A Birthday Celebration
The pulsing of the massage chair fades to nothing. Jennie is sure she is wholly disembodied now; she crosses her arms in protest. The Void is even more white and howling when perceived from within; she finds such whiteness and howlingness deeply disconcerting.
Rupert’s voice is somehow audible against the din. “Where would you like to go? I’m sure there are a great many dates from which to choose.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing. So. Have you reached a decision?”
Jennie takes a moment to consider. The length of a moment feels quite elastic out here. “I’m going to start with the day my stepfather died,” she replies when it elapses.
“I’m afraid you misunderstood. You’ll need to specify an actual date, in order to prevent
my selecting the wrong one based on ambiguous instruction. I suppose the day you murdered your stepfather is rather unambiguous, but we must hold to procedure, and in any case, the argument could be made that you killed him by degrees.”
“Excuse me? I didn’t murder anybody!”
“Semantics, Miss Winters. But I digress. If you would supply me a date…?”
Jennie has the strong urge to throw something, but Nothing is readily at hand. “Could you at least let me look at a calendar or something?” Before he can deny her, she continues, “Look. If I’m being judged on memory, you might as well fail me now.”
A large wall calendar rushes into sight. Opposite the grid of dates is a Thomas Kinkade painting of a snow-strewn cabin. Jennie studies the numbers in the boxes. “Friday,” she announces, “January 11th. I think.” If it isn’t the right day, she is certain there will be some other mistake to correct. Even discounting her death, it has been a bad, bad month.
“January 11th, then.”
With a nauseating sense of weight, Jennie lurches into a body at a table in a bar. The body in question is hers, to her relief; the bar is Scallywags, a dim-lit dive in the basement of the more respectable Church Street Taproom. The table she shares with Mona, Jimmy, and James is toward the back of the bar, near the staircase. A 1960’s Batman poster hangs from the bare brick wall nearby. It is their table at their bar; they come here after nearly every shift, it seems. It is the same bar Jennie will visit the night before she dies.
One quarter-second after her appearance, Jimmy and James shout, “Happy birthday!”
Mona blushes. Jimmy turns to Jennie and says, “Dude, way to drop the ball on the cheer.” “I,” Jennie explains, “what?” A moment later, she remembers something of vital import: the night before her stepfather’s death is Mona’s celebration of her 21st birthday. It seems grossly unfair that Mona’s 21st birthday gets to be recreated when it is Jennie who has a sudden deficit of birthdays to look forward to. “I’ll be right back.” She hastily rises from her seat. “I, um, forgot to take my birth control.”
“But it’s midnight,” Mona begins as Jennie rushes past.
There are two single-use unisex restrooms in the bar. The one Jennie selects features a phone number scrawled on the mirror in Sharpie that she is invited to call for “good head.” A halo of similar messages at the mirror’s edge frames her face; thus, it is a moment before she notices
Rupert standing behind her. “We’re a day off,” she says irritably.
“Midnight, January 11th, Eastern Standard Time. Though closer to 12:03 now.” He glances about the bathroom. “This is really quite the place. Pungent.”
“Midnight means there’s still a few hours of the night left. Everyone knows the day actually begins when you wake up. And since when is the kingdom of Heaven bound to Eastern Standard? I thought you’d be running on whatever time zone the Vatican uses, if anything.” He cocks his head; she drops the issue. “So do you stay with me throughout this whole thing?”
“Yes,” he replies, sounding none too thrilled at the prospect, “but I’d advise against conversing with me while other humans are present. I shall be visible only to you.”
“So you’re like my heavenly host.” He offers no reply, so she tries again. “My Valet of the Shadow of Death.” Rupert clears his throat. “I’m a professional actor, you know,” she informs him.
“Indeed,” Rupert replies. “An out-of-work professional actor, working in food service, if I recall the paperwork.” He shifts his cane from one hand to the other; its light is far brighter than that of the naked bulb dangling from the ceiling. Jennie had hoped never to see the surfaces of this room illuminated so clearly.
Jennie folds her arms across her chest. “This is coming from the angel who can’t tell the difference between a day and the night before it. Well, come on, it looks like I have a birthday party to attend.”
“The mistake was yours entirely,” he assures her gently as she opens the door, probably contracting several communicable diseases from contact with the knob, “but rest assured it is already forgiven.”
When Jennie returns to the square table, Mona is halfway through her first beer. “Welcome to the inner circle,” Jennie says, sliding into her seat. “J. Crew, we call it.”
Mona laughs. “Do I need to change my name to match?”
