Forever After - By David Jester Page 0,13

to discomforting levels.

“So, what’s bothering you?” she asked, pretending to look over a few notes on her lap.

“Do I really need to tell you?”

She made eye contact again, briefly this time -- her eyes doing all the smiling for her face. “No, but I prefer it that way.”

Michael wasn’t going for it. “It would save a lot of time if you just did your thing,” he told her.

“Because the art of psychiatry is about building a relationship.”

“I mean why do you even bother communicating with your--” Michael paused, hesitated and then frowned. His eyebrows narrowed disapprovingly at the grinning psychiatrist.

Unprompted the doctor said: “no, but I wanted to prove a point.”

“Did you have to do--” again Michael stopped himself, this time he wasn’t frowning. He shifted agitatedly on his chair, glanced this way and that around the spaciously isolated room and then finally relaxed, albeit with feigned comfort.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll do it the normal way. No mind reading. It’s off-putting.”

The doctor seemed pleased. She made a few notes. Michael stared absently at the nib of her pen as it scrawled its shorthanded squiggles.

“So,” she said, slowly lowering the pen and Michaels’ eyes. “How are things at work?”

He raised his eyes to meet her. “A nightmare,” he explained with a reflective nod of his lethargic head. “I’m still on the bottom rung, working with the worst; the scum of society.”

“Aren’t all people equal?” she wondered. “You deal with death all the time; you should know that better than anyone.”

Michael shrugged his shoulders apathetically. “Dead, everyone is the same. It’s their life that depresses me. Some of them have so little to lose that they see death as a minor distraction.” He slumped back, lowered his gaze. “Last week I picked up a drunk driver, he drove straight into a wall and died on impact, when I found him he was so fucking cheery that I wanted to kill him again.” He sighed heavily and wrapped his arms across his chest.

“Isn’t it good to see that?” Doctor Khan wondered. “Doesn’t it make a nice change?

Michael shook his head for a few seconds before answering. “You come to expect a certain something from the dead. A mix of anger, fear and loss. It’s a happy ritual that they all abide by. It’s the only part of the job I feel comfortable with, as disturbing as that may sound.”

“Is this man the reason for your visit?”

He shook his head, unfolded his arms and leant forward listlessly. “I want to know what I’m doing here. That’s why I’m here; I want you to tell me. I should be dead.”

The doctor didn’t flinch, didn’t lower eye contact. Michael had hoped for a note of sympathy, something different from the norm, but he got the answer he had been expecting: “You chose to work. You chose to live on.”

He sagged back in his seat. “Fine.”

“Immortality not good enough for you?”

He shrugged nonchalantly. “At the time it sounded like a good idea,” he explained. “But I expected a little, I don’t know, just...more. I guess.”

“More?”

“Naked virgins and free whiskey on tap,” Michael explained with a wry grin. “A constant state of euphoria, a body that never feels pain or disease.”

“It didn’t live up to your expectations then?”

“No. I’m on the breadline. I live in filth. Last week I had the biggest haemorrhoids I’ve ever seen. It was like a grape vine growing out of my arse,” he shook his head disconsolately. “How the hell do dead people get fucking piles?”

“It is a complicated world.”

“Too complicated. None of it makes any sense and every time I ask about something, every time I complain; you know what they tell me?

The doctor nodded. She had said the same thing to him before.

“In time you will learn,” she recited.

“Exactly,” Michael spat distastefully.

“And they are right,” Doctor Khan told him. “This world has to be experienced to be understood. You may think thirty years is a long time, but in the scheme of things, here, it isn’t.”

“So they keep saying.”

“It’s true. I’ve been around a long time and I’m still learning.”

Michael deflated in the chair. He hadn’t gotten what he wanted and once again he was going to leave just as clueless as he was when he arrived.

The doctor continued. “My advice to you Michael, is to relax. Stop wondering, stop asking questions and just let it be.”

“Fine,” Michael said with the stubborn and unconvincing tone of someone who certainly wasn’t going to relax and definitely was going to ask more questions.

He