He looked at the man pacing back and forth in front of him. He had been slightly in shock ever since he saw him.
When the man first arrived, he had asked only one question:
"Is your name James Smith?"
"Ah… yes."
That was all.
He was tall and thin, with the look of someone who had never exercised a day in his life, choosing instead to play video games for days on end without eating. The dark circles under his eyes looked as if he hadn't slept in days. He wore a colorful Hawaiian shirt that clashed with his pale skin, which looked as though it had never seen the sun. But with his flip-flops and shorts, he looked like someone about to go on vacation.
Until the moment he saw this man,even though he hadn't really had a set belief on the matter, he realized he had a certain image of the Angel of Death. He had expected someone terrifying or charismatic. But this man looked more like someone in his early thirties who had just come into a bit of money, gone on vacation, and downed every free drink he could find.
"Excuse me, how much longer do I have to wait?" he asked.
He and the Angel of Death had been waiting together for a while now. According to the angel, he had been delayed by some business "upstairs." They were waiting for the vehicle that was supposed to pick them up.
"It'll be here soon," the angel said. He moved through the crowd of people—those who were still alive—waiting at the station, glancing toward the tracks every now and then.
"Are we taking the metro?"
"Yeah, something like that."
"Well, what happened to the vehicle you used to get here?"
"Ah, I didn't come by vehicle. Getting down here from upstairs is easy. But going back is a bit of a hassle; there are procedures you have to follow. The soul has to be received, the necessary processes have to be explained to it, its ties to the world have to be cut, blah blah blah… boring bureaucratic work, you know." As he spoke, he kept checking his watch while leaning against the wall.
After waiting a bit longer, he felt the voices of the people in the metro suddenly begin to drift away. In their place, a heavy, screeching sound drowned out everything else. Then, the silhouettes of the people slowly faded, leaving only him and the Angel of Death standing in the empty station. Together, they walked toward the tracks to see the approaching vehicle.
They saw a handcar was slowly approaching toward them from the distance. He thought to himself that he'd only ever seen such things in cartoons. There was a scrawny, elderly man wearing a ten-gallon hat and a white undershirt, slowly pumping the wooden lever up and down.
They exchanged blank stares with the Angel of Death. The handcar came to a halt right in front of them. After a moment of silence, the scrawny old man shouted,
"Come on, get in! I don't have all day to wait for you!"
…
"Fu*k… we have a long way to go. I really hate this job."
Accompanied by the disturbing creaking sound of the handcar, they began to move slowly along the rails.
"I thought we'd be getting on something cool and white, like a high-speed train," the dead man said.
"I thought so too," the angel replied.
The frail man shot them a sharp look. "It's not like I wanted to come. I retired 250 years ago. They called me in saying there was an urgent matter."
"Ah, you too? They called me for an urgent job as well. I wonder what's going on upstairs… at this rate, who knows when we'll arrive," the angel said, checking his watch once again.
While listening to the Angel of Death talking with the scrawny old man, he drifted back into his thoughts once again. He was still stuck on the same question.
He had never really given much thought to whether angels of death existed or not. Still, he was certain that the being in front of him should have been something entirely different.
While he looked at him with his mouth twisted, as if watching a cringe video on TikiTik, he met the angel of death's gaze.
"Hey... Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Oh… Well… I just didn't expect the Angel of Death to be like this."
"The Angel of Death? Ah, you humans… What exactly were you expecting?"
"I mean… I guess I expected a serious looking man in a black robe, with some sort of philosophical approach to life and death."
"The dress code was abolished almost a thousand years ago. They decided that casual clothing made souls less uneasy. In the past, people who saw angels of death would cry, scream, and run away."
"Hm… So, Mr. angel of death, what's going to happen to me now? Where am I going?"
"Hey, hey, could you stop calling me an angel? I'm not an angel or anything—just an ordinary clerk working in the registration department."
He stared blankly at the clerk's face.
"Ah, you're the first soul I've ever collected. They sent me out in a hurry today, saying it was an emergency."
He paused for a moment and cleared his throat. His previously irritable demeanor suddenly gave way to that of an anxious man.
"So… I only really know how this death thing works in theory."
Hearing this, a tense silence followed, interrupted only by the creaking of the handcar.