An Interview With Death

It was late in the night – around 2 or 3 judging from the noise in the street – when the limousine arrived. They had let me into a suite that I found to be remarkably unassuming for a celebrity of this stature.

On top of it the electricity was turned off or suffering from some malfunction, so I had to wait in darkness.

The waiting, I must admit, made me both drowsy and cantankerous, since I had undertaken a considerable journey to make it to the appointment.

In the windows across the street, which belonged to another hotel, I could see the lights reflected from the Hotel Rust, where I was waiting.

“Vacant rooms, vacant rooms, vacant rooms”, the blinking neon light kept informing me. It was difficult for me to tell if it is supposed to be flashing at this rate, or it was due to another glitch in the electrical current.

The coffee did not work as intended. I suspected they might have given me decaf by mistake.

All in all, my meeting with the grim reaper was an awkward arrangement and quite poorly prepared.

He entered the room without making a sound. I cannot tell you if he used the door, or if he decided to just sort of manifest himself in the centre of the room. I was too exhausted, really, to care for his manner of entrance.

But I noticed he was modestly dressed in an inconspicuous double-breasted suit.

“I am terribly sorry to have kept you waiting”, he said. “It has been a busy day. The earthquake in Brazil had me running all day, and with revolutions everywhere…”

“Of course”, I said. It struck me that I had not heard of any major earthquake in Brazil or revolutions in the number of which he spoke, so I assumed I had travelled to another time.

“Welcome. Please sit down.”

Death – who, by the way, happened to look somewhat similar to the Christopher Walken – smiled at my presumptuousness. I made a gesture as if to say I knew he was the host, but to be honest I did not think an unlit room and a paper cup of instant coffee called for much courtesy in return. I have had far better receptions by establishments much smaller than his, but I guess death does not fret much about bad press.

Of course, I also felt it was safest to make sure he knew I was jesting. There is no way of telling what criteria he picks his victims by, or exactly how randomly they are transferred to whatever caliginous state he governs.

Seated in front of me, resting his elbows on the table and pressing his fingertips on one hand against the fingertips on the other, forming a pyramid in front of his face, he studied me as very experienced sources often do to let you know they are aware that any interview is a contest of wit.

Through the bony pyramid I could see his right eye twinkling to the rhythm of the neon light:

“Vacant rooms, vacant rooms, vacant rooms,” it said.

I thought that was quite eerie, and I wondered if he had somehow staged the effect.

“So, what would you like to know?”

“Well, to begin with I would like to know why you do what you do”, I said, trying not to come off too confrontational and probably failing miserably.

“Why I do what, exactly?”

“You kill people.”

He sniffed, as if he is trying to smell the word. Or perhaps it was some kind of feral gesture to signal discomfort or contempt.

“Killing is an intrinsic part of my job. I am the Grim Reaper, you know. For what's it's worth: I prefer to say that I round up stories to make way for new ones. If one writes a story, one should also end it, don’t you think? You are a writer as well, even if journalism may be the lowest form of literature, next to toilet poetry. Still, how would it look if you wrote a story without an ending?”

“Journalistic articles do not necessarily have an ending”, I argued. “If you write news reports you work according to the news triangle, which is a model in which you serve the most significant information first and then broaden the issue at hand with details. It is intended to quickly convey the essence of the story for the convenience of the reader. There are also additional advantages: Fewer readers are lost due to an exceedingly long overture. The editorial assistants can cut from the bottom and, for instance, make room for news that arrives late. It is a matter of lay-out, really.”

“How dull. Essentially you must write your stories on the premises of readers whose main characteristics are restlessness and short attention span. I never ever do that. You see, I am an artist. Having done what I do for so many years – aeons, to be more precise – I have become quite skilled. It would be thoroughly dissatisfactory for me to accommodate my audience on such a fundamental level.”

“You do not seem to care for your audience at all”, I said.

“Au contraire”, he exclaimed. “I care tremendously for my reviews. It is fair to say that no death occurs, where I do not study the responses with intense interest.”

“Like a serial killer… I mean, that is what you are, is it not?”

“That is a very narrow-minded view. Have you not read the Tao Te Ching? Chapter 74: 'People fear death because it is an instrument of fate'. Now, that is profound. Lao Tzu was one of the very few souls who understood anything about death, while he was alive...”

