To Eat a Strawberry
or: a short story about what happens after you die
"I'll cry about this earth in heaven too."
Marina Tsvetaeva
Somewhere below heaven, there’s a room with no walls.
Al sits on his usual chair, an old wooden thing that creaks as he rocks it back and forth. The air is warm, breathable, spring-like although you cannot see the sky. Al’s visitors have a beautiful couch all to themselves, and a small rounded table within their reach. On the table: food, drinks and three well-loved objects, each especially handpicked from the visitor’s memories.
Light is the only thing keeping the room standing, carrying its weight as though it had any gravity. Al likes to keep it simple.
“Hi,” he says, as the visitor starts to open her eyes. “Welcome.”
It takes her a while to get her bearings. She moves carefully, as though expecting her muscles to hurt, fingers checking the skin for wounds she does not find.
One of the great things about Al’s room is that nobody ever perceives it as a threat. People don’t jerk away from the couch, they never jolt up in a panic and demand to know what is going on. Whichever emotion they were feeling right before dying has had time to settle and subside, and the room opens for them a new chapter. It’s as if each visitor had already seen it before, somehow learned how to trust it.
The woman frowns, yet she struggles to put her confusion into words. Staring at her surroundings has left her speechless. Disoriented, she shifts her focus inward and begins inspecting her own clothes. She empties the pockets of her pants, then tugs them at the waist so she can see what kind of underwear she is wearing. She unzips her hoodie, takes her rings off and on again, puts her hands through her curls and pulls. Nothing seems to be out of place. Slowly, her gaze goes back up.
“Where am I?”
“This,” Al says, voice slow and sincere, “is a place people visit after they die.”
The visitor opens her mouth, trying and failing to summon a counter-argument that makes sense. In Al’s experience, common rebuttals involve dreams - I am in a coma, I am having a near-death experience, someone drugged me and this is my hallucination. He watches her go through the options, weighing chances against risks, until she decides the effort must not be worth it.
“I died?”
Al simply nods. “Correct.”
Her expression doesn’t betray much, beside maybe a sense of caution. It’s hard to tell whether or not the revelation takes her by surprise.
“And what does this place say?” she asks. “About me, I mean. What does it mean for me?”
“You are not here to be judged, if that’s what you are asking.”
The visitor nods. She is no longer looking at anything in particular, her eyes unfocused and distant, her body so stiff against the couch.
“And who are you?”
“My name is Al. I am here to guide you through what happens next.”
That doesn’t seem to satisfy her. Al expects her to press further, but instead she immediately changes the subject.
“Why does it feel like I’m still breathing?”
Al shrugs. “It’s what you are used to. Do you find it uncomfortable?”
Her chest rises and falls a couple of times, like waves reaching for the shore. “I don’t know.”
It’s not uncommon for visitors to take a little time to re-orient themselves, and today is no exception. Al and the woman sit in silence for a while, lulled by the sound of Al’s chair, and he tries to guess what she’s thinking, what she is scared of and whether she’s allowing herself to dream. He stares at her plainly, like a kid who hasn’t learned to eavesdrop, and if she notices she doesn’t seem to mind.
Eventually, she points at the cappuccino on the table and asks: “Can I drink that?”
“Of course. It’s for you.”
She picks up the cup with immense care, rotating it slowly with her hands so that she can fully admire the paintwork on the ceramic. Her eyes close as she takes the first sip and she smiles after swallowing.
“This is really, really good.”
Al imagines her back on earth, in a café or on someone’s breakfast table, chit-chatting about the coming day. Same clothes, same food, just different time. “I am glad you like it.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I don’t know,” he says, honestly. “What’s it from?”
She frowns, confused. “You don’t know?”
Al shakes his head, and already he is smiling. So much of his faith is based upon this table and its infallible, unmistakable care. In his eyes, it’s a perfect example of a real miracle: it requires no effort, nobody working for it but God, and it only brings people comfort.
“Are you an angel?” she asks, the question so timely that Al doesn’t mind the word choice as much as he usually does.
“Some people would call me that, yes. But I prefer the term Doorkeeper.”
