This site, as some of you know, was set up to keep an honest record of my failings in writing competitions. In truth I was planning to break that record at some point, with an amazing example of literary genius which I could humbly present to you with an accompanying certificate of victory. The record, however, remains boldly in tact.

The following is a bit special in that it has not failed in one competition, but two. Badly.

I record it here as a service to other aspiring writers, as evidence that, no matter how bad you seem to yourself, there is always somebody worse.

****************

Life After Life

 

The journey to the afterlife is a long one. Queues leading to the gates are seemingly eternal. Before drawing the final mortal breath, therefore, one would be well advised to find a bathroom.

Though no one really plans for these things, of course. My own arrival was particularly inconvenient, coming as it did, only a month before my scheduled return to society and my demise eventually led me to an impressive mahogany desk where sat a stern woman who introduced herself simply as Jane.

“How are you?” she asked pointlessly.

“Busting,” I replied.

“Down the hall. Third door on the left. Don’t forget to wash your hands.”

 

When I returned, relieved but still not entirely at home with the situation, she handed me a clipboard and pencil, with pages and pages of questions to answer. “Let me know if you need any help.”

The questions seemed utterly pointless, under the circumstances. Cause of Death, for example. The one thing that you are guaranteed not to recall with certainty is your own death. My last living memory was of standing with Clive in the exercise yard and that there was a lot of shouting going on. Then it all goes blank.

“Murder,” I wrote on the form, not only because it seemed probable given the location, but also because I thought it sounded sort of hip. Jane was unimpressed. Hipness doesn’t count for much once your heart stops beating. It probably never did.

Page after monotonous page the questionnaire continues, though. Political Biases, Sibling Rivalry, Former Unfounded Religious Beliefs, Higher Education, Lower Education, Favourite Fruit, Mother’s Maiden Name, Father’s Golf Handicap. When I got to the one entitled Sexual Peculiarities I slammed the pencil down on the desk. “Listen, lady, does any of this stuff matter now?”

“No,” she replied with bored formality, before leaning over the desk and adding, “nothing matters, but sometimes it helps to pretend that something does.”

I continued. ‘Previous Employment’ – ‘Bank robber’, I wrote, but it was a lie. I’d robbed about half a dozen drugstores and a gas station.

But, regardless of experience, everyone gets a token job in the afterlife. There’s still no such thing as a free lunch. The employment selection process itself is entirely random though, and I was thus appointed ‘Associate-Professor of Archaeology,’ here at the University.

Archaeology loses all meaning once the concept of infinite time sets in, but I nevertheless spend my working hours shuffling through papers and pretending to make sense of them, though they might as well be written Ancient Greek, as far as I care. Many of them are, apparently.

Once every semester I assign marks to the students based upon the flip of a coin. Nobody complains because, in the end, there’s no difference between success and failure. “Failure is its own reward’, Clive misquoted to me, only recently. But it’s really all about equality, here in the hereafter, so when a guy claiming to be Tutankhamun dropped by my office the other day to use the photocopier I charged him fifteen cents a page, just like everybody else.

*

A lot of people describe the afterlife as though it were a prison, but most of them have never been inside a prison. I have, and I assure you that, comparatively speaking, there’s no denial of freedom here. You can go anywhere you want to, any time you feel like it. But no matter where you go or when, you’ll discover that you’ve been there already. And that you’ve never really been anywhere else.

Clive, my old cellmate, viewed prison as an acknowledgement of one’s achievements, rather than as a penalty. “All good serial killers aspire to getting caught,” he informed me once, “and that’s why we set up patterns that the police can easily follow. We leave our signatures everywhere. It’s all about being noticed.”

He was right, I suppose. Life was all about being noticed.

Clive murdered seventeen librarians in twelve states in less than five years. Each had been strangled and discovered with a blank library card neatly tucked behind the left ear.

“Why librarians?” I gently inquired one day.

“Originality. Prostitutes and nuns had already been done to death by my heroes. It was never anything personal.”

I’m not sure that I really believed him about that last bit. Clive is illiterate and a homicidal grudge against librarians has a certain macabre logic to it.