“I don’t understand it.”

“Of course you don’t. As a Westerner you are comfortably sheltered from death and accustomed to viewing it only as an inconvenience…”

I interrupted him, again a bit more aggressive in my tone than I was comfortable with. Perhaps I even yelled.

“I would say that death is a little more than an inconvenience to most people.”

“I should hope so”, Death said. “I do my best to inflict devastating wounds, but human beings can be so callous. But if we return to Tao Te Ching, is there not something about the passage I quoted that strikes you odd?”

“Everything strikes me odd. This conversation, everything going on out there…”

I made a gesture to point at the room and proceeded to point out the window, hinting at the world below, where drunkards were leaving a night club and made quite a bustle trying to hail ordinary cars as if they were cabs.

It was not difficult for me to imagine them stagger about in the street, laughing from intoxication, and I half expected my interviewee to suddenly leap up from his chair and rush down to punish them for their folly.

No accidents of the kind happened. Death said:

“What I like about Lao Tsu is that he never made much of a fuss about death. I admire that in a man. Being death I see people go through endless agony and a great deal of evasive maneuvers to avoid death, and while confronted with the inevitable they act as if they were on a flea market, simultaneously complaining and offering up their most precious belongings in exchange for a bit more breath. What Lao Tsu understood – not to exhaust you with a long dissertation on Oriental philosophies – is that death is subordinate to other matters.”

“Death is subordinate”, I said. “And you are Death, so you are a subordinate.”

“Yes, I am merely one scribe in an infinite office space with scribes sitting close together, side by side, occupied with whatever their assignment may be. Some bestow luck, others happiness. Some inflict damage, and others make sure vain ambitions come to naught, or pride is humbled.”

“You are office clerks”, I said. “Accountants. And on top of everything sits the manager, God.”

“I don’t believe in God”, Death said. “I have seen too much destruction to believe.”

He was chuckling inside, I could tell. He thought he had said something very witty.

“Who decides, then, what is to be written by all these scribes?”

“They do. There is no management. Look, you are a professional. You have been around. You know that in every company, organization and institution in the world, chaos reigns. On the surface all the products are neatly aligned in the store, properly tagged and made attractive for purchase. But there is always a back room, where some malignant old bastard is threatening the staff, and cowards are creeping around with their head down not to get fired, and idiots are blabbering around the coffee machine. The further you come from the desk, where the customer is always right, the more chaos sets in. In the storage nobody can ever easily find anything, and the products are being routinely manhandled by underpaid, overworked and secretly disgruntled unskilled workers. The companies simply count on a dwindling number of people keeping their receipts long enough to run a warranty case. In short, everything is an illusion of coherence and efficiency and order, even fate.”

“I get that. It’s no surprise to me.”

“Then you should also understand that death itself is not a problem. I am not your enemy. You people always act like I am. Just that nick-name, Grim Reaper... it is very insulting. What I do makes sense, because it is instrumental to the rounding off of stories, of fates. But you people – you Westerners – do not believe in fate. You say you do not believe in anything, you cannot prove, and from that point – usually some time in your puberty, where nobody can really rely on their judgment – you decide to believe in free will. Every day fate happens to you. You are produced, shipped and manhandled like a piece of grocery, and you still won’t believe in fate. But you cannot prove free will either. You cannot show me free will, and if you think about it – if someone forces you to think about it – you also realize that everything that takes place is a matter of cause and effect. Science. Things happen. People happen. Everything acts on everything else, and processes are created, whether constructive or destructive. This all depends on perspective. One man’s death is another man’s bread.”

“You’re rambling.”

“Yes, but I get so sick of you people sometimes. You spend your life fighting the inevitable, is what you do. Instead of living...”

“I want to ask you something more specific before we are done, something of a personal relevance to me.”

He pulled himself together and looked at me attentively.

“Shoot.”

“I was in love with a girl, when I was in my early twenties. She was beautiful. She was the only girl – I have realized that many years later – I ever loved. I would have asked her to marry me, but she never came home. She was a Goth girl, into black clothing and somber music and such. She was raped and murdered. Beaten to death near the railway station…”

“Yes, I remember. I took the liberty of checking up on you before I came.”

“Most people do. Listen, what happened to this guy? They never caught him. Is he alive or dead?”