His distaste for the title angel runs so deep he has forgotten how or why it started. He suspects it might have something to do with modesty. Either way, Doorkeeper is a good option for English — it explains what it needs to without taking on too much credit.
“For what kind of door? Where else am I going?”
That’s a good way to approach the question. Al appreciates her patience, the way she’s willing to follow the conversation without rushing into it. In his experience, that means she will be better equipped to deal with what comes next.
“It’s two doors, actually. One leads above, to heaven. The other brings you back to earth. This conversation will determine where you go next.”
She blinks a couple of times, processing. There’s a part of this revelation that clearly took her by surprise, but Al is unsure on which.
“As in— reincarnation?”
He shakes his head. “As a ghost.”
This scares her. For a second, she panics, her breathing laboured by chemical processes that are no longer taking place. The room softens to accommodate her feelings, closes in around them to hold both of them closer to its heart.
“And how do you choose which door to open?”
“Oh, it’s not my choice,” Al says. “It’s yours.”
She picks up a pair of dice from the table and begins shaking them in her fist, at first gently and then with more confidence, as if they were a musical instrument meant to set a rhythm to her thoughts. The dice is plain, six-faced and made of wood, worn out by decades of use.
“Doesn’t dying fix that?” she asks, frustrated. “Shouldn’t I be done with choices?”
Al has heard this one before. “Do you want to be?”
She hesitates for a few seconds, the beat of her dice quickly coming to a close. “Yes and no.” She takes a sip from the cup and looks back at Al. “Do you really not know anything about me?”
“I know that you speak English and that you just died. I also know you have the capacity to become a ghost, which means you have an unfinished business. Beyond that, I know what you choose to tell me.”
This last part seems to give her peace. She puts her legs on the couch and brings her cappuccino with her, holding it with both hands against her chest.
“What about my name?”
Al shakes his head.
“Not even how I died?”
“Not even that.”
The lines on her face soften and she closes her eyes. She begins rocking back and forth, and it’s not long before she falls in sync with Al’s chair.
“Well, I am Jane,” she says. “Can you let me be for a second?”
Al is more than happy to oblige. “Of course. All we have is time.”
In Al’s experience, a visitor’s expectation for a life after death — what they think it means and looks like, the kind of qualities they are convinced brought them there and the implications they draw from the whole situation — never really match up with what they are actually experiencing. A Doorkeeper and their visitor, then, are inherently bound to speak different languages, and any good translator knows that making sense of that distance takes time.
Certainly, some cases are more complex than others. One of Al’s closest friends used to be a devout Christian, and apparently he had turned his original conversation into a theology lecture. Zayd had been his Doorkeeper — an incomprehensible choice, but that’s God for you — and he had fought him every step of the way. It was clear they were operating in two entirely different ballparks, the man referencing encyclicals and quoting the Bible verbatim and good old Zayd trying to explain to him the rules of ghost soccer. Sometimes, Al finds himself wishing that more encounters could look like that, force him to face directly and unambiguously all the words he doesn’t know how to translate.
As he waits for Jane, he can feel how he is longing for her, grasping at straws to figure out what she needs to hear. Maybe, he thinks, Jane is praying for the same, hoping that with a little nudging he’ll free her of doubt and simply tell her what to do.
“Okay,” she says, eventually, and her voice is louder, her tone less hesitant. “What’s it like being a ghost?”
Al decides to put it the way Zayd would. “It’s like living, but there’s no rush.”
“Define rush.”
“Time still goes by, but it doesn’t constrain you. Like, right now, if you had needed more time — hours, days even — no one and nothing would have bothered us. You don’t decay, you won’t need more than you did yesterday and your energy will feel limitless. You can dive into the ocean with no injuries, you can walk for a whole week and never feel tired.”
Without looking, Jane grabs another object from her table — a scarf — and wraps it around her shoulders. The red and the turquoise don’t go well with her blue hoodie, plus the silk sits strangely on her very casual attire, but somehow it all makes sense. If God were to draw her a portrait, Al thinks, this is what she would be wearing.
“Do I have to be with my family?”