But he certainly had no grudge against the prison system. “Look around you,” he would frequently advise me, waving his arms about inside the concrete walls and iron bars, “what more could you ask for? The beds are comfy, and the television reception is nearly perfect.”

Every night, after another serving of slop, he would insist upon his compliments being conveyed to the chef.

Blind optimism sometimes goes hand in hand with a poor education.

*

I should make more mention of Jane, the woman who, as I say, inducted me here, and functioned as my sponsor. In life she had been a professional golfer, before being involved in a multi-car pileup on the I-90. Postmortem, for the sake of appearances, they sewed her head back on. But it was a cheap job and so now for eternity, she seems to be focusing on something or somebody about 3ft to the left of target. It can be a bit off-putting at first.

“Don’t bother with any ‘handicap’ jokes,” she murmured after explaining this to me,  “because I’ve heard them all before.”  

Jane doesn’t have a great sense of humour, anyway. Violent death does that to some people. Nevertheless, it turns out that everybody likes Jane.

I recall losing interest towards the end of the induction process and beginning to skip those questions for which I didn’t have immediate answers. Jane leaned over the desk and pointed to one of them called, ’Revisitation Particulars.’

“It’s the standard phantasm application,” she explained matter-of-factly, “who would you like to haunt?”

I hadn’t thought about it. Nobody had ever haunted me, as far as I could tell. But it suddenly seemed like an important kind of decision.

I considered nominating Clive because I couldn’t, at that point, completely dismiss the possibility that he might have murdered me. But there didn’t seem much future in the idea.

Clive is not the sort of guy who scares easily, and he was due for lethal injection soon enough anyway. So, in the end, I nominated Sarah, my former wife, though not because I had any intentions of terrifying her. I just thought it might provide a chance for us to be close again. I had a romantic notion of watching over her, of protecting her, somehow.

The final part of the enrolment form was a ’Reincarnation Request.’

“Do I just tick the box?” I asked Jane.

She shrugged one shoulder. “Everyone else does.”

*

The day after my interview Jane showed me about and helped me get a feel for the place, although there is nothing much to feel. Death is life with most of the feeling sucked out of it, so people typically just go through the motions, in a world where every road leads to everywhere else and then back again. Death is a maze, within which, paradoxically, it is impossible to get lost. There are bars and restaurants and supermarkets and places to walk the dog. But there are no dogs. There is television and magazines and newspapers. But there is no news. My work at the university pays enough to afford the rent and a few nights a week at the local bar, The Last Drop, where Jane brings all her new inductees. So, there’s always a fresh crowd. The burgers are terrible and the music even worse, but the beer is cold.

My haunting approval came through after a couple of months, along with an instruction guide, A Poltergeist’s Handbook of Visitation, and directions of where and when to report. The handbook is mostly unintelligible gibberish written in the style of Revelations and encouraging any would-be spectres to concentrate deeply on emotions of love, hatred and revenge. For the most part it is a grossly out of date piece of literature, except for one editorial change at the very end which says, please switch all devises to airplane mode before entering the dark room.

My initial (and only) training was set for the following Friday afternoon.

 I arrived at the Transitional Apparition Gateway at the appointed time, where I met an overly officious and overtly homosexual man named Albert (previously a funeral director – oddly suited to the job) who handed me a photograph and a set of headphones and sat me in a tiny, enclosed cubicle before closing the door behind me. “Concentrate on the photograph,” he told me over the headphones. I stared as intently as possible at a picturesque scene of three children playing in an English country garden but found it difficult to conjure up any sort of emotional response. The lights went out suddenly and there was a low-pitched howl in the headphones, after which I was magically transported into that very English garden where I could see the children playing and I could move around freely and even smell the freshly cut grass. Then the children turned mechanically, looked at me unblinkingly, screamed, and ran away. The lights went back on. The entire process took about five minutes. I found the experience simultaneously ludicrous and disturbing.

“That was just a simulation. You’ll be fine,” said Albert when I emerged, dazed and a little shocked, from the darkness. “You’re on for the second Friday of every month, ten-thirty to midnight.”