“I think a healthy disdain for our workplace is the only criterion,” James says, raising his water. No Coke for him tonight. “That, and a sense of alienation from the rest of our coworkers.”
“Alienation? Gosh, James, I never knew you were such a wounded soul.” Mona puts a slender hand to her chest, feigning concern.
“He puts it all in the music,” Jennie explains. “It’s why his band is so… melancholy.” She regards Mona. The younger girl drains the remaining half of her pint in about a single massive gulp that implies she has spent years rehearsing for her first legal drink. Mona is pretty as only someone her age can be, with a pierced septum and lower lip and a violent violet streak through her black hair. On the first enactment of this night, Jennie had taken Mona back to her apartment to continue the birthday festivities, but she decides that, given the present circumstances, that terribly fun idea is probably ill-advised. She assumes it is best during this evaluation to avoid what her biological father had called “unnatural desires.”
“The words of Paul of Tarsus,” Rupert remarks. “Quite the character. “And yes,” he continues, “Of course I know your thoughts. What sort of heavenly being did you take me for?”
A damned intrusive one, she thinks pointedly in his direction.
“But you must admit,” he contends, “it’s really quite useful in cases such as this. We can communicate without the curiosity direct conversation might generate.”
In that case, do you have any useful info on the moral implications of just a little taste?
“I am disallowed, as you know, to divulge anything that might give you unfair advantage in this evaluation. I can only tell you that some philosophies find same-sex relations entirely permissible, while others find evil in the mere desire. And of course, if the latter is the case, this moment is already being factored into your judgment.”
Well, isn’t this uncomfortable.
“You just can’t,” James insists, interrupting her awkward intercession. “Back me up here, Jennie.”
“You can’t what?”
“I was just telling these two, you can’t really justify any morality without a higher power.”
As a given evening at Scallywags progresses, Jimmy grows more inebriated and James more evangelical, and inevitably their bar table becomes the fray of an intense, generally circular, debate. Most nights Jennie insists that their after-work outings be a sanctuary from intensity of any manner, but her present circumstance has created in her a hunger for whatever insight she can get. Ignoring Rupert and his unnerving mind-reading thing, she directs her focus toward the conversation. “I mean, that’s always made sense to me.”
The birthday girl appears displeased. “So what you’re saying is people who don’t have religion can’t have ethics.”
Ja
mes shakes his head. “Not at all. I’m saying the right and wrong recognized by all people, including atheists, are based in a God-given ethical system, whether or not they acknowledge it.”
Jimmy looks ready to reply, but Mona has taken the field. “If that was the case,” she begins, “you’d think that everyone would have exactly the same view of right and wrong, or else that the only rules that were absolute were the ones virtually everybody agreed upon. I think it’s a lot more likely that there’s no such thing as an absolute morality and human ethics just developed because, hell, to form a society in the first place you need people to agree on some things so they don’t all kill each other.”
James squeezes his wedge of lime into his water; a faint cloud unfurls around the ice cubes in the glass. “Accepting that,” he says, “for the sake of argument. What are you left with? You can do whatever, but what’s the point?”
Jimmy gets a word in, long overdue. “Dude. Think about this. You’re a reasonably healthy white male living in America. The world is open to you. I mean, pretty much anything you can think to do, you can do it.” He grins. “I mean, you can get away with some pretty messed-up shit. Or, you know I’m not a big humanitarian myself, but if saving the world is your thing, you have the power. Or you can spend your life bettering yourself, practicing your craft, and just taking care of you and yours. I mean, literally, man, you can do almost anything. Do you really need a higher power to cosign on that?”
Outnumbered given Jennie’s reluctant support, James still holds his own. “Again, I know it all has meaning. I just attribute that, I think rightly, to the fact that God made it meaningful. You can’t have intention without someone doing the intending, and I don’t think you can have meaning in a meaningless world. In the absence of a meaning that underlies everything, all the individual meanings you can find are just numbers multiplied by zero.”
“Maybe I’m okay with that.” Mona puts her elbows on the table and leans forward. “I don’t feel the need to know that there is meaning in anything on some invisible level. I can love things and have great experiences and do what I think is right, and there doesn’t need to be any more to it than that. That’s alright with me.”
James shrugs. “I mean, if that’s all you need. It just seems kind of empty to me. Hopeless.” She smiles. “I find it freeing. It lets you live your life however you want, and that’s that.”
“Would that it were so,” Rupert murmurs. Jennie finds the celestial being difficult to read, but as far as she can tell, there is no trace of irony in his tone.