The phrasing strikes Al as strange, but he tries not to make assumptions. “You can do whatever you want. Coming close to anyone you had a relationship with in real life has consequences, though.”
“What kind of consequences?”
“Okay, usually I explain it like this: imagine dying left you with a new umbilical cord, an open wound that connects you to the body you came from. When you are around someone you love, something happens. Energy gets passed around, reality becomes more malleable— everybody explains it differently. Point is, the living will feel your presence and vice versa. The catch is that the more this happens, the more the connection fades, until eventually it heals and disappears entirely.”
She is staring right at Al now, carefully scanning his words for hidden meanings.
“Could I go to my own funeral?”
Al shakes his head. “If you choose to become a ghost, you will descend on earth exactly two thousand days after your death, which is about five and a half years.”
Jane frowns. “Why?”
“I don’t know. But that’s how it goes, every time.”
“And what happens if I choose to go to heaven?”
“You’ll feel the room get bigger and bigger,” he says. “It’ll be brighter, too, but not blindingly so. You’ll feel closer and closer to the light, until, finally, you will ascend.”
Jane is still frowning, and it’s obvious she finds believing in heaven a lot harder than believing in ghosts. “And then what? What’s heaven like?”
In a way, all conversations Al has in this room are about an elephant hiding inside of it, and each visitor finds some harder to process than others. From Al’s perspective, however, this one is the most embarrassing to name.
“I am not entirely sure,” he says, simply.
For the first time in their conversation, Jane laughs. Al is surprised to find she has an infectious laugh, genuine and bright regardless of context.
“What? You have just never been?”
“Nope. And if I have, I cannot remember.”
Her eyes widen, incredulous. “What about god? Have you met god?”
“Not all of us believe God exists, actually. I have a lot of faith, though, so I’m biased.”
The shock has unlocked something in Jane, a sense of humor Al hadn’t seen until now. “Okay, so— jury’s still out on god, but you guys agree on heaven?”
“Yes,” he says. It’s almost entirely true.
“Why?”
“Well, we can feel heaven. Every time one of my visitors ascends, we get to hear its echo. It’s a very tangible sensation but it’s difficult to explain. It’s like a sixth sense. I know that’s what home feels like, and I know it’s real and it loves us.”
Jane’s head must be full of questions right now. Al has no trouble imagining them — so, why can you feel heaven but not god? if a doorkeeper doesn’t believe in god, what do they believe? what do you mean home, are you from heaven? — and he’d be glad to answer them all, but he can already tell she is not going to ask them.
Following what he assumes to be a fundamental pillar of her personality, she decides to go back to the point:
“Do ghosts go to heaven, eventually?”
“That’s the theory,” he says, and she bursts out laughing. Obviously, he knows it’s another nervous laugh, a response to the absurdity of life after death, but he can’t help it — before he can process what’s happening, he is laughing, too. It’s the kind of laugh you share with a stranger on a train, out of the blue and for a very good reason.
Seeing him laugh must exacerbate her confusion, because she laughs harder, her open hands hiding away her face. “Oh my god,” she mumbles. “How come you know so little, man?”
To be fair, some of this is Al’s fault. Many of his friends make fun of him, lovingly mocking his unshakable faith in a God he knows nothing about but seems to trust with everything precious, no questions asked. They joke that he is a terrible Doorkeeper, you look so wise but you don’t know shit.
“I guess that’s why I don’t think of myself as an angel. It blows my role way out of proportion.”
She nods. “I agree. Though, I gotta say, you have the aura of an angel.”
Case in point. “Thank you, I think?”
“No problem,” she says, casual. Al watches her sink deeper into the couch, settle against it until she is fully horizontal, her head on top of several pillows and her feet dangling from the edge. It strikes him how full of life she looks, especially for someone who just died, but then, again, all ghosts look alive.
“If I may give a more honest answer about heaven—”
She raises her hand and gestures lazily towards him. “You may.”
“Before, when you asked me what I knew about you, I mentioned that all ghosts have an unfinished business. We know this because sometimes the thing that’s keeping you on earth gets resolved, and when that happens you ascend to heaven.”
“Does it always get resolved?”
