Ushers

by Joe Hill

This is Special Agent John Oates,” Duvall said to the kid. “And I’m Special Agent—” “Let me guess, Special Agent Daryl Hall,” the kid cut in. “Do you take requests? I’ve always had a wicked soft spot for ‘You Make My Dreams Come True.’”

“I’m Special Agent Anthony Duvall. Martin, I—” “Duvall and Oates!” the kid cried and drummed his palms on the edge of the table. “C’mon, that’s funny. It’s so close.”

Martin Lorensen was either an extraordinarily lucky young man or extraordinarily unlucky, depending on how you wanted to look at it. Or—just possibly—luck didn’t figure into it at all.

He was also—and this was the most interesting thing about him, in Anthony Duvall’s view—not dead.

“Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman,” Duvall said. “What lasts four thousand weeks?” “A human life,” Martin said. “If you’re lucky.”

“I think sometimes, once in a while, nearly dying brings a new clarity to a person’s life,” Duvall

“Way older, and frankly my father ought to be ashamed for knocking up a sweet, naive high school girl who knew nothing of the world. But I guess that’s between my mom and dad.”

“We were going to see a cage match. I’ve never been to an MMA fight. I’ve never been to a strip club, either, and personally I would’ve preferred that, but my brother is against ’em on ethical grounds. I said he was the most sincere person I know, I didn’t say he was the coolest. This is a guy who unironically bought tickets to see Ed Sheeran.”

It never seemed like dying was anything so terrible. Most of them just kind of quietly . . . went. Like someone blowing on a dandelion clock, gentle as that. You do get used to it. You find out it’s the most normal thing in the world, like sex, or having a baby, or nursing a baby. It’s one of these fundamental human things, reminds you you’re part of nature. We forget that, you know. Or try not to think about it. Which is stupid. It’s better to just be a mammal. You know, take long naked naps in the sun. Never miss a chance to splash in the tide.”

Makes a great Instagram story, doesn’t it? A creepy random encounter and a narrow brush with death? It was such a great story it got her on TV, like you said. Social media brings out the worst in people. They’ll say anything for the likes.”

“There it is again. I didn’t survive a school shooting. I have friends who survived a school shooting. I wasn’t there. I was home. I had, to be honest, a seriously offensive case of diarrhea. Ask my mom.”

“He followed you on Twitch, didn’t he?” “I have eighteen thousand followers on Twitch, and a lot of ’em are from my hometown.”

“Mr. Duvall, you think there’s something suspicious about me because I wasn’t shot in a school shooting and I didn’t die in a train crash.” He craned his neck and peered around them in an exaggerated way. “Better take a look around. You’re surrounded by people who didn’t die in school shootings and weren’t killed in train crashes. If that makes someone a criminal, you better call for backup. You’re going to be arresting a lot of people tonight.”

“You’re not going to eat that? Can I have it? I love these things, but I gotta watch my pennies. You make surprisingly little money not selling oxycodone to people driving trains.”

“I’m not on the security footage. You know why? Because I’m not a thief and I’m not a drug dealer. What I am is an underpaid counselor who plays pickleball with mentally ill kids all scarred up from their previous suicide attempts.”

“Good but tough. About being a Black girl in the age of Breonna Taylor and Freddie Gray, when your dad carries a badge. And all the guilt and conflicted feelings that come with that.”

“I think,” Duvall said, “that people are always going to want law, and if the only lawmen are white, then it isn’t law anymore. It’s apartheid.”

Well fuck

“Because I’m about to tell you some crazy shit. But I figure it’s too noisy for you to record me on your phone, and if you ever repeat any of it, I’ll say you were drunk or nuts, and people will believe me, because it really is some crazy shit.”

“Because they had company when they got on board,” Martin Lorensen told him. “They weren’t alone. None of them. When you die, you aren’t alone. They’re always there, at the end, to collect you.” “They?” Duvall asked, the skin on his forearms prickling with goose bumps.

“I think of them as the ushers. Like at a play—the people who lead you through the dark to your seat when you come in late. I guess there are ushers at funerals too. But maybe you’d call them angels. They look like angels.”

They wear these cassocks, kinda like Jesuit priests, and there’s soot all over them. Soot on their clothes, soot on their wings. Like they came out of a coal mine.”

“Dolores Keats. She died in front of me when I was five. In the hospice. The man with pigeon eyes and pigeon wings was sitting next to her the whole time, watching The Price Is Right while he waited. He knew I could see him. He nodded at me.”

“He waited until The Price Is Right went to a commercial; then he leaned toward her and took her hand. He whispered into her ear. I don’t know what he whispered. Something nice, I think, because she started to smile. And then a flashbulb went off inside her body—this snap of light in her eyes and in her open mouth, like a stroke of lightning pulsing inside a cloud—and when it faded, she was gone. And so was he.”

“No, her body was still there. I mean, whatever is inside us that makes us who we are, that went away—disappeared with her usher.”

Maybe we emit sin, the way factories emit pollution, and it gets on ’em, the way soot gets on pigeons. Or maybe they take some people to hell and it’s smoky there. I don’t know. You ever see a movie called Wings of Desire?” Martin asked him.

“Martin,” Duvall said, “if you saw angels of death clustering around your school, why didn’t you do something?

“That’s a misunderstanding of how these guys operate. When they show up, someone is going to die. Every one of them is an usher, and they’re going to lead someone away into the dark, to take their seat at the big show. Because, Mr. Duvall, of course I’ve tried to save people.