Who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t flown her in!
But thus, if not devoting yourself to mortality in the name of wealth, then why? For fame?
Ha! Ha, ha! How much of Death do you know? Truly? How many times have you been intimately acquainted with her? Poured her coffee over breakfast? (Caffeine thins the blood!) Shared some home-bake? Watch that cholesterol! How many times does Death reach the heights of even minor celebrity? Perhaps in those occasional TV appearances when you see her “on” in cafes and bars on the beachfront or in the lobbies of larger hotels, spread-eagle on the floral floor or crashing through a fish tank? But no, perhaps not even then. Death can visit a department store unguarded, and stand in a long line unattended, even as she arrives at her very moment. Death can drive through small towns at speed, without a posse of police, a signpost of sheriffs. Not Death! She can dig her front garden in broad daylight, black as the heart of good garlic, until her breath races and the sweat pours off her deceasing brow. Plant petunias even, she can, create borders of lilacs in a climate (incidentally) not conducive to either. And still no one, no one at all, notices. She takes holidays to “resorts”, in sun and in shade, half-naked as the day she was . . . and is subsequently ignored around the vibrant morning buffet.
“Nice eggs, lady. What’s with the scythe?”
Fame? Ha! Not so! The Death I know is hard pressed to get someone to notice her, even as she races to the front of the stage. So . . .
Money? Fame? No! Then it must be, you say, because Death is among us devoting herself to a higher cause. That Death (Angel of the Abyss, Pesta, Mother Time, Santa Meurte, Rider of the Pale Horse, the robed skeleton, Namuss and Lean, Woman in the Wind, The Final Encountress) is seeking out the otherworldly that dwells beneath (or beside, perhaps) the daily lives of you, or I or others we know? Death commits to the co-committant. Impossible science! Yaahah! She is a signatory to the cause of unsuccess! That Death (forthwith and so forth and so on) here on The Communion Islands hereby devotes herself to the inner workings of human fading so that in each unseen aspect of you and I, our loved and our loving, our superlunary selves, through the delving into the deep moment of heartache or the reasons for an unexpected lump, in seeing you before 9.00 or sending you for a test, in laboratories shiny and wet with life or in the hardbound leather of a hard to comprehend journal and the hard cold pad of a scope, in couches and on beds, in cases of glass and mahogany where dwells an unknown bone, or so it seems, and the metallic instrument of some rarely discussed human truth, in the steady gaze of concern or the conventions of knowledge so specialist that the language is another country, another planet even, Death, unafraid of the unseen or of darkness, determined, unrelenting, given to live where we ordinary folk will not, principled, pursuing, a brave soul, a braver heart, this one, ours and theirs together, being equipped and installed at our forefront, is devoted entirely, without reticence or grimace, to the cause of human departure.
Do you know this woman intimately? No? Then know this: the truth of the matter is far more complicated.
4.
“You know what?” I said to Mee (now appropriately dead), as I stepped into our breezy seaside office in the world of the living, “word is that Rudd is going out to Spook Reef tonight to hunt for the elusive razor eel.”
Mee, Rudd: two living humans. An electric eel sparkingly slithered between the two of us and out onto our earthen runway, metaphorically speaking.
“That’s a surprise,” murmured Mee, into a nearby manila file, his thinning auburn hair aflame and his good eye alight, “I would have thought it was the wrong moon.”
“Oh,” I said, “You know something about The Moon? I thought you were more the terrestrial type? Earth. Larvae, wrigglers, grubbage, and the like?”
Mee shrugged hugely, like an old silver ape perplexed with an abandoned bean tin.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I said, “I don’t doubt you’ve eyed the Heavens. But you’re hardly a cosmologist, are you?” I said.
He seemed to be contemplating the attitude of our solitary rubber plant as it dipped its wide open arms toward the even more open window and the blistering sun beyond.
“No matter. Razor eel wait for no man.”
Poor Mee. Pronounced “mere”, incidentally; not, as some insist, “mea”.
Meanwhile, down at what then sufficed as the local clinic bat-loving old Death had turned up and, not to put too fine a point on it, all Hell was breaking loose.
5.
“I demand to see him,” she cried, having explained this three times previously, one shot fired closely across the bow of another. Math is immortal, as many will know. You might expect that these previous requests go largely unrecorded, but here is the extent of it:
I don’t want to bore you with meandary. Suffice it, Death had “wished”, she had “desired”, and she had “wanted”. With each addition to her ghostly barrage her voice rose a full octave, climbing the ladder of trouble. Tres loon! The bat-loving necrologist was now fully firing.
Perhaps there is something in the bat world of Death’s that would explain her irritation, her lively unrest there on the harbour front. Something in the world of the dying that is batly antithetical to our more general human understanding and feelings for life. Something frugivorous or nectarivorous, that comes with gritted variegated culmination and cannot be understood until you reach this, a blindness to a lack of person, to a person’s clear non-presence—because at that point Death was darting her eyes back and forth, from one corner to another of that front room of the office we locally called ‘the clinic’. No foresight could confirm the lack of the county clerk, no hearing could hear him there. But maybe, just maybe, that was what was going on, as Death flapped and swooped and echolocated her deadly way around the room. Perhaps it was this thin-winged and short-tempered battiness that drove our first encounter with Death to demand from the pale young woman behind the counter more information. Perhaps it was that Death’s mother had been born on the islands herself and her sense of inherited ownership flowed, much like lava seems to possess a sense of right as it engulfs your garden shed and makes its way up over the gasping family dog.
“Well, no,” said Penny Apple, white haired and priming one of her well known grimaces that doubles as her youthful smile. That smile sat on her pale pink lipsticked lips like a bright fly before her withering voice, “he is not . . . here . . . yet. But. . .”
Or perhaps, speculating a moment - and this is always possible - perhaps bats had nothing to do with what was unfolding in the clerk’s office, and Death’s motives were far more self-serving than we were ever to discover, either then or now.
“Buuuuut?” Death cried, positively (and negatively) charged, all at once. An increasingly ionic pompadoured bat-lover.
“Well, mam . . . ” began Penny, attempting to approach hot inveigling Fate; but then, noticing the fatefully darkening wings above front of her from across the clerk’s desk, fell into such a white fuzz behind the counter of the clerk’s office that she already appeared more like a shiny statue of a girl than an actual living person.
An aside: the current Communion Island Apples are, as their very name suggests, remnants of a long lived dynasty of local apple entrepreneurs (“An Apple a Day . . . ”) whose orchards once began at southern Mount Welson and, travelling the lower slopes as the best apples do (on account of the frost and the weeviling life that dwells beneath those
