Ralph had heard of time flying, but this was ridiculous.
Lois: [“Your]job is what we call natural death, isn’t it?”]
Her aura flickered with confused, incomplete images. A man (the late Mr. Chasse, Ralph was quite sure) lying in an oxygen tent. jimmy V. opening his eyes to look at Ralph and Lois in the instant before Clotho cut his balloon-string. The obituary page from the Derry News, peppered with photographs, most not much bigger than postage stamps, of the weekly harvest from the local hospitals and nursing homes.
Both Clotho and Lachesis shook their heads.
Lachesis: [There is no such thing as natural death, not really.
Our,lob is purposeful death. We take the old and the sick, but we take other… as well. just yesterday, for instance, we took a young man of twenty-eight. A carpenter. Two Short-Time weeks ago, befell from a scaffold and fractured his skull. During those two weeks his aura was] Ralph got a fractured image of a thunderstruck aura like the one which had surrounded the baby in the elevator.
Clotho: [At last the change came-the turning of the aura. We knew it would come, but not when it would come. When it did, tte ivent to him and sent him on.]
[“Sent him on to where?”
It was Lois who asked the question, broaching the touchy subject of the afterlife almost by accident. Ralph grabbed for his mental safety belt, almost hoping for one of those peculiar blanks, but when their overlapped answers came, they were perfectly clear.
Clotho: [To everywhere Lachesis: to other worlds than these, Ralph felt a mixture of relief and disappointment.
[“That sounds very poetic, but I think that it means-correct me if I’m wrong-Is that the afterlife is as much a mystery to you guys as it is to us.”] Lachesis, sounding a bit stiff: [On another occasion we might have time to discuss such things, but not now-as you have no doubt already noticed, time passes faster on this level of the building. Ralph looked around and saw the morning had already brightened considerably.
“Sorry.
Clotho, smiling: [Not at all-we enljoy your questions, and find them refreshing. Curiosity exists everywhere along life’s continuum, but nowhere is it as abundant as here. But what you call the afterlife has no place in the four constants-Life an Death, the Random and the Purpose-which concern us now.
[The approach of almost every death which serves the Purpose takes a course with which we are very familiar. The auras of those who will die Purposeful deaths turn gray as the time of nishling approaches.
This gray deepens steadily to black. We are called when the aura [and we come exactly as you saw last night.
We give release to those who suffer, peace to those in terror, rest to those who cannot find rest.
Most Purposeful deaths are expected, even welcomed, but not all.
We are sometimes called to take men, women, an children who are in the best of health… yet their auras turn suddenly and their time of ri ishing has come.] Ralph remembered the young man in the sleeveless Celtics jersey!
he’d seen bopping into the Red Apple yesterday afternoon. they had been the picture of health and vitality… except for the slick-the slick surrounding him, that was. of Ralph opened his mouth, perhaps to mention the (or to ask about his fate), then closed it again. The sun was directly overhead now, and a bizarre certainty suddenly came to him: that he and Lois had become the subject of lecherous discussion in the secret city of the Old Crocks.
Anybody seen em?… No?… Think they run off together?.
Eloped, maybe?… Naw, not at their age, but they might be shacked up… I dunno if Ralphie’s got any live rounds left in the old ammo dump, but she’s always looked like a hot ticket to me…
Yeah, walks like she knows what to do with it, don’t she?
The image of his oversized rustbucket waiting patiently behind one of the ivy-covered units of the Derry Cabins while the springs boinged and sproinged salaciously inside came to Ralph, and he grinned. He couldn’t help it. A moment later the alarming idea that he might be broadcasting his thoughts on his aura came to him, and he slammed the door on the picture at once. Yet wasn’t Lois looking at him with a certain amused speculation?
Ralph turned his attention hastily back to Clotho.
[Atropos serves the Random. Not all deaths of the sort Short-Timers call “senseless” and “unnecessary” and “tragic” are his work, but most are. When a dozen old men and women die in a fire at a retirement hotel, the chances are good that Atropos has been there, taking souvenirs and cutting cords. When an infant dies in his crib for no apparent reason, the cause, more often than not, is Atropos and his rusty scalpel. When a dog-yes, even a dog, for the destinies of almost all living things in the Short-Time world fall among either the Random or the Purpose-I’s run over in the road because the driver of the car that hit him picked the wrong moment to glance at him watch-” Lois: [“Is that what happened to Rosalie?”] Clotho: [Atropos is what happened to Rosalie. Ralph’s friend Joe Wyzer was only what we call “fulfilling circumstance.”] is young man Lachesis: And Atropos is also what happened to lollrer, Cl, late Mr. McGovern.] Lois looked the way Ralph felt: dismayed but not really surprised. it was now late afternoon, perhaps as many as eighteen Short-Time hours had passed since they had last seen Bill, and Ralph had known the man’s time was extremely short even last night, Lois, who had inadvertently put her hand inside him, probably knew it even better.
Ralph: [“When did it happen? How long after we saw him?”] Lachesis: [Not long. While he was leaving the hospital. I’m sorry for your loss, and for giving you the news in such clumsy fashion.
We speak to Short-Timers so infrequently that we forget how, I didn’t mean to hurt you, Ralph and Lois.] Lois told him it was all right, that she quite understood, but tears were trickling down her cheeks, and Ralph felt them burning in his own eyes. The idea that Bill could be gone-that the little shithead in the dirty smock had gotten him-was hard to grasp. Was he to believe McGovern would never hoist that satiric, bristly eyebrow of his again? Never bitch about how cruddy it was to get old again-?
Impossible, He turned suddenly to Clotho.
[“Show us.”] Clotho, surprised, almost dithering: [I… I don’t think-] Ralph: [“Seeing is believing to us Short-Time schmoes. Didn’t you guys ever hear that one?”] Lois spoke up unexpectedly.
[“Yes-show us. But only enough so we can know it and accept it.
Try not to make us feel any worse than we already do.”] Clotho and Lachesis looked at each other, then seemed to shrug without actually moving their narrow shoulders. Lachesis flicked the first two fingers of his right hand upward, creating a blue-green peacock’s fan of light.
In it Ralph saw a small, eerily perfect representation of the I.C.U. corridor. A nurse pushing a pharmacy cart came into this arc and crossed it. At the far side of the viewing area, she actually seemed to curve for a moment before passing out of view.
Lois, delighted in spite of the circumstances: [“It’s like watching a movie in a soapbubble!” Now McGovern and Mr. Plum stepped out of Bob Polhurst’s room. McGovern had put on. an old Derry High letter sweater and his friend was zipping up a jacket; they were clearly giving up the deathwatch for another night. McGovern was walking slowly, lagging behind Mr. Plum. Ralph could see that his downstairs neighbor and sometime friend didn’t look good at all.
He felt Lois’s hand slip onto his upper arm and grip hard. He put his hand over hers.
Halfway to the elevator, McGovern stopped, braced himself against the wall with one hand, and lowered his head. He looked like a totally blown runner at the end of a marathon. For a moment Mr. Plum went on walking. Ralph could see his mouth moving and thought, He doesn’t know he’s talking to thin air-not yet, at least.
Suddenly Ralph didn’t want to see any more.