Month: May 2006

Death had become bored with humans and their ridiculous rituals, their lip service to life and its preciousness. How could he take them seriously after all the centuries they’d been mucking up his once mostly orderly routine?

Once upon a time he’d had a pretty cut-and-dried job description. It wasn’t pleasant work –it wasn’t meant to be; he’d never taken any joy in it– and it wasn’t in his nature to be creative. Occasionally he’d get messed up in some large-scale collaborations, but he found these bigger, clumsier projects lamentable. Yet when all was said and done (and that, really, was his bailiwick), he was the closer, plain and simple. He didn’t, though, like slamming doors; he preferred shutting them as quietly as possible and going on his way.

There was a time when he hadn’t been ashamed of his job. It had been honest, necessary work. But, all the same, he’d always preferred operating under the cover of darkness, and favored black garments, not to strike terror, but rather so as to move as inconspicuously as possible. From the beginning his job had been simply to take people when their time had come. Even he had never understood exactly how this business was determined, but he didn’t ask questions. Which isn’t to say that he had never participated in some operations that struck him as tragic and even unjust.

God, how he despised the name “Grim Reaper.” He knew exactly who’d first coined the term, and it took every ounce of his mandated stoic restraint not to experience a spasm of pleasure when he’d finally received the order to take the man’s life. It didn’t mean diddly at that point, of course; the title already had wide currency, and would dog him forever. He understood all the same that a bad reputation came with the territory. There was nothing he could do about that, but he hated the melodramatic terror with which he was regarded; it was as if people didn’t understand that he had a claim on them from the moment they drew their first breath.

For heaven’s sake, the world had been burying his handiwork since the beginning of time. You’d think humans could make their peace with the idea. Some of them, of course, could, and he had the utmost respect for these people, and exercised the most careful restraint in stopping their hearts. At the same time, he had little patience for those who flirted with and courted him, the reckless and heedless and hysterical. Still, left to his own devices he was never rash or vengeful; he had his orders, and was nothing if not a fellow who followed orders.

There were, though, throughout history and increasingly, eruptions of violent madness, and he resented his role as glum sub-contractor in these mass incursions into his province.

Free will was a terrible mistake, and was constantly making an impossible mess of his business. Whenever humans took his job in their own hands they inevitably made horrific work of it, and often on a large and disgracefully untidy scale.

His presence continued to be required to seal the deal, such as it was, to make things official, but he seriously resented being dispatched at all hours to far-flung places where he was little but a helpless and disgruntled officiant.

He needed help –it had become entirely too much work for one man– but things were what they were; it was too late, and he knew no help would be forthcoming. On some base level humans had become his collaborators, which rankled him; they were apparently more and more willing to do his dirty work, and even to take on dirty work that he himself would have been reluctant to undertake.

He had long prided himself on not being a mess-maker, but it was too late for that as well. Every day anymore he found himself up to his elbows in messes and gore, whether he liked it or not.

The hardest pill to swallow was that he had been almost completely usurped; the work still had his name on it, it was ultimately his signature on the bottom line, but it was no longer truly his work.

It had become just another shit job. That was all there was to it. He had become an indifferent and exhausted practitioner of a profession he had once pursued with genuine dignity and skill and a certain stoic pride.

Whenever he had time –and he seldom had time anymore– he would retire to his sprawling penthouse on a top floor of a moldering skyscraper in a forlorn industrial neighborhood of Frankfurt, where he would sit in the dark, listening to Mahler or perhaps Thelonious Monk, and petitioning ceaselessly, and with growing desperation, for retirement.