As the Reaper Weeps

by Briahm D. Crowe

Death is a man with a frown on his lips and a tear in his eye. The skeletal face and black, flowing robe were lost ages ago to the needs of those he touches, those whose contacts prove to be fleeting and unfulfilling, merely a good-bye as they pass to wherever and whatever awaits us all. I know. I called him, prayed for the introduction that would take me into his bosom-- and he came.

Why would I do that, you ask? Wish for the shadow to come, ask that the seeds sewn in my life be reaped like so many weeds? I could tell you that it was because of Beth, that I wanted to know that her death had been painless. It seems almost noble when put under that light, doesn't it? But it's a lie, both to you and myself. I was just weak, and a coward -- too scared to own up to my part in her death and too weak to return to the life that was left me. It was much easier to find a needle and fill my arm with the heroin that had taken her. It was much easier to close my eyes and deny that I could have stopped the life and death she'd chosen -- made a difference if only I'd cared when it had mattered.

The drug rushed through my system like a brush fire. I didn't know if the dose I'd cooked was enough to kill me, but as low as my tolerance was to such a new predator in my system, it was ample and more. It hit my brain with force and had its way with my senses.

Euphoria was the first to set in, so powerful that I couldn't recall why I was doing this. But that ended soon enough, the reminder literally knocking at the door and announcing itself. Beth walked across the room and sat on the bed that I had fallen out of when the drug had taken over my veins. She looked at me with love and adoration enough to amplify my guilt.

She was how she'd been an eternity ago, small and fragile at four years old, with chestnut hair and brown, almost black eyes. She giggled and held a doll out for me to take, a doll with glass eyes and limp arms that foretold the future.

Then, just like that, she had grown to sixteen, and it was only this time that I really noticed her, for I hadn't in the twelve years when she had done the growing. I had been too overcome with her mother's good-bye and left her to be raised and educated by her peers -- and her eyes told the story. The love and adoration were gone, replaced by the doll's glassy stare and limp, track-scarred arms.

That's how my own death began, with reminders of its own necessity -- a bitter story, one that's painful and laced with guilt, but all too true to deny by silence. I wished death upon myself, weaker even in passing than I had been in life.

The door opened again. I raised my head from the puddle of vomit beneath my face. The man who walked in was naked, and this seemed somehow appropriate. He knelt beside me, his nakedness neither perverse nor acknowledged, and stroked my sweat-soaked hair. I knew who he was and what his intentions were, for I had called him and awaited his arrival. I tried to reach for him but I couldn't move, opened my mouth but couldn't speak. I was too numb even to feel that I had pissed myself.

My condition obviously weighed on him. His eyes were becoming moist and his strokes became ever more gentle on my brow.

"Why did you call me?" he asked. "Do you not know what I must do?" I thought I did. He was to take me to the ever-night and leave me to dream of Beth and how things should have been. He was to take me to an eternity of PTA meetings and father-daughter cook-outs.

"Do you not know?" he asked again as a tear gathered in the corner of his eye and fell into my open mouth.

"You could never know," he said as the salt of his tear spread across my buds.

He leaned and put his lips to mine, whispering words of sorrow against them; and darkness came with them -- the ever-night that I had hoped and wished for.

When my eyes fluttered open again, the taste of his tears was still laying salty on my tongue. A funeral dirge echoed just past the boundaries of hearing, setting rhythm for the waves of feeling that were coming back to my prone body.

At first, I thought that my wish had been denied, that the meeting with the dark angel had been just another drug-induced vision, like the reminders of when things had been lost with Beth. But when I rose, opened the door and left my room, the true nature of circumstances presented itself, for as the door swung open and revealed the minute part of the world that had been my living room, it proved to be -- nothing. There was absolutely nothing on the other side of the doorway.

Confusion and wonder at the unknown came in a package with the realization of what I was seeing. And, while this wasn't the ever-night I had envisioned, it most assuredly wasn't the world I had known before closing my eyes and feeling Death's lips on my own. Not knowing what else to do, and not relishing the thought of and eternity in my make-shift mausoleum, I stepped blindly into the dark abyss--

--and found myself in the florescent glow of a hospital room. A man lay, cheaply robed, eyes closed to the world around. A trio of people stood close beside his bed, clearly distraught, the most notable being a cleric, wearing his ominous black and speaking last rights. A woman stood beside him, holding a tissue to her face, trying in vain to stop the river of mascara that poured from beneath her tear-streaming eyes. And beside her, a young boy of perhaps ten stood with eyes that held more fear than sorrow.

The compunction hit me to go and console them, what with my recent marriage with the very thing that they would soon face. What better mouth to breath sympathies than one kissed by the Reaper himself? Who better would know the consolations?

