Closing Time

“Hey,” he said, like he knew me. I didn’t.

“Hey.” I responded in a cold vein that seemed strange to me.

“So you goin’ through or out?”

He had a New York accent. I didn’t know how I knew that, but he did. I wasn’t from New York—I wasn’t even from the same country.

“Uh… I don’t know. Going through where exactly?” I asked.

It was strange. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I was doing here. Or what here was. Or who he was. He was a person: stout, animated, and clearly inquisitive. But visibly, he was an amalgamated glow of all these characteristics. Not an outline, but a shape—like a ghost. An amoeba of light.

“Oh! Right, you’ve never been here before!” His face—or where his face would’ve been—was tingling with excitement.

“This is the Transit Area, pal.”

We exchanged a moment of awkward silence.

“You’re dead.” He announced.

This was news to me. And for some reason I was completely at peace with this. I didn’t feel shock or surprise. No sense of sadness or remorse. No regrets. Just peace.

“An’ from the look on your face, I can tell you’re probably headed to one of the nicer places.”

“Nicer places?”

“Well, yeah. From experience I can tell that you’ve done good so far.”

“I’m really sorry, sir,” I hesitated. “I just don’t—“

“I know what you’re thinkin’ son,” he said reassuringly. “Heaven, hell and all that dogmatic stuff. But the truth is, there’s a lotta grey in between.”

“Wait, but what did you mean ‘I’ve done good?’ And what am I?”

“Good question. In metaphysical terms, you are what they call the soul.”

“Right.”

“Your actions on the physical plane determine your next phase. A general healthy glow is an indication of KPIs being maintained.”

“KPIs.”

“Key Performance Indicators, kid!”

I work at a bank. I should’ve known that. Wait, I used to work at a bank, I guess.

“A good lookin’ glow points to a life well led. Now look at that guy over there.”

He seemed to point to someone a few rows behind me whose soul looked like an eggplant that had been sweating in the vegetable bin for too long. The shape looked far more solid but sickly, and had a sort of inward energy. Like a black hole.

“He ain’t doin’ so good. He is definitely headin’ for one of them boot camps.”

Another second of awkward silence.

“Oh, sorry. It’s not common for me to come across a first-timer in transit. Usually I’m bunked together with an older soul.”

“I’m sorry.” I began sweating, metaphysically speaking. “Where am I again?” My sense of peace was leaving. “Transit?” Fast.

“Alright kid, calm down. So you’re dead. So what? At least it seems to me ya lived a good life. Now,” he said adjusting himself to a more comfortable position in his seat, “Transit is this plane you are in right now. It’s like a holding cell till they figure out where to put you next. Usually you’ll spend a few hundred years in physical terms before you’re sent out again. Now that guy over there? He’s gonna be here a while.”

“Uh, a hundred years?” I wasn’t sure I lived fifty in the real world, and that seemed like a long life.

“Hundred’s nothin’, pal. It goes by like that!” He snapped his translucent fingers.

“And because of my, erm, glow I’m going to the nicer places?”

He fell silent for a minute.

“Look, I’m guessin’ you worked in a job in a big company or somethin’—Sorry, I haven’t been to the mortal plane in a while so I don’t know if companies and jobs still exist.”

“Yeah, I remember working in a bank.”

“Great! So unlike what you may have been taught, once you’re done with the mortal plane, there’s no heaven or hell. No black or white. You’re put in moratorium while the powers-that-be assess you on your KPIs, like I’m sure your bank would have. You get grades, and your grades determine your perks, the length of your stay here, the power (sometimes) to decide when you can go back even! Look, for first-timers this can be a bit daunting having return to the fold and whatnot, but you look like you’ve got a good handle on yourself.”

Good handle on myself. The last thing I remembered was having the impulse to push my wife on to the road. I think I slipped.

I did NOT have a handle on myself.

“Right so that’s how you came back.”

What! How did he—

“A little advice, kid. Here there’s only one form of communication. Thoughts and words aren’t separate. If you’re thinkin’ it, you’re sayin’ it and vice versa. It’s a shame you didn’t get along with your wife but that’s no reason to think you were a bad person.”

“No it’s not that. I would’ve never done such a thing, of course. We were having a bad week. It was her birthday, I was supposed to throw this surprise party like she asked me to. It became a whole thing.” I sighed. A little streak of life left me.

“Then over next few days, whatever I did, good or bad, every conversation led to my ‘performance’ in throwing the party. ‘Oh, you forgot to leave the toilet seat down. Just like you forgot my party!’ Or ‘Aw! You brought me breakfast in bed! I wish you were this thoughtful when you were planning my party!’ Snipes and jabs one after the other. And then we decided to take a tiny road trip. We stopped for fuel and she was rescuing a small bird off the highway when the impulse came to me. I went up to her. I think I slipped and that’s all I remember. Poetic justice, I guess.”

The New Yorker took it all in quietly.

“Not gonna lie, kid. They take a serious view of such things.” He cleared his throat and attempted to change the mood. ”Hey, you wanna know how I came back? Shrimp allergy!”

I wasn’t in the mood to laugh. I felt that all of the energy slowly leaving my being.

“Hey, kid. Whatever it is you’re feeling right now, it’s a sure-fire way of convincing them you’re not worth the hassle of a nice place. Look at yourself, you’re fringing on the edges. That’s a sign of disturbance, the beginning of corruption. You start spiralling, that’s a quick way to become bunk-buddies with the eggplant back there. Go on then, surely you had some good times, too!”

My life flashed before my eyes. I’m not sure it did just before I passed.

“Ah, you brought many companies back from the dead you say? That’s good, right?”

My tongue clicked on reflex.

“It was just a tactic we used to undervalue small companies so larger companies could acquire them.”
“But ya saved a lot of jobs, right?”

“You could say that.”

“There ya go! In my previous venture I was a car mechanic in Bronx.”

There you go. New York.

“And I never knew a customer I ain’t cheated.”

“So how come you’re not purple then?

“I was turnin’ purple. But I saw the error of my ways, as they say. Put in the time, healed. You see when you come back, it’s not like they deliver justice, an’ that’s it you’re sent to jail or somethin’. No, it’s more like detention. Or even a meditation if you like. You work for your glow if you want to and are willing to. Then, if you’d like to and if they’d like you to, you go back.”

The walls surrounding us started changing colour as if they were charged by an external force. A small doorway opened and Mr. Purple-Black Hole was sucked right through it.

“You see how fast that guy went through? The weight of your actions determine how much ‘force’ they put through you to get you to go where they want you to go. That dude must’ve been terrible for a few lifetimes for that kind of suckin’ power!”

“So he will be punished for his actions?”

“No! Haven’t ya been listenin’ kid? You have to pay the price in penance. You put in the work, no one judges you, and you earn your right to go back or stay to get to a better place.”

“So the nicer places, then?”
“Well it’s kind of like a hotel. The more goodwill ya have the nicer room you can afford—although I wouldn’t call it a room per se. It’s more like the space made for you to be.”
A pleasant ringing sound filled the room and I felt like I was gently being lifted up. The wall opened up into a doorway again and I was drawn towards it.

“Ah! Closing time. Looks like your number’s up, kid. Pleasure talkin’ to ya!”

“Thanks, mister…uh. Look, I’m not even sure how to—“
“That’s alright kid. Maybe we’ll meet down the road again, eh? I hope you remember all those clichés huh. As so sow, so you reap, karma, good begets good. And here’s one of my own: You’re here because you are.”

For some reason, his personal cliché of all the known ones made sense to me. I moved towards him to possibly shake his hand.

I slipped.