The Last Appointment

Death worked out of a converted office building in Detroit that someone had chopped into studios in 2015 and everyone had regretted since. The waiting room smelled like rain and old receipts, the kind of atmospheric gloom you'd expect if you were the type to expect atmospheric gloom, which Gideon wasn't because he was primarily focused on the fact that he was definitely, completely, no-question dead.

"Mr. Kowalski?" Death looked up from his clipboard. He wore a cardigan that had seen better centuries and reading glasses that caught the failing light like tiny promises of nothing. "Sorry to keep you waiting. We're a bit short-staffed." He smiled at his own joke. "Get it? Because everyone's dead?"

Gideon stared. The neon sign across the street flickered its death rattle through windows that probably hadn't been cleaned since the Clinton administration. Geometric ceiling tiles sagged overhead like they were tired of holding up the weight of bad renovations and worse puns.

"I... what?"

"Please, have a seat," Death said, gesturing to a chair that looked like it had been rescued from a 1960s typing pool, all cracked vinyl and institutional ambition. "Take a load off. You must be dead tired." He paused. "Get it? Dead. Tired. Because you're—"

"I got it," Gideon said, even though sitting seemed like acknowledging this was real, and he wasn't ready for that. Through the window, the city decayed beautifully, fog rolling in like it had opinions about his life choices.

Death shuffled papers. The overhead light hummed in a way that suggested it was thinking about dying too. "Now, I see here you were hit by a bus while texting. Tragic. Really struck a chord." He winced at himself. "Or a pedestrian, more accurately."

"Are you seriously—"

"Listen, I know this is grave news." Death peered over his glasses. "But we all have our coping mechanisms. Mine is wordplay. Yours was apparently not looking both ways, but who am I to judge? I'm just the end game."

Gideon felt like he should be more upset about being dead, but mostly he was experiencing a mounting horror that had nothing to do with mortality and everything to do with the realization that Death had more puns where those came from. The walls were that specific shade of landlord beige that suggested giving up, and somewhere a radiator clanked like it was keeping time with the universe's worst open mic night.

"So what happens now?" Gideon asked, desperate to move this along before Death could make another joke.

"Well, that depends." Death leaned back, chair squeaking. "See, there's a grave situation developing—sorry, I really can't help myself—you're not exactly scheduled yet. The bus was early. You're in a sort of liminal space." He waited expectantly.

"Please don't—"

"A limbo, if you will!" Death beamed. "Get it? Liminal, limbo? It's a dead ringer!"

"I GET IT."

The rain started then, because of course it did, tapping against windows that had seen better decades with the rhythm of a funeral march played on a Fisher-Price xylophone. The whole building seemed to lean into the moment, Art Deco bones settling into their own obsolescence.

Death sighed, suddenly looking ancient and tired and genuinely lonely in the way that made Gideon remember that this being had been doing this job since the first thing died in waters that tasted like rust and the beginning of everything. "Look, kid. I know the puns are deadly." He couldn't help himself. "But this is a dying art form, and I'm trying to keep it alive." Beat. "Or dead. Whatever."

"Is there a point to this?"

"The point," Death said, and for a moment the atmospheric gloom intensified, shadows pooling in corners that shouldn't exist in a studio apartment, "is that humor is what we have against the dark. You think I enjoy being the punchline of existence? That I want to be reduced to dad jokes and skeleton memes? I'm the most fundamental force in the universe, and my best material is puns about the graveyard shift."

Gideon sat then, because standing felt like too much commitment to outrage. The chair springs groaned their agreement with his surrender.

"Every single person who comes through here," Death continued, fog curling around him now like he was remembering he was supposed to be cosmic and terrifying, "they all do the same thing. No matter who they were, how they died, what they believed. Rich or poor, young or old, saint or absolute bastard."

"What's that?"

Death smiled, and for just a second he looked beautiful in the way that gothic things are beautiful—terrible and true and completely unavoidable. "They G.A.S.P."

"They... gasp?"

"Groan. At. Stupid. Puns." Death spread his hands. "It's universal. Transcendent. The one thing that unites all of humanity in our final moment—the recognition that even Death, even the end of everything, can't resist a terrible joke. You've been doing it for five minutes straight."

Gideon realized, with mounting horror more profound than the fact of his own death, that this was true.

"So here's the thing," Death said, pulling out a form that looked like it had been photocopied sometime during the Eisenhower administration. "You're not quite dead yet. Bus was early, like I said. I can send you back, but you have to promise me something."

"Anything."

"Groan at the stupid puns." Death was serious now, as serious as the rain and the decay and the beautiful rot of everything temporary. "When someone makes a dad joke, when humor tries to push back against the dark, when people cope through wordplay in the face of everything ending—groan. Let them know you heard it. That their ridiculous attempt at levity in a dying universe matters."

"That's it?"

"That's everything." Death handed him the form. The neon across the street guttered out completely, leaving them in geometric shadow that smelled like rain and old magic and the specific melancholy of knowing that everything beautiful is temporary. "We're all going to die, Gideon. Everyone you love, everyone I love—which is everyone—all of it ends in rooms like this, in cities like these, in bodies that betray us and time that runs out. The least we can do is acknowledge each other's terrible jokes along the way."

Gideon signed. The ink was the color of rain in gutters, of rust and regret and stubborn insistence on finding humor anyway.

"Now get out of here," Death said, already turning back to his paperwork. "And Gideon? When you tell people about this, and you will, because everyone does—make sure they know the puns were killer."

Gideon groaned.

Death smiled.

And Gideon woke up in a hospital that smelled like disinfectant and second chances, with only the memory of rain and wordplay and the absolute certainty that somewhere, in a converted office building where the rent was too high and the ceiling tiles sagged with the weight of better days, Death was still working through his material, making terrible jokes against the dark, waiting for the next person to come through his door and do the one universal thing that every human being, living or dead, cannot help but do:

Groan. At. Stupid. Puns.