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2014 ‘Goodbye’ Disclaimer

CEE

    (edit)...and, I came to a river, or some long, wide body of water...the thing stank. It was rancid water like I’d never imagined, not that much, at least; like the entire Chicago city supply, gone bad. The grass near the banks, was just as dead, that “dead-living” I mentioned, and coated in it. The water. Coated like the water was the consistency of laquer.
    Others stood there, fifty, sixty, something like that. Just people, all ages, all shades, nationalities. I’m positive one of them was Joe Cocker, it had to be. I tried to catch his eye, to know better, but everyone was wooden in expression and manner. The way they moved. More robotic than even I made Others out to be.
    There was a large floating craft, half gondola, half pontoon. The pilot of it, a long, single paddle in his right hand, was herding everyone on, one by one, slow motion. He spoke briefly with each in turn. I stood off, but nearby, ‘with, but not of’. Just like I’d been in Life.
    As the last of the persons stepped onto the craft, the boatman began to step aboard, then looked back and up the hill, toward me.
    “Will you join?” he asked, in a voice like the Grand Canyon was speaking.
    “I don’t want to,” I said, scared, vulnerable-scared, like for my first bus ride every school year.
    “You did before you got here,” he said. He was perfectly reasonable about it. “You’re here, now, and ‘want’ means nothing, ever again.”
    And, I knew that as correct, and I knew it all through me, and I saw it as inescapable...and I moved like floating wood, down the hillside.
    The boatman, it didn’t surprise me, was something more and something less, than human. Tall, as “Too Tall” Jones. Looked like a Longshoreman on a bender. But that unreal-real, like I said earlier. And he had that oar cocked, at an angle. I figured it was Mortal Kombat, the video game, if I so much as sidestepped. There wasn’t going to be any Chuck Norris-thing, or put a Walter Payton move on him and go home. Out of peripheral vision, I saw the faces of the Others. Their faces were oval, now, and with no features, but it might have been the dark light. This close, the stench of the river hurt my eyes.
    I was dead, as I told you, and I was going to a holding place, like where the State stores old paperwork that Had To Be Filled Out, but then meant nothing, so had to go away. There’s nothing as empty, as the last train to Clarksville. Sorrow and suffering, Here, are like a bad soap opera. Broad bullshit. I prefer them, because they’re idiot. You don’t understand “no option”, until you’re standing There. And, there’s no option, right, so “getting it”, is meaningless. Reality as dark and cold and silence without silence. Aloneness with no true solitude. An ‘is’, that doesn’t give a shit about the ‘I’. I nodded to the boatman-thing, and began to step aboard.
    The creature caught my arm. I once heard an expression, “bands of steel”. It doesn’t come close. I was a feather, and this thing was a demigod.
    “Your toll fee,” he was stern, now, and direct.
    The demand shook me.
    “Whaa—?”
    “You were given an obolos or coin, for after you passed through. The waterway toll. There is a fee for ferrying. You must pay for your journey.”
    The words floored me. I was struck, horrified, and beyond believing. Beyond any kind of fear.
    “Pay? For this?”
    “For your journey.”
    “...yeahyeahyeah, ‘journey’. To eternal cold storage.”
    “Yes.”
    “I have to pay for this.”
    “It is The Way.”
    I said, “Yeah, well, my parents each owned their own storefronts. My allowance, was 50 cents a week. I lost my shirt betting jai alai, at 18. I never bought healthcare, because it was just another jai alai bet. And, if you want me silent sitting, until all the suns have burned away, either you’re comping it, or I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck what your rules say. So, Fuck You—WHORE!!”
    It released me immediately. Its hungover visage was darker, far.
    “You will pay,” the boatman said, stepping aboard and single motion, pushing off land with his oar. “You cannot return; there is only Here. Stand and learn. When you tire of Self, accept, and pay me.”
    The boat, pontoon, gondola, barge, ferry, slipped into blacker shades, in just seconds, but I stood there by my guesstimate, nearly twenty minutes. Then, I snorted at what asses even demigods are, walked back uphill and reversed my way through what I told you. Pretty soon, I came awake, hearing the Town ambulance guys chuckle and tell my wife they couldn’t actually touch me, because they weren’t allowed. Indemnification. You know.
    DOCTOR’s Voice: If I take you literally and take this all as true, you were physically dead, and in what used to be called “the underworld”. Yet, upon a kind of denial through noncooperation and left to yourself, you simply came back to the land of the living—so to speak. Bing, Bang, Boom.
    CEE: ...that’s right.
    DOCTOR: How were you able to accomplish this? Sounds like a metaphysical dilemma.
    CEE: Because After Death operates according to the same, baby poop principles. Like the times I was told to stay after class, but then whatever teacher had to go to the office before my detention began and I was alone in the classroom. I just left, that’s all. If The Honor System is the only thing holding me in check, lotsa luck! “When you tire of Self”? What monastery is he from? And, I’m not paying money, for going to Hell! That’s fiscally unsound. (edit)
—from the printed transcript of a recorded interview with a convalescing patient; followup for Mayo Clinic Psychiatric Division, New Years Day, 2015

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