*

The real thing bore little resemblance to the simulation. For the first couple of attempts, when the lights went out and the same strange howling noise came over the headphones, I saw and heard absolutely nothing. I had a vague sense of being somewhere else but it seemed to me that I was there alone.

“It takes time,” Albert assured me, clearly bored by the same advice he must have given everyone, “any sort of usable manifestation can take months to develop. It just takes concentration. The tricky stuff, like rattling windows and moving things on tables, can take years.” He was already shuffling me out the door to make way for his next customer. I was not inspired with confidence.

But I persisted (what else was there to do on a Friday night?) and eventually made some progress, though the first verifiable visitations remained disappointing. Mostly it was just a grey mist through which I could detect movement and little else. I was conscious of my own body and could see my hands in front of me. I thought once that I recognised the kitchen sink but, other than that, I really couldn’t be sure that it was even my own house that I was invading.

Slowly, though, with each consecutive attempt, things became clearer, and I could find my way around the place without constantly walking through walls or losing sight of myself in a wardrobe. Sounds became identifiable and I thought that I could sometimes smell her in the air. Every now and again I’d recognise a flash of her green eyes. Nevertheless, I wasn’t getting the results for which I had hoped. I had optimistically envisaged witnessing some uncontrollable grief, to be honest. A heartfelt display of mourning over the tragic loss of a great love. But she seemed to be coping very well with it all, and several times, as I achieved further clarity, I even heard her laughing. She seemed mostly to be in bed, and the only positive sign I could extract from that observation was that her sleep had become uncharacteristically restless, which I elected to take as symptomatic of trauma.

I got into the habit of passing by The Last Drop for a few drinks with the other ghouls on the way home after a haunting, to compare notes. Nobody else was having much luck either. One fellow had accomplished a brief manifestation in the passenger’s seat of his father-in-law’s car sufficient to cause the vehicle to veer off the road and plough through a group of innocent school children waiting at a bus stop.

We all went a bit quiet after hearing that.

It was on about my eleventh or twelfth haunting that I came to the alarming realisation that, not only was Sarah not sleeping alone, but that she was, quite brazenly, enjoying not sleeping alone. This was no post-traumatic reaction. She was really into it. The woman had become insatiable. It was painful. The more I could see the less I wanted to see.

 But it was hard to look away.

*

Soon I had begun visiting the bar before each haunting, endeavouring to pre-emptively dull the pain. But it did nothing for my concentration, and my attempts at holographic incarnation became increasingly disconcerting. Some nights I found myself madly leaping up and down and wildly waving my arms about, trying to disturb their pornographic demonstrations, but the best I ever achieved was to slip over on items of discarded underwear and fall headfirst onto the bed. “I think I might have just felt the earth move,” Sarah murmured.

The worst of it came one evening when I’d sobered up sufficiently to recognise her lover. It was Michael, my defence attorney. I was furious. If only he’d put this sort of effort into my case, I might still be alive today.

Later, back in the bar, whilst I was complaining about my unwanted voyeurism experiences, Jane placed her arm gently around me, “Don’t worry,” she whispered, “nothing lasts forever.”

“Yes, it does,” I snapped back, “isn’t that what this place is all about? Everything lasts forever.”

“Well, yes. I suppose so. But you can still move on.”

I found that idea difficult to accept.

*

One night, when I got home after work, a note had been slipped under my door. It was from Clive. He’d transited into the Afterlife some months ago and wanted to catch up. He hadn’t lived long enough for lethal injection, as it turned out. He’d died peacefully in his sleep of heart failure instead. So much for justice.

We agreed to meet at The Last Drop on the following Thursday and, when I arrived, he was dressed in bright red shorts, a green tee-shirt, and a tie. He was circulating cheerfully amongst the other deceased drinkers and tapping his bare feet to the music.

He had lost none of his former optimism. “How good is this place?” he exclaimed as I approached, holding up a half empty glass of beer, “they’ve got everything!” The glass was still half full for him, of course. “This mightn’t be heaven, but it sure feels like it.”

