Death catches a cab.

   I saw Death getting in a cab at the corner of 34th and Broadway last week.  At least I'm pretty sure that was him.

   Whenever someone wants to personify Death, they imagine an eight-foot tall skeleton, shrouded in a flowing cloak as black as night, carrying a sharp silver scythe at the end of a long oak pole.  But he doesn't really look like that.  Death is a short, stout Latvian immigrant wearing cheap running sneakers and a short-sleeved dress shirt and threadbare chinos.   He's a good 45 years old, and has a hairline in full retreat.   The top of his head shines a little, even when it's cloudy.  When he abruptly waves his arm to flag a cab, he kind of hops up and down a little, like an overeager student trying to attract the attention of the teacher.

   I know, I know.  "That's not Death, you idiot," you're thinking.  "That's Pavel, the guy that owns the fruit stand down in the East Village.  I buy white peaches from him." 

   But think about it: the Grim Reaper strolling the streets outside Macy's is going to attract a lot of attention, and not all of it positive.  New Yorkers can be confrontational, and the last thing that Death needs to be doing on a busy weekend is fending off some hostile 20-year old slacker who wants to argue about why Grandma had to die.   What on earth would Death be able to say that would explain mortality to an indestructible youth?  That "Grandma was ready to move on to the next stage of her existence?"   Every time he used that line, he'd get into extended and often hostile arguments about what the hell "ready" was supposed to mean.  You'd be amazed at how sarcastic people always got when they'd argue that their husband certainly wasn't "ready" to get shot in a convenience store holdup or that their infant daughter couldn't possibly have been "ready" to die mere hours after being born.   More than a few people tore up one side of him with the "ready" business, then came back down the other side over the vagueness of "next stage of her existence."   I'm sure he hated sounding like the I Ching, but certain universal truths just can't be explained to people any more precisely without opening up a whole new can of worms, so he probably didn't bother.

   He'd tried just leveling with people, explaining that Fate, that pain-in-the-ass bean counter up on the 9th floor of Headquarters, sent a standard memo through the interoffice mail, indicating on a smudged, yellow, second-generation carbon copy (carbon!  why the hell didn't they have a photocopier in the underworld?) that one Eleanor Lambert of Levittown, N.Y., age 81, had finally balanced out the two columns of strange, indecipherable symbols running down each side of her page in Fate's ledger.  When he was first starting out in the job, Death had asked what each of those inky black runes with faintly glowing edges meant, hoping that he'd be able to explain to families exactly why he was coming for Mom.  But that condescending and pretentious Fate had a way of speaking in confusing riddles and wordy epigrams about each entry in the log, and after listening to twenty minutes of fortune cookie platitudes, Death finally gave up and stopped asking.  It was easier to just disguise himself as a Slavic greengrocer or a lesbian bike messenger or a flight attendant for a struggling commuter airline when circulating in the world of the living.

   I bet getting the Christians was probably a mixed blessing.  They wouldn't get all indignant or resistant or start pleading for more time like the agnostics did.  The true believers probably got all bubbly and excited that it was time to "go see Jesus."  But they'd endlessly badger Death with questions on the way back, questions he neither had the knowledge nor the inclination to answer.  How is he supposed to know why we're here, or what Heaven is like?   He probably snapped the first few times he got that one-- it was like asking the local county clerk what color the ceiling in the Reichstag was.  As far as he was concerned, the afterlife consisted of a tiny, windowless office, stuffed with dented green filing cabinets, an antique coatrack, and a tiny desk with an overflowing "IN" box, tucked away of the third floor of a crumbling building in the Underworld.  Sometimes, Death wondered whether the third floor was his eternal torment-- he hated taking the stairs everyday, but people in the elevator gave him dirty looks when he got on to only go up two floors.   As for the Jesus question, Death didn't really know.  He got his marching orders from Fate, and didn't really like the guy enough to have a cup of coffee with him and talk about his family.

   Death was sanguine about his job: it wasn't the most glamorous thing to be doing, and it took him to bad neighborhoods a lot, but for the most part, he was his own boss and most of his assignments were generally pleasant.  He liked fetching the terminally ill the most.  They were cheerful to finally be liberated from their disease, but subdued enough not to riddle him with questions or plead for more time.   They had spent days, weeks, months in hospitals, storing up huge reserves of words during those long hours of silences between visits from super-efficient nurses or family members with their forced nonchalance.  When Death finally gave them an audience, those storehouses of words came tumbling out of them: the accumulated wisdom of those who had been given an extended opportunity to contemplate their own mortality.  Nobody ever said anything too profound, but Death seemed to most enjoy the company of those who had spent some of their time on Earth in considered reflection.  Their observations and conclusions about their lives would remind him of things he recalled thinking about at the end of his own life, like the insight one gains into a movie by reading its reviews after seeing it. 

   At any rate, I stood on the corner and watched Death as a yellow cab veered wildly across three lanes of traffic to abruptly stop in front of him. A woman carrying three oversized Macy's bags tried to push her way into his cab, assertively claiming that the cab was actually responding to her hail.  The woman assailed him with heated words-- recklessly, in my opinion, since the man could have easily harvested her eternal soul right there on the curb.  But he didn't.  Instead, he turned his back to her, ignoring her increasingly assaultive words and tone, and silently climbed in the cab and closed the door.  As the cab squealed away from the curb to catch a stale green light, the woman gave the departing cab and its supernatural occupant the finger, not realizing that they would meet again.  Shortly.

Posted: 5/30/01