Elsewhere: List 2

“I just got back from my funeral, but I think I sort of knew before.”
Thandi nods solemnly.

“We were probably the only two sixteen-year-old girls who died of acute head traumas that day.”

Liz wants to say something to acknowledge the profound experience that she and Thandi have just shared, but she can’t find the right words.

Liz decides to wait until she can’t hear any more people and only then will she venture from her cabin.

In between doors opening and closing, she listens to snippets of conversation.

As it is, I have to say, ‘I’m your grandmother. We never met, on account of my untimely death from breast cancer.’

From her position, she can see a boy of around her brother’s age, dressed in a white captain’s costume with gold epaulets and a matching captain’s hat.

“I assure you my experience and qualifications are exemplary. I have been the Captain for nearly one hundred years.”

“Isn’t seven a bit young to be a captain?”
The Captain nods his head. “Yes,” he concedes, “I must now take naps in the afternoon. I will probably retire next year.”

Liz can’t believe how unfair this is. If it isn’t bad enough that she died before getting to do anything fun, now she will have to repeat her whole life in reverse until she becomes a stupid, sniveling baby again.

Of course, a wandering mind is not always advisable for the recently deceased and is nearly never advisable for the beginning driver.

When dead people are her age, they’re usually little kids with cancer or some equally horrible and abstract disease.

“You could look at things that way, I suppose. But in my opinion, that would be a very boring and limited point of view. I would hope you haven’t embraced such a bleak outlook before you’ve even been here a day.”

On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless.

“You have your acclimation appointment at eight thirty,” says Grandma Betty.
Liz removes her head from under the covers. “What’s that?”
“It’s a sort of orientation for the newly dead,” says Grandma Betty.

Her grandmother’s clothes look expensive and well made, but a bit theatrical for Liz’s taste: felt cloches and old-fashioned dresses and velvet capes and brooches and ballet slippers and ostrich feathers and patent-leather high heels and fishnet stockings and fur.

“Oh, I know I should probably trim everything back and impose some order on it, but I can never bring myself to prune a rosebush or clip a bud. A flower’s life is short enough as it is.”

Out her window, Liz sees a gargantuan, rather homely structure.

“It used to be better looking,” says Betty, “but the building’s needs are always outpacing its size. Architects are constantly concocting ways to expand the building, and construction workers are constantly implementing those plans. Some people say the building looks like it’s growing right before your eyes.”

If not for a faded, rather macabre poster hanging on the wall, Liz might have thought she was at her doctor’s office. The poster depicts a smiling gray-haired woman sitting up in a mahogany coffin.

The peevish-looking woman at the front desk reminds Liz of the poster; she, too, is faded, dated, and grim.

“Oh yes, enjoy the film,” she adds in a perfunctory manner as she walks out the door.

With the detestable Polly as guide, the video covers some of what Liz and Betty have already discussed: how everyone in Elsewhere ages backward and becomes a baby, and how the babies are sent down the River when they are seven days old, back to Earth.

“On Earth,” Polly squawks, “man ages from the time he is born to an indeterminate point in the future, when he will die die die.”

She learns the official definition of acclimation. “Acclimation,” yells Polly, “is the process by which the newly deceased become residents of Elsewhere. So welcome welcome welcome, dead people!”

The end of the video deals more with metaphysical issues on Elsewhere. It talks about how human existence is like a circle and a line at the same time. It is a circle, because everything that was old would be new and everything that was new became old. It is a line because the circle stretched out indefinitely, infinitely even. People die. People are born. People die again.

She wakes several minutes later to the sound of Yetta Brown admonishing her. “I hope you didn’t sleep through the whole thing! Get up! Get up now!”

He indicates that Liz should sit in the chair in front of his desk. However, that chair is entirely covered in paperwork. Indeed, all of his windowless office is shrouded in paperwork.

“Last year my teeth came back in. The teething was murder! I kept my wife up all night with my blubbering and ballyhoo.”

Aldous carefully removes a file from the bottom of a precarious pile of paperwork in the center of his desk.

“An avocation is not a job. A job has to do with prestige! Money! An avocation is something a person does to make his or her soul complete.”

“I see by your expression you don’t believe me,” Aldous says. “It appears I’ve got a cynic on my hands.”

One silly little errant teardrop runs out of the corner of her eye.

“Young people sometimes find the process of adjusting to life in Elsewhere quite difficult and their acclimations ultimately fail. So, if you choose, you can go back to Earth early. As long as you declare your intentions within your first year of residence. It’s called the Sneaker Clause.”

In fact, she is quite interested to know what her last words were. Would they be profound? Sad? Pathetic? Heartrending?

“That’s what it says in the book, and the book’s never wrong.” Sarah pats the tome affectionately.

If your last words are somehow meant to encapsulate your entire existence, Liz finds um strangely appropriate. Um means nothing. Um is what you say while you’re thinking of what you’ll really say. Um suggests someone interrupted before they’d begun.

Liz shakes her head, vowing to omit um and all equally meaningless words (uh, like, huh, sorta, kinda, oh, hey, maybe) from her vocabulary.

The gist was ‘Jesus Christ, Slim, I think I’ve been shot in the head!’

“A position has just opened up, and as soon as I saw it, I thought of you. ‘Why, Aldous,’ I said to myself, ‘this is positively providential!’ So will you do it?”