No Word in Death's Favor (Part III)
The Runaway reaches the final destination and there finds what he is looking for. It is Satisfaction, so Death says.
This is the third and final part of a longer story. Thus, if you have not read Parts I and II, I highly suggest you do. They are both available for free on The Wayfarer. You can find them by clicking the links below.
And so the Runaway remained behind The Guide and followed him to the Final Destination, where he soon arrived. Finally. They arrived finally in that Final Destination and what awaited them there? A Dead Man - or, at least, a man resembling a Dead Man, resembling Death himself - who, like Virgilio, wore no shirt, his bare skin visible only under the flashlight of The Guide (yes, he'd been sitting by himself in the dark, waiting, lurking, anticipating the unanticipated Runaway as he had anticipated every runaway before him and will anticipate every runaway after until the sewer system finally gives in and collapses over him like a heel bashing in the head of a snake), and his skin clung tightly to his bones, stretched over his ribcage like a tight rubber glove on a closed fist. He - the Dead Man, Death himself - lurched over his bird-nest chest with his elbows on his knee and one hand over his face. What was he sitting on? A chair? A box? A pile of bones? The Runaway did not know. He could not know. Most of the Dead Man and his surroundings were shrouded in darkness resembling not shadow, but void, as if darkness itself was emanating out of the Final Destination and into the rest of The Underground and out into the world, into life, feeding every shadow, every nightfall, every inch of the unfathomable expanse of empty space, devouring the light of even the most gigantic stars.
Death had bones etched onto his fingers. Not tattooed. Etched. Etched not with ink, but with scar tissue; with fire or red-hot metal, or with a razor blade. Pale lines protruded from his skin tracing each nimble phalanx, each bone inside his outward-facing backhand. When he lowered his hand, The Guide's light shined on his face, revealing to The Runaway eyes as black as the nothingness that surrounded him. They were so black that The Runaway knew they were the Final Destination. They were the source of the darkness. They were Darkness. And just as they spawned darkness into the world, they were too like cosmic vacuums, as if they could pull the world and everything in it - every particle of matter and every immaterial soul - into pure oblivion, pure nonexistence in a single sweep of irresistible gravity. The light of The Guide also revealed a face - a face covered with more scars, lines outlining the face of the skull underneath it. Yes, this was a Dead Man. This was Death.
And it was he who had what The Runaway was looking for. It was in his other hand, in his wrinkled palm facing up toward the ceiling, toward the many upward layers of Hell that towered above this one. And in that palm was a silver cup and in that cup was some sort of liquid which appeared no more or no less liquid than any other liquid, yet was before him as the solution to all of his problems, as an answer to his most sincere desires. Sincere, so he thought. There, before The Runaway's face and in the palm of Death, in that cup adorned with little silver skulls, there was Satisfaction. There it was once and for all.
"This is it?" the Runaway asked. He asked, not to The Guide, but to the Dead Man.
"This is what you seek," answered the Dead Man boldly, mystically, as if a prophet uttering a prophecy from Satan or from God. "This is what all of us seek, all of us from the First Man to the last, all who have suffered and wanted not to suffer. This is the ire of mankind, the object of all wars, all clashes of will, for this is the object of all will itself. This is everything, everything at least that can matter to a self that seeks itself. The self could not ask for more, and all you must do is drink it, and it is yours."
"And what'll it do?"
"It'll do exactly what you think it will do. Ease your suffering."
"How?"
"How matters not. What matters is only that it does."
"But will it hurt me?"
"Hurt? How will it hurt if you are no longer permitted to suffer?"
Perhaps a smart person would have an answer to that question. But The Runaway was not smart. He was only smart enough to be a runaway. And that was all he was, not a boy, but a runaway. He had ceased to be a boy when he left his home that was not a home, and he ceased to be anything else but a runaway. And he wanted what all runaways want. He wanted something. And there it was: something, but he did not know what it was.
"I don't want to die," was all the Runaway could muster. It was all he could say because he was not smart enough to say anything else. Nor was he brave.
"Then why'd you come here? Why'd you come to The Underground?"
"For Satisfaction. That's why I came."
"And what is Satisfaction, but Death?" asked Death himself. What is Satisfaction but him?
Once again, The Runaway lacked the intelligence and courage to procure an answer. Once again, he was lost for words. Once again, he was being fooled by Death into dying like the two idiots who first picked the apple off the tree.
And Death fooled him further.
