14
I do something strange a few weeks later, apart from all the other strangeness going on in my former life: I watch my murderer get murdered.
It started as I sat with a little girl who will only call herself J. We are playing with Barbies and talking about our killers. It is a bizarre and puzzling thing, but sometimes I find myself craving the presence of children, probably because I miss my little brother, Chase. Or perhaps it is because I gravitate towards people who were similarly struck down in their youth, in similarly violent and gruesome manners as my demise? Who knows. The girl told me she was a murdered beauty pageant star, and she was waiting to Ascend to the next level until police discovered that her own father had accidentally killed her on Christmas night after a spanking had gone too far. Until then, all she wanted to do was play with her dolls and put makeup on them and brush their hair and maintain their innocence and purity forever. I did not question this. Many people often distilled and carried over their most basic essences when they crossed over, and this little girl had become an immaculate little vision of faultless beauty forever. I reckon that my essence had a warm, sunlight-y effect, but this girl was a cipher of lost innocence, an eternal doll, an immortal Barbie with blonde curls and a porcelain smile and the most tragic blue eyes anyone could ever see, in this world or the one below it.
As we talked, she turned those sad eyes to the skies and snapped her fingers, and the low clouds above us were suddenly replaced by the shimmering, undulating view of the birth of a new galaxy. She seemed a bit happier under the pinkish blue glow of the sparkling heavens, but not much. Shiny new things were often destroyed. This was the nature of the universe.
“Why don’t you just lead them to the truth?” I asked the baby. “I’m sure you can.”
She sighed and then smiled with a wisdom that looked eons beyond her years. It was eons beyond her years, of course, but still, one does not get quickly used to seeing these things.
“Justice will be served,” she said calmly, angelically, as she dressed a baby doll in a purple romper. “It is always served. Maybe down there, maybe up here. But he will get what he deserves in the end. Until then, I’ll be waiting.”
She smiled with her preternatural calm, patted my hair and told me it was pretty, and then vanished into vermillion vapor.
A few days or months later – there is no real way to tell here – I am skipping through the lives of humans in Cape Town, South Africa. It had always seemed like a cool place to me, and I watched a family climb a bluff for a sunny picnic when I first got a feeling that something was about to go wrong half a world away. Except this version of wrong somehow felt so, so right.
Dr. Richard Dill was not always an evil man. The thing is, all monsters were born innocent, before the world got to them. As he grew older and acquired more wealth and influence, Richard forgot about his previous life, with the food stamps and the drunk daddy and the insults the rich kids would hurl at him at school, and he got comfortable. Too comfortable.
Because it was not directly associated with Cooper or my family, there was not much I could do about him. For months I was aware of this man hiding documents related to my death, altering records, bullying and threatening and harassing any lawyer who was rumored to be signing my family on, just to make a lawsuit impossible. And they deserved a lawsuit – horror stories about my surgery had been leaking through nurses and aides for months, and soon it became horrifyingly clear that my operation and its aftermath had been an absolute aberration of justice. On the day of my surgery, Dill had been in a fight with one of his girlfriends, his wife was picking up on his trail of infidelity, and he couldn’t have cared less about his job when he showed up for work. That would’ve been understandable – every human had worries. But every human did not slice open other humans for a living.
My family knew the battle against such a powerful and manipulative man would likely yield no money, they just wanted vengeance – they wanted someone, somewhere down the line to pay for what had happened to me. That was the worst thing of all, that there was no villain of the story, no clear cause of my demise, no closure. And this man’s behavior made it worse. The day he heard that the last lawyer in town had rejected the case out of fear, and that the drama was over, he shared a cigar with his mistress on his veranda and then took her into his wife’s bed while she was at a hair appointment.
I was not the first person to be killed by my surgeon’s negligence and ignorance, either. In fact, he’d set free another soul only two months before his own murder. He’d scheduled a surgery before immediately leaving for the Bahamas with one of the mistresses. Something went wrong, the surgeon was needed immediately, and yet he refused to end his vacation early. The patient died before he could be fixed. Now, I do not find joy or redemption in Dill’s mistakes. If anything I wanted him to do his job well and save more humans. But tonight, all this has led the recently deceased patient’s brother, Peter, a convicted felon and drug abuser, to the site of the doctor, with death on his mind and a machete on his floorboard.
