“The Line”

a Short Story by Michael Sauter

for my grandfather, Thomas McGinley.

There will truly never be another like you.

1. PROLOGUE

    In a hospital somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania, a man lies on what will soon become his own deathbed. He typically wonders just exactly what day his condition will ultimately get the better of him – but until then has found no great reason to raise too much of a physical stir. Nurses proceed to wander in and out of the room – taking with them whatever standard, customary forms of bedside manner that can be expected of patients this close to the day they’re meeting their maker. When it came to this man in particular, all the nurses really had to worry about was the man’s tendency to make an off-color crass remark about the much younger nurses’ looks and his insatiable desire for apple juice. 

    A nurse had asked him whether or not the painkillers just particularly made him fond of the stuff – and he responded that it was his granddaughter May’s favorite drink when she was little. The nurse sat there, completely and totally enveloped in the man’s stories regarding his granddaughter and the endless times he was tasked with watching over her as she grew up. His face settled into a completely content smile when talking about this time period in his life – even this close to death with this much pain radiating through his bones. The nurse simply stared and let her face match the relaxed state of his and let her mind wander off, picturing the scenes of jovial joy in both of their faces. He’d mention all the time about how she’d talk back to him even as a five-year-old. He’d attempt to feed her something she was too picky for – she’d snap her fingers and go “nuh-uh”, perfectly mimicking something she saw on the TV a meal beforehand. The first time he saw her do it, it sent him into a laughing fit so strong he fell backwards into the china cabinet sitting in the dining room and nearly knocked it over. He remembered the first time he ever took her to an amusement park – rattling off details of the duo riding rickety old rides with near-pinpoint precision and deadly accuracy. The tone of his voice took dramatic leaps and bounds with each time his granddaughter’s face changed during the first time they ever went up a rollercoaster hill. This wasn’t the first day that the man had gushed about these stories endlessly – and it perhaps wasn’t even his strongest performance recounting them during the year. However, the nurses were keeping count of every time he would – and frequently discussed which time he seemed to be having the most fun. 

    More frequently than not, these gigantic tirades of nostalgic love tended to flow out of the man whenever he knew that his granddaughter was coming to give him a visit. She had recently confided that seeing him wrapped up with all the standard, gaudy hospital equipment was giving her a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach as of recently, and that his frequent morbid jokes only were making her more saddened in the recent few trips. However, if she ever seemed too dejected about anything in particular, he – even now – would go, “Where are you and where the hell is May?” He had been doing it with stunning regularity ever since she said her first curse word around him. She was fourteen years old and had recently been getting into online video games – she swore like a sailor because of it. The first time she let one slip out near her grandfather, she expected a lecture. When he let that one fly, instead, he became May’s favorite grandpa. 

    She came bursting into the room the same as she would any other day.

    “HEY not crying, totally not crying. I love you Papa. You look so good today – I..I – I just hey here’s food, we got food.”

    She collapsed into his arms on the bed – both failing to attain silence as they shook, tears reaming down both of their faces. This scene of tears was all-too-familiar in the preceding weeks, but however they both knew that if they never took the opportunity to get these moments of embracing in that they may never have it again. Both being as strong as they ever were, they’d always move past it with a joke or some common world news event. Recently, it had become a heated debate over the actions of the President – a passtime that seemingly everyone in the country could bond over as of recently. May was steadfast in her determination to spend as much time with her grandfather as she possibly could in these weeks.

    “Do you remember the time we went up to Philly to see the Eagles lose?” He said to her, multiple bites into a sandwich from their favorite place in the city.

    “Yes, Papa. I remember every single thing about it. The only thing that sucked about it was having to wear those freaking Eagles jerseys just to not get a beer thrown at us. Seeing them get smothered was so worth it, though. And it’s down to Philly, pop. Down.”

    “Alright...but...shutup.”

    Every moment they had like this, however, had to be equally intersected by a moment that brought them both back to the grim reality of the situation. In this case, it thankfully happened to line up just perfectly with the self-imposed time limit that May had put on herself for her visit. Right at about that moment, terrible pain overcame the man. He attempted to remain as quiet as he could – as he always does – but when he released an audible swear at the first convulsion, May’s face receded into a deep wince. She kissed him on the forehead twenty-four times and then stormed out the door in what was now a typical sob directly into the hands of a regular nurse of the man’s.

