Chapter V: Love Macabre

 I’m not sure whether to feel relieved or cheated when I find underneath the black hood, the mother of all anticlimaxes: a Dia de los Muertos mask. Yet somehow I feel I know the reason behind this diluted image. No shape could ever truly contain the deep and pervasive horror that Death inspires; to see it in all its raw potential is to literally explode my head.

Then, in one fluid, memorized motion, Sephtimus whirls his cloak off and into the air and a spirit steps out of a wall of monitors to take the role of a coat-stand. This spirit is fully skeletal; tragically its head is missing so there’s nothing but its spine protruding between the shoulder-blades, which is anyway perfect for this occasion as a peg. Sephtimus tosses his guitar case in the same direction and the decapitated skeleton also catches this out of habit, before stiffening ramrod straight like a foot guard at Buckingham Palace.

I discover the reaper is wearing a black leather trench coat with crisscrossing metal-studded straps sewn on the shoulders and the chest, suggestive of a straitjacket that ironically restrains the warden of hell. The coat’s lining sweeps all the way down to the floor, which is probably for the best because there’s no sign of feet whatsoever under it.

When Sephtimus finally sits behind his desk – more like throws himself down in total abandon – another apparition scurries on all fours to catch him while three more jump from behind to support his back and arms; all four of them melding into one grand throne made entirely of human bones. Sephtimus then takes a pack of cigarettes out of a drawer and one of his melded assistants dislocates its forearm to light his stick with one hinged finger. Apparently, everything in this room is a living extension of the Chief Astral Deporter and exists to serve on his every whim.

“I swear, nicotine and caffeine are going to be the death of me,” he says to himself, smoking with humanoid lips in the fraction of space between the maxilla of his skull mask and his coat’s stand-up collar. But he sounds so pleased with himself that I doubt if he means what he’s saying.

All at once it comes to me with an almost physical shock; this mind-boggling observation. Death has pursed his actual lips when he took a drag on his cigarette but for any other purpose than this, his mouth doesn’t budge. His lips are a frozen ornament when he speaks. Death has been communicating with me through telepathy!

“Bravo!” Sephtimus hisses. “Faster than the others.”

Others? What does he mean others?

“One thought at a time, meatball. First, let me address your sloppy question with a proper answer.” He motions with his thin human fingers holding the cigarette towards the now lively, constantly shifting mosaic of the mystery girl at the coffee shop.

“This,” Sephtimus rasps, “this is my Helen, as you would say in your tongue, my Cleopatra, my Delilah.” His metaphors sound as though they’ve been pilfered from comprehensive summaries, highly suspicious and out of place. Who could’ve imagined hearing Death quote from English literature, even the Bible!

“She is the fly in my ointment, the chink in my armor.” He blows a thick and impressive smoke ring that slowly elongates into a tiny Scream mask before it dissolves. “My problem. Yours to solve.”

Even as he started saying these things he had taken on the air of a mafia boss barking out orders, like it has been ingrained in him to expect nothing but blind obedience. But the whole thing’s so unexpected it takes a while for me to digest it: Death, more powerful than all the politicians and tycoons of the world combined – he who can take away the only thing that really matters and send hundreds of billions of people through eternal torment, Death is… in love?

“Yes, that's how you would put it, wouldn't you? Tiny, insignificant, annoying sack of flesh that you are. Love. That silly, pathetic excuse for raging chemicals inside your faulty, substandard bodies. Only childish mortals can invent something as trivial as love. Something your half-baked minds can swallow hook, line and sinker.” He stands up and starts pacing back and forth like a husband outside the delivery room, cigarette smoke trailing behind him as immutable as water on taro leaf. “As blissful as it may be, I can't regress to such ignorance.”

“Oh how shall I put this?” he asks out loud while massaging his temples hard. Seeing the Grim Reaper show human reactions to stress is eerie and thoroughly disorienting. He says: “It’s aggravating that I can't put this predicament into your hollow human words.”

Just when I think I see a point of vulnerability in Death's swagger and bullying, his eyes start to glow like lumps of coal. “I suppose for you to understand you must first see. And for you to see, I need to furnish you with my own eyes. Very well…”

Sephtimus floats inches from the floor, suddenly as light and diaphanous as a ghost ship with parchments for sails. “I hereby lend you the unique privilege of being nowhere…

“… and everywhere all at once…”

Because I’m hanging about a foot from the floor myself, we stand face to face. I don’t feel any relief at all when I glimpse the outline of human eyes within the holes of his mask because their scleras are still glowing and soon flashing as bright as headlamps. More than that, they become exploding suns in a bleeding sky, the last sources of light in a world spinning wildly out of orbit even as it gets incinerated. And it’s like all the hair on my head has gone white in my terror as Sephtimus floats right into me – and through me. Three hundred and sixty degrees around us, all the videos freeze up.

The monitors now show people doing things backwards, chirping like chipmunks and getting noticeably younger and shorter as the days rush by. But the one common thread running through all these scenes, directly or indirectly, is Sephtimus’ object of affection.

The chapters of her life fill every screen. On one she’s crashing a driver’s-ed car over a street island, on another she’s tossing her graduation cap in the air; next, she’s sipping her first bitter taste of beer, being kissed by a guy in the darkness of a movie theater, wincing at the stain of her first period, riding on a swing pushed by her father from behind till finally she’s blowing out ten candles on a birthday cake and right after she’s standing small and alone next to a bed – a deathbed, I figure, of the same man, her father who on a better day would've looked like a jolly, ruddy-cheeked Colonel Sanders with plenty of love handles to go around. But this time he can't put on a brave face for his daughter because there’s something irreversibly broken inside him.

