The Empty City

There’s a place that everyone goes when they die. A city. A city of the Dead. A forever city, to stand for eternity, painted in the colors of your emotions. Grey: there is nothing to feel, so all you see is grey. You no longer have anything to lose, gain, nor anyone to miss, nor to miss you, and you feel no sorrow that you are dead, because you have never felt so light. Thus, the city is all grey monotony and supposedly full of souls, and yet they call it the Empty City.

Souls are subjective, see? When you can see someone’s soul, you know them – personally. This gives the illusion of spectral streets so still it’s as if they’re preserved in time; because in the face of the whole of history, you hardly know anyone.

They say it looks like your home – though not everyone has come from one. It’s more the city you imagine it to be. And if your home was a city, then, well, naturally you’ll imagine it to be that. If not, then, I don’t know. I see London. Fairytale London. I never went there in Life, but you don’t have to go somewhere to imagine it, do you? The way everyone talked about London, it made me breathless. In my head, it’s a hazy glow of lights against a low grey sky, reflecting, glittering, in the blue-grey Thames that twists through the city like the hugging arms of a friend. Now I’m kind of there, I am definitely not breathing. It’s like the city fell right out of my head.

Before, Life was a good friend. You never know how heavy life is until you’re just a breathless, bloodless, bodyless soul drifting in the Empty City. During, I was spinning. Death came to me in the form of an airbag punching my chest, headlights slicing at the darkness, and a duet of screams. Before, I thought I knew things. I can’t remember them now. After, all you know is Death, and the Empty City.

All that I just told you, I wasn’t told. It’s just in my mind, replacing the stuff I knew before, and I’m not really one to question things. Not really. It’s like, there’s a lot of knowledge you gain across your Life, but you don’t have to justify those things to yourself every time you think of them. You just know rain is cold and cruel and hurts like knives; you don’t have to think about that time you went out in the November rain when you were fourteen, stubbornly believing you won’t need a coat, and returned home with hypothermia, or the time your hand slipped in cooking class and sliced your finger open, to know that. I think something might’ve whispered it all to me when I appeared here not long ago, or it might’ve just been my inner monologue.

Also, it’s kind of self-explanatory that I’m dead. Because, well, there is the fact that I am… well, I’m not so sure what I am. A soul, I guess, something incomprehensible and not really there, or here, or anywhere. Kind of nothingness, but everything-ness at the same time, just conscious mind and thoughts clumping indefinitely together in space. But I think it’s also the fact that it’s one of those things you just know, like I said. There was pain – so, so much pain – and then there was lightness, sweet relief, bliss, and a city right from my imagination spread out before me.

No, that whispering is definitely something else. The sky. The Whispering Skies, apparently, the great dark heavens that sag ominously over the Empty City. I suppose the city of the Dead would be ominous. There’s definitely something moving amongst the clouds – more grey, like everything, but significantly darker, like roiling masses of… Death, probably. I sigh, take my first Lifeless step, and I hear the Skies hiss louder.

Do not consider it. It is against the protocol. You do not want to break the protocol, unless you wish to spend your forever up here with us, instead of down there, cupped in the hands of your own fairytale.

And then it’s like a new thought is drawn abruptly to my nothingness, and I do remember things. It’s like my unconscious thoughts were floating only just out of reach, brewing, invisible, but whatever roiled in the Whispering Skies could see them as clearly as the city before me. I remember spinning. I remember an airbag punching my chest, headlights slicing at the darkness, and a duet of screams. There was another, with me. A pale blur of a face in the night, a mask of fear, but the memory of the face is friendly, and I catch on to it and keep it close.

I realise what I’d been stepping towards: a telephone booth. A should’ve-been-bright-red London telephone booth. I’m sure the face had died too. The spinning… neither of us were ever going to survive. I’m pretty sure. Quite sure. Anyway, I wasn’t going to spend decades alone drifting about empty streets. My siblings, parents, even my grandparents had outlived me. It’s only that friendly face who might be here go drift the streets with me.

Contacting the Dead? Easy as making a phone call. Literally. I just knew that, like all the other things, but also from the sheer amount of telephone boxes dotting the streets – they weren’t a part of my London fairytale; something other than that had conjured them there. Contacting the Living? That’s where it gets tricky. You just… don’t. Not now. Not ever. You wait until they die, then contact them. But I shouldn’t worry, they all come here eventually.

You’ll come here eventually.

I’ll wait, but I won’t wait alone. Like I said, I’m not one to question or doubt. The friendly face is here too. Faceless now, but here. Surely.

Calls to the Living break the protocol. The Living cannot know there is an After. Humans would be reckless – more than usual at least. And if it came to that, if such large amounts died too quickly, the barrier between everything could puncture, even in just the slightest. Life and Death could mix, and spawn something terrible, something primal.

One call wouldn’t do that. One call to someone I am absolutely, pretty, quite sure was Dead, anyway.

I slip into the booth, shut the door, and pick up the receiver. I retrieve the memory of the number and punch it in confidently. The Skies moan and churn outside, hungry. Waiting. Ready.

Beep. Beep.

Silence.

Beep. Beep.

Silence.

Beep. Beep.

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

“The number you have called is Living. Prepare for booth self-destruction.”

No, one call wouldn’t do that. But we warned you of what it would do.

I only distantly hear the explosion. All I manage to think is Well, guess I got my answer! before the roiling masses above become definite to cut me out my fairytale and drag me up to their heavens–

You do not want to break the protocol, unless you wish to spend your forever up here with us.

–and my own scream fills the Empty City. Where all has been so devastatingly quiet for what, even to me, seems like so long, I found myself hearing nothing but that devastatingly lonely scream for the rest of my eternity.