“Not necessarily. What I can tell you for certain is that some ghosts have been dead for several centuries, and a lot of them believe they missed their chance.”
“Okay,” she says, sounding somewhat annoyed. “What you are telling me is that it’s possible to get stuck as a ghost, forever.”
“Well, we don’t know. None of us has experienced forever before.”
Jane just looks more frustrated, unsatisfied with Al’s ignorance, but then a thought catches her attention and straightens her spine. She props herself up on her elbows and looks at Al properly. “What’s my unfinished business?”
Al doesn’t say anything. This time, he doesn’t need to.
“Let me guess. You don’t know.”
“Correct.”
She lets out a sigh and lies back on the sofa, arms crossed to better fit under the cover of her scarf. “Should I know?”
“Most ghosts try to guess. But they don’t always get it right.”
She winces. “That’s terrifying.”
“Not necessarily. Again, it depends on who you ask.”
Jane shakes her head, utterly unconvinced, maybe even a little suspicious. “What could be the point of waiting forever if you don’t even know what you are waiting for?”
It’s a gamble, but Al decides to answer her exactly the way Zayd would. After all, it has worked before. “Sometimes,” he says, “the real treasure is the friends we make along the way.”
The joke lands and it also doesn’t. “Are you serious?”
Al leans forward in his chair so he is sitting still, feet planted on the proverbial ground. “Look, I cannot tell you what any of this means. Many of us have been around for so long we have forgotten who we used to be. All of our theories are their own kind of faith. We know more than the living, but not by much.”
Jane sighs, disappointed but not surprised, like a kid who just got told there’s no such thing as Santa a few years too late. “But you believe in god.”
“Correct.”
“Great,” she says, and Al cannot tell if she’s being sarcastic. Then, without skipping a beat: “Do you want to take one of my pastries?”
The sudden pivot surprises him, but Al is always happy to share a meal with a visitor. It doesn’t happen often. “Are you gonna take one, too?”
She nods. “You first, though.”
Al obliges. The pastry is incredible. No food ever tastes as good as it does in this room, and he treasures each bite.
Jane sits up slowly, reaching for her own cannolino just as he is licking a splash of cream off his fingers. “I didn’t know angels had an appetite.”
“You know, it’s one of the reasons why I believe in God.”
She laughs, mouth full. “This?” she says, pointing at her cheeks.
“Yeah. Exactly that.”
Jane shakes her head, putting up a performance of disbelief that’s mostly there for show. Al takes that as a good sign. As far as translating goes, joy is a good place to start.
“You know, I don’t remember living. I don’t know if I ever lived at all. I can feel heaven, faintly and only sometimes, but mostly I am a ghost among ghosts. And although the living world cannot see me or touch me, both humans and I get to enjoy strawberries. Personally, I think that’s God.”
“That’s.... cute,” she comments, earnest and maybe a little shocked. Cute is certainly not a common adjective for faith. “But how does a ghost eat a strawberry?”
Al smiles. “I truly wish I could demonstrate.”
Jane raises her eyebrows. “That last one is mine,” she says, confiscating the cannoli plate from the table, and Al lets her eat it in peace.
It’s too early to draw conclusions, but Al is confident the two of them have found a good rhythm. If the room’s job is to make the visitors feel comfortable, Al’s is to provide them with the perspective of a peer, a stranger who cares but ultimately has no power over them. All he has to offer is his own experience, as subjective and emotional as it gets.
“Look,” he starts, as Jane lies back down, same position as before. “Life as a ghost is diverse, nuanced and at times unpredictable. I don’t think I can convey with words all there is to say about it, but I’ll try my best to give you an accurate impression.”
“Alright.” She stretches her arms above her head, relaxed. “Tell me how ghosts eat strawberries.”
“Basically,” he begins, glad to find her already right there, walking at his pace, “ghosts can only interact with the world when no one is looking or listening in on them. We can eat, cook, paint, chop wood and smoke cigarettes, for as long as we want with no limitations. But when a living human so much as glances in our direction, everything we have touched goes back to the way it once was.”
Jane nods, slowly taking it in.
“Do cameras count?”
“When someone is checking them, yes.”
