Spirit Wars (4 page)

Indeed the only damage I can find is the portion of the ceiling
above me, a ventilation shaft that has expanded as if it had been burst open
with dynamite, and the immediate spot on the floor that has
buckled
and cracked under the weight of my imported mounting
board. Apart from these, the room is spick and span.

There’s a customized desk made of luxurious ebony in the middle of
the room. On top of it, there’s a solid-brass name plate proclaiming in big,
bold letters: SEPHTIMUS REX, CHIEF ASTRAL DEPORTER. But counting these out, the
office is spartan and lacks even chairs for a visitor (not that I’d be needing
any) or Sephtimus Rex himself to sit on.

As though reading my mind and not liking what he finds there,
Sephtimus Rex swivels on his heels to face me and take off his hood. I brace
myself for the worst. The most grotesque and sickening sight yet. I resign
myself to the impending revelation, the climax to all the evil man wasn’t meant
to see.

 I’m not
sure whether to feel relieved or
cheated when I find underneath the black hood, the mother of all anticlimaxes:
a Dia de los Muertos mask. Yet somehow I feel I know the reason behind this
diluted image. No shape could ever truly contain the deep and pervasive horror
that Death inspires; to see it in all its raw potential is to literally explode
my head.

Then, i
n one fluid, memorized motion, Sephtimus
whirls his cloak off and into the air and a spirit steps out of a wall of
monitors to take the role of a coat-stand. This spirit is fully skeletal;
tragical
ly
its head is missing so there’s nothing but its spine
protruding between the shoulder-blades, which is anyway perfect for this
occasion as a peg. Sephtimus tosses his guitar case in the same direction and
the decapitated skeleton also catches this out of habit, before stiffening
ramrod straight like a foot guard at Buckingham Palace.

I discover the reaper is wearing a black leather trench coat with
crisscrossing metal-studded straps sewn on the shoulders and the chest,
suggestive of a straitjacket that ironically restrains the warden of hell. The
coat’s lining sweeps all the way down to the floor, which is probably for the best
because there’s no sign of feet whatsoever under it.

When Sephtimus finally sits behind his desk – more like throws
himself down in total abandon – another apparition scurries on all fours to
catch him while three more jump from behind to support his back and arms; all
four of them melding into one grand throne made entirely of human bones.
Sephtimus then takes a pack of cigarettes out of a drawer and one of his melded
assistants dislocates its forearm to light his stick with one hinged finger.
Apparently, everything in this room is a living extension of the Chief Astral
Deporter and exists to serve on his every whim.

“I swear, nicotine and caffeine are going to be the death of me,”
he says to himself, smoking with humanoid lips in the fraction of space between
the maxilla of his skull mask and his coat’s stand-up collar. But he sounds so
pleased with himself that I doubt if he means what he’s saying.

All at once it comes to me with an almost physical shock; this
mind-boggling observation. Death has pursed his actual lips when he took a drag
on his cigarette but for any other purpose than this, his mouth doesn’t budge.
His lips are a frozen ornament when he speaks. Death has been communicating
with me through telepathy!

“Bravo!” Sephtimus hisses. “Faster than the others.”

Others?
What does he mean others?

“One
thought at a time, meatball. First, let me address your sloppy question with a
proper answer.” He motions with his thin human fingers holding the cigarette
towards the now lively, constantly shifting mosaic of the mystery girl at the
coffee shop.

“This,”
Sephtimus rasps, “this is my Helen, as you would say in your tongue, my
Cleopatra, my Delilah.”
His metaphors sound as though
they’ve been pilfered from comprehensive summaries, highly suspicious and out
of place. Who could’ve imagined hearing Death quote from English literature,
even the Bible!

“She is the fly in my ointment, the chink in my armor.” He blows a
thick and impressive smoke ring that slowly elongates into a tiny
Scream
mask
before it dissolves. “My problem. Yours to solve.”

Even as he started saying these things he had taken on the air of
a mafia boss barking out orders, like it has been ingrained in him to expect
nothing but blind obedience. But the whole thing’s so unexpected it takes a
while for me to digest it: Death, more powerful than all the politicians and
tycoons of the world combined – he who can take away the only thing that really
matters and send hundreds of billions of people through eternal torment, Death
is… in love?

“Yes, that's how you would put it, wouldn't you? Tiny,
insignificant, annoying sack of flesh that you are. Love. That silly, pathetic
excuse for raging chemicals inside your faulty, substandard bodies. Only
childish mortals can invent something as trivial as love. Something your
half-baked minds can swallow hook, line and sinker.” He stands up and starts
pacing back and forth like a husband outside the delivery room, cigarette smoke
trailing behind him as immutable as water on taro leaf. “As blissful as it may
be, I can't regress to such ignorance.”

“Oh how shall I put this?” he asks out loud while massaging his
temples hard. Seeing the Grim Reaper show human reactions to stress is eerie
and thoroughly disorienting. He says: “It’s aggravating that I can't put
this predicament into your hollow human words.”

Just when I
think I see a point of
vulnerability in Death's swagger and bullying, his eyes start to glow like
lumps of coal. “I suppose for you to understand you must first see. And for you
to see, I need to furnish you with my own eyes. Very well…”

Sephtimus
floats inches from the floor, suddenly as light and diaphanous as a ghost ship
with parchments for sails. “
I hereby lend you the
unique privilege of being nowhere…

“…
and everywhere all at once
…”

Because
I’m hanging about a foot from the floor myself, we stand face to face. I don’t
feel any relief at all when I glimpse the outline of human eyes within the
holes of his mask because their scleras are still glowing and soon flashing as
bright as headlamps. More than that, they become exploding suns in a bleeding
sky, the last sources of light in a world spinning wildly out of orbit even as
it gets incinerated. And it’s like all the hair on my head has gone white in my
terror as Sephtimus floats right into me – and through me. Three hundred and
sixty degrees around us, all the videos freeze up.

