The End of the Day

  Charlie shook his head. “I’ve gotta get out of here,” he growled, dropping unsteady to the floor, finding his feet. “I’ve gotta … I have a job to do …”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Even the Harbinger of Death needs a break.”

  “No, I’ve … The job is more than a job, it’s … There’s a bridge, there’s a goodness, there is … I’ve got to …” He staggered, and nearly fell. Patrick caught him under the arm, held him up.

  “You’re a bloody idiot,” he muttered. “Where do you need to go?”

  He helped Charlie wobble to the backstage dressing rooms. Corridors packed with clothes and props, busy men and women with tools and radios, a buzz of noise, the sound of applause from the studio, muffled by bricks. Charlie asked for a name, explained his purpose, was directed to a door.

  Knocked once, twice.

  After a moment, the door was answered.

  The scientist, his tie ripped from his throat, his face contracted and pale, stood in the doorway.

  “What do you want?” he spat, hands shaking by his sides, knees knocking in his trousers, breath fast and hard.

  “I am the Harbinger of Death,” Charlie replied, leaning hard against the wall, as Patrick watched. “I was sent to give you this …”

  He handed over a small cardboard box. Slowly, the box wobbling in his jelly-fingered grip, the scientist took it. Opened it up.

  A tie, blue and purple, lay inside. He lifted it slowly on one finger, holding it in front of his now-bare neck. Tears began to well in his eyes, and quickly, he put it back in the box, held the box close to his chest.

  “I …” he began, and then looked down, liquid curling round the lines of his cheeks. “I … I fucked up totally, didn’t I?”

  Charlie didn’t reply.

  He raised his head now, faster, staring hard, first at Charlie, then at Patrick, and seeing nothing in Patrick’s face, looked back at Charlie, grabbed his hand, held it tight, bent in to hiss in his ear. “Reason is dead. Reason is dead. We killed it, and reason is dead.”

  So saying, he let go, and holding the tie box against his heart, stepped back inside the dressing room, and slammed the door shut.

  Patrick gave Charlie a lift back to his hotel.

  How had it got this late?

  “Can’t I take you to a doctor?” he asked, as Charlie got out of the car.

  “No. Thank you. I feel okay.”

  “You’ve got my number.”

  “Thank you. For … for tonight. I appreciate it. Thank you.”

  “Call me. I mean it. And get some rest.”

  So saying, Patrick gestured to his driver, wound the window up, and the car drove on.

  On a scale of one to five …

  That’s meaningless.

  On a scale of one to five … sleeping well?

  No.

  Eating well?

  No.

  Do you feel sad in the day?

  Yes.

  Are you worried a lot of the time?

  Yes.

  Why?

  Dying.

  Dying?

  All of it.

  All of what?

  All of it. It’s the end of a world. It’s the end of a world.

  Are you listening to me?

  Are you there?

  Can you see?

  It’s the end of the world.

  Charlie, tired, dishevelled. Been a while since he last shaved, must have not noticed, didn’t really care. Slipped his keycard into the door of his room. Door unlocked. Stepped inside. Keycard into the holder inside the door that turned the electricity on.

  Lights snapped up around the bed, drowning out the glow of the city through net curtains. The air conditioning whooshed, his eyes prickling in the sudden dry air. Went to the bathroom, had a piss, washed his face, stared in the mirror, wasn’t sure he knew the face that stared back. Walked to the bed, lay down, fully dressed, thought about turning the TV on, didn’t move.

  Didn’t move.

  Didn’t move.

  Voice outside, distracting. Rolled onto one side, reaching for his phone, and over-reached, pushing it to the floor. Flopped onto his belly, crawled to the edge of the bed, fumbled around in the carpet to pick it up. As he rose, someone knocked on the door. He staggered out of bed, still holding his phone, and answered it.

  Three men stood outside. They wore white shirts, black trousers, leather shoes.

  One said, “Mr. Harbinger of Death?”

  Charlie replied, shouted, nearly screamed it, “My name is …”

  The man who’d spoken drove a syringe, thin and white, into the side of Charlie’s neck, and caught him as he fell.

  Chapter 98

  “There is a curfew on the apartment, so if I’m not back by ten p.m. I can get locked out, and I want to know how is that safer for women, how does that make me safe. I am being imprisoned and they say it is for my own protection …?”

  “I have always loved the BBC, but I cannot support an organisation that has biased its every guest towards big business and right-wing commentary, instead of offering a balanced, expert view …”

  “Some people are better off dead.”

  “Oh my God, so this handbag, it’s just the most perfect and I was like, I need to have it and she was like, sweetie, you just got one but I was like, you don’t understand, you don’t understand, I need …”

  “People are dumb. You wanna get ahead in advertising? I’ll tell you the secret: people are dumb.”

  “The bubble will burst, just you wait, it always does.”

  “I don’t think the internet’s changed all that much, really.”