    Every time May would leave, the thoughts of the man would immediately head to the same place – death. Normally, the dramatic exits May would tend to have wouldn’t help – but the man became used to them, and hated to see his granddaughter cry more than any self-pitying thought of death. Yet for some reason, every time she would leave, his mind would immediately turn to an image of the same church. The church he had attended his entire childhood.

    It’s as if it was some sort of unconscious trigger within his brain, perhaps it was simply his subconscious preparing for the idea of his looming death and trying to search within itself to soak up every ounce of nostalgia he could – while he still could. Perhaps he was consciously trying to make peace with his sin, and continue dedicating his mentality to God – a practice he had begun to pick back up in his later years after abandoning them for a short while in his childhood. Whatever the reason may be, it didn’t matter. It’s as if – in that very moment – he was transported directly back to the church pew. His parents at the end of the row, and his brother separating them. He could picture just exactly how awestruck he was at some of the imagery located throughout the church. He’d always be interested in the more gritty, messy elements of Christian imagery. He could immediately picture his brother’s antics next to him that would get him scolded by his father. The constant fart noises that would get them both chuckling and the whispered juvenile wordplay that would be undoubtedly filled with as many poop and sex jokes that you could handle. Those times rang constantly in the man’s head now. He’d even begun subconsciously talking to God again, much as he had a habit of doing back in the days of his God-fearing youth. 

    For some reason, the ritualistic vision the man had this night was especially vivid – and you, dear reader, can perhaps guess the reason. The painkillers seeped throughout the man’s body and he began to fall into a deep state of trance. Seemingly all at once, flashes of images from the man’s entire life began to spill out before him. None of them were ever so defined that he could fully grab at one and hold onto it for any more than a couple of seconds. Subconsciously, something was telling him that he knew exactly what this meant – that his end date had quickly arrived, and that the event horizon of his life was going to reach up and swallow him at any second now. In a state of near unconscious trance, the word “nurse” is all that is able to escape his mouth. When he near-instantly realizes he is too weak for the whimper to be even an option – he subconsciously asserts that he’s ready to face death.

    The last thought that enters his conscious mind is one of his granddaughter May. She’s sitting on a beach in Wildwood, New Jersey. Barely old enough to speak, her face beams with excitement as the man arrives at the blanket with two ice cream cones, stacked high with sprinkles plenty. An excited “Ahhh!” springs from her mouth in near perfect synchronicity with with the setting sun along the opposite horizon, turning the entire New Jersey sky into a shade of perfect orange-red.

2. THE LINE / ADMITTANCE

    That last thought the man had was perhaps not the last thought he ever did have – but the last one connected at all to his real, accurate memories in his brain of his time on Earth. There was a part of  him somewhere in his subconscious that knew this was the best memory he could possibly ever hope to end his life on. As that last thought left his brain, his vision receded more and more into a dense, encompassing black. Fading out with gradual dissolution as if placed at the end of a perfect film, the grip of reality was starting to loosen itself from the man’s mind. Thoughts ceased – at least for a little while. It was hard to tell just exactly how much time had passed in between those fleeting memories and what would follow – but once the man’s senses had become totally deprived, a glowing, circular speck appeared in what would typically be the center of what you or I would call “sight.” The light grew larger and larger, slowly but surely. Once it began to expand, the man felt some of his conscious thought begin to reassemble itself. It’s not that he could really make too much of a conscious connection as to what was happening, yet the depiction of how the entire event transpired was incredibly vivid in his memory.

    The light quickly snapped itself, fully blanketing the entire formerly dense, black void with cascading, blinding white. As if in the snap of a finger, the man looked down and saw his feet. With a loud clap, the man appeared as if in an entirely different room – one that resembled any hallway on Earth but shaded a sheen of glimmering pearl, and with its walls and ceiling fading seamlessly upwards into a cohesive display of pure white. Disoriented near immediately after the transition, he falls forward directly into the back of another woman. Hitting the floor with an incredibly percussive tone, his blurred vision gradually makes itself clearer, unveiling the winding, twisted curves in the filter of his eyes to be a row of people – all dressed in a different colored tee-shirt. They’re all standing in near perfect formation – eyes perfectly fixated downward past each other’s heads as they stand, waiting for gradual shifts forward in the line.  A few faces are turned to each other, talking presumably about the entire situation that the man found quite immediately preposterous. There is the swelling sounds of pianos gradually playing in the distance – not loud enough to be particularly discomforting yet not quiet enough to completely escape your ability to hear it. It seems to be moving forward in a pleasant progression, yet never remaining the same throughout different structural sections – and playing in an endless loop.

