Whoever said drowning was a peaceful way to die has never come close to drowning.
They have never experienced holding your breath, and having to let go because your chest will explode.
Sea water cutting your lungs to pieces with icy, salty, sharpness.
Suffocation and panic are not peaceful.
Drowning is not a good way to die.
In Vanessa’s final moments she saw Michael floating lifeless.
He did look peaceful.
Now.
Because he was dead.
And in a few seconds, Tina would be dead as well.
She thought about the lie of peaceful drowning.
Tony stood on the shore, wagging his tail, wet and heavy with seawater and sand, barking at his owners playfully, waiting for them to come back to the safety of the shore, like they always did.
But they didn’t.
Because now they were both dead.
Their bodies were pulled from the icy West Coast water, and the media was there to report it all for that evenings 6.00pm news bulletin.
Tony went to live with an SPCA foster home until he found someone new to walk him along the beach.
There was a funeral that was well attended, and Vanessa and Michael would watch it all from a waiting room with a linoleum floor that had a print on it to make it look like marble.
On the wall were two black and white photographs, framed tastefully in white, one of a loaf of bread and the other of a toaster on fire.
Lady Gaga and Adriana Grande played from a small speaker neither of them could see. It sounded like “Rain on Me” was being played from a small transistor radio that look four AA Batteries, the type of transistor radio Vanessa’s Grandfather used to listen the horse racing on while he drunk Gin in the shed and made wooden pot plant holders.
“Well this is a surprise” said Michael, genuinely surprised.
“You mean your sister showing up at the funeral?” said Vanessa, thumbing through a Time Magazine from 2013 with a picture of a bee on the cover under the headline - The World Without Bees.
“No, this waiting room. It’s not as grand as you’d think an afterlife waiting room might be.” Michael whispered “I mean, not that I ever thought you’d die and then be put into a waiting room.”
“I guess it makes sense” said Vanessa as she threw the Time magazine back onto the pile of dog-eared reading material, “Why would an after-life be any different to life?”
Michael had always hoped he’d be reincarnated as a spoilt, rich family’s Chocolate Labrador. A 30 something man in a robe, with long hair, broke the silence.
“Michael and Vanessa Bromley?”
They said yes at the same time.
“Please, come with me.”
In the after-life, Jesus looked exactly like Jesus did in all the Catholic stained-glass windows.
He scuffed his sandals lazily as he walked like an entitled millennial who didn’t give a fuck about anything, but Leonardo Da Vinci had got him pretty spot on when he painted The Last Supper.
Vanessa was disappointed Jesus wasn’t female, or black, or Asian, or from Mexico. To her that would have made the after-life interesting. She resented that the white male Jesus was walking down a hallway and leading them into interview room number 12. He had that air of a rich spoilt kid who never had to struggle, like one of the Trump siblings.
“Please, take a seat” said Jesus.
They both sat, and Jesus offered them mini Bounty bars, the ones that weren’t for individual sale.
They took one each.
“Please, take two or three. Drowning is hard work, all that treading water and fighting the current. You must be famished?”
They were. They took three.
Jesus sat in front of them with a plain A4 cardboard file that had a yellow post-it note with “Vanessa and Michael Bromley” written on it with blue sharpie that was nearly out of ink. Bromley had been spelt wrong, with the e missing. It was a common mistake.
Jesus looked at the file seriously, took a deep breath, and smiled as he put his head up to look at Vanessa and Michael in the eye.
“I guess you’ve got a lot of questions?”
They sort of did. But they knew what was about to happen. They knew they’d be told to go one or the other. They just didn’t know which way yet. That said, when someone like Jesus asks you if you’ve got any questions, they knew they’d better have some questions to ask.
Michael nervously went first. Which concerned Vanessa, because when Michael was nervous or uncomfortable, he tried to conceal it by being funny. But Michael wasn’t funny, and instead of coming across as confident, he was the exact thing he was trying to hide, nervous and uncomfortable.
