a tunnel with a light at the end, but at least
it’s not too hot in here, right?” he says with a smile.
His words sink through
George’s shock like a stone through water. Yes, he thinks, I’m dead, and
his calm is suddenly restored. “Right,” he returns the smile, “but I never
believed in all that, anyway.”
“No?” the kid asks. “What
do you believe happens when you die?”
“Nothing, I guess.” George
says. “The body rots away, and our minds just disappear.”
“I don’t think we’re
talking mind-to-mind,” the kid laughs, “These are our souls. Oh! There’s the
tunnel!” The young man points to a wall. George sees the tunnel, and a bright
light at the end of it. There are distant figures silhouetted in the light,
beckoning. “Let’s go!” the kid says, and starts away.
George attempts to follow
him, but he can’t seem to move his feet. He looks down and discovers that,
though he can separate the rest of his… soul?...from his corpse, his feet are
firmly planted in his dead flesh. “Wait! Help me!” he shouts. He looks up at
the retreating figure of the young man and sees other spirits walking toward
and through the tunnel. He recognizes the sleeping woman from the wheelchair
among them. When the last of them enter the tunnel, it closes and vanishes.
George struggles with his
feet. Neither of them will come out of his body. They don’t even feel slippery.
It’s as though everything but his feet had died.
He notices movement across
the immense room. The Middle-Eastern man from the plane (George winces as he
catches himself assuming the man’s ethnicity when he really has no clue) is
struggling up from his own dead body and taking in the situation. In moments,
he is on his knees and praying fervently.
“Mister, I don’t want to be
dead,” a tremulous voice says behind him.
George twists around and
sees a plain, but not unattractive, girl huddling against the wall. She’s
sitting on the floor, knees drawn up to her chest, hands limp at her sides.
“I’m with ya on that,” he
says as three living people enter the room. One is an African-American woman in
a white labcoat who reminds George of Michelle Obama. The other two are white
men (though George detects Hispanic heritage in one’s genetics – and quickly
admonishes himself for noticing each person’s racial identity first) in black
blazers and blue ties. The trio cross purposefully to the praying man’s body.
“I’m going to Hell.
Everyone says so, and I know they’re right,” the quivering voice behind him
says.
George tries to say
something consoling, but he finds himself listening to the living conversation
further down the line of tables.
“This man was responsible?”
one of the agents asks.
“He was found holding the
timer. He also had the luggage belonging to one of the passengers. He obviously
switched suitcases with her,” the other agent replies.
“Okay, Doctor, you know
this is practically a formality. The case looks like a clear-cut case of
terrorism, but we need to rule out the influence of drugs…”
“That will come out in the
toxicology reports,” the pathologist tells him.
The agent continues as
though there was no interruption, “…and we also need information on the
explosive device for future security measures. You say he suffered shrapnel
impact? We’ll need autopsies performed on all such victims. Start with him,
though, as some of the chemical components may have entered his system prior to
the event.”
George sympathizes with the
pretty pathologist as he tries to imagine how she’ll decide who didn’t receive
shrapnel damage.
“My parents always said I
wasn’t good enough to go to Heaven,” the girl on the floor says.
“Huh?” George is startled
into remembering her. “That’s terrible, but some parents are just crappy. You
can’t go believing everything they say,” he says.
“My teachers and siblings
all said it, too. Even the neighbors told me I’d end up in Hell,” the girl sobs.
George tries to imagine
such an environment, and is shocked again by a bloodcurdling scream. He twists
toward the sound and sees that the pathologist is in the process of making the
large Y-incision in the praying man’s corpse. The scream is coming from the
praying man’s soul, as an identical slash appears on his torso.
The agonized screams go on
for hours as the doctor spreads open the abdominal wall and removes internal
organs for inspection and tests. George takes a certain satisfaction in the
man’s suffering, even yelling curses and things like “Take that, asshole!” from
time to time. Even he has to turn away, though, when it’s time to remove the
skullcap and brain. The screams continue through it all.
Someone wearing scrubs
enters the room and wheels one of the occupied tables (they’re all occupied,
George notices) away. George takes a moment to inventory his surroundings. The
room has four autopsy tables on each side (three, now, on the side opposite
George). The wall with only three tables in front of it is sectioned neatly
into squares, each with a small handle. Souls are randomly squirming through
the small doors into the room.
The main doors into the
room are to George’s right. When he looks at the other end of the room, he sees
a cloud opening up to reveal what must be close to a hundred young women. A
dozen of them hurry to the spectral form of the bomber, lying on his back on
the floor, moaning and wailing. They carry him into the cloud, and disappear.
“What the actual fuck,
man!” he exclaims. “He still gets his seventy-whatever virgins? That settles
it; this isn’t real.”
He twists to look at the
girl on the floor. “So what did you do that was worse than bombing a plane full
of people? What was so bad that you’re going to Hell?”
“I smoked pot,” she
murmurs.
