The Banks of the Great River

If the world we live in is a gateway to the beyond, and if all religions, past and present, are correct, we are in for a wondrous time indeed.

The cattails and reeds of the marsh by the Great River tickled my thighs as I scanned the muddy shores for bodies. The damned ferrymen never checked when people fell—or got tossed—overboard, leaving the bloated corpses for me to dredge up. Respect for the deceased seemed to be for the living.

Which made sense to me, really, being dead myself.

It's actually a pretty good afterlife. The banks defined peace, with an air of cool mint and warmth of Ra. Or Apollo, I suppose, depending on who you asked--or rather, when you asked.

I would have been content to linger here among the lightly lapping shore, but apparently loitering had become sinful at some point. Squinting against the sun, I scanned the riverbank, feigning interest in my immortal task.

A bright red power tie clashing against the soft brown and green tones of the marsh grasses caught my eye. Another of the ferrymen’s droppings. This one seemed to be a businessman in a fine-tailored suit: water-logged Italian if I wasn’t mistaken. That could be the suit or the person, and I made a silent bet with myself as to which it was.

Back to work. A smoke-filled sigh escaped through the part in my lips where a lit cigarette dangled. There never was a moment for deep contemplation or prayer when you were one of the lesser gods, if I could call myself one. I liked to think of myself that way, in any case. The Angel of Death! I was more a glorified janitor, really, than the fearful myth the people conjured in my image. And that image had suffered so much ever since I lost my flaming sword in a poker game with Brahma, the cheat.

Never play cards with a god that has four heads, that's what I say.

The crumpled gray suit in the reeds had seen better days. The man, as well. His stomach strained against an algae-covered dress shirt causing a broad tie with spots of black mold to list to one side. He looked like a bloated sack of old potatoes sprawled, spread-eagled, with one shoe balanced precariously on his big toe that bobbed in time with the waves. A scraggly mess of hair plugs, weeds, and muck had piled on his head and draped over his shoulders. The pockets were empty. Nice wristwatch, though.

Blowing out a long puff of tobacco smoke, I propped the man up on a nearby boulder and salvaged his shoe from the river before it floated downstream.

The man didn’t look so bad; maybe this one would pass for judgment. If not, I could probably slip him under the constant bickering of the gatekeepers--though the bureaucrat, Rhadamanthys, usually cast most of the refuse I dug up into the recycling center with a wave of his ledger and not much coin lining my pocket. One could assume that, from the general filth and pungent stench that permeated the corpses I found, most didn’t make it into the afterlife. That assumption would be mostly true.

Time to see if this soul was worth his weight. The easiest part of my job was the resurrections. It was surprising more people on Earth didn't figure it out, truth be told. Heck, a carpenter managed to do it on himself eons ago without any special training.

It was simply a matter of knowing about the ‘reset’ button that reanimated the body. This one would only need his sloppy vessel to get to the gates. After that, the matter was out of my hands. I shook the man’s shoulder as if rousing him from a deep sleep.

The man’s head lolled back as though on a well-oiled hinge.

Some people needed a jolt. I curled my hands around his neck, feeling for the small lump at the back of his head where the spine met the base of the skull. The Soulspot. My fingers buzzed with a charge, courtesy of Zeus--or Jupiter, depending on whom or when you asked.

I jammed my finger onto his Soulspot. A tiny snap of electrostatic singed hair, and I wrinkled my nose at the sharp smell.

With a gasp, the man twisted from my grip as he contorted and writhed. He rolled over and vomited a steady stream of black bile onto the riverbank, eyes churning from cloudy to nut-brown with each heave. He sat up, swiveling his head in every direction at once.

When I had first taken the mantle of Death, this part had been fun. I used to delight in frightening the newly deceased, complete with a big old skull mask and rusty scythe (it had been better with a sword on fire, truth be told). But that novelty had worn away with routine. Now I dreaded each awakening, sometimes wishing the Big Guy had put in a system to keep souls from losing their memories of this place after each reincarnation. It occasionally came up in council meetings, but his answer was always infuriating: “It’s all part of my plan.” It’d be nice if he let us know exactly what that was.

The man wobbled as he stood and bellowed, “Where am I? Where—what is… Goddamnit! Who the fuck stole my watch?”