What humans refer to as “karma” is, most of the time, simply common sense. If someone is happy and positive and sweet, the odds are that nobody will want to kill them. And if someone goes around killing people, they will probably get killed one day, too. And this is what was coming: a massive dose of common sense.
I follow the vibrations to South Beach, Miami and zoom in on the bad doc. He is at a Miami art show with a young yoga teacher who is neither his wife nor his girlfriend. This one is simply a weekend girl. Peter has been on a drug bender for four days now, and posing as a desperate patient, he was able to find the doctor’s hotel through a clueless secretary. The doctor has run out to buy his flavor of the week some Pepto Bismol. She is sick to the stomach, saying she might be pregnant, and he is thinking of slipping an abortion elixir into her dinner. It is on a side street near a Walgreens that he steps into the killer’s sights.
I know what is coming, but I try not to celebrate it. All the revenge in the world could never replace the love that man does not have in his life. He puts his love in golf clubs, in convertibles, in red-lipped beauties who sip martinis by the bar, and I pity him for it. He lives a life without love, and really, no hell could ever surpass that level of misery. And I know I can stop this. I could save him. I am learning how to intervene. I have done it before, and I could do it again. Instead, I float and watch Peter follow him down the dark street.
Peter waits until they are alone. Fully, lethally alone. (Well, alone besides me and his beautiful victim I’d found a few years before and had just summoned to my side, who is smiling beside me.)
“Mr. Dill?” Peter asks from the darkness. The doctor turns around and peers uselessly into the silence.
“Hmm? It’s Doctor, actually, and who is-”
Peter not so much stabs the doctor as walks directly into him at full speed, machete out, and slams it into his chest. It sinks up to the handle. Blood rises to Dill’s mouth as he stares down in disbelief. I get a quick glimpse into his thoughts, and they are almost unbelievably callous. In this last moment, he thinks not of his two grown children who barely speak to him, nor of his sweet wife who has suffered quietly for three decades as he ran around on her. He doesn’t even think of his little old mother, who was shipped off to a Tampa nursing home a decade before and has gotten nary a visit from him even though she calls him every Sunday night. Nor does he consider the half-dozen souls who have died on his operating table due to his carelessness just in the past few years alone. In the waning moments of his life, as his lungs fill with blood and his vision flickers, the doctor is angry that he has just put a down payment on a yacht.
I waver as I float over a dumpster. I shouldn’t be watching this. But I want to. I need to see. I need closure on the future I could’ve had, if this man hadn’t stepped into my path. Revenge and anger and bitterness are ghastly human traits, unconstructive and pointless and corrosive. And after all, I’m not doing anything to hurt him. All I’m doing is watching, right? Just like he watched me bleed out on an operating table ten years before.
Peter pulls out the machete and sinks it in again, with a nasty sound like a pumpkin being cut in half. I hear angels of death calling out their dreadful and gorgeous hymn as the doctor staggers backwards. This resembles a mixture of human voices and strings and horns, the Deathcall, welling up from the center of the world. I hear the good angels calling, too, beckoning him forward, but soon they are overcome by darker, more urgent voices, and that’s when I knew where he was headed. There is nothing light or upbeat about this man’s Deathcall. He is marked for purgatory, the other in-between. And I am almost grateful. Almost.
And I know he sees it, too: every right decision he never made, every time he had the opportunity to help a human and didn’t, is flashing before him in a deathly procession of searing regret. He feels the despair of his elderly father who called him to rescue his mortgage only to be cruelly turned away even though his request was a small portion of the surgeon’s monthly salary. He feels the heartbreak of every woman he ever fooled into falling for him, only to walk away when they started to get too close and ask for too much of his time and affection. He even feels the hunger of the homeless man with the rotting wound who asked him for food two weeks before and was waved off due to an important business call. He wishes he could go back and undo all of these ugly marks he has left on the face of humanity, because he knows just what is coming.
The horrible hymns get louder, swelling and overtaking all that he sees and feels. The pain becomes less of a pain and more of a calling. The orb is here for him. Peter cuts into him again and again, the first strike only opening the gates of anger within his wounded soul. And he will kill himself, too, finding death a sweeter option than a lifetime in a federal prison, but he wants the doctor to die first. He wants to watch the life leave his eyes, just as he had to watch the life leave the eyes of his sister after the botching of her routine abdominal surgery. And he is about to see all this and more.
