The Museum of Doubt (19 page)

Damages?

Money.

What can you spend money on here?

Najla, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to slaughter the goat now, said Mak.

He led the goat to a smooth mound of clay a few yards away that gave the highest elevation as far as he could see in any direction. With his hand he dug two scoops in the clay at the foot of the mound and two shallow channels running down to the scoops from the top. Standing on the mound, he took the bottle of water and the coil of rope out of his bag and set them down. He hunkered down next to the goat, which turned its head away, placid and anxious about the lack of vegetation, and bleated.

There now, said Mak. Easy. He stroked its back with slow, firm strokes, murmuring Easy, girl, easy. After he’d stroked for a while he grabbed the beast around the neck, holding it in a tight lock, and with his other arm reached around to enfold its legs and jerk them off the ground. As soon as the flank of the struggling animal hit the clay he pinned it there with the full weight of his body and looped the rope around its ankles. Dust rose off the surface as he pushed his locking hand out from under the goat to finish the knot binding the goat’s legs. When it was done, still pinning the animal down, he dragged it, bucking and twisting, so that its head was more or less over the top of the channel. He took out the knife, pulled the goat’s head back by
the ears, felt for the pulse, and cut its throat. The blood ran free into the channel and flowed down to collect in the scoop. When the animal had stopped moving and there was no more blood Mak stood up, lifted the goat by the legs and flung it to the bottom of the mound. He drank water from his bottle and poured the rest into the second channel.

Within a few seconds a crowd of clay-eaters was mobbing the scoops. Where there had been puddles of blood and water there was a seething tide of scalps and outstretched tongues. The goat was torn to pieces. Its stripped white bones flew out of the scrum in broken lengths, sucked dry of marrow.

Ladies and gentlemen! called Mak, clapping his hands together. Could I have your attention, please. Thank you. My name is Maurice Mak, I’m an attorney, and I’ve come here to your afterlife today to talk about litigation to ease the difficult conditions you find yourself living in, through no fault of your own. Firstly, my sincere apologies to those who were unable to taste the goat or the water. In the fullness of time, if we are successful, I hope there will be goat and water enough for all of you, as much as you need. That’s the very least you deserve.

The crowd peered up at him, silent and attentive. Mak took a legal pad out of his pack and brandished it. In the colourless realm it seemed to shine like a hazy sun.

At the other end of the river, in what they like to call the land of the living, they call you the dead, he said. That’s when they call you anything. That’s when they don’t forget about you. Because they don’t like to think about you much, do they? They live their fine lives in the light, with their steak and wine and their beating hearts, and they don’t concern themselves with you. If they do, it’s for no other reason than to be glad of the distance from here to there. They don’t want so-called dead
people coming into their homes and their gardens and their shopping malls. They’d do anything to shut you out. They’re afraid of you! It’s true, isn’t it? They’re afraid of you. Why is that? Why should they be afraid of you? After all, you used to be where they are now, and chances are they’re going to be coming here some day themselves. Wonder why they’re afraid? Could it be because they’re guilty? Could it be because they know they’re walking round in a civilisation built by the people they call dead, and deep down they wonder whether those people aren’t going to come back and claim it? Well, maybe they’re right to be afraid. Maybe it is time you went and claimed what’s properly yours. They call you the dead. But let me ask you this. Was anybody here born dead? I don’t think so. Did anybody here ask to be dead? OK, the gentleman at the back, I see you, but you thought you’d end up somewhere better, yes? Yes. My friends, this is a defining moment in the history of dead rights. As long as enough of you are prepared to testify, and you can remember who you are, like Najla here, we are going to pursue our campaign for justice in the very highest courts of the still alive. And believe me, when the dead begin to sue, the living had better run for cover.

Excuse me, said a voice over Mak’s shoulder. He turned. A thin, short, bespectacled man in tee-shirt and jeans and sneakers stood hunched there, arms folded, all Adam’s apple and no chin.

Yes? said Mak sharply.

Can I see your papers?

What papers?

This is a restricted area, said the man. It’s off limits to living people. I need to see your permission.

If you’d just wait while I finish this meeting.

I’m not going to wait, said the man, simpering. I’m Ashbath. One of the servants of Ereshkigal. Now show me your papers.

I don’t care who you are, said Mak. Get off this fucking mound and let me talk to these people.

Ashbath laughed for a second, wiped his nose with his finger, took a flick knife out of his pocket, triggered the blade and stabbed Mak through the heart with it. As Mak went down he felt Ashbath gather his hair together in a bunch in his fist and start dragging him along the ground.

