[But we are not only agents of death, Ralph and Lois, we are also agents of the Purpose. And now you must listen closely, for I would not be misunderstood. There are those of your kind who feel that everything happens by design, and there are those who feel all events are simply a matter of luck or chance. The truth is that life is both random and on purpose, although not in equal measure. Life is like] Here Clotho formed a circle with his arms, like a small child trying to show the shape of the earth, and within it Ralph saw a brilliant and evocative image: thousands (or perhaps it was millions) of playing cards fanned out in a flickering rainbow of hearts and spades and clubs and diamonds. He also saw a great many jokers in this huge pack; not so many as to make up a suit of their own, but clearly a lot more, proportionally speaking, than the two or three found in the usual deck.
Every one of them was grinning, and every one was wearing a battered Panama with a crescent bitten out of the brim.
Every one carried a rusty scalpel, Ralph looked at Clotho with widening eyes. Clotho nodded.
Lois. I don’t know exactly what you saw, but I know you saw what it was trying to convey. Lois? What about you?] Lois, who loved playing cards, nodded palely.
“Atropos is the joker in the deck-that’s what you mean, [He is n get of the Ra dom. We, Lachesis and I, serve that other force, the one zebich accounts for most events in both individual lives and in life’s wider stream. On the lour level of the building, Ralph and Lois over-the creature is a Short-time creature, and has an appointment with death the same say that a child pops out of its / other’s womb with a sign around its neck reading (:[T (:ORD ( amp; 84 I’L"IIR,, I I MONT’/ 1,, 46 3 D,A I-SIR,";, 4 MINUTES, AND 21 SECONDS";. That idea is ridiculous.
Yet time passages are usually set, and as both of you have seen, one of the many functions the Short-Time aura serves is as a clock.] Lois stirred, and as Ralph turned to look at her, he saw an amazing thing: the sky overhead was growing pale. He guessed it must be one in the morning. They had arrived at the hospital at around nine o’clock on Tuesday evening, and now all at once it was Wednesday, October 6th.
Ralph had heard of time flying, but this was ridiculous.
Lois: [“Your]job is what we call natural death, isn’t it?”]
Her aura flickered with confused, incomplete images. A man (the late Mr. Chasse, Ralph was quite sure) lying in an oxygen tent. jimmy V. opening his eyes to look at Ralph and Lois in the instant before Clotho cut his balloon-string. The obituary page from the Derry News, peppered with photographs, most not much bigger than postage stamps, of the weekly harvest from the local hospitals and nursing homes.
Both Clotho and Lachesis shook their heads.
Lachesis: [There is no such thing as natural death, not really.
Our,lob is purposeful death. We take the old and the sick, but we take other… as well. just yesterday, for instance, we took a young man of twenty-eight. A carpenter. Two Short-Time weeks ago, befell from a scaffold and fractured his skull. During those two weeks his aura was] Ralph got a fractured image of a thunderstruck aura like the one which had surrounded the baby in the elevator.
Clotho: [At last the change came-the turning of the aura. We knew it would come, but not when it would come. When it did, tte ivent to him and sent him on.]
[“Sent him on to where?”
It was Lois who asked the question, broaching the touchy subject of the afterlife almost by accident. Ralph grabbed for his mental safety belt, almost hoping for one of those peculiar blanks, but when their overlapped answers came, they were perfectly clear.
Clotho: [To everywhere Lachesis: to other worlds than these, Ralph felt a mixture of relief and disappointment.
[“That sounds very poetic, but I think that it means-correct me if I’m wrong-Is that the afterlife is as much a mystery to you guys as it is to us.”] Lachesis, sounding a bit stiff: [On another occasion we might have time to discuss such things, but not now-as you have no doubt already noticed, time passes faster on this level of the building. Ralph looked around and saw the morning had already brightened considerably.
“Sorry.
Clotho, smiling: [Not at all-we enljoy your questions, and find them refreshing. Curiosity exists everywhere along life’s continuum, but nowhere is it as abundant as here. But what you call the afterlife has no place in the four constants-Life an Death, the Random and the Purpose-which concern us now.
[The approach of almost every death which serves the Purpose takes a course with which we are very familiar. The auras of those who will die Purposeful deaths turn gray as the time of nishling approaches.
This gray deepens steadily to black. We are called when the aura [and we come exactly as you saw last night.
We give release to those who suffer, peace to those in terror, rest to those who cannot find rest.
Most Purposeful deaths are expected, even welcomed, but not all.
We are sometimes called to take men, women, an children who are in the best of health… yet their auras turn suddenly and their time of ri ishing has come.] Ralph remembered the young man in the sleeveless Celtics jersey!
he’d seen bopping into the Red Apple yesterday afternoon. they had been the picture of health and vitality… except for the slick-the slick surrounding him, that was. of Ralph opened his mouth, perhaps to mention the (or to ask about his fate), then closed it again. The sun was directly overhead now, and a bizarre certainty suddenly came to him: that he and Lois had become the subject of lecherous discussion in the secret city of the Old Crocks.
Anybody seen em?… No?… Think they run off together?.
Eloped, maybe?… Naw, not at their age, but they might be shacked up… I dunno if Ralphie’s got any live rounds left in the old ammo dump, but she’s always looked like a hot ticket to me…
Yeah, walks like she knows what to do with it, don’t she?
The image of his oversized rustbucket waiting patiently behind one of the ivy-covered units of the Derry Cabins while the springs boinged and sproinged salaciously inside came to Ralph, and he grinned. He couldn’t help it. A moment later the alarming idea that he might be broadcasting his thoughts on his aura came to him, and he slammed the door on the picture at once. Yet wasn’t Lois looking at him with a certain amused speculation?
Ralph turned his attention hastily back to Clotho.
[Atropos serves the Random. Not all deaths of the sort Short-Timers call “senseless” and “unnecessary” and “tragic” are his work, but most are. When a dozen old men and women die in a fire at a retirement hotel, the chances are good that Atropos has been there, taking souvenirs and cutting cords. When an infant dies in his crib for no apparent reason, the cause, more often than not, is Atropos and his rusty scalpel. When a dog-yes, even a dog, for the destinies of almost all living things in the Short-Time world fall among either the Random or the Purpose-I’s run over in the road because the driver of the car that hit him picked the wrong moment to glance at him watch-” Lois: [“Is that what happened to Rosalie?”] Clotho: [Atropos is what happened to Rosalie. Ralph’s friend Joe Wyzer was only what we call “fulfilling circumstance.”] is young man Lachesis: And Atropos is also what happened to lollrer, Cl, late Mr. McGovern.] Lois looked the way Ralph felt: dismayed but not really surprised. it was now late afternoon, perhaps as many as eighteen Short-Time hours had passed since they had last seen Bill, and Ralph had known the man’s time was extremely short even last night, Lois, who had inadvertently put her hand inside him, probably knew it even better.
Ralph: [“When did it happen? How long after we saw him?”] Lachesis: [Not long. While he was leaving the hospital. I’m sorry for your loss, and for giving you the news in such clumsy fashion.