“So, is this Heaven or Hell? We must be in hell because Lady Gaga and Adriana Grande where on repeat out there in the waiting room.” He snorted through his nose.
Jesus looked at him surprised and a little offended.
“You don’t like it?”
Vanessa changed the subject quickly.
“I like the photographs in the waiting room. The bread and the toaster on fire. Do they represent heaven and hell?”
“Yes” said Jesus, happier now. “That’s very preceptive of you. They were taken by a man who could have been the next Robert Mapplethorpe, but sadly he died. He had an abnormally small oesophagus and choked on a piece of ham.”
Vanessa let out a laugh.
Jesus glared at her.
She quickly got serious and put a Bounty Bar into her mouth.
“So” said Jesus “How are you feeling about being dead?”
Vanessa and Michael were surprised by Jesus’s bluntness. But death was something Jesus had dealt with every day so it wasn’t such an unconsidered subject. They were also surprised by his, nearly corporate, nonchalance about something that 99% of the human race were terrified of.
“I miss Tony” said Vanessa.
“Ah yes” he grabbed their file and opened it. “Your dog. That IS a bit annoying isn’t it.”
Michael was struck with a thought. ‘Do animals go to Heaven or Hell?”
“Good question” said Jesus. “Generally speaking, they go to Heaven and roam around happily, sometimes reuniting with their previous owners.”
Michael was happy with that response, but he did wonder about poisonous snakes and rats, which he hated, and wondered if there’d be any scurrying around where he was about go. Which raised another good question for him, where was he going to go?
“So, will we be going to Heaven or Hell?” he asked.
“We prefer not to call it Hell. There actually is no fiery pit where you burn for all eternity. That was a story created by our marketing department many years ago. They did some great stuff back then. Penmanship was important then.”
“So, there’s a marketing department?” said Vanessa, a little confused.
“Oh yeah. Bunch of young kids in their twenties. Between you and me, they’re good fun, but none of them can write. I don’t think any of them have actually read a book. In the old days we really crafted some great stories. We entertained. People really liked us.” Jesus thought for a moment. “And I guess they were scared as well. Some of the old marketing is pretty scary. Scared the bejesus out of people.” Jesus sighed lamenting the old days, and repeated himself, to himself “Such great penmanship.”
But maybe even more than their own death, through drowning, Michael and Venessa were gobsmacked that the afterlife was basically, a business.
“So, the walking on water, your birth from a virgin, all that stuff came from a writer in your marketing department?”
Jesus nodded “Absolutely. But not one writer, there used to be a few of them. The virgin birth was incredible! People still talk about it today. You couldn’t do that now. No one would believe you.”
Vanessa and Michael stared at each other, while Jesus gazed into the distance reminiscing privately about the way things used to be.
The room was silent, until Jesus broke out of his memories and slapped his hand down on the folder. “Right then!”
Michael and Vanessa jumped.
“Let’s take a look at this folder and see what’s going on.”
Vanessa looked at Jesus as he thumbed through their folder. His face gave nothing away.
Quietly in the background Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande continued to rain down on the halls of, what she now realised, was a very corporate building. There was the white noise hum of air conditioning, and in the distance, she could hear the default setting of an iPhone ring.
She could also hear laughter, and the occasional cough from an office that was close to where they were sitting. Her days as an insurance assessor made her familiar to this environment. And sitting here with Jesus reminded her of being at a job interview, or asking for a pay rise.
Michael was no stranger to the office environment either. He had dreamed of being a cameraman for the BBC, working all over the world, spending days, sometimes months, in cramped conditions in the wild hoping to get a rare shot of a snow leopard, or bears mating, or whatever David Attenborough told him to film. But he was a graphic designer. He wished he wasn’t, but Michael had always been averse to a life less ordinary and settled for a steady income, getting on the real estate ladder, and a dog. Tony.
Not that he was unhappy.
A life of certainty was something that made Michael sleep well at night.
