There had been better Thursdays. Usually Shel quite liked them. You were over the mid-week hump of Wednesday, well past the adolescent gloom of Tuesday, and stretching ever closer to Friday, the day everyone anticipates so that they can properly anticipate Saturday.
This isn’t to say that there were definitively better Thursdays on a comprehensive spatial scale. Someone, somewhere, was no doubt having a jolly old time, driving or napping or debating socioeconomic procedure with that smarmy little bastard who sits front row in the lecture hall.
Nor that there weren’t worse Thursdays on a chronological spectrum. No, that record is still held by Martin White
of
But it was decidedly one of the less desirable of the Thursdays Shel could recall. This is largely attributable to the fact that he had just died. In situations such like his, it’s not uncommon for the anticipation of Friday to diminish slightly.
He was now standing in what looked like a soundstage designed by a lonely claustrophobe. The end of the room grayed off into its own horizon.
“Hello?” called Shel, because that’s the sort of thing you say when in a very dim, very large, very empty place.
“Hello?” echoed the very dim, very large, very empty place, because that’s the sort of thing it’s inclined to echo when being asked for a greeting.
He looked around. Evidently there was no one coming, and if they were, they either had a damn long way to walk or could materialize at will, so it didn’t matter where he was. Might as well be somewhere else.
A thousand questions bubbled into his head as he walked, and he went to work deflating them one by one with the thought, “Look, you know as much as I do right now; trust me, you’ll be the first I tell once I find out.”
Where am I?
Look, you know as much as I do right now.
What’s going on?
We’re sitting on the same page, buddy.
But what’s going to happen?
…are you NOT seeing a pattern, here?
The room continued, its dull angles spearing into the distance. He stopped and turned. It looked exactly the same as the way he’d been heading, except for the obvious difference that he was walking away from it.
“This reeks of student film,” said Shel.
“This reeks of student film,” agreed the room, and decided it liked the line so much that it would repeat it a few times over.
Oh well, Shel thought. He found he grew irritable with the concept of organization and hated to keep schedules or even wear a watch, so the idea of Just Walking Until Whenever didn’t have as much of an intimidation factor as it might have over, say, the woman he will be meeting in the transition between this paragraph and the next.
“Hello,” said Shel. “Nice uniform.”
It was. A classy jacket, silver with gray buttons, and a matching skirt of a sensible but not unseemly length. Inside was a woman who looked as uncomfortable in the clothes as most people would without any on. She didn’t so much wear them as stop by for a quick visit without being able to come up with a decent excuse to bolt at the first crevice in conversation.
“Yes,” she agreed, but only in word choice. “I’m glad I found you.” Again, her diction was the most convincing aspect of her delivery.
“You were
looking for me?” he chimed. There could
certainly be worse afterlife stalkers.
“Not you,
specifically.”
Damn.
“But someone,” she said.
This was at least a mite encouraging, as Shel was very much of the impression that he was someone, contrary to much of what his Uncle Richard had to say during their lunch meets.
“Well, here I am.” This didn’t elicit the response he’d hoped for, so he added, “Technically speaking, anyway.”
Nothing. It wasn’t a good line, he’d readily admit, but you’d think if one were to take the time to traverse what-looked-to-be a landscape of infinite mileage with almost the opposite number of sentient beings, one would be at least a tad enthused to hear anything that wasn’t along the lines of, “I bet your hands tastes real pretty, City Girl.” But nothing. Not an eye crinkle. She had an expression the moon would feel immature for smiling at.
“I’m Diana,” she said, offering a hand that was either very professional or ferociously restrained (although the terms are nearly interchangeable).
“Shel,” said Shel, weighing the likelihood of getting his arm back should he commit to the handshake. Being dead was one thing, but being dead AND having to learn to juggle one-handed seemed excessive. “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise.” She turned and began walking back the way she came.
“Er,” said Shel as she trailed off. With a hustle, he caught up. She was moving as closely as one can to running without breaking two miles an hour. She seemed to be penitently concentrating on this.
“Are we looking for another Someone?” he asked.
“If there is one,” her firm calves twitched, irked at conventional movement, “But I do have a schedule to keep.” The schedule did not sound like something she was interested in expounding upon, but Shel inquired regardless.
“’Schedule’? There’s Time in this place?”
“Of course there is,” she furrowed, “How do you think we’re having a conversation?”
“I only ask because I don’t seem to have remembered my watch,” he said, deflated. Logistically speaking, there are an infinite number of incidents and experiences you can feasibly have or take part in at every single picosecond of your existence, and to commit yourself to one specific one by keeping a schedule had always struck Shel as being upsettingly unambitious. Interestingly, “unambitious” was the word critics opposed to this philosophy tended to use when describing Shel. And now here he was in the afterlife, keeping pace with a guide whom he could sense was preparing to intone, “Quickly, now,” in order that she might not miss the prologue to the Seraphim Symphony or whatever.
“Quickly, now,” she intoned, “You can have my watch if you want, but I don’t think it’ll do much for you.”
He took it and observed. It was nice, silver with a gray face. The digital readout text even seemed somehow eloquent. The disconcerting bit was what it read:
YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINE.
“He tried the whole ‘Non-Existence of Time’ bit up here a while back,” she inserted, vaguely conversational, “But then when he started it and went to say something, he never got past the first word since it was the only thing that existed, had existed, or would exist, so he had to reset.”
“What, the Universe?” he asked. He was too afraid to ask if the “he” she spoke of was God, partly because he anticipated she would look at him as if he’d just asked which of the two of them he was, and partly because he dreaded an answer along the lines of, “No, Erik the Janitor, duh.”
She snorted, “Please. No, he just restarted Time,” she said in the tone of a mother mentioned her child managed a B on his vocabulary test, “to a more…mingling-appropriate setting. The whole bit with the numbers, though, that’s gone. Had a big vote on that. We figured if you need numbers to tell you if it’s “before”, “now”, or “later”, you probably aren’t ready to be up here. But no, he didn’t restart the Universe. He’s good, but not that good. He did make this place, though,” she risked a glance up to the incalculable I-bars of the rafters. “Very handy for wars, plagues, and increases in teenage intellectuality.”
“This is just the entry room, then? There’s more to this world?”
“Of course, we’re headed there.”
Oh, thank Erik the Janitor, thought Shel.
“Anyway, very handy for mass arrivals,” she persisted, now comfortable that the talk was thoroughly dependent upon her knowledge and barely involved listening to him, “But positively silly for individuals. With groups, you see a thousand grown men each in fifty pounds of armor, all shrieking at wounds they remember having before they got here, that’s not hard to miss. But single entrants in an infinite realm? I go to the Front Office, they say to me, ‘Oh, don’t you do tracking? That’s one of your things, right? Could you just nip out and have a look for us?’ Have a look! I mean, yeah, I track, but usually I do it in an environment where there’s sand or foliage or a subject that isn’t spectral!”
“I’m sorry,” said Shel, clicking at the word ‘tracking’, “What’d you say your name was?”
“Diana,” she said.
Shel cocked his head at her.
“No,” she breathed, “I’m not Wonder Woman, nor have I met Lynda Carter yet.”
“You’re the Roman Moon Goddess!”
“Well,” she
looked as far away from his as she could, surprise inherent in her tone, “Born
in