“What’s with the tie?” I asked.

 “They gave me a job in real estate” he paused and looked at me seriously for a moment before adding, “I slept and dreamt life is beauty, I woke and found life is duty.” Then he laughed.

He filled me in on the details of my own mortal end, which had not been, technically speaking, murder. “Just your stock standard prison riot,” he explained, “the guards got a bit excessive, and you copped a stray bullet. The boys and I said a few words over your body before they dragged it away. You would have loved it.”

“I’m genuinely touched,” I told him.

*

Meanwhile the hauntings were starting to seriously mess with my head, and my drinking was getting out of control.

“I’m beginning to worry about your health,” Jane said to me, late one Friday night, as the bar was emptying out.

“Do you realise how ridiculous that sounds? What could be the worst possible health outcome?”

“I just wanted you to know that I cared.”

I paused to consider what she meant by that, before asking of her own haunting experiences, hoping, I suppose, to find some comfort in comparable stories of anguish and dissatisfaction.

“Actually, for me, it worked quite well …. for a while,” she told me, instead, “I made quite an impact. But it was all about professional jealousy and I began to feel guilty in the end.”

“Who were you haunting?”

“Tiger Woods. You would have heard about the accident.”

“Gee,” was all I could think of to say, “well done. I can’t even get the dog’s attention.”

She placed her hand gently over mine and whispered in my ear, “you just need to find yourself again,” she motioned in the direction of the TAG building, “but you won’t find anything down there.”

So, I began to slacken right off on the visitations. I only haunted my former house now and again in the vague hope that they might have a furious argument. With time that seemed increasingly unlikely. They were made for each other.

Eventually I decided that they deserved a bit of privacy, because alone in a small dark room, a ghost is doomed to haunt only himself.

It was the beginning of a recovery of sorts. As Jane had predicted, I was moving on.

*

That’s not to suggest that I was completely at peace with it all, a fact that I confessed to Clive the next time he, Jane and I were at The Last Drop. “I’ve been dead for about a year now, and I still haven’t found any real answers.”

Clive’s big round face took on what he must have considered to be a sage-like appearance. “The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room,” he said, “especially if there is no cat.”

“Where are you getting this stuff, Clive?”

“Confucius. I’m studying Eastern Philosophy in my spare time.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Clive, you’re illiterate.”

“He who opens a school door opens a prison. Haven’t you heard of talking books? Where the hell have you been?”

Indeed. Where the hell had I been?

It was still a bit of a turnaround from murdering librarians, though. And I told him so.

“Hmmm, yes,” he sighed, “perhaps. But it’s all part of the learning process. There’s no point in crying over spilt milk. If the path be beautiful let us not ask where it leads…..”

It was as though Clive had swallowed a book of quotations but bypassed the digestion process altogether, “What’s your point, Clive?”

“That we are here, this is now, I have arrived at my destination …”

“Death, you mean?”

“One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things. So it goes.”

Clive guzzled down the remains of his beer and took the last cold, greasy french-fry from his plate before slipping it delicately between his rotting teeth.

“Delicious!” he announced, “but I must be going. I’ve got a date. It just so happens that I bumped into one of the librarians the other day. Charming woman. We really hit it off.”

He gave me a wink. “Death smiles at us all, and all a man can do is smile back. Seize the day!” and then he disappeared out the door happily whistling to himself.

I turned to Jane, who was casually examining her fingernails, “you know he’s insane, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, of course. Criminally insane.”

“So do you think he’ll strangle her again?”

“Hmmm,” she murmured, looking up over my right shoulder, “…. I don’t know. Maybe. Old habits die hard. Do you think it matters?”

“S’pose not.”

She smiled at me sweetly.

*

Because nothing matters. That’s the official opinion of the archaeology department, anyway. You might want a second opinion, and the philosophy department is right next door. Though you’ll never get a straight answer from those guys.

*

When my name eventually came up for reincarnation late last week, I elected to forego the offer. I just couldn’t see the sense of going back to the end of the queue. And I think I might have something special going with Jane.

Nothing matters, but sometimes it helps to pretend that something does.

*