  “So I’ll have the katsu, with extra chilli flakes and some …”

  “The problem is that it may not be accessible for all our readers, and we really think that with a little work you could make more people feel more comfortable with …”

  “Boom bust boom bust boom bust …”

  Tick tick tick tick tick …

  “… eighty per cent of my time answering emails and I’m like, what even is this shit and then I don’t read it ’cos I’ve got better stuff to do and then everyone’s like, ‘but I sent an email,’ I mean shit …”

  “If you’ve been affected by any of the issues raised, then please …”

  “I left her, because with her, I wasn’t really me.”

  /*your comments here*/

  Chapter 99

  The sun rises, and Death comes to Manhattan.

  Death has been here many, many times before.

  In the good old days, she came with her brothers and sisters. Pestilence and Famine have always had a soft spot for crowded places, and War loves the music of the marching band more than any song.

  “Parp parp parp, parp parp-te-parp!” hooted War, as they watched the boys march by.

  “You’re embarrassing yourself,” Pestilence muttered, stretching out her dull, aching bones.

  Let it play, Death replied, as the ticker tape fell. Let it play.

  That was long ago, and since then even Famine has moved with the times, and sits in board meetings and says things like, “It’s not about the quantity; it’s about the method of distribution.”

  Death has moved with the times too. Witness her choice of

  Harbinger. Once—once she chose her Harbingers to strike terror into the hearts of men, once they were demagogues who raged against the rising sun, who walked through fields ploughed with salt and shook their fists at the raven and the moon …

  … but now.

  Now Death comes to Manhattan, and she stays in a four-star hotel off the Avenue of the Americas, and will be taking advantage of the complimentary face mask treatment, thank you, because who wouldn’t really, if given the chance?

  Times being what they are?

  In Harlem.

  “I knew you’d come,” whispered the old woman. “When I’m gone, no one will remember how this street was, before the world changed.”

  I remember, Death replied, as t
he woman’s eyes slipped shut. I always remember these things.

  At the precinct.

  “I shot him,” whispered the cop. “I shot him. I was so fucking scared. I was so fucking scared and he was just a kid and I shot him. Jesus. Oh Jesus.”

  He didn’t just shoot the kid—he shot him three times in the head, five times in the chest, then switched rounds and shot him another three times in the chest and twice in the leg, before his colleagues managed to restrain him. The boy was trying to pull out his wallet with some ID. He was drunk; he didn’t really understand what was happening.

  Death holds the boy’s mother as she cries. Death walks with the funeral procession on a day too bright, too blue for a child’s mourning. Death sits with the policeman as his world falls apart. You’ve been so scared for so long, she breathes. You’ve been so frightened of me your whole life. Now we’re here, you don’t have to be scared any more.

  At the nursing home.

  “Doctor said I would see you when I was just a young man. But they were wrong and I lived. I have been stuck in this chair and I have not used my hands for so many years but I lived. I lived.”

  Death kissed the man on the forehead. You lived, he replied. And you were wonderful.

  At the university.

  “Professor, will you apologise for the remarks you made on the show, will you resign, what do you say to the threats of legal action against …”

  The scientist, slamming the door shut, cutting out the noise, pressing his back against the wood, dragging in breath.

  Death waited on the other side of the room, one leg slung across his desk, the other perching on the floor.

  For a while, the two faced each other, the scholar and the end, until at last the scientist said, “Reason is dead.”

  Death shrugged.

  “Was there ever a time when to be human meant we valued these things? When the height of humanity was invested in these attributes—logic, thought, reason, enlightenment, the betterment of society, the good of the whole, the …” He stopped, half choking on the words, then took a deep breath, and tried again. “As a boy, I grew up in a time of invention, of aspiration and wonderful dreams, and to be a scientist, a doctor, an engineer—these things were considered the greatest paths man could take. We walked on the moon and the world as a collective creature breathed a sigh of wonderment and delight, one species, one dream, a dream of … or did I imagine it? Was I in fact living in a fantasy, in which I saw only what I wanted to see? Have I made the past something romantic, and in fact it’s always been this, we’ve always been this species, and everything I believed, I believed to make myself feel better? I made this dream of reason my form of God? Is that the truth?”

  Death didn’t answer.

  The man staggered towards him, until they were just a few feet apart, stared deeply into Death’s eyes, saw a thing he could not look at, shuddered and turned away.

  His hand, on the desk, knocked something in a small cardboard box. He hesitated, then picked it up, opened it.

  Inside, a garish blue and purple tie.

  He lifted it up, turned it this way and that, feeling the silk, watching the light play on the colour. Then slowly, he flicked his collar up, threaded the tie through the cotton, and began to tie the knot.

  Death watched him.

  When the last loop was tight, he stood stiffly to attention, shoulders back, chin level, and said, “Reason is not dead. Not while I fight for it.”

  Death smiled, slipped down from the desk, and without another word, passed on by.

  One last call, before her work is done.