Her answer startles a harsh
bark of laughter from him.
She stares at him with
wide, fearful eyes. “I went to parties and drank alcohol, too,” she adds.
“Miss, if that’s the worst
you’ve done, you’ve got nothing to worry about! That guy-“
“I had premarital sex.” Her
whisper carries to him perfectly.
He pauses to watch as the
pathologist starts in on another cadaver, this one already vacated by its soul,
but one table nearer to George’s body.
“Lady, that’s nothing. Par
for the course, these days, actually. Maybe better than par. That scumbag murdered
hundreds of people! And he still got his Paradise!”
She shook her head. “I
remember him from the waiting area. He was crying so much. I don’t think he
wanted to do it. Maybe he was coerced into it.”
“True, buddy,” says a voice
next to George’s table. A middle-aged man sits, also attempting to free his
spirit-feet from his dead body. “There are other possibilities, too. Who knows
what he was taught all his life? Most of us here were taught to be good, little
assembly-line workers for an industrial age that died out fifty years ago, but
we don’t even question it. Should his soul be judged based on what his mind was
molded and conditioned to think?”
George gapes at him,
stunned to be outnumbered on this issue. “Look, none of it is real, anyway!
There is no heaven or hell, no Paradise, no bright light, no demons with hooves
and pitchforks! I’m in a coma and dreaming all of this, or maybe I am dying,
and this is one last desperate attempt by my mind to hold on to life.” At this,
another scrub-wearing attendant enters the room and wheels away another corpse.
“What are they doing?”
George asks no one in particular.
“Disposing of the bodies,
is my guess,” the other man replies.
“Disposing, how?”
“Sending them off to
funeral homes if they have families or burial plots. Cremation for the others,”
the other man says.
“But they haven’t been
autopsied yet,” George protests, in confusion.
The other man chuckles. “No
way she’s gonna dissect all of us. Like you said, there are hundreds of us.
She’ll do a reasonable sample of us – looks like our side of the room, at least
– and call it quits. I’d really like to free my feet; I’m next in line.”
“Why are you and I stuck to
our bodies?” George asks.
“I’m no expert, but maybe
it’s because we didn’t believe in an afterlife,” the other man replies. “I was
an agnostic. I didn’t know what to believe, so I never made a choice.”
George turns to the girl on
the floor. “There you have it! Start believing in a different outcome! You
don’t have to go to Hell.”
She lifts her face, seeking
that dim glimmer of hope that George’s words offer, but just as quickly shakes
her head and resumes staring at her knees. “It’s too late,” she says. As though
on cue, a great tentacle creeps from the wall behind her and entwines her, its
black, purple, and gray suckers attaching to her spirit, dragging her into the
wall. George has a fleeting memory of Disney’s The Little Mermaid and the
scenes with Ursula, the Sea Witch. The girl screams anew with each sucker that
touches her. Then she is gone.
“Her- her parents did that
to her,” George stammers. “Her parents, her teachers, her neighbors… they made
her believe that thing is her fate, and now that’s what she has to
endure for… what? Forever?”
“Supposedly,” the other man
says. “The soul is eternal.”
An attendant approaches the
other man’s table and unlocks the wheels.
“Wait!” George yells.
“What’ll happen to you?”
“I have a burial plot,” the
man answers. “If I can’t free myself, I expect I’ll spend eternity staring at
dirt. I’m only five-seven.” Then he, too, is gone.
George strains to pull his
feet free of his corpse, checking the pathologist’s progress. She is entering
notes into a computer, having finished with her previous autopsy.
George hears heavy
footfalls in the hall outside the room. The doors swish open.
The pathologist sets
scalpels and a bone saw on a stainless steel tray next to George.
The attendant approaches as
she pulls on latex gloves, but hesitates.
George watches each of them
in turn, eyes wide with fear. Take me out of here! He thinks at the
attendant.
“Go ahead,” the pathologist
says. “One less for me to do.” The attendant nods and steers George through the
doors.
Relief washes over George,
until he remembers that he has no family; no burial plot.
He watches the corridor
darken, notices the sparse lights flicker.
He is brought to a large
and presumably heavy iron door set into a brick wall. The door is swung open,
and George is unceremoniously shoved inside an unlit furnace. George screams
for the attendants to wait, there’s been some mistake… but the iron door clangs
shut. Blue-white jets of flame shoot into the chamber, and George incinerates.
The pain is unendurable. When George was a child, someone accidentally spilled
a cup of hot coffee on his bare shoulder, scalding him and giving him
second-degree burns. That coffee was the silky caress of a lover compared to
this devouring, full-length, invasive and penetrating conflagration.
As his flesh melts to his
bones, and his bones char and crumble, his soul shrieks. The shrieks continue
after the flame jets have been turned off and only ashes remain.
With no body to attach to,
and no destination… and incapacitated in any case by agony, the soul of George
Clemency remains in the furnace. When the next body is brought in, the torment
begins again, reinvigorated.