It was good to let them blow off some steam first. I had tried to subdue the first hundred newly resurrected, and usually, we had fallen into the Great River and carried downstream. The gatekeepers, particularly Kepha, didn’t take too kindly to an unruly deceased and a janitor exchanging blows near the doorways to paradise. I had gotten an earful from the Anubis each time as well—and he was the rudest, most foul-mouthed god of all. Probably because he was so short.

The man continued to lash out, screaming at nobody in particular, until he collapsed into a wet, blubbering mess, wiping at his eyes. After he had said his Hail Mary’s and prayers to God, he looked up, as though expecting me to fill in the blanks in his memory. I extended my hand and took inventory of his life through our touch as I pulled him to his feet.

“My name is Jack Corvid,” I said with a casual smile.

The man nodded solemnly.

“You had a heart attack on East Main Street and passed away on your way to the hospital. This is the land of the dead.” Keep it simple, for they were simple people.

The man searched his pockets. The dead always seemed to do that first. Maybe they were trying to find themselves in the soggy lint that lined them. One time a man did manage to bring over a Swiss-army knife--I never knew the corkscrew could be a deadly weapon until he had taken a chunk out of me with it.

“I’m S… Samuel,” he stammered. “Gimme your damn phone. I need to call the hospital and my wife and…” His hands dipped into his pockets again, eyes fluttering, perhaps trying to choke back tears, even though that wouldn’t have made a difference either way since he was already sopping wet.

“Yes, I know. Samuel Johnson, the last name you owned.” I dragged on my cigarette and blew a cloud into his face, hoping it would add a dramatic effect to my words.

“What you had in life and what you accomplished doesn’t have any bearing in this world. What matters to us are the connections to others you’ve made, and what you’ve learned spiritually. Judging by your tailored suit, I would imagine you’ve made several great connections. I hope they were genuine. But I am not here to judge your transgressions. Only the gatekeepers can see your truth when they weigh your heart.”

Samuel’s eyes widened.

“Relax, Sam. Can I call you Sam? That’s just an expression. We’re not actually going to rip your heart out and put it on a scale. I mean, Anubis used to, but that was centuries ago. He’s not allowed to do that anymore--it traumatizes the dead.” Although it was pretty funny.

“Are… are you Death?”

“In the flesh... as it were. It’s just a job, Sam. No hard feelings.”

“A job?” Sam smoothed his lapels, water sloughed to the reeds.

“More like cleanup. Don’t worry. You don’t need to know the details unless you’re given work. Maybe you’ll take my job, and they’ll finally let me cross over.” I laughed into the breeze. That didn’t even happen when I dredged up a cannibal. It’s hard for the gods to recommend reincarnation for me when I have no soul to speak of. Well, not anymore. Just an empty vessel. "Unlikely, however, considering ‘Sam’ is your four-thousand, three-hundred and twelfth name. You seem to be going for the record. Some important lesson you haven’t learned yet?”

“Going for a record…” Sam repeated. “The record for what?”

“Reincarnation, of course. Your first name is Salim, and you were first born of thirteen, in the Kashaf Ud Basin in what you would know as Iran. Your current name is Samuel Johnson, third born of four, in the Houston area of the United States. Welcome back.”

Sam spluttered, denying my words, the reality around him, and eventually, his own existence. That would have pissed off a creator if they were in earshot. Shiva would have turned him to dust on sight. Yahweh, being only a creator, would have settled for something more vengeful and vindictive, or even, dare I say, creative. His revenge strategies made for great small talk at company get-togethers. Like when He gave platypuses venomous spikes on their feet to spite a group of tourists to Australia in the seventies. Yahweh had incredible foresight—though He mostly used it for pranks. His face on a bit of burnt toast, for example.

I followed the flow of the river as I tramped through the tall grasses—Sam followed close behind.

"Where are you taking me?"

"Where you need to go."

“Is this heaven?” Sam asked, his voice on the verge of cracking.

He certainly had low expectations. “We’re trudging through a stinking marsh and you’re wearing sloppy, soaked clothes. Is this your idea of paradise?”

“No, but I thought—”

"Fluffy clouds and angel choirs? Trust me, you don’t want a job in the choir. Unless you like long work hours and a sore throat.

“We’re going to the gatekeepers, who will judge you and proclaim your next destination. Probably another round of reincarnation, from the looks of it.” He hadn't been very exemplary while alive. I had done a quick check of his naughty-nice tally, part of his 'life file,' when we touched. It didn’t quite dip low enough to send him to the underworld, but it wasn’t anywhere near paradise levels.