T
he
monitors now show people doing things backwards, chirping like chipmunks and
getting noticeably younger and shorter as the days rush by.
But the one common thread running through all these scenes,
directly or indirectly, is Sephtimus’ object of affection.

The chapters of her life fill every screen. On one she’s crashing
a driver’s-ed car over a street island, on another she’s tossing her graduation
cap in the air; next, she’s sipping her first bitter taste of beer, being
kissed by a guy in the darkness of a movie theater, wincing at the stain of her
first period, riding on a swing pushed by her father from behind till finally
she’s blowing out ten candles on a birthday cake and right after she’s standing
small and alone next to a bed – a deathbed, I figure, of the same man, her
father who on a better day would've looked like a jolly, ruddy-cheeked Colonel
Sanders with plenty of love handles to go around. But this time he can't put on
a brave face for his daughter because there’s something irreversibly broken
inside him.

She’s in ponytails and as thin as a reed but there’s no mistaking
whose younger version she is because even at such young age she’s already
stunning, with her light blue eyes as cool and sparkling as a flash of sea
spray and her dark brown hair
bringing forth the
wonderful contrast.

Now each and every frame focuses on the girl, her eyes flashing a
maturity far beyond her years of age. All the videos have flawlessly synced
together to bring forth a larger-than-life, segmented recording of that precise
moment when a girl chooses to become a woman; the very first time she wills
herself never to cry again. For some reason, all the videos end here.

“As a child she wasn't a stranger to death,” Sephtimus suddenly
starts narrating in my head yet also from somewhere
inside
the father’s
bedroom. The words themselves sound disembodied and the fact that the
personification of death is talking about himself again as a separate incident
isn’t lost on me.

“There were many
departures
around her, as there are around each and every meat always.
First, Granny’s stroke. Next, Uncle Tony’s lung cancer. Then her mother was the
victim of a traffic accident. It was difficult enough watching the people who
make up your world leave one by one, the constant fear of being left all by
yourself, but it was even harder not to understand what was going on and not to
be able to talk about it with anyone. It was all the grownups' fault thinking
they could hide death by not mentioning it, when death was in every drop of
water they drank, every breath of air they took, every wisp of dream they
dreamt.

“She watched her father as she had watched her uncle leave little
by little, day by day. Slowly and painfully learning to give up the fight. The
young girl could smell sickness inside the room, between the sheets and under
the leaves of the potted plants where no medicine or prayer could reach. She
knew the smell all too well; so well in fact that when it came time for me to
severe her comatose father's umballicus, out of the blue she raised her head
and whispered. By all appearances to an empty room, she spoke: ‘
Take me
.’

“She had just lifted her head from the fold of her arms. She had
been crying by her father's side and her eyes as she looked up to vacant space
were red and swollen but all wrung out of tears. Inside them were blue circles
of such awareness and concentration that they had me frozen to the spot. She
looked about a hundred years older in the bottomless pits of those irises. And
in spite of those silly ponytails and pink floral dress, she was ethereal.
Ethereal, I tell you, not beautiful or lovely or whatever it is you call those
who simply fall short. She was at that moment a glimpse, an apparition of the
exquisite creature she was to become. Death could do that to a mortal. Take
away everything from her. Eat her down to the bone, so to speak. Until there
was nothing left except sheer will and the most basic instinct to survive. Shining
like a diamond shaped by great forces under the earth.

“I
was standing to her left and she was looking in the opposite direction, but for
some reason she had her head cocked slightly like a deer on the scent of a
predator. All this from a nine-year-old was enough to make me wonder if my
presence had indeed been felt, which would be quite the feat.

“Humans
can never see us reapers except if we allow them to. We stand inches from your
faces, poke our finger in your food, in your eye, in your nose, but you never
once feel a breeze. We stalk behind cash registers at a store robbery, inside
ambulances on their way to the ER, in steamy bathrooms where you die naked all
alone; but nobody ever realizes we are there. Thirteen years ago in front of
this nine-year-old was the closest I’ve ever come to being discovered by a
mortal.

“She was delirious from grief. So much emotion caged inside that
small chest. She rose. Then, realizing that one point in the air was the same
as any other, she focused her eyes, bent all her spirit and will to it and
repeated the words in her native tongue: ‘Take me. Let my Papino live and I
shall freely give myself to you.’

“I chose to stand in front of her and bend down to her height to
meet her gaze. And for a moment it did appear like she was
looking me
in the eye. She said: ‘Yes, I'm young. I'm only nine
and I don’t know anything. It's easy for me to speak of these things because my
life doesn't mean anything to me.’

“I nodded somberly while holding her gaze.  

“ ‘Then you should wait till I'm older’,” she continued without
any encouragement. She said: 'Til I've started enjoying my life, to the peak as
you so desire, then take me at that time. When it shall be the sweetest for you
to rob me of something truly precious.’

“I couldn't believe it. What an intriguing concept! To have the
opportunity to raise your lamb, feed her, watch her grow, and then lead her to
slaughter. It was novel and perfect in its simplicity. What I would’ve simply
brushed aside as frivolous amusement was at that moment wisdom coming from the
mouth of a child! I guess being around dying people does have a peculiar effect
on humans. She was no longer an ordinary child but a being much, much more
aware. I was dumbfounded, tickled. It was a funny sight: Death stopped cold by
a nine-year-old girl. You can say I was
rejuvenated
, for the first time in my existence spanning eons. From
the ultimate knowledge of everything comes the insignificance of life and the
eternal boredom of it all. Out of nowhere came this flash of a challenge, this
whisper of a thrill, and I was totally smitten.