Current mood:

stuck

NaNoWriMo Words 1,094 - 2,311
Scientists say that from the moment we are born, we begin to die. I can’t deny that it’s true, although I’d modify the words a bit. When an infant is born into the world, he already has a handful of tasks to accomplish: learn to make demands through cries and whimpers, learn to crawl, learn to walk, learn to talk, learn to use the potty, learn how to manipulate mommy into giving attention just because. It’s daunting, and takes several years to learn those things. When a person dies an infant, they have the most difficult time transitioning into death because they have such a minute library to fall back on. From the moment we are born, we are preparing ourselves for death. This is where the opinion of the dead differs from that of earthly scientists. Death is much easier for the elderly, because they’ve had the longest time to prepare for the transition. Sure, some people waste their earthly time and don’t worry about it, but that is not always the case. I’ve been told that a man who lived to be a hundred in five died and did not need to take a single class on death. Or at least, that’s what they like to tell us freshmen to get our asses in gear. There’s really not a lot of time to waste once you’ve died.


My pick up was a man named Andrew, and he was late. I hadn’t remembered math, so I couldn’t tell you how many people had followed the hazel-eyed woman into the room. I noticed Andrew because he wasn’t like the others. Like me, he was a distant part of the equation. I can’t tell you what Andrew looked like. Dead people don’t really have a look to them, they just are. Somehow I knew he was there, and he knew that I was there. So few humans can communicate as clearly as the dead without words. Andrew and I had never met before, but I understood perfectly what he was telling me.

I wish I could say I left the scene reluctantly, because I did not know the answers yet. Truth be told, I was eager to leave the busy-bodied bedroom with Andrew. I had already labeled just about everything that I could, and couldn’t quite comprehend the force of what was going on. It would come in time, Andrew told me. I would learn about life now that I was dead.

The first few minutes of death are crucial, as the relearning process is what allows the dead to understand life. If the first few hours after time of death are lost, the dead have a difficult road ahead of them. There are prerequisite classes before one can really be engrossed in learning to be dead. Few people have to relearn sight, but a handful has to learn to hear and to move. Most have to at the very least learn how to remember. Andrew enrolled me in Sound, Verbal Communication, Memory Over Time, and Spatial Relation, all of which took me less than five minutes to relearn. Suddenly, thoughts poured out. Andrew called it word vomit, and caught most of it in a bottomless-sack.

“This is normal,” he told me. It was the first real thing I heard anyone speak, and to be able to understand it instead of only scattered noises was like a eating a magical lollipop. More word vomit poured out of my mouth, and Andrew continued to catch it. “It happens to everyone. You don’t understand why you died, so shit’s gonna keep pouring out. Trust me, we go back to the scene and it will all make sense.”

If only it were so easy. Andrew had been late, and I missed a lot in the five minutes I spent relearning. I understood that the body that had been crumpled on the floor was mine, but the human discovery had already been made. The hazel-eyed woman and her posse of less emotional bandits had moved it, and my impression of what it had looked like was not so clear. When Andrew and I arrived, the gun was sliding across the floor as if someone had thrown it, and I couldn’t quite remember which hand it had been in. The blood pools had smeared and it was all over the woman as she cradled my former body in her arms. She shook it as if she could awaken me from sleep. I wondered who the hell she was.

“Why were you late?” I asked Andrew, the first thing that had fallen from me that he hadn’t caught in the sack.

A short grunt of laughter came from him. “You gonna blame me?” he chuckled. “Look at your body. You got a hole in the back of your head; you had a gun in your hand. You commit suicide. No one is there waiting for you to get dead when you commit suicide.”

“I commit suicide?” That question needed no answer though I was surprised nonetheless. I noticed things I had not noticed before: splattered pieces of my brain on the wall; a bottle of pills sprinkled all over the floor. The woman was behaving so strangely, rocking back and forth with the body and trying to put the pieces of tissue and skull back into the head. “My baby, my baby!” she kept weeping. I have to admit it was kind of funny. Here was some woman that I didn’t recognize, practically dancing with a lifeless corpse. And that’s just it! It was a corpse! I’d already registered in the After Life; I’d already taken my perquisites! Didn’t she understand that?

Paramedics arrived to pronounce me dead, but the woman screamed at them to save me, to breathe some life into me or fix me somehow. A tall, broad-shouldered man took her aside; he practically had to restrain her. “Ma’am,” he commanded her to calm down in a way that came out: “There is nothing more we can do for her.”

“My little girl!” she sobbed. “My baby!”

I turned to Andrew with a sigh of frustration. “Why does she keep calling it that?” I still had difficulty correlating the body with myself. “I wasn’t a baby, I wasn’t little. I think I was in my twenties or something.”

Andrew laughed again. He had the sort of deep, echoing laugh that gave the impression of long, working days in the sun. “Sometimes the living remember the dead in the time they loved them the most,” he said. “Your mother has happy memories of your childhood.”

Finding the resemblance between a living woman and a dead girl is difficult. “She’s my mother?” I asked Andrew, as if somehow he knew all of the answers. The image of her fearful eyes filled me, and I remembered what it was like to understand that feeling again. She was my mother! No wonder she had acted the way she did! An uncomfortable feeling crept over me, like my stomach had filled with mud. “How can she be my mother?” I whined. “Shouldn’t I remember my own mother?”

Andrew gave a knowing smile, looking at me with amused curiosity. “Do you remember your name?” The answer was no. I couldn’t remember anything at all.