Jesus said nothing as he flicked through the folder, licking his thumb every time he carefully turned a page.
He got to the last page and closed the folder. He put his head up and smiled at Vanessa and Michael while he tapped a finger on the file.
He said nothing.
‘Well?” asked Vanessa. “Is it heaven or hell?”
Unwrapping a bite sized Bounty bar not intended for individual sale Jesus answered “Like I said, we prefer not to call it Hell. It conjures up such a negative image. We like to use the term “Internship programme.”
“So, basically, heaven, hell, the afterlife, whatever, is a corporation, with the sole purpose of making profit?” asked Michael.
Jesus laughed “Soul purpose. That’s a good one Michael.” He wrote something on the file then looked back at the both of them. “All joking aside, yes. We’re a family business, started by my Father. And a very successful business. Faith doesn’t require much capital investment to produce. But the income coming back in, well, it’s phenomenal. Right now, we’re working on making God great again. And it’s going very well. Especially in the US Market. We’ve always done well in the United States. And that’s the department you’ve been assigned to. I’d love to offer you both internship positions working with the USA team. You won’t get paid. And you’ll do it forever. But there is the opportunity within the next 50 years to really try and make an impact in China, which we’re all very excited about.”
Jesus beamed with pride an excitement.
“Can we think about it?” asked Vanessa.
Jesus popped the Bounty bar into his mouth. “No.”
Michael had one last question.
“The file? What’s in it?”
“Oh” said Jesus “It’s basically your internet history, and screengrabs that surveillance took through the camera in your laptop.”
“You watch us through our computers?” Vanessa asked.
Jesus looked at her with an – of course we watch you through your laptop - look. “It’s so much more cost efficient than sending angels down to earth to physically watch over people.”
Being an insurance assessor Vanessa couldn’t disagree with the logic.
Michael was curious. “What did you see that made you decide we’d be interns for the rest of our lives?”
Jesus wiped the chocolate from his fingers on his sleeves before he opened the file and put three pages of screen grabs in front of them.
“Oh” they both said.
In front of them were pictures of swingers’ parties they would hold four times a year. A Spring one, a Summer one, an Autumn one, and a Winter one. There were pictures of them both engaged in sex with multi-racial partners, a shot of Vanessa caressing a woman’s’ breasts, and Michael with his head between the legs of a muscular Indian man dressed like a tradie.
Jesus rubbed his tongue over his teeth to get rid of the small bits of coconut from the Bounty bar. “We get a little uncomfortable about sex up here. Mainly because we try to keep the American market as happy as possible. I know strategically it seems a bit, nebulous, but it keeps this train on its tracks. And our shareholders are happy.”
Vanessa and Michael weren’t sure whether to be angry or embarrassed. They had loved the swinger parties and it kept their relationship strong. But they also knew that what they were doing was, naughty. And that’s why they did it. The rush. They were too busy being professionals to take recreational drugs and stay out all night, so they stayed at home and had naughty sex with strangers who also wanted naughty sex with strangers.
Jesus took in a sharp breath, put both hands on the desk and smiled at Vanessa and Michael. “OK then, shall we head down to your department and meet the team!”
Jesus, Vanessa and Michael walked down a white corridor where plasma TV screens played commercials filmed by Spike Jonez and Ridley Scott. Big name, expensive actors like Benedict Cumberbatch and Idris Elba walked through CGI environments talking about faith, togetherness, and washing your hands to stop the spread of disease.
Vanessa and Michael looked at each other and took deep breaths.
They held hands.
Back on earth Tony slept on his new dog bed in his new home. He dreamed.
He dreamed of Vanessa and Michael swimming that afternoon at the beach.
He dreamed he was barking at them to come out.
His paws twitched and his floppy lip moved up and down as he dreamed.
His new owners laughed and filmed him dreaming on their new iPhone XR with a dual lens camera. They uploaded the video to Instagram and got over 100 likes.
A screen grab of that moment was taken by the surveillance team in the afterlife and then placed into their file.