The Diner at the End of Your Life

Jonah wasn't certain that he'd died until Death rapped her knuckles on his hospital door. "Knock knock." Death smiled.

"It's over then?" Jonah asked.

"That portion, yes." Death waved for Jonah to follow her. "Come on, we've got some forms to fill out."

Death guided Jonah through the door of his hospital room, but they emerged into a small diner instead of the hallway. "I've been here," he said. "Haven't I?"

"Yes and no." Death guided him to a table for two and produced a clipboard with a stack of papers. She spoke with a distinct British accent, adding a layer of formality to everything she said. "Do you remember?"

After taking in the vinyl seats, the nighttime world beyond the diner's scum-coated windows, and the tacky cartoon pig on the menus, the memory clicked into place. "We stopped here on the way back from New Mexico."

"I searched your memories for a place to eat where you'd feel comfortable. Currently we're right on the border between your previous life and what comes next, so this is just neutral territory, only partially real." She shuffled a few papers, then laid a series of forms on the table in front of her. The letters were so alien to Jonah that he doubted they existed to transmute any human language. "Think of this as an exit interview."

"Is it really necessary?"

Death blinked. "Of course."

"Don't you know everything about me already?"

"Jonah, there are billions of humans on Earth. You really think that we can keep tabs on all of them? I scan your brain, pick out a few key details, and we work from there."

The diner was empty. No staff, no customers. Just Jonah and Death. He supposed that he should have been worried, but what was the worst that could happen? He had already died.

"Key details?" he asked.

Death sighed. "Yes, Jonah. An appropriate setting for the interview, some basic biographical information, what appearance I should assume for the duration of the interview--"

"So you don't look like that? Not really?"

"You think one of the driving forces guiding the universe looks like a pudgy British woman?" She shook her head. "Not that I mind, though. I get tired of carrying the scythe around, and you'd be surprised how many 40 year old men like to picture Death as a femme fatale in a gown with a deep neckline. We could spend some time psychoanalysing why you think Death is a middle-aged lady in a cable-knit sweater, but I don't think that you would appreciate my thoughts on the matter, so if you don't mind..."

"What do you really look like?"

"If I showed you, what's left of your mind would splinter into a million screaming shards of chaos. Besides, we aren't here to talk about me." She produced a pen and wrote something at the top of a form in that alien alphabet. "We're here to talk about... Jonah Stephens of Manchester, New Hampshire."

Jonah fidgeted and searched the diner for any sign of life.

"Shortly we will be greeted by a member of the wait staff. You will order exactly one dish. You may order anything you like. We will have a brief conversation, and then I will summon a door and you will be on your way. Understand?"

"On my way? On my way where?"

"Wherever your answers indicate you belong."

"You'll tell me where I'm going?"

"No. We found over the eons that there are a subset of humans that believe everyone in a position of authority is lying to them all the time. I could tell you that heaven waits on the other end of the door, and you would panic and think I am sending you to hell. As if anyone but a human would be stupid enough to settle for a two-party system. Instead, you just need to know that what you deserve is on the other end, and you can find out for yourself what that looks like. Poltergeist activity dropped substantially after we implemented this policy."

The menu was thicker than he remembered from the diner. The children's section on the first page contained a list of dishes his mother had prepared for him. A few pages later there was a section titled Adolescence that included his very first beer, movie theater nachos, and the pot brownie he'd nibbled on before pretending to get like, so high, man. He flipped the page again, and again, and again, and he seemed no nearer to reaching the end.

"My afterlife hinges on this?"

Death nodded.

"And... and ghosts are real? You just sort of dropped that one in there."

"You know how ninety-nine percent of humans accomplish nothing of real significance in their lives? The same holds true in their afterlives, so don't worry too much about them." She made this proclamation with chipper formality. These were just the facts of life. Or, rather, the facts of death.

The door to the kitchen swung open, admitting a teenage boy with a notebook. "What can I get you?"

"Um..." Jonah flipped a page.

The boy tapped his toe.

"Just... just one moment..."

"Any day now."

"I'm sorry. There are just so many options." He tried to laugh, but it sounded thin and frail.

"Uh-huh."

Death scratched down a note.

He was sweating. He'd been dead for under an hour, and he was sweating, and his shirt was clinging to his back, and the teenage boy was glaring.

"C'mon, man. Hurry up."

"Sorry."

"Just make a decision. Any decision."

"Right..."

The waiter slammed a hand onto the table. "What's wrong with you? You see how you're slowing the whole world down, don't you? You see that? Hurry up, you useless lump of--"

"Cake!"