She’s in ponytails and as thin as a reed but there’s no mistaking whose younger version she is because even at such young age she’s already stunning, with her light blue eyes as cool and sparkling as a flash of sea spray and her dark brown hair bringing forth the wonderful contrast.

Now each and every frame focuses on the girl, her eyes flashing a maturity far beyond her years of age. All the videos have flawlessly synced together to bring forth a larger-than-life, segmented recording of that precise moment when a girl chooses to become a woman; the very first time she wills herself never to cry again. For some reason, all the videos end here.

“As a child she wasn't a stranger to death,” Sephtimus suddenly starts narrating in my head yet also from somewhere inside the father’s bedroom. The words themselves sound disembodied and the fact that the personification of death is talking about himself again as a separate incident isn’t lost on me.

“There were many departures around her, as there are around each and every meat always. First, Granny’s stroke. Next, Uncle Tony’s lung cancer. Then her mother was the victim of a traffic accident. It was difficult enough watching the people who make up your world leave one by one, the constant fear of being left all by yourself, but it was even harder not to understand what was going on and not to be able to talk about it with anyone. It was all the grownups' fault thinking they could hide death by not mentioning it, when death was in every drop of water they drank, every breath of air they took, every wisp of dream they dreamt.

“She watched her father as she had watched her uncle leave little by little, day by day. Slowly and painfully learning to give up the fight. The young girl could smell sickness inside the room, between the sheets and under the leaves of the potted plants where no medicine or prayer could reach. She knew the smell all too well; so well in fact that when it came time for me to severe her comatose father's umballicus, out of the blue she raised her head and whispered. By all appearances to an empty room, she spoke: ‘Take me.’

“She had just lifted her head from the fold of her arms. She had been crying by her father's side and her eyes as she looked up to vacant space were red and swollen but all wrung out of tears. Inside them were blue circles of such awareness and concentration that they had me frozen to the spot. She looked about a hundred years older in the bottomless pits of those irises. And in spite of those silly ponytails and pink floral dress, she was ethereal. Ethereal, I tell you, not beautiful or lovely or whatever it is you call those who simply fall short. She was at that moment a glimpse, an apparition of the exquisite creature she was to become. Death could do that to a mortal. Take away everything from her. Eat her down to the bone, so to speak. Until there was nothing left except sheer will and the most basic instinct to survive. Shining like a diamond shaped by great forces under the earth.

“I was standing to her left and she was looking in the opposite direction, but for some reason she had her head cocked slightly like a deer on the scent of a predator. All this from a nine-year-old was enough to make me wonder if my presence had indeed been felt, which would be quite the feat.

“Humans can never see us reapers except if we allow them to. We stand inches from your faces, poke our finger in your food, in your eye, in your nose, but you never once feel a breeze. We stalk behind cash registers at a store robbery, inside ambulances on their way to the ER, in steamy bathrooms where you die naked all alone; but nobody ever realizes we are there. Thirteen years ago in front of this nine-year-old was the closest I’ve ever come to being discovered by a mortal.

“She was delirious from grief. So much emotion caged inside that small chest. She rose. Then, realizing that one point in the air was the same as any other, she focused her eyes, bent all her spirit and will to it and repeated the words in her native tongue: ‘Take me. Let my Papino live and I shall freely give myself to you.’

“I chose to stand in front of her and bend down to her height to meet her gaze. And for a moment it did appear like she was looking me in the eye. She said: ‘Yes, I'm young. I'm only nine and I don’t know anything. It's easy for me to speak of these things because my life doesn't mean anything to me.’

“I nodded somberly while holding her gaze.  

“ ‘Then you should wait till I'm older’,” she continued without any encouragement. She said: 'Til I've started enjoying my life, to the peak as you so desire, then take me at that time. When it shall be the sweetest for you to rob me of something truly precious.’

“I couldn't believe it. What an intriguing concept! To have the opportunity to raise your lamb, feed her, watch her grow, and then lead her to slaughter. It was novel and perfect in its simplicity. What I would’ve simply brushed aside as frivolous amusement was at that moment wisdom coming from the mouth of a child! I guess being around dying people does have a peculiar effect on humans. She was no longer an ordinary child but a being much, much more aware. I was dumbfounded, tickled. It was a funny sight: Death stopped cold by a nine-year-old girl. You can say I was rejuvenated, for the first time in my existence spanning eons. From the ultimate knowledge of everything comes the insignificance of life and the eternal boredom of it all. Out of nowhere came this flash of a challenge, this whisper of a thrill, and I was totally smitten.

“ ‘On this exact hour thirteen years from now,’ she went on, ‘at three in the morning of October 31st, come and visit me. I shall be waiting for you.’

“I indulged her macabre game. I touched her tiny fist clenched at her side and held it in the semblance of a handshake. I made her sense me like a cold draft too, in that dark, shut room, while her whole bare arm broke out in goose bumps as big as when men still shuffled forth on their knuckles. Then I went to work.

“First, I froze the Sands of the Horologium. Next, I plucked out the rotting, almost dissolved kidneys wrapped in layers of pustules, what had been withering her father from the inside right before her eyes. So he’d live a whole decade more. I breathed the sweet breath of cherubs down the parched mouth, the sandpapery throat until he awoke with a gasp. They embraced each other and, as you fleshies are wont to say…

“They all lived happily ever after,” Sephtimus finishes with a smirk that I see inches from my face.