After the tense silence, James spoke.
"Great," he said with a strained expression. He had just thought that, since he was dead, he could finally stop worrying about things. "For some reason, I don't feel safe at all right now."
This time, the clerk stared blankly at his face.
"Hey, you're already dead. It doesn't really matter whether you feel safe or not."
"I guess you're right," James said with a sigh. But habits didn't leave a person just because he was dead. He had always liked certainty and reassurance.
The handcar was moving so slowly... He had only just died, and while he'd expected things to be more spiritual, calm, and peaceful, now—out of nowhere—this Angel of Death... no, this Death Clerk, was blabbering on without end. He was telling James things he wasn't curious to hear at all.
"Do you have any idea under what difficult conditions we work? You suddenly open your eyes and they tell you that you have to keep death records. You work in shifts. And there's no chance of promotion. I've been doing the exact same thing for the last 300 years…"
"If you humans hadn't started reproducing too much and then dying in huge numbers, there would have been no need to create me. Because of your stupid reproduction, my existence—once drifting through the infinity of the universe without consciousness—gained awareness. And in return for what? One day off a week and a company dinner at the joint Heaven and Hell gathering on New Year's. And the worst part, attendance is mandatory, and I hate employees from both sides."
"They gave you food? We didn't have anything like that in our time. We only had three days off a year."
"Really. Dinner isn't the problem, but having so little vacation sounds bad…"
"What is that thing you're wearing, boy?" the scrawny old man asked, gesturing toward the palm trees on the Clerk's shirt.
"When they sent me here, I thought maybe I'd get a chance to do a little sightseeing. My dream was to relax on a sunny beach, sipping a drink. I'm almost there. I've officially completed 0.3% of my term. Only 90,700 years to go." the Death Clerk replied with pride.
'Is he serious? This is terrifying,' James thought.
They went on talking like that
While listening to this conversation, James saw a white light ahead. There really was light at the end of the tunnel. As it drew closer, it grew larger and gave off the divine aura he had been expecting.
A moment later, he felt himself being pulled into it.
"Finally," he heard the Death Clerk mutter.
Finally, James thought to himself. He was dead now; he was at peace, and his soul was returning to where it belonged. Unless he had done something to earn a place in Hell, he imagined his soul would drift through eternity in tranquility…
Of course, he was wrong.
…
Perhaps a few hours had passed, or maybe just a few seconds. He wasn't sure. When he opened his eyes, he found himself in a town that looked like a set from an old American Western movie. The handcar came to a stop at a dilapidated train station... the tracks ended here.
He wasn't sure where he was. He didn't know what was going on here.
"The judgment will take place here," the scrawny old man said.
"Did you say judgment?" the Death Clerk asked, looking as though he didn't understand what was going on either. "Ever since World War I, judgments have been held in standard courtrooms. I think there's a problem."
"I don't know about all that," the scrawny old man replied. "I just did what I was told." "I just did what I was told…" He had already taken out a cigar and started smoking it.
"Well, why am I being judged in a place like this?" he asked. He had expected some sort of Q&A session before heading to Heaven or Hell, but this wasn't the place he had imagined. He had probably pictured somewhere with high stone ceilings or a place high above the clouds. But it certainly wasn't here. He didn't even like Western movies. Then he realized a detail.
"I'm not even originally American," he said. He had an American name, yes. He held American citizenship, yes. But did the afterlife truly operate based on the bureaucratic details of the world?
'Nothing was authentic anymore. Not even death' he thought.
"Oh, that?.. You're here because you died on the tracks." He tapped the handcar with his hand. "Right now, this little baby is the only thing that can get into places like this right now." he said.
"You're lucky, really. In the past there were things like the Inquisition courts, the French Revolutionary courts, even the Salem witch trials. You couldn't even tell what they were judging people by." He started laughing.
"There was a time when the folks upstairs loved experimenting with different concepts. This place was one of them... Ah, those lunatics."
As he tried to laugh while telling the story, he choked on his cigar smoke. After a fit of coughing, he spat on the ground.
At that moment, strange shapes began to form in the smoke rising from his cigar. The old man quickly extinguished it.
"We can't even enjoy retirement in peace. Some idiot just had to fall onto the train tracks again," he grumbled as he passed through the white light appearing on the rails with his creaky handcar.
Two men—one in a business suit, the other in a Hawaiian shirt—were left all alone in this strange town. As a tumbleweed drifted past them in the wind, they looked at one another; one waiting for an answer, the other wearing an expression that clearly revealed he didn't have one.
A moment later, the ringing of a cellphone shattered the silence between them.