Be Good

I feel the weight of a hand clasped in mine, tethering me to this world. It is an effort to open my eyes. I am so tired, the weary, dense sort of tired that isn’t from lack of sleep, but of decay. I look around the room, faces smile at my gaze, but their smiles don’t meet the eyes. My daughter pulls her hand away and lies her body over mine to hug me instead.

“Be careful.” I hear someone say. Everything is a little hazy, but I fight it. I can feel my mind drifting away, and I won’t let it. Her soft weight on my chest grounds me, and I pull my arms around her in the tightest hug I can bear. She looks up, tears welling in her eyes, and I try not to be afraid. I try to soak this in, my last moments. I try not to spend them being scared.

“I love you.” I whisper in her ear, my voice wobbly. I barely recognize it. When you think of aging, you think of wrinkles, and knees that crack, and wheelchairs, but you never think of your voice and how it will change. I sound old, like my grandma did when I was young. My voice sounds weak and brittle, and that tangible change was worse than any saggy skin or brittle bones.

“I love you more.” She whispers back. I hug her tighter and shake my head.

“Not possible.” She pushes herself up, letting the others say goodbye.

I look around at the next generation of this family, those who will carry on in my absence, and I am proud. I am proud of the daughter I raised to be kind and the kids she raised to be the same. I think about the kids they will raise, and the ones they will raise, on and on for a century, hoping that even if they forget about me, they will always remember to be kind. In a world that can be so scary, if we all just look out for each other, it isn’t so bad.

The nurse standing in the corner of the room meets my eyes. She is a shy girl, and she doesn’t want to intrude on this moment. She looks like she wants to blend in with the wallpaper. I nod at her, a small showing of my gratitude for taking care of me in these last days. She nods back, smiling sadly. She is new to death, it won’t ever get easier, but she will learn how to cope.

I hear my heart beat slowing on the monitor, faltering its beats, telling everyone in the room that I am close. At this, my chest tightens with fear, and I can’t help but think of what will happen when I die. I’ve spent my life agnostic, knowing there is probably something out there, but also knowing that all the religions have it wrong. Whoever created all of this is much different from what we think, too complex to even describe or understand. Sometimes I think I can feel their gaze, watching. I wonder if I will meet them. I wonder if I did enough with my life to prove that I am worthy. If I did enough good to outweigh the bad.

This fear must show on my face, because my daughter squeezes my hand. “It’s okay,” She says softly. “Everything will be okay.” I take a deep breath, and I feel as the world begins to fade. I stare into her eyes as everything falls away except her face, then her eyes, and then I am falling.

I am tunneling out of my body, and I don’t know if I’m moving up or down or inside out. I feel like I am being torn apart, mind and soul stretching and twisting through time and space. I can’t open my eyes, and I don’t want to. I can’t even form enough thoughts to be scared, just a primal feeling of wrongness. And when it all becomes too much to bear, it stops.

I lay, gasping for breath, unaware of my surroundings. Someone peels back my eyelids, staring down at me with a grotesque-looking face. I flinch away.

“You are ready to be evaluated.” It speaks, voice gravelly and sickening. I don’t respond, just watch as a computer-like screen is pulled in front of my face. It scans my eyes and begins to load. It flashes “COMPLETE” and the creature presses a button. The screen flashes and starts playing clips of my life. I see myself as a toddler, helping a girl on the playground. Then middle school as I stand in front of my friend, shielding her from the boy calling her names. High school, inviting the girl sitting in the corner at the party to come play a game with us. It continues playing, showing me all these moments of kindness in my life, big or small, and I fall in love with myself all over again. My heart feels warm and fluttery. I was good. I did what I was supposed to do. I was kind. I see myself holding my daughter for the first time. I see me feeding her, and caring for her, loving her. It gets faster through my middle years, moments passing by before I can tell what they are. When the screen pauses on my last moments, I feel as though I have relived my whole life, and I am proud of who I became.

And then the screen starts over from the beginning, this time showing me something else. I see myself as a toddler hitting her brother, and I watch as he cries. A bratty teenager who yells at her mom, without showing the moments after, where I know I apologized. A college student who gets too drunk and throws up in the bathroom stall. An angry mother scolding her child as she cries. Me in my 40s, sitting at a table with lawyers, getting a divorce. And it goes on, shame creeping up from my toes, skin hot and prickly with regret. Maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought. Maybe I didn’t do enough. Maybe I don’t deserve forgiveness. When it flashes its end, I feel sick with dread.

I open my mouth to speak, to beg, I don’t know, but the screen starts loading again.

“GOOD: 64%”

“BAD: 22%”

“UNKNOWN: 14%”

I exhale, feeling the anxiety in my chest loosen. I hold my hand to my chest as my heart rate slows. I wasn’t perfect, but I did my best to make life easier for others, to not cause suffering at my own hand. Maybe that would be enough, maybe anything over 50% is a passing grade.

“FAILED” blinks in red on the screen, intrusive and jarring. My arm burns sharp and fast. An alarm on my chair begins to beep. The creature reaches down, about to press a button on his pad, like this means nothing to it.

