#237 sat at the cafeteria table across from #414. By an odd coincidence, they had ordered identical sandwiches—Virginia ham with Havarti cheese, lettuce, tomato, and Dijon mustard. 237’s sandwich lay untouched on his tray, while 414 worked at his with vigor. A small bit of lettuce clung to left side of 414’s lower lip. 237 could see it clearly but said nothing. It was the peak of the lunch hour, yet the cafeteria, which had a capacity of hundreds, was surprisingly empty. Aside from 237 and 414, there were perhaps two dozen other diners scattered throughout the room. It was nearing the end of the quarter and the pressure to make quotas was immense. People were skipping lunch these days, working at their desks, drumming up leads. Everyone in the cafeteria was dressed identically—floor-length heavy black robe with hood. It was the only officially sanctioned work uniform. There were no casual Fridays. The closest thing to casual was an understood tolerance for lowering one’s hood so long as you were on company premises and not in the presence of clients. 237 picked up his sandwich, considered it for a moment, then replaced it on the tray without taking a bite. He glanced slowly about the cafeteria, then back at 414.
“Maybe it’s the uniform,” he said, leaning back in his chair with a heavy sigh. He had been sighing a lot lately. He held up one long draped arm and considered it. “It’s pretty depressing.”
“Of course it’s depressing,” 414 responded, wiping his mouth on an identical sleeve. “It’s supposed to be depressing. We’re messengers of death, for God’s sake. You’d prefer maybe a tutu?”
“What I want is to feel good about my job,” 237 said, at last taking a reluctant bite from his sandwich. A glob of mustard squirted out the back of the sandwich, landed on the front of his robe, and slid slowly downward leaving a snail-like trail as it went. “Great,” he said, looking down. “Just great.” He wiped at the mustard with a napkin but succeeded only in smearing it around and creating a bigger stain on the thick dark fabric. 414 watched in fascination 237’s futile efforts. “I want to feel like I’m making a difference.”
“You’re certainly making a difference in the front of that robe,” 414 said, holding a clean napkin in his companion’s direction.
“Gee, thanks. I knew I could count on you to understand.”
“Oh c’mon, man. Lighten up, will you? A difference?! How much more of a difference could you be making? You get paid to accompany people on their final journey from this world to the next. You get to travel to exotic places, meet different people every day. Do you honestly think wearing a sailor suit is going to change how you feel about your job? You’re just in a funk, that’s all. Happens to everyone at one time or another.”
“I guess,” 237 said unenthusiastically. “I just feel like there’s something missing, you know?”
“All you need are a couple of plum assignments—Bahamas, Cancun—before you know it you’ll be right back in the swing.”
“Cancun?” 237 said. “Are you nuts?” He held up his black-clad arm. “In these things? It’s ninety-eight degrees and a hundred fifty percent humidity down there. There’s no Tommy Bahama version of the cloak on the approved uniform list that I’ve ever seen. No thanks, my friend. You can keep your tropics.”
“What brought all this on anyway?” 414 asked. He ate potato chips from a small bag, dropping crumbs onto the front of his robe. “You were fine last week. Oh wait, is this about 178’s party? It is, right?”
“No, it’s not about 178. Okay, so he reached fifty thousand. They’re throwing him a party. Bully for him. The guy goes out like five times a day. No wonder he reached gold so fast. Maybe a few of us have other interests in our lives aside from working all the time.”
“You’re JEALOUS! You can’t stand the thought that 178 made gold already and you’re still puttering along trying to get your first five thousand. I can’t believe 237 is jealous.”
“I’m NOT jealous, damn it. I think I’m just bored. Doesn’t matter whether you get one call a day or ten. It’s the same damned thing over and over.”
“The same? Are you kidding? This job’s got great variety. You got your plane crashes, car wrecks, heart attacks, school shootings. How much more variety do you want, for God’s sake? Besides, you must be getting at least some of the gigs you put on your dream sheet, right?”
“What is that? Some kind of sick joke? You wanna know what’s on my dream sheet? All I told them I want are the slow peaceful cases—nursing homes, hospices, dying-in-your-bed stuff. I like the conversation, the interactions.”
“Conversations? Don’t you mean whining? You can have those calls as far as I’m concerned. People who are still alive are annoying as hell. Everything’s a negotiation. ‘Please, just one more day. I don’t have my affairs in order yet. What about my poor wife? There’s so much more I wanted to do with my life.’ No, sir. Give me a good old-fashioned train wreck any day. Blood, guts, spontaneity, no back talk. That’s what it’s all about, my friend.”