I wait to feel glee or some kind of pleasure as I feel the life of my doctor slip through his fingers, but for some reason all I feel is pity. Pity that this man drifted through life, hurting as many people as he could because he just didn’t care. His neglected wife, his dead patients, even his dog that wags his tail at him every evening only to be shooed away. He is a taker, a sucker-upper, a destroyer, and he is about to meet his final destruction. They call it a “meeting” of fate because that is exactly what it is: life is the ultimate boomerang, and he is being met by everything he sent out into this place.
Okay, maybe I feel a little glee. This is validation of something I anguished over for years as a human: there is, indeed, order to this chaotic universe.
The doctor coughs and splatters blood onto the wall and falls pathetically to his knees. He doesn’t even try to fight back. He is worse than evil: he is simply a coward. The attacker brings the machete up to his own neck, preparing to feel the sweet release, and that’s when I decide I have seen enough. As the awful hymns swell louder and the doctor prepares to fall off the other edge of the knife, I whisper a prayer and wish him off with love.
With newfound solace in my soul and ancient confidence in my path, I drift on and leave my killer to die cold and alone on a desolate Miami sidewalk. And I’m glad I didn’t help him. Humans understand that karma is real – its proof is everywhere. What they do not understand is who is in charge of that karma, who is behind the scenes, doling out comeuppance and settling the score in the name of celestial justice.
Then I do something for someone who actually matters. I visit the doctor’s long-suffering wife, several cities away. I slip into her, show her what has happened, but that it will be okay. People often describe simply “knowing” when bad news has come, and this is the ghosts of their loved ones coming to soften the blow. As she breaks down and slides to the tile floor I sink into her, show her how strong she is, that she will get through this, that she is better off without him in her life anyway. And as she stares up at the ceiling through hot tears, she suddenly realizes just how okay she will be. I see it all, and I show her. She will move to a condo by the sea. She will have a little herb garden on her deck. And she will never again have a silent husband return home at six in the morning and slip back into a silent marriage that suffocates her more and more every day.
Severing ties can feel impossible. Feeling yourself move in a direction that is different from the person you were previously moving with, on a path that is different from the path you were previously moving on, and wanted to be moving on, can take everything out of you. I know you don’t know it now, when you are so deep in this hole, but one day soon you will move on from this. There will come a day when you wake up and look back and shrug your shoulders at the problems of your past, wonder why you ever cared so much about someone who didn’t care about you. You will rise from your cocoon of sheets, step into your shower, and prepare yourself for a brave new world without the one you have left behind. You will squirt some shampoo into your hand and wonder why you never left sooner. You will brush your teeth and marvel at just how easy this new life is, this life you thought would be impossible without him. There will be a day when this (or he, or she, or they, or whatever is tugging at your soul) will mean nothing to you anymore. Until that day arrives, go in your room and turn off the light. Turn the air conditioning all the way down and lie on your bed. Breathe in, breathe out. Put your hand on your chest and feel the beat of your heart, that muscle in your chest letting you know that despite the best efforts of this punishing world, you are still here, you are still trying, you are still fighting. You are doing just fine, here on this planet that does its best to kill your heart decades before it kills your body. You are doing just fine. I promise.
And really, the ultimate justice this surgeon could’ve been dealt was the stab wound he just died from, because in the end his death was only the termination of a self-created lifelong prison sentence. Under the smirks and the sports cars he was miserable, and even the most pathetic of humans deserve to be set free from their misery eventually. Because in the end, the people who live with no love: these are the ones we should pity. These are the souls we should feel sorry for. It is not the pure and the good that need our love: they have enough. It is the evil, for they need love so much more than we will ever know. They are all alone, and it is so sad.
I don’t feel all that bad, though, because even though I am dead and will never age another day, I still think my spirit has grown a little more mature with my handling of this situation. I am maturing, even if it is from the wrong side of things. I could have gloated and rejoiced at the death of this sad, poor waste of a man, but I did not.
That much.
I smile to myself as I hit the edge of the Milky Way with the doctor’s other villain. I don’t care about the details anymore, and I don’t care that this man got to live a long and full and eventful life while I did not. Justice has been served. It will always be served. Just ask little J.