  She finds Robinson on her third day, sitting in the sculpture garden of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

  Inside, prayers written on pieces of card: We pray for social equality. We pray not to judge people by their skin, creed or colour. We pray that we might respect all people, whatever their sexual choices …

  Candles burn, and a haze machine pumps thin mist into the high, high ceilings of the place, so that it seems that shafts of light are spearing the vaults of heaven, and Robinson sits outside. He smells of sweat and the street, of dirt and the corners of doors. He smells of rotten cheese, and when he leaves a shop, having begged for a drink, a bite to eat, his stench lingers after him, like dust in the air.

  In these few days, his beard has grown and his body has shrivelled, and he sits now, knees curled to his chest, holding his suitcase, scuffed, the top bent by the weight of his head where it has been his pillow.

  Death sits down next to him, and Robinson raises his head, slowly, so slowly, to see her at last.

  He smiles, teeth furry and aching. “Wondered where you were,” he breathed. “Wondered when you’d come.”

  Wordlessly, Death held out the packet of peanuts that she’d been munching, and with shaking hands Robinson took the proffered plastic, tipped a few nuts into the dirty palm of his hand, and began to eat, one at a time, popping each salty treat onto his tongue and chewing as if it was medicine.

  “Brother’s business failed. Few years back, never told anyone. Too ashamed. I didn’t tell him neither what had happened to me. Think he saw that I was ashamed too. He does construction now. Works on the sites. Don’t think he’s any good, but he knows a few people, gets shifts where he can. Who’d have thought it’d fail, business like that, men always need tools, always, it’s how you know you’re doing something right, being a man, making something and … anyway. It went down. I was close to paying off the debt, back in Florida, back south. I was down to twenty-four thousand dollars. Twenty-four thousand! I was at eighty five years ago, if they’d just waited, if they’d just given me a chance … but that was on top of the mortgage, I guess, so … When you’re poor, banks don’t lend. Poor people ain’t as safe a bet as rich ones, so if they do lend, the rates, well they’re more than your projected profit so you can’t start nothing new, not on rates like that, so you have to go to someone … different. More flexible. I shouldn’t have, but it were the only way I knew to make it so that …

  “… anyway. I guess you know all this, don’t you?”

  Death offered him a slurp from her bottle of water, to wash the salt down. He drank, deeper than he’d meant, nearly choking on the clear, cool fluid. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, shifted his position a little, shoulders back, staring at the sky.

  “How’s Charlie doing?” he asked at last. “I really liked Charlie, by the end.”

  I haven’t heard from him for a little while.

  “He’s a good guy.”

  Yes. He is.

  “I appreciated the lift. For all that … I appreciated the lift.”

  You’re welcome.

  “Am I gonna die?”

  No. Not today.

  “But … why are you here?”

  Death sighed, creaking her head from side to side, working out an old ache. What did Charlie tell you?

  “That everybody dies. That everybody sees death, but the looking is all.” He thought about it a little longer, then added, “That sometimes you come for ideas, as well as people.”

  Silence a little while. Then Death said, There is this dream, in America. There is this wonderful dream. I remember when I first understood it, it was so incredible, I nearly wept, and I am not renowned for my sentimentality. It said that if you worked, and if you cared, and if you believed in yourself, you could do anything. There was no bar to the potential or the achievement of man, there was nothing that stood between him and fulfilling his every aspiration.

  I went to Georgia and I held the hand of an old woman, and she died so proudly because her granddaughter is learning how to work in new technologies, and will not live the life that she lived or be what she was, and she was laughing, at the end. She was laughing with joy to think of it, even as her heart stopped. This dream. Who knows what the daughter will be, but this dream, it surrounds her in a halo of light. In North Carolina a woman made her world, and having made her world she made this world a better p
lace, and when she died she spoke of the future, even though her life was gone, but always, still, the future.

  I am with a man now who rides his last storm, we will meet in the eye and he will rejoice in all that he has done, and it was mighty, and he is beautiful. All those who now I touch, they are so beautiful, and so many of them are lifted up and given light by this dream. This incredible dream. It is a dream of freedom, and like a flag, freedom has many meanings. The dream is in the hands of the men who buy assault rifles from their local store; it is in the eyes of the surfers as they ride before the wave. It is on the tongues of the men who run beneath the monuments in Washington; it is in the prayers of the churchgoers of this cathedral; it is in the eyes of the child who learns to read, in the whispers of the father watching his son grow up. It is a dream worth honouring. It is a dream that is most fit for the living.

  Robinson nodded, holding his suitcase tight, and didn’t meet Death’s eye.

  “I got nowhere to go,” he said at last.

  I know.

  “I got nothing. No money. Don’t know anyone here. No bank will respect my name, I ain’t got no security, no healthcare. Last night some dude pissed on me, ’cos I was there and he felt like it. He pissed on me like I was nothing, like I were …”

  A rat?

  Words failing, Robinson nodded.

  Death waited until the man’s tongue could speak again.

  “I believe in that dream,” he whispered. “I believe in it. I believe in the potential of every man, woman and child. I believe that we can all make something of ourselves, that the world is there waiting to be … waiting to be seized and that … that …” His words faded away again. He looked down, at dirt.