“What about animals?”
Al shakes his head. He really likes this part. “Nope. Some of us have dogs.”
Jane immediately turns to look at him, flabbergasted. “Like, living dogs?”
“Yes. As long as there are no humans around.”
“That’s so strange. And that goes for all animals?”
“Yep.”
“Can you get bitten by a mosquito?”
Al likes a visitor who has their questions ready and loaded. It reminds him just how much there is to say, how rich of a culture ghosts have built around them.
“No animal has ever tried to get something from us,” he clarifies. “You could pet a starving lion and he would barely notice. It’s like they can feel we are not part of their ecosystem, they know we are not food. There are ghosts who could talk your ear off trying to explain why.”
Jane gives him an incredulous smile and then settles back down. “I just cannot picture the things you are talking about.”
“Being a ghost is very strange,” Al confirms, although it’s all he has ever known. “We can show up last minute at any concert, in any country on earth, and watch the entire performance from the stage. We can run around on a football field during the biggest game of the season, we can accompany presidents and sit beside them during all of their meetings. And yet, we don’t really have special powers or fancy ways to move from one place to another. If we want to travel, we need to go to the airport and walk into the right plane.”
He takes a pause to give Jane the chance to interrupt him, but she doesn’t take it. Instead, she keeps silent, laser-focused on what Al has to say.
“Many ghosts live among humans, but you will also find ghost cities built in the most inhospitable places on earth. Sometimes, the worst thing that can happen to a ghost is a random guy with a torch walking into the abandoned building they were using as an art studio.”
Al has seen it happen several times. A few years ago, he used to play music with a bunch of friends in a very old house, truly on the verge of total collapse. The place was remote and unimportant, out of anyone’s way and unlikely to show up on the map of an urban explorer. One evening, mid-song, all instruments disappeared from under their noses, along with all their furniture and various months-old decorations. Turns out the road the house was built on was perfect for illegal motorcycle races, and no one had thought to look for whichever shady website they used to publicize the meetings.
“No matter what, though,” Al finishes, “ghosts are never alone. We will always have each other.”
“Okay,” Jane comments, her focus broken by a worry All cannot decipher. “And that’s good? Ghosts never get sick of each other, they never argue or disagree?”
“Of course we disagree.”
“But do you ever, like— hurt each other real bad?”
Over and over again, Al finds that human beings struggle to imagine a world without abuse. It makes him incurably sad. It’s one of the reasons why he feels the need to believe in God, to trust that there’s a final destination where all wounds will be healed.
“I know it’s not what you are used to, but ghosts are not cruel to each other. Again, I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe it’s because we don’t need to struggle to survive, so there’s no point in fighting for resources. Perhaps death has taught us all a good lesson. Your guess is as good as mine.”
Jane looks like she’s about to say something else, but then stops herself. She wiggles out of her hoodie and wraps her arms in and around the scarf, silk caressing bare skin.
“That’s gorgeous,” Al comments, pointing at her shoulder. She smiles and raises the sleeve of her t-shirt, revealing in its entirely a one of the most impressive tattoos Al has ever seen. It’s a cobra snake, so not at all an uncommon subject, but it’s drawn in such a distinctive, elegant style that it’s hard to look away from it.
Jane stares at her own tattoo for a long while, as if she had never seen it before, either.
“Do ghosts ever get sad?”
Al leans back into the rocking chair and lets it sway. Immediately, it settles into the perfect rhythm— not too slow, not too fast, calming without becoming a distraction. “Yeah,” he says. “Of course.”
“About what?”
“About everything. Our team just lost the championship. We tried cooking our favorite meal and it turned out bland. A friend lied to us. You name it. If I had to narrow it down, though, I’d say that we often suffer from helplessness.”
Jane turns to her side, curling up around her scarf. “Because... you are stuck on earth?”
“No, it’s not about that. We don’t feel like prisoners. If anything, it’s the opposite.”
She frowns. “How do you mean?”
“Well, we are witnesses to humanity’s lives, but we can never intervene. Some of us died in wars that only got worse and bloodier since our passing and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. We cannot prevent harm or provide comfort, we cannot stop a premeditated murder and we cannot give food to someone who is starving.”