The thought itself was enough to put me beside the death bed and, being so close to the dying man, I felt that I could hear his heart slowing, giving up the burden that had carried it through the man's life. I tasted that life seeping out with every breath -- salty like Death's tears on my tongue -- and smelled the impending rot of his passing. I turned to his family with a lie on my lips and prepared to tell them of the better place and pass along the bundle of cliches that had helped mankind face death throughout history and before. I wanted to tell them that the river Styx was a pleasure cruise through eternity, but they hadn't even noticed my arrival.

I voiced a soothing word of consolation, careful of its choice and pleased with such a metaphysical metaphor, but it was lost on them. They were too wrapped up in their own grief to realize my presence, so I turned my attention to the man whose taste and smell gave the secret of his time.

His eyes were open. Even as I heard his heart slow further and saw the line on his EKG showing more horizontal than vertical motion, his eyes were opened and fixed on me. Again, I tried to get the mourners' attentions, a word of sorrow now traded for bursts of joy, but they still ignored my presence. I turned back to the man. His eyes were still open and his gaze still rested on me. Only now there were two of them, one superimposed over the other. He still lay flat and still, eyes closed, in his hospital bed, but that body was pale, milk-whitish and transparent, only seen through the solid self that gazed at me.

He was beautiful in a way that can never be explained . Any who live in a world where beauty is associated through sex and primitive urges toward reproduction, such as the waking world does, could never understand. His beauty was in his plane of his existence, or should I say in his being between such planes. He was beautiful because he knew me as I suddenly knew myself. The end was near and I (who had shirked the greatest of responsibilities, and thus the greatest of relations, in life) was here to take him to it. Understanding came from nowhere and everywhere. I knew myself for what I had become.

And with the knowledge came the same of him. I knew him as intimately as if I had birthed him and raised him as my own. I knew every pain and joy that had made his life real; I knew that he had grieved the death of a goldfish named Sharky at the age of four, knew the joy he'd felt at the birth of his son and the pain and fear he'd felt when the heart-attack came for him while bending his young secretary over his desk that very night. And, where she had betrayed their mock intimacy by leaving him to other mourners, I had created the real by coming for him.

That was the realization, the undeniable truth and reality. That's what I had become with the taste of death's tears, the tears that were forming in my own eyes at that very moment.

Through the blur that my vision was becoming, I saw again his gaze upon me, both frightened and awed, like the fear of God. And, as the first tear slid down my flushing cheek, I bent to him.

Lip to lip, breath to breath, I touched him, drinking his life into my lungs and passing it back through my nostrils to be recycled by creation. He gave it to me; freely or forcibly, I don't know, but in the end, he gave it to me and the transparent body became the real and the one I had kissed became the dream.

Death's time had passed once again, and I cried for it.

Tears are the tides of emotion, rising to passion and loss like the sea in its lunar infatuation; and once risen, the tide carries things back with it. That's the force which carried me. The hospital room and its contents of loss and sorrow were gone, no longer connected to me. In its place, I was left drifting on the tides, rocking with the waves created by the force of those who left their world and those who unknowingly awaited their own departure. It was timeless and, in the greatest of paradoxes, time was my only companion. I was left to sail on this salty sea with nothing but my mind to drift. And it did.

I thought of the man and his passing, of my place in the events that had occurred. I tried to rationalize them so that they made sense to me, but I was beyond the world of the rational and was forced to either accept them as fact or come to grips with my loss of sanity. I toyed with both. But mostly, I thought of Beth. The thoughts of her were a torment, spurring me into fits of rage and then utter despair. I would wail my fists on my soul-raft and then recluse into its furthest, darkest corner to lay motionless, hiding from the thoughts. But they came no matter what. I would remember her in her innocence-- the hand-shaped cut-outs that had been painted as Thanksgiving turkeys, the look in her eyes when I had taught her to ride a bicycle, the complete trust that I would never let her fall or let her down. But I had done both.

I saw more clearly now how she'd been in her teens, recognized the signs that I hadn't cared or needed to see at the time -- the drop in her grades, the change in music and fashion tastes, the chasm which had opened between her and I. All quite innocent-looking at first glance, but in retrospect... In the timeless drift, this was what I had been left with, this and the constant horizon to mark my progress through the deep current of the tears. And, where the thoughts and memories proved unending, the horizon finally showed signs that this emotional sea was finite. It was the horizon which brought me land.

It started as a mere speck just within view, but grew larger and larger, becoming a port for my vessel. And my vessel was anxious to dock, hungry for company other than my failures.

I soon found myself standing on land, the sea at my back seeming hesitant to release me. It wasn't a beach I stood on, but a city street. A horse and carriage trotted past me, breathing new life into my thoughts of the timelessness of my voyage, for they betrayed the approximate time into which I had docked.

The stench of recent and impending death hung in the air, almost solid in its covering of the place. It stole its way down my throat and into my lungs, a reminder of my place and new-found responsibilities in this ever never-after. I struggled through it, pushing on in hopes of finding life, a pleasant greeting for my loneliness after an endless time adrift on the sea of my tears. And life I found, huddled in the corner of a deserted alley, wearing the rags of a beggar woman and the marks of an all-too-apparent plague on her ravaged flesh. She was covered in great, deep, running cankers, and what untouched flesh was left to her was flushed with terrible fever. Through the fever, she shivered and her body racked with cough.