“I cannot tell you, I’m afraid. I wish I could, but I cannot. Call it the confidentiality of the living.”

“So, he is alive?"

"That cannot be deduced from my answer."

"I need to know if he is alive.”

“What for? Would it give you any relief if he was dead? Everybody dies. As a form of punishment death is trivial and, in most cases, laughable, since life can be far more excruciating than even the most agonizing death.”

“Look, what happened back then ruined my life. I have spent the rest of my life on one long, dark journey to this place, just to be able to ask you. It was why I became a journalist in the first place. I’ve worked myself up the ladder, report after report, until I knew you would grant me an interview. I have met with thieves and lawyers, tyrants and rock stars, and now, finally, I am here in this room with you to ask you: What happened to the murderer? Is he alive, and if so, where?”

“You’re out for justice”, Death said. “You disappoint me. There is no justice. What would you do? An eye for an eye? It’s an admirable sentiment – I do prefer tigers of wrath to the horses of instruction – but you wouldn’t do to him what he did to her. You would have to actually rape him or get someone to do it, and then you would have to bludgeon him to death and leave him bleeding in a puddle some rainy Thursday night. What would be the point of that?”

“I know, I know. It is pointless. I have seen myself killing him, in a dream, and the next morning I woke up, and I did not recognize my own face. I looked like someone else… like him, I think. At least the thought came to me that I had become a murderer, marked... like Cain. Even if it was just a trick of the mind, it was horrifying.”

“So, you’ve been through all this: Nothing will bring her back. On top of it, human justice is trivial. It is merely an administrative principle. It is meant to keep peace and an appearance of order. No wounds are ever mended. No satisfaction is ever gained. No balance is achieved. It's just one story out of many.”

“Not to me. To me it is reality. And maybe I want him captured and sent to prison. Maybe that is what I demand of my story, of my fate.”

“Fate is another department”, Death said.

“So you can do nothing for me.”

“Unfortunately not…”

“But you did for this man. You let him take her life.”

“I did not. I took her life. It was better that way. If you are sore with me, you are welcome to take a swing at me. But it will do you no good, no more than all the wailing and raging I imagine you must have gone through. Look, son…”

Death reached forward with his right hand, across the table between us, but did not proceed to touch me, a restraint for which I was grateful. I think it was at this point I noticed a glowing white symbol on my collar bone, so bright the light passed through my shirt: The bottom was a cross and the top a circle resting on the horizontal beam.

“…this event left a hole inside you, I know. But it is a hole that all humans live with in one form or another. It is a hole in your sense of harmony. It is a revealing darkness, so to speak, pointing out the hollowness of not only mere existence, but all the principles you choose to believe in to comfort yourself and remain attached to life. It undermines every concept of justice, fairness or hope. It undermines them, but it does not allow you to crash all the way through. It lets you stay on the brink of the abyss, staring down in despair. Confronted with me you realize the most important thing.”

“Which is?”

“No matter what has come before, you must struggle to make a happy ending. You are compelled, because it is your nature. It is human nature. You cannot accept this gap between the perfect state you can imagine and nature as it unfolds around you – and inside you – and from this contradiction you draw out everything of value in your culture, from moral virtues and philosophical questions to legal principles and technological improvements. Your civilization is founded on bridging these two worlds, so Plato was, at least, half right.”

“It is also human nature to kill.”

“True. But to kill is not exclusively human nature. Animals kill. Hell, loose rocks kill. But you do not see other creatures struggling to make sense of it all or to bind a garland of tearful memories.”

“A garland of tearful memories…”

“Let me tell you something of a personal nature: I was much more sad in the old days, when I had to collect the souls”, Death said. “You modern people are poor, because you choose to live in reality, which is the most ridiculous fairy tale of all. In the old days – not so long ago, if you think about it carefully – people understood far more about the journey they make in life. They were more deserving, and yet they fell off the wagon like melons on a bumpy road. You see, back then they understood that life is a story. They did not understand what kind of story, of course, but they saw the framework. They understood the basic concepts. You rationalists see nothing. Everything is futile to you, an infinite number of particles dancing without any plan or order - there is no good or evil, and subsequently no conscience or even love - and yet you complain about death. You have created an entire civilization to fight death, but all you can manage is to postpone it. Every time the average life expectancy is pushed a notch, your papers hail it as a great achievement. You have bested me of, what, a couple of months, a year or a decade? You pour all these resources into fighting cancer and preventing war, because both are instruments of death. What you fail to see is that compared to all the numerous ills and evils of your existence, death is trivial. That makes you fools, and your stories – individually, and as a group – become the fables of fools. William Shakespeare wrote about it. If you notice it, there are several places, where he points to the illusory nature of human existence.”