Jane’s confusion has quickly faded into understanding. She gets this part, Al is sure of it. “How do you deal with that?” she asks.
Al shrugs. “It’s our reality. Each of us finds their own way to accept it.”
“Our relationship to animals helps,” he adds, then. “If we notice that someone is abusing their dog, for instance, we can finds ways to sneak the dog out of the house.”
Jane smiles her most genuine, joyous smile yet. “That’s really cool.”
“Yeah. I agree.”
“Can ghosts fall in love?” she asks, then, and Al feels like part of his job as a translator has been done. He tries really hard to get his visitors to ask positive questions, to move beyond will it be painless? and start thinking will it be fun?
“Yes,” he says. “We often do.”
“Can you have sex?”
“Yes,” he repeats, a little embarrassed. “We do it just as often, if not more.”
Jane laughs a little. “Good for you.”
Al can feel himself blushing. This is another point of contention between him and his friends — assuming Doorkeepers were never “alive” in the proper sense of the word, who made him a prude? How can a guy who has had sex for literal centuries still blush at the mention of a handjob?
The obvious answer is that people who live in heaven don’t have sex, and some Doorkeepers have internalised this absence in peculiar ways. If that’s the theory, however, Al disagrees — as far as he is concerned, having sex is too strong of a pleasure to be left out of literal heaven — but trying to counter-argue embarrasses him further, which then fuels the jokes at his expense.
“What if,” Jane starts, before Al can think of a good way to change the subject, “you fall in love with someone and only their unfinished business gets resolved?”
Thankfully, the question lets him off the hook, although it also stirs them away from pleasure. “I mean, we get sad. It’s another basic fact of our existence, and it can be heartbreaking, but it’s not quite the same as human loss. We are all pretty sure we are going to see each other again, after all.”
“In heaven?”
“Yeah.”
She rolls onto her back, staring at the endless light up above. “What do you think heaven is like?”
Al closes his eyes, smiling wild and unashamedly. “I think it’s beautiful and fulfilling and real. I know I miss it. It’s probably just— a very different kind of beautiful.”
“Different from...?”
“From— earth. Humanity. Both living and dead. I don’t think we will stop being people, but there will be much, much more. And maybe a little less.”
“I see,” she says, shyly.
“But again, your guess is as good as mine. I just think there’s something on earth worth being a ghost for, a kind of beauty that some of us particularly appreciate. The way I see it, you become a ghost because you have fallen in love with those unique parts of the human experience, and you are willing to delay your stay in heaven to go through them again. That is an unfinished business.”
The last object on Jane’s table is a pair of sunglasses. She sits up on the couch and puts them on. They are definitely big for her, not to mention way too tacky to make sense with any other part of her outfit. Still, she looks like a superhero who has finally assembled her uniform. Scarf on her lap, dice in hand, sunglasses on. Unstoppable.
She takes one deliberate breath, slow and steady, and then takes the glasses off. “Al,” she says, looking down at the table, “I have to tell you something. About how I died.”
He doesn’t ask if it’s good or bad, personal or philosophical, and he also doesn’t try to reassure her that she can say whatever she wants. At the very last moment, he sees the words coming and moves aside to give them space.
“I killed myself,” Jane says.
For the second time during their conversation, the room closes in around them. It’s difficult to explain what’s happening and why Al can feel it, but he doesn’t care. He thanks God for it.
“I guess this wasn’t what you were expecting,” he tries, gentle.
She meets his eyes, a sad smile on her face. “I guess not.”
Al has found himself in this situation before. It certainly makes things more complicated, but maybe not by much.
What’s true, however, is that out of all human experiences, this is one he will never understand. No matter what, he doesn’t have the capacity to terminate or alter his own existence, and he struggles to imagine what it feels like to have the chance, much less to want it.
“Is this better or worse than what you had imagined?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t imagining anything at all. But it’s also like — hard to put myself back in that moment.” She stops, struggling to express what she is thinking. Then, soon enough, something clicks. “You know, I have lived in lots of places that were freezing during winter and boiling hot during the summer, and I remember that as a kid I would lie awake at night and try to immerse myself in the memory of another season. Like, I would try to remember what the cold felt like, because maybe that would make the heat more bearable. But It just— it never worked.”
