So, I got old and died. It’s cool, these things happen. I found myself in the woods, beautiful woods like when I was a child. I am guessing that at this point they don’t even have woods like that anymore, since I lived a long time in cities and pretty much stopped paying attention to what was going on outside of them. I reckon it’s all wall-to-wall coffee hut by now. But here was a wild place with dappled sunlight and other crap that makes poets fap like crazy.
I walked up a riverbed on the rocks and the water gently flowed past my ankles. I could see the water skimmers and the shimmering just underneath the surface. I should have been surprised to see that there were no condoms or coffee lids, but I wasn’t. I thought it was maybe that river of forgetfulness…what is that thing called? But I didn’t forget what was behind me. I was dead and I wanted to get back, or get somewhere. I could remember my life, but it was like it didn’t matter.
I found a map on the edge of the stream (level up!) and tried to make sense of it. The land as it was rendered had a rough outline and looked something like an oatmeal cookie a child had taken a bite out of. There were three or four outbuildings with yards or plazas in the middle, and a bunch of areas that were marked off limits somehow. “Here there be dragons and shit.” Well, who cares? Is a dragon going to eat a dead person? I wondered if they had dead dragons for eating dead people, but couldn’t conjure up any kind of fear either way. That was nice. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent being fearful in life—it was endless, really. Get one thing licked, and here comes something new and terrifying, with the old stuff stretched out behind you, no longer scary. You’d think I would have figured out that the stuff I was afraid of in life ahead of me would someday be behind me, but it took til now.
I reflected on the possibility that a map with warnings, a map that was meant to instill fear, well, maybe it wasn’t for someone like me, someone fearless. Or maybe I was reading it wrong.
The riverbed I was walking up widened into a pond about the size of your average backyard swimming pool, except the water looked pure black and I couldn’t see the bottom. In life I had always been afraid of a body of water without a visible bottom. Here, I shrugged. Being dead was empowering. I probably should have tried this eons ago, it would have made life easier. There was probably a catch there somehow, but damned if I could figure it out. After walking up the river, thinking about my life made my brain kind of lock up like when someone started saying something horrible like “a train leaves Boston going forty miles per hour. At the same time a train leaves Chicago…” Actually, it wasn’t so much that my brain would lock as up it was the mental abstruseness that comes with homicidal rage.
I put the map in my pocket and kicked off where the river ended. It was an abrupt drop off and the water was colder here, and quieter. It was like something was coming out of the pond that hushed the noise all around and above.
Then I did hear a noise. A staticky hissing sound from someplace up ahead. I was sort of moving forward without doing anything, kind of how you see crocodiles do—none of that pathetic flailing around I would have to do in life. I was never much of a swimmer. If I was still alive, one, I would never be in this creepy-ass pond thing, and two, I would be doing a sad frog stroke and getting really tired.
Ahead of me was some kind of stone lip that led into a cave or crevice in a rock face, and this was where the noise was emanating from. I pulled myself up onto the rock lip and saw the waterfall inside the crevice. I did not look behind me, and I did not fear what was ahead.
A voice came from the waterfall, or somewhere behind it.
“Hello, and welcome to the afterlife! This is God speaking to you now via this natural wonder known as a waterfall.”
“Bull FUCKING shit,” I said.
“This is a service message to expedite the long lines and amount of waiting ahead. Please follow these instructions carefully so that you and your fellow passengers will have an enjoyable trip with the least amount of delay.”
I looked around again. There were no fellow passengers ahead of or behind me, or anywhere. The pond had disappeared, and I was surrounded by philodendrons in their natural environment. When I was alive I never traveled to a jungle, but I had philodendrons in my house, and I spent a fair amount of time thinking about them, and what they would look like as wild free things that had not been captured and tamed by the hand of man. “Philodendron” is Latin or something for “tree-loving.”
The voice droned on about removing my shoes, and I could only think, am I even wearing shoes? They seemed to be part of my feet somehow. If this was some kind of stupid test about metaphorical shoes, then, well, I was probably going to start having those special feelings I have relating to story problems again.
I had a memory then. I thought about when I was alive and in the drug house, and we had forgotten about the philodendron the bathroom, and when we had to flee I tried to take the plant but it had eaten its way into the wallpaper and wall. Chunks of plaster fell past me as I tried to pull the vines down. Did the scientist who named it mean “loving” or “smothering”? Was I seeing this because my definition of jungle meant “philodendron,” a boring plant ubiquitous to every home and office in my part of the world? Did etymology and natural history matter in the afterlife? I didn’t know if I wanted to be part of an afterlife that had no pompous etymological discussions.
I had associated tropical places with paradise when I was alive, so maybe I wasn’t in hell. But then there was the airport wait message. I would have to see what was coming, I suppose.
The message ended, and I had missed most of it, probably because I had always had some kind of block against authority, or at least pointless authority-for-the-sake-of. There was a part of me when I was alive that always enjoyed tuning out in school and then waking up to discover I had drawn penises all over the margins of my algebra homework. Let’s see if I could teach myself the quadratic equation now.
I glanced to my right and saw that a cut-stone stairway had appeared next to the waterfall, innocently ascending at me as if it had always been there, all covered with moss and looking just the tiniest bit treacherous and slippery. Well-played, prop department. I wondered if I would fall and bash my teeth out, another fear which had plagued me constantly but didn’t seem to matter here. I think I was in that denial where way down deep you know something is true, like in high school when you know that the too-good-for-your-sorry-goth-ass JV quarterback is going to dump you, and your best friend Tronda McVey is consoling you at your locker with, “He just gave you a note last period, of course he likes you. Look, it’s folded into a heart.” You are single by lunchtime.
Tronda was there with me for a moment on the stairs, and angel with a Cure teeshirt jammed over her fucking choir robe or whatever, and too much eyeliner going “Hark, it is possible you could knock all your fucking teeth out of your head.” But way down in that deep place, I knew, I was dead. She was just trying to make me feel better. I began to climb the stairs.