Death paused, took a deep breath and then proceeded with his dissertation:

“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.”

“I know this quote very well.”

“Yes, you are well read. It is widely known”, Death said. “But people usually misunderstand this speech, because they do not understand context and misdirection. They take it as Shakespeare’s view of the world or, at least, a fragment of it. They read it like believers read the Bible, out of context and without reverence for the subtleties at work in great literature. Shakespeare puts the words in the mouth of a murderer, a man condemned by his own actions and betrayed by all, even by his own fortunate omens. Macbeth is a victim of his passions. It is failed ambition speaking, the same sentiment lurking in Richard III, when he speaks of the ‘winter of our discontent’, only at a different stage in the ripening process. Likewise, when Hamlet describes humans as ‘the stuff that dreams are made of’, people take it as a lamentation of the shortness of life. But there is equivocality in the phrase. Perhaps this is where Shakespeare speaks in his own voice, between the lines – I must remember to ask him, when I return – and not just Hamlet’s voice, frustrated about the schismatic existence he must inhabit. It could very well be that to Hamlet the words simply refer to the illusory and elusive nature of life, but it could also be interpreted in the sense that humans are a matter from which gods derive dreams. Of course, I do not speak of deities in the ancient, primitive meaning, but in the enlightened meaning: active forces beyond human control, possessing distinct characteristics, defining the human experience.”

“So, what you are saying, if I understand you correctly, is that human beings produce stories. That is the ‘meaning’ of life. All our struggles and all our suffering amounts to nothing more a collection of fables, where one contradicts the morale of the other, and no final verdict can be passed on any matter.”

“Not just that. You make it sound so trite. You produce dreams. Some of the best stories are not unfolded, but rest in the heart. Take you, for instance. You come all this way, like Orpheus, just to have a few words with me in a hotel room in Berlin. You have been mortally wounded, and yet you have lived on, year after year. Inside you there is always this darkness, which you must hide from the world – all this grief and disappointment and terrifying rage, which have led you to understand your own nature, even your own capacity for murder. But you also have something else, something very rare. Was it Camus who said that for love to be undying, it must be prevented from reaching its goal? Your heart possesses infinite love. Most people do not even dare to dream of a very mundane love, and you have lived long enough to understand that couples are together for a variety of reasons, and love is at best merely one flower in a bundle of motivations. Without this love in your heart there would have been no point in you requesting this interview. Her death would have been meaningless. It would have been just another event, really, not dissimilar from the falling of a flower from a cherry tree in the spring, or a limp dog run down by a car. And while you may think you lost something very precious, you did not lose the essence. I have often thought about the fable of Orpheus and Eurydice, and I think Ovid misunderstood it.”

Death paused, pondering the points raised by his own musings.

“So many interesting people I will have to look up after talking to you”, he then said.

“I am not sure I understand everything you just said, but I think there is enough in it for a good story... a garland of tearful memories, as you call it.”

“Does that make you feel a little less sore?”

“A little…”

“That’s good. I am glad I could provide some solace. I would not want to leave people with the impression that I do not care for the living at all. In many ways I envy you, particularly your pastimes, which seem amusing. All the drinking, the music and the dancing…. Oh, and making love… Me, I am a working stiff, so to speak. The harvest is always waiting for a farmer like me, around the clock and in every season.”

“I take it you have to leave soon.”

“Yes, soon. I have executions scheduled in USA, China and Iran. But I have one question for you, before we say goodbye.”

“Shoot”.

Death laughed. It was no more than a grimace revealing an ugly set of oblong teeth, but there was no doubt he was amused.

“I just wanted to ask you: If this was not a dream, and I was in fact a creature of flesh and blood, what would you have done?”

“I would leap across the desk and rip out your heart”, I replied.

“That too”, Death said, “would have made for a remarkable story.”