Jane starts playing with her sunglasses, handling them lazily as her thoughts carry her forward. “There’s a lot of distance, between the way I felt before I killed myself and the way I am feeling now,” she says. “I can remember it clearly, just as clearly as I can remember feeling cold, but I cannot feel it.”
Al doesn’t feel the need to add anything to that. They look at each other in comfortable silence, both reaching for something impossible to grasp, until Jane speaks again.
“My best friend gave me these.” She shows Al the glasses, opens them for him. “They were originally a birthday gift from a high school boyfriend. He was a real shitty guy and I tried so hard to convince her to leave him. One night, we were having a sleepover at her house, and she was talking my ears off trying to defend him. Mind you he was literally cheating on her. And then—” Jane cuts herself off, shaking her head with a smile like she’s there again. “I saw these on her bedside table and I just put them on. I didn’t even have to say anything. I just looked at her, kind of deadpanned, and we burst out laughing. I’m talking huge, belly laughs, tears streaming down our faces.”
It’s a beautiful memory. Al can see it clearly, like a painting on a wall.
“Did that convince her to leave him?”
Jane nods. “Yeah. I mean, they still got back together one other time, but I think that moment played its part. After she left for good, I got into the habit of keeping the glasses by my side whenever we spoke about something difficult. It was like a secret weapon. Our way of making everything funny.”
Al can see what she is talking about. “A best friend is someone you can laugh with when you are at your lowest,” he says. “I got a couple of those, too.”
“Yeah. They are pretty rare.” Jane puts the glasses back on the table and lets her body sink into the cushions. She looks a little more relaxed, now, relieved from a judgment that hasn’t come. “Can I ask you for a favor, Al?”
“Of course. What is it?”
“Can you just, be really honest with me?”
Part of him wants to say I have been, this entire time, but he knows that’s not entirely true— at least not in the way she means it. She is asking him to be honest above all else, no matter how biased his personal position may be.
He nods. “I promise.”
“Do you think God wants me to change my mind? Is that what this is?”
Al takes a minute to think about it earnestly, not just as a Doorkeeper but as a believer, too. As it turns out, however, his answer is rather uncomplicated.
“I don’t think this counts as changing your mind,” he says. “You made a decision based on your circumstances, the tools you had and the emotions you were feeling. Now, your circumstances have changed, your options have changed, and you are somewhere new. I’m not sure it’s a fair comparison.”
Jane nods, but she seems unconvinced, lost to a train of thought Al cannot see.
“What I’m trying to say is that the God I pray to wouldn’t judge you for killing yourself. And they wouldn’t judge you right now, either, no matter what you decide.”
“Okay,” she replies, distant. “And what happens to my depression when I become a ghost?”
Al doesn’t have a convincing answer to this one. He doubts anyone does. “I’m not sure. I know that it gets better, but I cannot tell you about the how or why.”
Jane brings her knees up to her chest and holds on. “It gets better... in which sense?”
“You know how I told you that a ghost could walk for days and not get tired? Well, you still would walk at the pace your body remembers walking. And if you never could walk at all, then death wouldn’t change that. Not quickly, at least, and never entirely.”
“Alright.” She moves her head up and down, like a detective going over the evidence in their mind palace. “So, what happens if a person who uses a wheelchair becomes a ghost?”
They have found their rhythm again. Al hopes his translation skills will not disappoint him, not now that they are drawing close to the end.
“Usually, they get a ghost wheelchair.”
Jane smiles. “That’s cool.”
“Yeah, very. It’s usually a combination of the specific wheelchair they had in life, plus all the expensive ones they saw other people use but couldn’t get for themselves. It’s like an extension of their bodies. And bodies, too, can change.”
“I don’t know if that answers my question, though.”
