Invention of Dying, The. Brooke Biaz

fangs alarmingly close to my fuselage.

      “You’d be surprised,” she continued, staring downward but her words floating upward. ‘Do you know . . . ?’ Face still facing beyond the plane. ‘. . . a fruit bat can carry the most deadly of all diseases but never, never ever mind you, suffer from that disease?’

      “I did not know that,” I said, genuinely impressed. Old Death, you’ll be pleased to hear, knew her stuff.

      She flashed a set of dangerous teeth at me so even but so contrasting in color, one against another, that she appeared to have swallowed a piano.

      “Entirely true,” she said.

      Subsequently arriving before I had predicted - “We’ll be there by 5.00 pm, Doc.” it was barely past 4.30. I landed with a jolly “Whippy!” and a thin curl of my brute lips.

      So what now?

      “Go?” I said, no doubt looking quizzical as I jumped to the jetty.

      “Sure,” said the Death, “sure”, taking hold of her black case I began unloading at her from the stowage hole beneath the aft pitot plate, a case that I had placed there a little over two hours before.

      “He? You said . . .”

      “I said?” I asked.

      I said many things in my daily attention to my duties among tourists, some more beautinious, than others, I dare admit, but I didn’t recall the mention of our (soon to be dying) clerk. Deceased of the Communion Islands governmental offices, as he was to be; descended in his early teens to the islands’ coastal rim, as many of us did, and now was stuck there like a young shellfish on the rim of the coast. I didn’t recall mentioning him. Not at all.

      So be it! Circumstances dictate, I have long found, that the cockpit of small plane is no place to fence with ideas, and certainly not with Death. Experience shows, tools in hand, that you are better off capping ideas in a cockpit with a slim reference to a recently visited relative (“Dear ol’ Nancy, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear”), or turning a determined ideaist to the West with a note on your brawny religious beliefs. My favourite, though, is to conjure up my personal interest in certain breeds of cat. “The Burmese has its cute ways. Now, let me tell you a thing or two.” And: “Do you know the ordinary story of how the ordinary tabby got its ordinary name?” Meooow.

      Though our young clerk had already turned his hands to many things in his time on the flatlands, he had never met Death.

      “Along the front,” I said, looking at the squat dark bat-loving old deceaser, whose red hat was now in her hands. Adlibbing. Pointing. “Third wooden building on the left.” Or thereabouts.

      And so, black case rampant, Death’s pompadour went winging its way down the street.

      Or so I thought.

      3.

      Apropos Death.

      Why would a smart woman devote herself to demise? I mean, what’s in it for her? Some say there is wealth. But that is a misnomer. There is no wealth in true, honest dying. It is entirely devoid of gain. Years pass. In another vein, there is always income forthcoming for a general physician, for a specialist surgeon, for a renowned pulmonologist, for a fine thorapologist, for a companethesist. But Death moves through education to training and nothing pertains.

      Already she smells like the pungent inner lips of a dark blue jar of Vaseline. Poor Death! She walks with a short, tottering gait, brought about by her long determined hours “at the table”. She sleeps in conversations and wakes in the middle of dreams. And she speaks hardly at all, and then only in riddles. Ask her a direct question and she replies in inanimate chestnuts and fated aphorisms: “Time spent on your colon is time well spent.” “You are the by-product of your pancreas.” “Beware of the cunning trips of your feet.”

      Figure 2.

      There is no glamour in this madness! This is no wealth in this! No gain in this damaged cause. . . .

      Incidentally, I am not denigrating manly Life, the well-known vie de l’homme, as he is known in those wondrous healthy health camps and the like. Männlich leben. In fact, manly Life was almost certainly going to be appointed the first official medical practitioner here in The Communion Islands. He was on his way to provide for us, was manly Life. But, because of a poverty of traditions of human healthcare here (you could say), and a lack of attention to detail perhaps, because he was morally flawed - because of bat loving Death arriving ahead of him, circumstances changed. Who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t flown her in!

      But thus, if not devoting yourself to mortality in the name of wealth, then why? For fame?

      Ha! Ha, ha! How much of Death do you know? Truly? How many times have you been intimately acquainted with her? Poured her coffee over breakfast? (Caffeine thins the blood!) Shared some home-bake? Watch that cholesterol! How many times does Death reach the heights of even minor celebrity? Perhaps in those occasional TV appearances when you see her “on” in cafes and bars on the beachfront or in the lobbies of larger hotels, spread-eagle on the floral floor or crashing through a fish tank? But no, perhaps not even then. Death can visit a department store unguarded, and stand in a long line unattended, even as she arrives at her very moment. Death can drive through small towns at speed, without a posse of police, a signpost of sheriffs. Not Death! She can dig her front garden in broad daylight, black as the heart of good garlic, until her breath races and the sweat pours off her deceasing brow. Plant petunias even, she can, create borders of lilacs in a climate (incidentally) not conducive to either. And still no one, no one at all, notices. She takes holidays to “resorts”, in sun and in shade, half-naked as the day she was . . . and is subsequently ignored around the vibrant morning buffet.

      “Nice eggs, lady. What’s with the scythe?”

      Fame? Ha! Not so! The Death I know is hard pressed to get someone to notice her, even as she races to the front of the stage. So . . .

      Money? Fame? No! Then it must be, you say, because Death is among us devoting herself to a higher cause. That Death (Angel of the Abyss, Pesta, Mother Time, Santa Meurte, Rider of the Pale Horse, the robed skeleton, Namuss and Lean, Woman in the Wind, The Final Encountress) is seeking out the otherworldly that dwells beneath (or beside, perhaps) the daily lives of you, or I or others we know? Death commits to the co-committant. Impossible science! Yaahah! She is a signatory to the cause of unsuccess! That Death (forthwith and so forth and so on) here on The Communion Islands hereby devotes herself to the inner workings of human fading so that in each unseen aspect of you and I, our loved and our loving, our superlunary selves, through the delving into the deep moment of heartache or the reasons for an unexpected lump, in seeing you before 9.00 or sending you for a test, in laboratories shiny and wet with life or in the hardbound leather of a hard to comprehend journal and the hard cold pad of a scope, in couches and on beds, in cases of glass and mahogany where dwells an unknown bone, or so it seems, and the metallic instrument of some rarely discussed human truth, in the steady gaze of concern or the conventions of knowledge so specialist that the language is another country, another planet even, Death, unafraid of the unseen or of darkness, determined, unrelenting, given to live where we ordinary folk will not, principled, pursuing, a brave soul, a braver heart, this one, ours and theirs together, being equipped and installed at our forefront, is devoted entirely, without reticence or grimace, to the cause of human departure.

      Do you know this woman intimately? No? Then know this: the truth of the matter is far more complicated.

      4.

      “You know what?” I said to Mee (now appropriately dead), as I stepped into our breezy seaside office in the world of the living, “word is that Rudd is going out to Spook Reef tonight to hunt for the elusive razor eel.”

      Mee, Rudd: two living humans. An electric eel sparkingly slithered between the two of us and out onto our earthen runway, metaphorically speaking.