Welcome to eternity!
As in all things, there are rules and policies. For you to make the most of your death, please be mindful of the following.
You are not allowed to leave your residence, except when contacted by a living descendant and are called to Earth. Note that your doors are locked and only open when you are called.
Contact among the deceased is forbidden except during transit or while on Earth.
A descendant is anyone related to the deceased by blood lineage but may also be someone the deceased has left behind, such as a spouse, a close personal friend, a godchild, and the like. It can also be anyone who contacts the deceased by name.
You must listen to, view, or read every message that comes to you. However, you are free to decide whether to respond to a particular message and return to Earth.
Transit to Earth is accomplished by leaving your residence and walking down the path to the forest.
While on Earth, the deceased may resume their human forms to accomplish any tasks, but changing into another person is strictly forbidden. Additional rules may apply.
Interfering with the course of history outside of the particular request is prohibited.
Should you need anything, you may think of it, and it will appear. However, certain items are prohibited. You will learn such things as time progresses.
Do not worry about contacting us. We will contact you if it becomes necessary. Enjoy your death!
The Management
Part I
Guy
Dead men tell no tales.
—Mid-seventeenth-century proverb
I shall have more to say when I am dead.
—Edwin Arlington Robinson
Chapter 1
When I returned to Earth, I landed in the middle of a park in downtown Chicago, naked and dazed. Why hadn’t the old Hopi told me that would happen? I mean, naked? In broad daylight? The Hopi had told me other things, though. Well, just a few things. We’d only spent a few moments together, so in retrospect, arriving on Earth with my bare ass in the air was probably not on his mind.
You see, I’ve been dead for twenty-five years. No, I’m not a ghost. Those don’t exist. I’m just dead—and after over two decades of boredom waiting for the phone to ring, it finally did. Yes, I know. Why would dead people need phones? Well, not all of us do. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the old Hopi. I met him right after I died. I passed him on his way to Earth. His expression bore the years of his life—his face folded into tiny dry creek beds resembling the arid landscape of the Southwest. His step was spry, though, and he marched right up to me, dark eyes bright as he waved a salutation. He introduced himself as Joe Redfeather, but quickly it was clear he wasn’t there just to say hello.
“You’re Christian, aren’t you?” he asked.
“I was raised Catholic. Why?”
“You Christians have it all wrong. You forget about your dead. You don’t call out to your ancestors. Get ready for some long periods of waiting.”
Before I could ask him to explain, he rose into the air, dissolved into millions of particles that gathered themselves into a straight line, then sped out into space as fast as light. His clothes lay in a heap on the ground.
“My, my,” I said, doing my best Judy Garland impersonation. “People come and go so quickly around here.” Those rumpled clothes should have been a signal to me. Of course I’d wind up naked on Earth, but hindsight is twenty-twenty.
Anyway, it didn’t take me long to understand what the old Hopi meant by waiting. Contrary to what many of us have been raised to believe, there is no heaven, and there is no hell. Instead, death is nothing more than waiting by the phone—day after day, year after year, decade after decade—hoping it rings. I know, I know. Again the question. Why do dead people need phones? I suppose some explanation is in order.
When you die, your essence goes to a place beyond the physical dimension of time and space. You are directed to a dwelling, and you are given a messaging device in case you get called back to Earth to help someone or some group—something natural for Native Americans and many Asian and African cultures. They pray to their ancestors all the time. But not us, as the Hopi had suggested.
In any event, my dwelling resembles an average-sized unit within a high-rise condominium in central Chicago, where I died at the age of fifty—kitchen-dining-living-room combo, a master bedroom, and a secondary bedroom that functions as an office. My furnishings are specialty pieces from boutique furnishing stores, some of which make no sense. For example, I have a marble square cocktail table with sculpted wooden legs and braces. Sure, it fits with the condo-style residence, but what dead person needs a cocktail table? We don’t drink. The sofa is soft, made of pliant leather the color of the thick layer of foam that floats on top of a hot cup of espresso, dotted with cushions echoing fall colors. When I sit, I melt into it. Now that piece makes sense. I do a lot of sitting and reading novels and books I’d never read while alive. Irony of ironies, I finally read Dante’s Inferno. Meh.
From my window I see the Hopi guy has a trailer, probably like the one he had on the reservation. It looks to be about thirty feet long, double-wide with enough wear and tear at the corners and seams to let you know it must have seen a good number of desert monsoons. A sagging and faded green canvas awning juts out from one side where the door is, and its tattered fringe flaps in the occasional breeze like a carelessly tossed plastic bag stuck to a skeletal tree limb.
My communication device is a portable phone like the one I had when I died. Cell phones had just crept into people’s lives back then so most of us still used land lines. From my window, I see the Hopi guy has a CB radio. Its crooked antenna sits perched on the top of his trailer. I’ve often wondered what people who died in earlier times must have for communication devices. Some probably have telegraphs. Some may have carrier pigeons. Maybe some hear drums.