"What is life, but suffering? To live is to suffer, do you not know? And to cease to suffer is to cease to live. It is to die. You know this deep down. You believe it because you are here. You came into the darkness from the light because the light only served to show you that you were miserable, and you could only hide that misery in darkness. What you seek is not to see but to unsee, not thought but thoughtlessness, not knowledge but ignorance, not existence but annihilation, for in existence is struggle. In existence is pain. One cannot experience pain only if he does not experience, for experience presupposed existence and to exist is to be, but also become, and those two forces are perpetually at war. War, you see, is the spirit of life, and peace can only be found in death. For war will tear life apart, and death is, therefore, inevitable, but to prolong the inevitable is to hurt. So, no, this medicine, this cure, this solution of all solutions, it will not hurt you. It will only render you nonexistent, and you will be no more, here no longer to suffer. You will be nothing at all, free to be nothing, free to not exist, finally at peace, spared from a struggle that you for too long took for granted as offering reward when that reward shall never be realized. See, you are worthy of death, not because of your weakness, but because of your strength. You might not think yourself strong, but it is you who made it here, made it here without drowning in the dim grayness that lies between here and outside, between the darkness and the light, without desperately attempting to escape suffering not through death but through distractions or through science or through art. None serve to abate but only prolong. There is only one abatement. And that is the one which is permanent."
"There ain't nothing better... ain't nothing better than death?"
"No, there isn't, dear friend," Death said, raising the silver cup with a smile. "There isn't anything sweeter in this world. Take what I say as true and drink from me. Drink from me and die."
And the Runaway, still unsure, but not smart or brave enough to be sure one way or the other or cautious enough to act in the face of his doubt, fearfully and uncertainly grasped the cup with both hands.
He held the cup to his lips.
And Death, as articulate as he has always been, won over The Runaway at last, claiming him as his own. And The Runaway ceased to be the Runaway or anything at all and became nothing.
Epilogue
The Priest, now without blood on his hands but not yet reconciled to The Light allowed The Poor Momma to spill tears into the fabric of that black shirt which was the same color as his skin. He held her tight and let her mourn the loss of Her Beloved. Her Beloved: he who did not know who he was, did not know he was Her Beloved, who had forsaken The Light for darkness through his quest to forsake what he thought was nothing for what he thought was something. Now, Her Beloved was no more, dead and gone, claimed by The Underground. His body was nothing but ash in an urn because that Poor Momma, who had not even been able to afford to be present at home for Her Beloved, could now not afford a coffin and a plot and could only fork up so many weeks' savings to afford him fire and clay.
And so they - The Priest and The Poor Momma - found themselves outside that subsidized door of that subsidized unit through which a boy once walked and became a runaway then became nothing, in front of that door in the ghetto under that hot Southern sun, which summoned sweat from the pores of The Priest's black skin under his black shirt, as he let The Poor Momma be a poor momma and do what poor mommas do: lament poor lost beloved sons, lost to the darkness and lost from the Life, fooled by Death to become not something but nothing.
The Priest let the Poor Momma lament and concealed the fact that he knew more than she did. He knew that he knew more than she did about the darkness because he knew about the darkness more than any man. He knew about the darkness because he'd been there. He had been in the darkness of his own volition, a runaway in a cleric's clothes. He had been there, a runaway with blood on his hands about to take up death's sinister offer because he had forgotten what he had once known. He had once known he was loved and he forgot it. So he forsook The One who loved him, just as that boy walked out of that subsidized door and forsook the Poor Momma. And The Priest was about to be fooled by death's silver-tongued, silver-toothed argument and drink from that silver cup. But he ultimately did not choose to do so. He did not because he remembered Who loved him by looking over his shoulder and past The Guide and into the end of the tunnel, where The Light was, The Light which the darkness could not conquer. It was far away, but It drew him out. It drew him out and gave him hope.
Yes, there was hope, hope as long as he turned around and returned back to The Light - hope not of avoiding suffering, but of something to make the suffering mean something, Hope of Love.
And so he left. He left and crawled out of The Underground into The Light and into Love. And, at that moment, holding the Poor Momma against his chest, holding her under the sun, under The Light, he knew what he must do. He must be reconciled. He must accept the consequences of his transgressions, sinister as they may have been. He must admit to his crimes and suffer but suffer under The Light.
For, in life is suffering and, in suffering, there is Life.
And that is what makes life worth living.
"My poor baby! My poor baby!" The Poor Momma wailed, Her Beloved's urn and ashes somewhere on a smoke-scented shelf inside where the sunlight could not reach.
"Tell me, Father," she begged. "Tell me. Is he in a better place? Tell me he's in a better place."
And The Priest said nothing.
L.W. Blakely is a writer in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of The Wayfarer, a newsletter where he publishes literary fiction, criticism, and musings. Learn more about L.W. and The Wayfarer on the About page, or (if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read) consider subscribing and sharing his work.