I rushed to her, moved by pity and the selfish need for human touch even from this woman who had lived and was dying hundreds of years before my birth. I bent to her; my hand found her thin arm, which still shook with her weakness.

She slowly struggled her face up into mine and smiled at me. She too needed the solace of another, and her joy spread to me. I wasn't alone now. This woman, pitiful and sickly as she was, wanted me and shared her company freely. Tears of joy formed in my eyes, wetting my cheeks and bidding them to wrinkle further with the smile that was appearing there. And she, tuned in to the intimacy of our exchange, smiled more freely, thankful for a companion in her

time of weakness.

She made to speak, to express whatever thanks or praises would continue the moment, but with the words came the breath that powered them, and with the breath came the rest of her, any strength that may have fought for a place within. I caught her as she fell and cradled her into my arms, bending my face farther into hers to catch whatever words she labored, but the breath had gone, becoming my own. My touch had been given, taking all that she was and trading my tears of joy for those of grief.

The alley was gone and I was left to the tides once again. The horizon and memories were back as companions, and I mourned their presence. No birds circled or sang above to occupy my mind. No mermaids swam beside to sing away my loneliness, only the steady rock of the waves and the ever-present longing and loss. Only the realization that this was my future and eternity. What retribution could be more fitting? I had ignored the needs and relations of the one who had needed me most. I had pushed her to her death and then belatedly cared enough to bring the death to myself. How fitting that I was left to bring it to others and be unknown to them until that time came. How fitting...

Eternal voyage. Surrounded by the past, present and future and drawn always to the horizon and those it brought me to. I crossed that horizon countless times into countless times. I stole the breath from millions in the civil war, the same in the first and second, and again in the Third. Back and forth across eternity I sailed, alone but for the brief moments with the dying and their recognition. I was Death, fated to learn why the Reaper becomes grim. And through it all, Beth's face traveled with me, reminding me of my penance. It was her that I cried to in my moments of agony. It was her whose forgiveness my tears begged. It was she who I prayed to see again.

The horizon brought sight of land anew, and I was left to wonder at whose death I was to ingest. Soon enough, my vessel scraped the bottom and came to a halt. I stepped from the floating prison and relished the feel of a solid step.

I was standing in a back alley in a bad neighborhood. The buildings were peeling paint and exposing bare brick beneath. The majority of their windows were broken out, and the ones that were left carried scars of bullet holes. Trash was piled high in the alley and what I could see of the street showed the same. It was a part of the city that had been given up on long ago.

As I stood wondering at where I was to go, the building closest to me got even closer, as if I was being drawn to it without the use of limbs. I could do nothing but surrender and await my destination. I passed through the wall and into the condemned structure, nothing more than a menacing tenant awaiting the victim that would force my actions.

I kept moving across the room and heard moans as I got closer to the far wall. As I passed through it, the source of the moans became visible. My legs became weak and my gorge rose. The familiar tears encamped my eyes and my voice failed me as a name lodged in my throat.

"Beth!" I was finally able to scream. "Beth! Oh, God! Oh, God! No, God!" She lay with her eyes rolled into the back of her head, her arms limp, one still tied with a rubber strap. There was vomit oozing from the corner of her mouth. It broke my heart a million times over to see her like that-- to see the state which my fatherly incompetence had driven her to.

I rushed to her side, cupping her face and calling her name. My heart jumped with hope when her eyes opened, but the dread and heartache came right back when I realized the story that was unfolding. I pulled my hands back, intent not to touch her. She had died once already and I wouldn't be the one to cause it again. But she had awakened and she grasped my arm as it was drawing free. She pulled it close, speaking in a soft, fragile voice.

"Daddy?"

The single word, though whispered softly, cut through my mind and soul like a shriek. Thoughts of times long lost came as if they had been lived that very day-- times when I had fathered her instead of trusting that she would get by. And now, after such time of praying to hold her again, to ask her forgiveness, I tried to push her away. I knew the power of my touch, the end result, but she clung to me as if I were her life preserver in the sea that she could not know awaited her.

"Daddy?"

A semblance of her former self glinted from beneath her tired eyes-- the love and adoration, trust and devotion.

"Daddy, are you really there?"

With my silence, the glint began to falter, being replaced with the fear and loneliness of her last moments. I knew that I couldn't do that to her. More than ever before, she needed her father and I couldn't-- wouldn't deprive her of that again.

"Yes, honey," I said. "I'm finally here."

She smiled through the fog of her high. Daddy was finally here. After the years of neglect, Daddy had come. She leaned awkwardly to hug me, to kiss her father as every little girl loves to do. And, as no other father could, neither could I refuse the gesture.

Copyright 1998 Briahm D. Crowe