Anyway, you sit in your dwelling and simply wait to see if your phone rings—or if your CB crackles to life or if a pigeon flaps at your window. Then you have to decide how to help—or maybe even if you want to help.
There’s no other communication around here. Visiting among the dead is forbidden, and I have no idea who’s in charge. I’ve just learned to accept that we deceased exist as we do, outside of the perceptible world of the living, somewhere between the looking glass and eternity. We are out there, beyond the stars, within the stars, around the stars. I’m not sure.
You wouldn’t believe the hobbies I’ve taken up just to pass the time. In the pamphlet of rules, it says that if you need anything, just think it. And so I’ve dabbled in everything from wood carving to clay sculpting to painting. I was in the middle of my first glassblowing when the phone startled me.
Ring! Ring! Ring!
I jumped, dropping the blowpipe and knocking embers out of the kiln onto the living room floor. The carpet was not fire retardant. Flames shot up faster than you could shout, “Call 911!” Frozen in place, I gawked as huge swirling fingers of orange sputtered and crackled, blocking my way to the telephone. Heat poured forth. A vision of Sister Mary Glen in my first grade catechism class loomed before me.
“Sister Mary Glen, what happens to those who sin against God?”
“Well,” she said, peering over reading glasses that seemed to barely stay on the end of her long pointy nose, “those miserable wretches suffer eternal damnation.”
Her tone was as flat as the words that tumbled effortlessly from her pale lips. She instructed us to open our books to a particular drawing of a sinner writhing in hell. A blaze consumed his lithe, naked body—genitals appropriately hidden behind a flame—while tears streamed down his cheeks. His longing look toward heaven conveyed more grief than my impressionable six-year-old mind could bear.
After that glimpse of hell, I couldn’t look at a flame without thinking about eternal damnation. It almost did me in at the next family beach barbeque. My Uncle Johnny was a master at building fires from dried driftwood. From the shallow pit he had dug, orange flames crackled and snapped as they flung lighted cinders skyward. He skewered several big fat Oscar Mayers and held them over the open flames. I could hear the sizzling and popping as the wriggling fingers of heat snatched at the hot dogs and instantly seared them. Impaled and unable to flee, the wieners seemed helpless while their skins quickly developed black blisters. Inner juices oozed outward to trickle down the dogs and drip, drip, drip into the heart of the blaze. A loud sizzling accompanied their roasting, and I could smell their burning flesh.
Eternal damnation.
My body shook and I erupted as a volcano of tears forced its way out of my eyes. My mother dropped the ice chest she carried and dashed to my side.
“What’s wrong?” she asked as she held my face, one of the few acts of tenderness I remember from her. All I could muster was a weak blubbering.
“I—” sniff, “I—I—” sniff, “don’t want to wind up like a weenie!”
With her brow furrowed, she looked at my uncle, who merely shrugged. After my sobbing had subsided, she went to fetch me a cold drink. I fell to my knees and recited the rosary over and over until I was exhausted and fell asleep on the warm sand. Until the day I died, I had an aversion to hot dogs.
Ring! Ring! Ring!
The incoming call yanked me back into the present. The phone! Damn! What would happen if it was consumed in the blaze? The rules say we’re supposed to answer every call. What would they do to me, whoever they were? My first call and here I was, panicked about becoming a weenie at a barbeque. I clicked into crisis mode. I thought up a fire extinguisher, and when it appeared in my hands, I sprayed until I emptied the can.
About one-third of the living area had been turned into a burned-out firepit. I took in the charred mess before me, smoke wafting across the room. The smell of burnt wood and fabric permeated the air. I let go with a stream of obscenities and then threw the empty fire extinguisher across the room. It made contact with a Lalique sculpture, flinging chunks of crystal everywhere. I threw my hands up.
“Shit!”
Ring! Ring! Ring!
I traipsed through the debris and picked up the receiver. A faint voice, weak and raspy, was on the other end. The line hissed and sputtered from interference, which didn’t make any sense. You’d think they’d have that sort of thing taken care of around here. But despite the bad connection, the voice was unmistakable.
“Guy, if only I could talk to you. Only you would understand. Where are you?”
I stood there, phone pressed to my ear, listening in disbelief.
“Guy, I need you. Where are you when I need you?”
I pulled back from the phone, staring at the receiver. “What the . . . ?”
It was TJ, my former partner—who I had lived with for fifteen years, who dumped me for a twenty-one-year-old, who I blamed for stealing my adulthood. I pressed my ear to the phone again. Then the hissing stopped, and the line went still. I replaced the receiver in its cradle.
Of all the people who could have called. My sister. My last lover. My best friend in Chicago. No. It was him.
Son of a bitch.
So why had he called me? What did he want? I’ll get to that. I never went back to glassblowing and took up writing instead. I thought up a new computer, printer, paper, and other supplies, and I found this hobby much more satisfying and certainly much safer. It’s how I decided to write down what happened to me, how I met Torrance on Earth—and how we tried to beat the rules on that pamphlet.