“The… what? Gatekeepers? To judge me? What should I do?”

“Just be polite. Anything you could do to impress Anubis and Kepha has already passed. That was a pun, Sam. You need to laugh more.” I offered a grin.

Sam gripped his tie with the force of a thousand raging demons. “So… the land of the dead, then?”

The dead were always excessively slow to catch on. “Just follow me–oh, god damn it.”

He had paused to regard the water, though what he expected to find in its murky depths was beyond my own reasoning and ability to read his soul. Something about the river always fascinated the recently deceased, though I hoped he would snap out of his trance before I would be forced to drag him away from the shore.

“Have I been ferried across?”

“No. You fell off the boat. You're flotsam, Sam.” The dead always had a million damned questions. They never could accept what they saw with their own eyes—though that attitude was probably vestiges from their time on Earth. Blind faith went both ways.

I quickened my pace, and as luck would have it, he followed. The sooner I was rid of this one the sooner I could get back to ‘work’--smoking and picking up moldy wallets or shoes that had fallen off the boats. At least that was peaceful.

"Is this the River Styx?"

Sometimes it seemed the dead ran their mouths more than the living. Styx indeed. “I wish this was the River Styx. Good benefits. Cool cave, nice breeze, and no marsh grasses. There are several rivers—Phlegethon, Lethe, Acheron, Cocytus… each with their own ferrymen. You've landed in the Ganges.”

“I’ve never been to India, sir.”

Was that a joke? His sheepish smile told me it might have been, so I looked at him sidelong and gifted him a polite laugh. "‘Sir’ is a bit formal. Jack’s fine.”

He snapped off the end of a cattail and twirled it nervously in his fingers, shredding it to fluff as he walked and getting it all over his suit. "Have I chosen right?"

He meant religion. Here we go again. I bit down on my lip to stop a hailstorm of snark. "Faith isn't about being right or wrong."

"Sure, but... there is an answer. I followed the one true religion." Cattail seeds covered the front of his jacket as he tore the head to pieces. "I'm a Christian. A damned Christian, Jack!."

Damned indeed. "And you spent most of your time in a secular world. Once a year for Christmas isn't faith, Sam, it's insurance."

"But I went. And I prayed."

My eyes rolled before I could stop them. "Mostly for yourself, right?" Sam seemed to have been stuck somewhere between faithful and faithless, a spongy state still undefined because "faithmoderate" didn't quite roll off the tongue.

"But I'm no atheist."

"Their faith in the belief they don't have faith is stronger than you think."

"That's contradictory."

"Yet their assuredness would have kept them from falling off the boat."

Sam's mouth twitched in anger. "What about cults? Surely--"

"Even some cultists have a form of faithfulness. If they wanted to believe in a flying spaghetti god, one of our own would eventually lay claim to having been that being. Or several would, and we would have an insurrection, which generally ended up with several gods sharing the role on certain days of the week."

He furrowed his brows, likely upset that we would give cults any credit at all. "That's ridiculous. Just what kind of man do you think I am? I'm not fucking dumb. False religions are--"

"Who are you to decide what's false or not? Look, it's not my job to debate religion with every vessel that comes to my shores." And it was infuriating--because it was all they ever babbled on about. Why couldn't an athlete who died making an amazing play wash up and brag about how great it felt to break his neck but win the game? That would make for a fun story to one-up someone with at a meeting. "Look around you, Sam. What do you think the gods want?"

"Loyalty. And I--"

"Faith, Sam. Just that. It doesn't matter what religion you signed up for, just that you believed in it, walked with it, and died with it. Life was for you to love. To make spiritual connections with others and live for your faith, whether you believed in any one god, a few of them, or none at all. And you were into spirituality for your own damned selfish reasons. You think any of the gods would have liked that?"

Tears wetting the corners of his eyes, he clamped his mouth shut--at last. Now maybe he would walk in silence.