“You are right.” Al leans forward again, bringing his chair to a rest. He needs to focus for this part. “I’ll give you an example, perhaps it’ll be easier to understand. Recently, a person who spent their entire life bed-bound became a ghost. I was their Doorkeeper. They descended into a ghost-city, so they could stay in a proper room without disruptions, and they spent a couple of months there. When I visited, they told me that it felt like all the discomfort they were still feeling was a kind of phantom pain. They told me they had undergone an amputation as a teenager, and the sensation was eerily similar. Only all the body parts that hurt were still there, and the pain was getting better and less frequent faster. Some of us built them a bed on wheels, and that allowed them to go outside. Last I heard, they transitioned to a sitting wheelchair and had successfully tested it around living humans, just to make sure it had truly become a part of their body.”
“Now,” he continues. “I don’t think they’ll ever run a marathon. They are his body, in a sense, just like you are your mind, and becoming a ghost doesn’t erase who you are. But I do think that death makes change easier, if only because it frees us of deadlines and nonnegotiables. So, no. Becoming a ghost won’t magically cure your depression or heal you from your trauma. But you’ll have time, and your body and mind will give way to your desires in ways they never could before.”
The dice in Jane’s hands come alive one last time. Al can tell she is almost there, he can feel the weight of her decision materializing around them, like the smell of freshly baked bread from a window.
“And what if I go to heaven? What happens to my depression?”
Al shrugs. “That’s anyone’s guess. Personally, I think you’ll be happy. Whatever that means. I don’t remember being a kid, but I imagine heaven must feel like the most beautiful day of a happy childhood.”
“My childhood sucked,” Jane replies, but she is smiling. Al wishes he knew exactly what she was feeling.
“I guess you are as clueless as me, then.”
“Guess so.” She brings her legs down and takes in a breath, slow and methodical. “So, how does it work? How do I make my decision?”
Al feels like he can hear Jane’s heart beating from across the table, although he certainly can’t and it no longer needs to.
“We’ll need to be establish a physical connection. You can look at me, hold my hand, sit beside me— whatever you want. We could both hold on to one end of your scarf and that would work, too. At that point, you either come with me, or you ascend to heaven.”
She is swaying back and forth, although the rhythm of her movement reads offbeat, somehow. “And how do I do that?”
“Either you keep holding on, or you let go.”
Jane picks up her sunglasses and puts them on, shaking. “Okay,” she says. “Can you come sit beside me?”
Al would tell her there’s no need to hurry, but that, too, would be a lie. Clearly, there is a need to hurry, and it’s hers. Who is he to deny her of that?
“Sure,” he says, then gets up from his chair and sits down on her left.
“Okay, so. We’ll look at each other. Would closing my eyes work, as a signal that I wanna go to heaven?”
Al nods.
“And if I keep them open, I’m coming with you. Back on earth.”
“Correct.”
She hesitates to face him, instead fiddling with the hem of her scarf.
“Are you scared?”
“Yeah.” She glances at him, just once. “You?”
“No,” he says, and that gets him a laugh.
“Right. Dumb question.”
“I mean, not really. I know Doorkeepers that would give you a different answer.”
I will introduce them to you, if you decide to become a ghost, he thinks but doesn’t say. She doesn’t need any more from him right now than a shoulder to lean on.
“Okay,” she says, and finally turns around with her whole body, her legs crossed and the scarf wrapped around her shoulders. Shyly, her gaze still fixed on her lap, she gestures for Al’s hand. He puts it on the pillow, midway between them, and she takes it.
“And these fuckass sunglasses are allowed. It’s not cheating.”
“I cannot see your eyes like, at all,” he admits. “But it’s not cheating. It will work.”
Jane nods, all worries placated, and finally raises her head to look at him.
He truly has no idea what she is going to do, but, in an instant, he feels the strength of her choice opening up the room, like wind blowing through sails.
A sense of closure washes over him, and he feels everything at once. Sadness, for all the living years Jane won’t get to experience. Anger, for all the pain she had suffered and any injustice she had faced. Envy, for the joy she got to share with a high-school best friend, but also heartbreak, because she only got to experience it once and she cannot go back to it. Hope for her and her future, curiosity for what it will look like, admiration for whatever she has allowed herself to want.
“Thank you,” Jane says, and the room blinks, casting them in light.