The waiter scratched down a note. "Type of cake?"

"Chocolate. Chocolate cake."

"Uh-huh... And for you?"

Death smirked. "I'll have what he's having." Once the waiter walked off, Death wrote a few scribbles on one of her forms and said, "The impressive thing is that the waiter is just your internal concept of a waiter. I can't imagine that you enjoyed restaurants very much."

"It's a big decision."

"I noticed that you didn't spend much time considering options from the childhood section."

"My relationship with my mother was... it wasn't ideal."

Death hmmed and wrote another note. Jonah imagined that she was writing Didn't... love... his... mother.

Undoubtedly his afterlife was growing more hellish with every scratch Death's pen made on her forms.

"It just seems like a lot of pressure to put on a piece of cake."

"You don't trust the system?"

"Well..."

"When I knocked on your door, you didn't ask who I was," Death said. "Recognized me intuitively, you did. That's the system at work. Trust the system."

"But..."

She gestured for him to go on.

"But to reduce my entire life to a single slice of cake..."

"You think you're an individual," Death said. "But I run a hundred and fifty thousand of these interviews per day. How many people did you know in your life? A hundred, maybe? Fewer? I give this exact speech more times per hour than the total number of people you knew well in your life. So when I say the system works, trust me. The system works."

The waiter arrived, dropping the plates of cake in front of Jonah and Death without any pomp or commentary. He sneered at Jonah as he departed.

The cake itself was ordinary: a wedge of cake with the familiar, rubbery texture that was the result of a box mix coated in a waxy, brown frosting. Jonah used the side of his fork to break off a bite, but he found himself unable to force it into his mouth.

"Regretting your choice?" Death asked.

"I'm not hungry." He set the fork down. "Not really."

"Tell me about the cake."

"It's... fine."

"You had the opportunity to order anything, and you chose something that you knew would be fine."

Jonah sat back in his seat. "It was the first thing that came into my mind."

"And that's all?" Death asked with a slightly-knowing grin on her lips. Maybe she knew that there was more to the story from her initial brain-scan, or maybe she had simply performed so many of these exit interviews that she'd gained a particularly cunning capacity for insight into human nature.

Uncertain how it would impact his eventual destination, Jonah said, "I made this cake once."

"Tell me about that."

"I made it for my wife. My ex-wife."

Death scratched down a note. "Yes?"

"We never ate it. I threw it in the garbage. I had... I'd made some mistakes. I tried to patch things up--that was what the cake was for--and she called me out on that. So I said, Fine. And I threw it in the garbage."

"Not exactly a happy memory."

"I was thinking about her." Jonah shrugged. "I guess I was wondering if we'll see each other again."

"Did you ever... how did you put it? Patch things up?"

"No." And then with a weaker voice, he said, "But I tried. I tried my best. I'd made my mistakes, but I tried to make them better, and that counts, doesn't it? Not just the mistakes, but the attempts to fix them?"

Death wrote for a few more seconds then said, "What do you think? Honestly."

He looked down at the cake. It looked pathetic, like a brightly-colored birthday balloon limp in the rain. "I don't know."

Death bit a mouthful of cake off of the end of her fork, chewed it with a thoughtful expression, then shrugged. After writing a few more notes, she clicked the end of her pen and filed the form away in her brief-case. As she snapped the latches shut, the light from the door they'd entered through changed.

"Off you go."

"I could stay," Jonah said. "Right?"

"Stay? No. This temporal bubble will collapse shortly, and I'll be off to my next interview. If you don't pass through the door in time, you'll become a ghost."

Jonah knew from the impotence of his life that he'd be unlikely to become the sort of legendary ghost that haunted hotels and cropped up in tourist guides. But he could continue to watch life flow by. Thinking about his ex-wife and the ways he'd betrayed her trust, he couldn't imagine that the doorway would lead him to paradise, but that wasn't fair. He had tried, dammit. He'd tried to fix things, and he would have succeeded if anything was fix-able. He'd given it a damn good shot.

"Mr. Stephens?"

The cake had been the wrong choice. He knew that in hindsight. He should have gone for something that exposed less of the guilt that still haunted his mind decades later. But what meal could he use to accurately summarise his life in the best possible light? It wasn't like he'd ever given away his food to save anyone else, showing some grand capacity for compassion and generosity.

What meal could he have picked?

He didn't know.

"I can distort time," Death said, "but even I don't have all day."

Jonah swallowed. "I... I think I'll stay."