After a few hours of trekking through the marsh, with Sam grunting after long introspective intervals but never quite forming thoughts into words, the docks before the cavern to the gates of the afterlife came into view over a dip in the path. A ferryman’s white paddle steamer had been secured to them with a thick barbed chain--Kharon's, from the look of the glistening red paddle off the backside. It contrasted badly with the rusty, moss-covered body of the rest of the skiff. He was probably inside the Cave of Judgement, trading bodies and banter with the gatekeepers—the worst brown-noser of all the ferrymen. Probably the only thing St. Peter and I had in common was our mutual distaste of Kharon and his personality that was best described as "loud."

Confronting the gatekeepers with Kharon flitting about their feet wasn’t going to score me any points with them. I had a few things to go over with Sam anyway, and with some luck, Kharon would be long gone by the time we entered the Cave.

Herding Sam under one of the docks where the water of the Ganges flowed to just a trickle, I halted our march by a rotten post and offered him a cigarette.

Sam stared at my offer, face contorting as though sorting through a logic puzzle that was missing half its pieces. "Sin stick?"

"No. Menthol."

He declined anyway. His loss.

"I'm scared, Jack."

I smirked. Judging by his pulse and temperature, he was angry--not scared. Was he already using a narcissist's final ploy to tear at emotions to get his way? Sam hadn't learned anything during his time alive. Neither had Narcissus, either--and the mere thought of that old gazer made me queasy. "Are you truly scared, Sam? Or are you upset that you don't have control?"

With a volume rivaling Kharon's, his entire life story spilled out from his rotten mouth. Nothing he had done was his fault—something that wouldn’t sit well with the gatekeepers. The ‘path to the righteous’ was admitting your follies, or something. Though it wasn't my duty to be his confessional, I nevertheless snuck in suggestions of pious reflection, though each was met with a quick denial or excuse. The smell of death--a fruity stench of month-old raspberries, which is what you get when you let the god of wine, Bacchus, have a hand in creation at a drunken party--became more pungent the more he ran his mouth.

"You should tell your charge to save their breath in this place, Jack, or else you'll be dragging another empty vessel before the gatekeepers again." A heavy hand bore down on my shoulder and spun me around—Kharon. My skin crawled. The damned ferryman must have heard us from inside the Cave and come out to spread his greasy attitude all over my pep talk.

With a smile of muddy silk and a wreath of laurels that sat crooked on his head, covering his male-pattern baldness and bringing a sort of elegance to the wrinkled, reddish-brown tunic open to his naval, he cocked his shoulders back like he owned the Ganges and sauntered over to Sam. But not before squeezing my shoulder in a way to display his sculpted muscles.

“Wonderful! I see you’ve dug up my leftovers," he said, running a finger down Sam's cheek as he circled him like a wolf would a young shepherd. "What a fine bit of sacred refuse you have brought! I dare ask, Jack, if you think this man will put even a minuscule dent in your debt?”

God damn you, Kharon. “I don’t have a debt,” I lied.

Kharon faced Sam, licking his lips. “Tall and dark--if you didn’t have such a potbelly, you’d be Greek perfection, despite, or maybe because of, your sharp Roman nose.” He hung an arm around Sam’s shoulders. “Beautiful facial symmetry. I bet you had a gaggle of ladies pining after you. Men, too.” He laughed. “Don’t listen to Jack, Sam.” Kharon shoved a manicured finger toward me. “He’s using your soul as payment to get his own back. He's not even licensed!”

Kharon wouldn’t flinch at my stink eye, but I gave the ferryman the evilest I could anyway.

Sam ducked out of Kharon’s embrace and took a few steps back, a wild gaze darting to the both of us. Kharon’s grin widened along with Sam’s eyes. The ferryman wouldn't ever forgive me for that time I short-changed him at a company picnic--a petty transgression, but I had learned ever since that the gods and those under them ran the universe on petty grudges.

“Nothing’ll come of that one, you hear me?” Kharon belted out as he laughed his way to his skiff. “Sisyphus is going to love hearing about this. You’ll be paying your debt until the end of time, Jack!”

I kicked a stone into the river in Kharon’s general direction as the boat pulled away from the dock, then turned an eye to the jagged rocks rounding out the entrance to the Cave of Judgement. The gatekeepers were waiting, and the sooner I could get rid of Sam, the sooner I could get as far away from the docks as possible before Kharon’s next load.

“Are you going to sell my soul,” Sam blubbered.

Only if I can haggle a good price. “Let’s go.” Yanking Sam by his blazing cherry-red tie, I hauled him toward the Cave.

One more soul closer to freedom.