    Standing up, the man immediately apologizes to the woman standing directly in front of him. There is a quick look of anger that potentially flashes over the glazing of her eyes, but it recedes itself near immediately into a smile that the man finds somewhat uncanny. The woman’s tone is that of any particular human meeting another particular human on Earth – awkward, unsure, and self-critical. Her tone is entirely forgiving, and quickly the unpleasant nature of the fall is replaced by a more friendly and mannerly way of introducing themselves. After getting basic pleasantries out of the way, his eyes quickly dart to the left of her head, back to the entire, behemoth, sidewinding sea of bodies in a single-file line. 

    “What the hell is going on?”

    “It’s a lot more organized than I’d thought it would be.” She seemed relatively unfazed by the situation. The man felt the strangest of urges up his spine that indeed everybody in that line, regardless of how ridiculously nihilistic the situation seemed were incapable of feeling anything in the situation except anticipation and bewilderment. The length of the line absolutely dumbfounded the man, and his eyes couldn’t help but stretch with all the power that his capable being allowed him to as it stared upwards, seeing the collection of people standing mercilessly and infinitely upwards. As the situation started to become concrete in the man’s consciousness, his attention fixated back to the woman. They both knew in their minds the entire nature of why they were here, and cloud-like figures towards the top of the man’s sight of the line indicated that they were, in fact, two of the newest residents of the afterlife. Their conversation resumes again, this time focused on their shared predicament and their current situation.

    The man begins,  “Doesn’t it seem like this is a bit long? I guess I never truly thought about logistics or semantics when it came to the gates of Heaven. I expected it to be a bit more instantaneous, not like Space Mountain in the middle of June.”

    “Well I think the wait’ll end up being much shorter than we think.. Every time I feel my mind wandering off too far up here, it seems like I shift upwards another thirty feet or so.”

    The man had zero sense of just how much time had passed since he initially snapped into place. He had no cell phone on his person and he felt that it could’ve been hours or minutes. Looking around, he noticed that the initial scene of a somewhat Earthly room had been replaced by more of the endless white void surrounding it. He stared downward and noticed the room below him, along with a group of similarly colored shirts trailing him starting immediately below him.

    “I think the spawning in has some little kinks and stuff.” The woman started to observe. “But once you get started it’s really not that bad. It’s like an escalator, but you can’t feel yourself move.” He looked back downwards and noticed the room was now further away. Looking at himself he noticed not a hospital gown or a plainly colored tee-shirt, but exactly what he was wearing the day that he collapsed in his home – leading to the occupation of his final resting place. An army-green jacket, a pair of faded denim jeans, and a pair of black sneakers. Shifting his eyes back to the woman, he noticed her in the same plain tee-shirt get-up as everyone else.

    Seeing the room drift near-entirely out of view below him – along with it the entire memory of that fateful snap into place that now seemed like eons ago – his thoughts began to drift to what could be immediately at the top of the unending row of people. Perhaps he could recall faint, yet very vague memories of during a life on Earth in moments where he was told he would reach the pearly gates. Memories began to seep their way back in, little by little as he approached the top. Those pictures of early youth days in his church began to infest the man’s mind again. He began to picture every time he stood in a confessional and every surrounding event and memory that came with it. Ultimately, the man  reminisced that his last few waking memories were spent remembering the glow of his religious youth – and that this would be a fairly positive omen for the ascension up the human escalator.

    “So are you religious?” The man asked of the woman in front of him. “Normally I wouldn’t ask – but seeing this makes me feel like it’s a pretty pertinent question.” 

    “Yeah, I am. Christian.” The woman began. “I think if I wasn’t, I’d be freaking out a lot more than I would be right now. Thankfully, I’d like to think me and God were cool for a while before I passed.”

    The woman’s voice wasn’t entirely assured, and the man pondered his own instability in his religious faith – and assumed she had encountered her own particularly unique brand of temptation in the past as well. Yet he felt more and more as she continued to unveil pieces to her backstory that he had remained slightly more faithful to his religion than her.