“Wait!” A scream burst out of me. He didn’t flinch or even react. I grab his arm, stopping him from locking in my fate. “What did I do wrong?” I sound frenzied, I can hear it in my voice. It stares at me for a moment, eyes flicking to the button, and then it sighs.

“You have it wrong.” It garbles out.

“What? What do I have wrong? I was good! I did my best!”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” It stares at me like that explains everything. I stare back, waiting for it to elaborate. It sighs again. “You were too good.” I hesitate for a moment, hand loosening on its wrist, and he snatches it out and makes to press the button finally. At the look on my face, it pauses for just a moment and says, “He values ruthlessness and cruelty, you got it wrong.” And then he presses the button, sending me plummeting down, so fast everything is a blur, just shades of red, black, and brown flying by. I can barely process what I’ve heard. Who is he?

I slam into another chair, with another creature, the breath knocked out of me. It grabs my arm and lifts the sleeve, looking at my skin where my stats have been etched. It snickers, laughing at me, and then types on his computer very fast.

“You have been sentenced.”

“Sentenced to what?”

“You all have so many questions. If I answered them all I wouldn’t get anything done. The Bad people never ask questions, it’s only you Goods. You all think you are better than everyone else, that you deserve something from us.” It sneered. I just stared at it, eyes wide. “Fine. You’ve been sentenced for punishment, level 3.” I opened my mouth to ask what that meant, and it held up its hand. “I know, I know. Level 3 out of 5. You were pretty good, hooray for you! So now you get to spend eternity serving Him with all the other level 3s. Before you ask, I get these questions all day. Yes, being good is bad and being bad is good. Yes, I know most of you think it’s the opposite. No, He is not God, He cannot be simplified into something like that. Yes, you were all wrong. Okay, now that that’s out of the way, here’s your uniform.” It slammed a wad of clothes into my chest. “And here’s your assignment.” It folded my hand over a piece of paper. “Now go.”

I didn’t move. Disbelief and anger coursing through me. How could this be? How can the murderers and rapists get rewarded for their lives? How am I supposed to be okay with this? The creature groaned in frustration.

“I have more people to check in today, we are already behind, please move along and have your existential crisis elsewhere.”

“No.”

“No?” It looked surprised, like people don’t surprise it very often.

“No. I won’t move. I won’t accept this. I won’t sit here and let you sentence me to torture because I was a kind person. I won’t allow it.” It laughed.

“He doesn’t care. Hold me up any longer, and I will send you to Him, which you will regret. He grows bored with eternity, always looking for humans to entertain His endless days.”

“Do it.” I surprised it again.

“Okay, but it was your choice.” He pressed a button, and I was falling again. I didn’t have enough time to prepare, to be frightened, to think of what I wanted to say.

I fall to my knees, ground cracking beneath me. I sit kneeling in a throne room, one opulent and dressed with gold. A man sits on the throne, his expression lazed, and he twists a stone through his hands. His very presence felt oppressive and all-consuming. The air thick around me, my breathing difficult and labored.

“What?” He exhales, annoyed. I stayed silent, choosing my words. I needed to play this right.

“I would like another chance.” He quirked a brow, a smirk on his face now.

“And why should I grant that to you?”

“Because I will use it to serve you. I will be cruel, and I will not hesitate.”

“I have seen your life, you are not capable. You will disappoint. You are not worthy.”

“But I can be, now that I know the rules.” He continues to twirl the rock through his fingers.

“What do I look like, to you?” I stare at him, confused but compliant.

“A king.” He laughs.

“You are so simple. Of course I do. You humans see what you want to see. I look different to each of you, so I am always curious, but most of you Goods are the same. You are so simple, you lack vision. If your subconscious is this unimaginative, why should I expect anything different if given a second chance?”

“Because, deep down, I’ve always had this penchant for what you would call evil. I pushed it down, so desperate to be good because I thought it mattered. I was constantly plagued with thoughts of cruelty. I thought myself insane. I thought myself a sociopath, and did everything in my power not to get caught. My husband realized and divorced me as fast as he could. I taught my daughter to be kind so she wouldn’t be like me. Every person I met, it was an effort to act how I was supposed to, how I was expected. So now, knowing what I know, I understand that it was you the whole time. It was you telling me to be bad and I didn’t listen. I should be punished for not listening to you, but if I get a second chance I will not let you down.”

He smiled, morphing into a snake-like man, no longer a king but a sadist. That smile pleased me. Finally, for the first time in my life I knew that I was normal. That I was meant to be this way. That I can let myself loose upon the world like I was always meant to. I hoped he could feel my sincerity wafting off me, like a noxious gas.

“Do not let me down twice.” He flicked his fingers and I felt my soul be sucked out of my body, tunneling again through the Earth, stretching and ripping. As I flew, everything I was and everything I knew leaked out of me, until I was blank.

And then I was being pushed, shoved, and squeezed. I gasped for air, suffocating. Everything was dark. And with one last push, light blinded me. I took a strangled gasp of air and began to cry. They lifted me as I wailed, and I was being swaddled into someone’s arms. I couldn’t remember who I was or how I got here, but I could feel His touch as he soothed my cries. This time, I leaned in.