I'll Let You Off With a Warning

You're walking towards the door of your office building when high above you, a window repair man accidentally nudges a large adjustable wrench off the edge of his suspended platform. The wrench plummets three hundred feet in a little over four seconds and hits you on the top of your head, slowing from over a hundred miles an hour to a stop in a very small amount of time. The energy that the wrench had picked up in the fall is deposited first into your skull, breaking it, and then into your brain, making it unfit for its previous task of sustaining conscious thought and animating your body. You die in the middle of the thought that the bar you are passing seems like it used to be a deli.

You feel yourself accelerating rapidly upward from the street and your defunct body. You move faster and faster and the air becomes a blur. You fly through the bottom of the cloud layer and see nothing but dense fog. Then, suddenly, things stop happening and you are nowhere. There is nothing for as far as you can see. The dark-white floor melds seamlessly with the light-gray sky where an optimistic person might look for the horizon. You turn and look all around, or, at least, it feels like you do, as the aggressive monotony of your surroundings make it impossible to be sure that you have moved at all.

You hear a polite cough and turn again. This time you know for sure that you moved because a figure comes into view. He is a non-descript man, wearing loose gray sweats. He is sitting on a stool and balancing a clipboard on his thigh. There is another stool in front of him. You walk over and sit down on it. The man looks at you with an expression of mild interest and almost infinite patience, it’s clear that you will have to get the conversation started.

"Umm... how’s it going?" You ask, still not sure what is going on or where you are. The man looks down at his clipboard and lifts the brick of papers that is clipped to it, revealing the very last sheet, which he quickly scans. He looks at you, a little guiltily, and speaks. 

"Whoops! I assumed you knew. But it says here that you had no idea it was coming?" He phrased the last sentence as a question, obviously expecting some kind of agreement from you.

"No idea that what was coming?" Some fear creeps into your voice as you begin to realize what has happened.

"Oh man." The man wrings his hands, "Well... uh... you are... you're dead. You got hit on the head and you died and now you’re dead." You honestly don't know how to respond to this. You didn't really think about death too much when you were alive, you were young and healthy and besides some well repressed fear, death was not a big part of your life.

"If I'm dead then what is this? Why am I here? Why am I... anywhere?" The man responds to your hurried questions by looking around, shifting on his stool to peer at the non-landscape surrounding you both.

"Were you very religious, you know, back when you were alive?"

"Not very religious." You say, realizing that you may want to bend the truth of your agnosticism a little, "But I-" The man interrupts you with a happy sigh.

"That's a relief. Makes everything so much simpler. You wouldn't believe the dog and pony show I have to put on for some people. I feel like I just started here and already I’ve got so many people insisting that I'm Anubis or Saint Peter or some other nonsense and I have to put on some crazy costume or they refuse to take this seriously. I mean you wouldn't believe how ridiculous I look wearing a big dog-" He stops talking suddenly, having just caught the expression on your face, which is strained with the effort of holding back tears. "Hey man, listen-"

"I don't want to be dead!" You fail at your self-assigned task of not crying and tears start to flow out of your eyes. "It’s not fair! I lived a good life! I had a family and another kid on the way and I donated to charities and I had friends and a dog I was going to get a promotion and I don't want to-"

"Okay. Okay buddy. It’s alright don't uhh... don't cry" The man makes a halfhearted attempt to reach out to comfort you but lowers his hand once he realizes that the stools are set too far apart. "Listen," He speaks calmly, trying to project over the soft sobs you can't stop making. "It doesn't really work like that. People don't die because they were bad or good, stuff just kind of... happens." He flips through the pages awkwardly, not really reading any of them. "I actually argued against that, you know, in the beginning." He continued, trying to fill the uncomfortable soundscape with something other than sobbing and sniffling. "Always seemed a little unfair to me, you know."

You let out a loud sob and almost fall of your stool as you breathe in a strained breath, the first on the path to hyperventilation. You aren't listening to his increasingly hesitant objections to the moral structure of the universe. You just want to go back to your life and your family and you really, more than anything, don't want to be dead. The man finally stops talking and makes the effort to look at your tear soaked face. Your skin is red and blotchy and there is a fair quantity of snot hanging out of your nose.

"Oh Jeez. Come on man. You’re making this really tough on me. Listen, if you just stop crying I've got some pamphlets and stuff that'll really-" You interrupt him with a wailing sob. "Alright!" The man throws up his hands in exasperation. "Fine! I'm not supposed to do this but you are really bumming me out and I've got a long day up here." You choke off a sob and wipe your eyes clear just in time to see the man take a pencil and erase something on the back of the last piece of paper. He quickly scribbles something new on the sheet, balancing the clipboard precariously on his legs. "There you go." He looks up at you, "Can you please stop crying now?" Before you can do more than sniffle, the feeling of rapid acceleration starts again and everything is gone.

You're walking towards the entrance to your office tower when, thirty stories above you, a window repair man accidentally kicks a large monkey wrench off the edge of his suspended platform. It takes just over four seconds to fall the three hundred feet to the ground. The wrench slams into the pavement in front of you, cracking the concrete slab and shaking the sidewalk. The violence of the impact jolts you out of your daydream about the history of a nearby bar and you jump back, letting out an undignified scream. Looking up, you see a tiny head poking over the edge of a platform hanging on the side of the skyscraper. You raise your hand and extend your middle finger towards the silhouette.

"Asshole! Be more careful! You could have killed me!"