“Where’s the challenge in that? All you’re doing is mopping up. I had a car wreck the other day. Nothing left but parts everywhere. Dispatch should’ve told me to bring a putty knife and some baggies. How am I adding value in that situation?”
414 suddenly glanced over 237’s shoulder and excitedly waved his hand toward the door of the cafeteria.
“Yo, 829,” he shouted. “Over here, man.” The newly arrived reaper was dressed identically to the others but was a full head shorter than the two already at the table. His feet kept catching the front of the robe and he nearly stumbled forward into the table as he approached.
“Watch it there, son. You’re gonna kill yourself.” 414 glanced down at 237 and winked. “Why don’t you get that thing taken up or something?”
829 sat down heavily in one of the unoccupied chairs.
“Don’t think I haven’t tried. I’ve sent it out twice already, but it’s like the guys in laundry assume that everybody in this place is Kareem Jabbar or something.”
“Well, you’re just in time. 237 here is having an identity crisis, carrying on about the lack of fulfillment in his job. He wants to relate to his clients. Convince them to come willingly.”
829 unwrapped his sandwich. “Willingly? Are you on that again? Really? Last time you got in a funk was the language thing as I recall.” He turned to 414. “They gave him like seven Spanish clients in a row.”
“And a Russian. That’s another thing,” 237 responded. “The one thing I like about this—the one freakin thing—is actually talking to people, but they gotta send me to clients who can’t even speak English. It’s like they’re going out of their way to piss me off.”
“Sucks, right?” 829 said, throwing his hood back. “Shit, I hate this thing. These people ever heard of cotton? Look, I get what you’re saying. I mean, I like talking too, but it’s not as though I’m trying to get to know these people. How much time do you really have with each one? Five, maybe ten minutes tops. Besides which,” he said, momentarily lifting both up arms up, “once they get a load of the outfit, they’re all a little freaked, right? It’s not as though they’re gonna open up to you, unless it’s to grovel. That’s the one great constant of humanity. Rich or poor, brown, yellow, or white—they all excel at groveling when the big moment comes.”
“See, that’s where I gotta disagree with you,” 237 said. “There are folks out there who aren’t grovelers. They’re ready to go. They know it’s time. It’s an actual pleasure to interact with them.”
“Yeah, well you must have a different bedside manner than I do, or maybe just a different clientele, cause all I get are the negotiators.” He looked to 414 for affirmation.
“Best of all,” 414 said, his mouth still full of ham sandwich, “is when they offer you money. I really got into it with this stockbroker the other day. I mean, there he is, three hundred pounds if he’s an ounce, laying on the gurney about to go in for a quadruple bypass, and I’m sitting next to him, just waiting, you know, cause I don’t want to rush the guy. And out of the blue he offers me—get this—ten thousand shares of unrestricted shares in Google. Seriously, he starts asking me where he can wire the stock to. So I get up out of the chair and I’m standing over the bed, doing my whole ominous angel-of-death thing, and I ask him do I look like I have any use for common shares? Now he’s got the oxygen mask on and IV’s hanging out of him everywhere and so, just to have a little fun, I say “Now if you have some options, then maybe we got something to talk about, know what I mean? And just for a moment I think he thought I was serious. Only then he flat-lined and that was that. Never even made it into the O.R. Google—can you believe that?”
“At least you got to have a conversation,” 237 said. “You gonna tell me that isn’t more interesting than cleaning up after a house fire?” He sighed again and took another bite of his sandwich.
“Hey look,” 414 said, “this is death, all right. These people aren’t exactly expecting fireworks and dancing girls. We’ve spent a long, long time building up a certain reputation. There’s a reason why ‘grim’ is in the job title, you know. Better get your head back in the game, my friend, or you’re gonna find yourself stoking a furnace someplace a whole lot less pleasant than this.”
At that moment a shrill tone sounded from the speakers in the ceiling of the cafeteria, followed by a deep, urgent voice.
“All unassigned staff report immediately to the main conference room. I repeat…”
237 wrapped up his mostly uneaten sandwich and tucked it into the deep front pocket of his cloak. Everyone in the room rose at once and made their way to the front door, each retrieving a scythe from the rack as he made his way out. Moments later there were more than two hundred reapers sitting in the theater-like surroundings of the main conference room. Clearly there were a lot more reapers awaiting assignments than had been apparent from the cafeteria crowd. 237, 414, and 829 sat next to each other in a row near the back of the room.