Later Mak woke up on a plain of fine, talcy dust littered with sharp pebbles. He was lying on his side outside a trailer home. The only other feature in sight was a rusty iron gibbet with a butcher’s hook hanging from it. He felt no pain. When he got up he felt nothing except a sense that he had been simplified. His hands, arms, legs looked and worked the same as before, but if he’d been told he’d been reduced to cardboard, clay and straightened-out coat-hangers, he wouldn’t have been surprised.

The door of the trailer creaked open and a woman stepped out, chewing gum and holding a cigarette. She was tall and slim, in a tight black polo neck and black jeans, with a tiny pouty red mouth and her eyes covered by a fringe of curly brown hair. She plucked the gum from between her lips, tossed it into the dust, took a drag of the cigarette and said: You Mak?

Yes.

Come in.

Inside the trailer Mak found the woman sitting behind an almost bare desk, a cheap sheet of veneered chipboard on a trestle. There was a full ashtray and an open bottle of red wine. On the wall was what looked like a calendar and in one corner a muscular black dog dozed.

Hi, said the woman. I’m Erishkigal. I’m in charge here. She leaned over the desk and shook Mak’s hand. Mak sat down on a three-legged stool facing her.

So, you’re an attorney, said Erishkigal. She took a swig of the wine from the bottle. What brings you to these parts?

Just a little routine legal work, said Mak.

OK. What do you think of our realm?

It’s unusual.

I need to see your passport.

I don’t have one.

Any ID?

Mak handed her his driving licence. Erishkigal examined it while helping herself to more booze. After a few moments she tossed the licence over her shoulder. The dog sprang into the air, caught the licence in its jaws and slunk back to the corner, chewing.

Hey, said Mak. You have no right to do that.

Don’t worry, said Erishkigal. Don’t worry! You’re so anxious! All these travellers get so anxious about their papers. They’re in a strange place, they don’t have the right documents, they start to panic, they go to the police, the police start asking questions, the travellers freak out. Like if you don’t have the right visa the police are going to take you out and shoot you! She laughed. Mak laughed with her. I mean, said Erishkigal, chortling in a girlish way Mak found attractive, what must these travellers think about the world? Like some bureaucrat is going to destroy you because of some crappy stamp.

Right! laughed Mak.

No, said Erishkigal. No. If someone like yourself, a living person, comes here without my permission, then there’s absolutely no problem.

No problem, said Mak.

We cut right through the bureaucracy. We just stab you through the heart, you’re not living any more, and you remain here for the rest of eternity among the dead.

Mak clenched his teeth to stop his jaw going slack and clapped his hand to his chest. He felt with his fingers under the brittle clay crust of his shirt and stroked along his ribs. There was a dry slit in his chest over his heart. He fumbled with his fingertips for a pulse in his wrist. He couldn’t find one.

You look fairly flummoxed by what I’ve just said, said Erishkigal. Have yourself a drink. She handed him the bottle.

Mak drank. The wine was profound, majestic and noble, a dark stream seeped through loam, beech-mast and truffles, trickled round venison sepalled with cobwebs.

Good, isn’t it? said Erishkigal. That’s your blood you’re drinking.

Ma’am, I’m a lawyer––

I know who you used to be, said Erishkigal. You’re dead now. We don’t have courts here. We live pretty much in a general state of injustice, and there’s no going back. So you won’t be needing your law. Or your reputation. Even your name won’t be much good to you after a while.

Mak gathered himself. Listen, he said. Just you listen. He took another swig of his blood. He drained the bottle and licked his lips. I’ve done my research. Tell me this. Who’s better qualified to say whether the courts of the state of New Jersey are going to accept jurisdiction in the afterlife of Mesopotamia – you or me? You want to talk about law? See you in court.

You’re dead, Mak, said Erishkigal. Death disqualifies counsel.

Macy versus Tagus, 1927, said Mak. See? You don’t know jack.

Erishkigal cocked her head. You shouldn’t trust Inanna. Last time my bitch of a sister came here I hung her on that hook out there, dead as you are. She screamed at me to let her down and I pushed her toes and watched her swing. I enjoyed it. What is it with her? Who does she think she is? Why does she want
this fucking place? Does it look like fun to you, sitting around eating dirt for ever and ever? She got the looks in the family, she got the lifestyle, it’s like, everyone loves Inanna. What’s going to happen to Erishkigal? Oh, she’s dysfunctional, better give her the afterlife to take care of. Yeah, I’m dysfunctional, I’m running this operation, try counting the number of stiffs out there on the plateau. Try doing an audit. I’ll tell you who’s fucking dysfunctional. You know how my sister got out of here? She gets one of her big god friends, Enki, to send her food and water to bring her back to life, and she sweet talks me into letting her go as long as she sends me a substitute from among the living. And who does she send? Her husband! She says Erish, while I was away, the bastard was whoring and partying like it was going out of fashion. Dumuzi, his name was. He’s still here.

I could find you a substitute, if you’d let me go, said Mak.

Erishkigal laughed. I can’t let you go, she said. You’re not a god. You’re not a hero. You’re not even a king.

Eternity, yeah? said Mak. Eternity. OK. I’m going to deal with your points one at a time.

Mak began to argue. He argued in Erishkigal’s trailer for thirty-three days and thirty-three nights, or would have if there had been days and nights. Erishkigal’s aides, the Anunnaki, and her messengers Ashbath and Maikurg hung on the walls, eavesdropping. Some of the dead even summoned up the interest to try to listen in, greeting the lawyer’s sharper thrusts with a great bellow of squeezed toads. Stopping only to eat clay, Mak dredged up precedents going back to the ancient Egyptians, staged Platonic dialogues with imaginary witnesses, expounded on natural justice, fair play and the rights of man. He plucked articles from case law, canon law, commercial law, international law, common law, Roman law and the Code Napoléon. He cited
from anthologies of near-death experiences, from Homer, Norse sagas, Pythagoras, Origen, Plotinus, Milton and the
National
Enquirer
. On the thirty-third day, Erishkigal banged her fist on the table and told him to shut up.

OK. Leave, she said, folding and unfolding her arms. Go on. Try making it back. Try.

I can go?

Sure.

I can just leave?

Three conditions, said Erishkigal, standing up, stretching and yawning. To get back to the land of the living, you have to be alive. Second, you have to bring me a substitute within seven days, or you get the hook. Third, you have to sleep with me before you go. You’re quite good-looking, and I don’t get enough of it.

Mak took out the gold cereal bar Inanna had given him and put it in his mouth. Chewing it was like chewing a live mains wire. Rings of shock rippled through him and his heart ground out the futile stutter of a broken starter motor. He forced it down, fell to the floor writhing and screaming, scraped grooves in the floor with his nails and lay still. His head ached. He had a pulse. He smiled and snivelled and looked up at Erishkigal.

Well, she said. You’re alive. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or excited. Straight to condition three.

Just as Mak had struggled and failed to describe Inanna, so conveying the experience of sex with her sister proved beyond the glib lawyer’s mastery of English in all its registers. He groped for modifiers: dry, he said at last. It was dry. Disturbing. Dry and disturbing? No, not that … he had never felt so inadequate. So he got no pleasure out of it? No, no, there was pleasure … not enough … He came too early? Of course, several days early, but it wasn’t that … It was like you’d lived all your life in a
desert, and the biggest stretch of water you could imagine was a pond, and when you thought of the sea you imagined something maybe like the pond, only ten times bigger, and then just before you died you saw the sea, and your whole notion of the scale of water changed, and you understood that what you’d thought was swimming was only paddling, and there was a whole new scale of travelling over water to comprehend – sailing – and you’d been so proud of your paddling …

Forty days after Maurice Mak arrived in the afterlife, he stood at the edge of a glassy stretch of desert cleared of the dead, with Ashbath holding him by one hand and Maikurg, a short, powerful man with a Karl Marx-like beard, by the other. They began to walk forward, then to run. Mak’s feet left the ground and he floated back like a pennant in the slipstream as Ashbath and Maikurg thundered across the desert, a racehorse in two parts. The ground began to slope away from them. As it sloped steeper the two emissaries ran faster to stop themselves falling. The surface of the desert blurred, turned to a mirror-like finish, and they were running upside down on the underside of it. Mak felt himself turned inside out like a surgical glove carelessly peeled from a doctor’s fingers, felt Ashbath and Maikurg’s hold on his hands slipping, and curled himself up into a ball, hanging in the void. He hung clenched for an indefinite time, until he heard a dog barking and felt a warm wind on the back of his neck. He lifted up his head and saw an apricot light on the horizon, braiding the folds of thunderheads over an unseen ocean. He wept. Then he thought of Inanna and laughed. To see her again, hear her voice, meet her eyes. That warmth and grace. She was a goddess. But to match stories of the afterlife. They were the only ones who could do that now.