“What do you think?” whispered 414. “Gotta be big, right? Last meeting like this was that tidal wave in Indonesia.”
The lights dimmed slightly and a tall, thin figure strode to the podium at the front of the conference room stage. He was taller and thinner even than the reapers in his audience, a group that comprised individuals already well above average in these characteristics. The speaker was clad in the requisite heavy black robe, identical to the two hundred or so in the room save for seven very subtle gray stripes around each wrist, signifiers of his rank in the organization. At the sight of a single-digit reaper, a murmur arose from the audience. There were nine of them and they comprised the topmost layer of the reaper hierarchy. They did not make appearances unless there was an extraordinary reason to do so.
“Holy shit, it’s 7.” 237 whispered, but it came out so loud everyone within five seats heard him. “I haven’t seen that guy since Vietnam.”
“I saw a single once, I think,” 829 said. “No idea which one though. He was pretty far away. Is it true what they say about 7? He got Kennedy?”
“I heard he got four presidents, two popes, and Jimi Hendrix,” 414 said. “Those guys get all the plush assignments.”
“Freakin Hendrix? Can you even imagine?” said 237. “Closest I ever came to fame was a roadie for Fleetwood Mac. Guy plugged the wrong two cables together and fried himself.”
“I had a NASCAR driver last year,” 414 responded. “Guy hit the wall doing about 195. Talk about messy.”
The single cleared his throat at the podium and the enormous room immediately fell into a hush.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he began. “You will, of course, know that we do not make such impromptu requests of your time without there being a compelling reason for doing so. In short, we have a large-scale situation shaping up that is going to require all of the available unassigned staff we can assemble. He raised a bony right hand toward the large screen behind him and a photo of a gleaming white ship appeared. The water surrounding the vessel was calm and deep green. The sky was blue and cloudless.
“This is the luxury liner Ocean Angel. Sadly for the individuals on this cruise, conditions at the moment are rather less ideal than is depicted in this file image. I am going to assume, for the purposes of the remainder of this presentation, that everyone here is current on their open water rating.”
“Shit,” whispered 237. “I hate water jobs.”
414 whispered back. “Why? Because you can’t have a fulfilling conversation with someone who’s treading water?”
Someone in the row in front turned and shushed their conversation. 7 continued.
“There are something like thirty-eight-hundred individuals on this cruise. Currently the ship is in the middle of the North Atlantic en route from New York to London. They are, however, not going to make it, as the captain has managed to run aground off the coast of Iceland and the hull is badly breached. The ship is fatally compromised, water temperature is in the mid thirties, and there are no rescue vessels within five hundred miles save for a handful of Icelandic helicopters. We are expecting significant casualties, so I strongly recommend that you each set aside for the moment whatever pressing matters you have and make your way to the scene with all haste. You’ve all got quotas to meet, and this is an unexpected opportunity to do a bit of catching up. As for protocol, due to the large-scale nature of the situation, there will be no specified assignees. All souls are to be regarded as targets of opportunity and handled as such. Happy hunting, gentlemen.”
With this enthusiastic exhortation, he turned and left the stage without further comment.
“Sheesh,” 237 said, rising from his seat. “Thirty-eight-hundred. That’s like twenty apiece for everybody in the room.”
“Not likely,” 414 said. “They won’t all be casualties. A few lucky souls will get plucked from the icy waters. But none of them will be our casualties if we stand here jawing about it. C’mon, lads, there’s work to be done.”
———————
Newest Sea-Rider Line luxury vessel Ocean Angel founders; thousands perish
December 16, 2012
NEW YORK (AP) — The Icelandic navy has reported that the luxury liner Ocean Angel has run aground near the Iceland coast during a holiday cruise from New York to London. There were in excess of 3,800 persons on board and rescue forces have removed no more than one hundred fifty from the frigid North Atlantic waters. The captain, James Wainwright, survived, but remains in critical condition at an Iceland hospital.
The Ocean Angel is the newest vessel in the Sea-Rider fleet and was engaged in only its fifth voyage when the disaster occurred. Reporters on the scene have indicated that the ship is thought to have run aground during a whale-watching portion of the voyage near the southern coast of Iceland.
Sea-Rider CEO Joshua Desjardins indicated in a press conference today that the line has halted all planned voyages for the foreseeable future and has launched an investigation into the cause of the accident. He offered his sincere condolences to members of the victims’ families.