LEAVE TO REMAIN by Ros Levenson (3rd Place, June25)

My first thought when I woke up was that I was cold. Freezing cold, colder than I had ever been before. You know how the mind tries to make sense of situations that you don’t understand? I spent a long time, or so it seemed, trying to figure out why I felt so bone-chillingly frozen and at the same time why I was not shivering. No goosebumps, no teeth chattering. Just very, very cold.

Maybe I wasn’t dressed for the unexpectedly low temperature. And sure enough, when I looked at what I was wearing, the sleeves of my white gown billowed around me, gusts of icy air insinuating themselves through the fine lawn fabric of my under-shift into every pore of my body. I didn’t even remember buying these garments. They just weren’t me. I was more of a denim-jeans-and-plaid-shirt kind of girl really. All I knew was that ‘frozen stiff’ seemed like the perfect description of my current condition.  

I didn’t feel right in other ways either. Brain fog, I think they call it. That feeling of hearing words and knowing at some level what they mean, but somehow not being able to make sense of them. 

And then I remembered: I was dead. 

It was an oddly consoling thought. Being dead seemed slightly less alarming than going mad, and it was certainly one or the other. Even so, the remnants of my befogged brain couldn’t join the dots to make sense of the bigger picture. How could I be stone-cold dead and, at the same time, have metaphysical conversations with myself about whether I was dead or alive? This was all too tiring, and I felt myself drifting towards a semblance of sleep once more, only to be roused by a cheery voice in my ear. 

‘So you made it here at last!’  

A sing-song voice tintinnabulated into my ears. A fashionably trans-Atlantic accent that I didn’t much care for, but I could tell that the speaker was making every effort to be pleasant, so I refrained from dredging up a sarcastic comment. The effort was beyond me anyway. I became aware of a light flutter of down as though from the softest of wings, brushing my left cheek. I opened one eye, then the other, and tried to gain control of my senses.  

‘Welcome, Anastasia,’ the voice continued. ‘I’m Gabe.’ 

‘Gabe.’ I repeated the name non-commitally. No ‘Hi’ or ‘Good day’. Just the name. After all, I didn’t know him from Adam. Was he friend or foe? And why was he calling me Anastasia? ‘Jean’ had always suited me perfectly well up to now. 

As though he had read my mind, Gabe launched into a lengthy explanation. My new name, he said, began with the first letter of the Greek alphabet. ‘My favourite alphabet, actually,’ Gabe added. ‘I hope you like the name. It means rebirth’.

I shrugged. I clearly wasn’t getting a choice. Gabe explained that arrivals were allocated new names as they embarked on their journey. He had picked mine out personally from a list of names beginning with ‘A’ and he was quite sure that it suited me far better than ‘Aurora’, which had been his first idea. Had to be an ‘A’, he said, as they rotated through the alphabet for every batch of newcomers. A bit like naming hurricanes on earth, he added, as he explained that here they most often used the Greek or Roman alphabets, sometimes Cyrillic, occasionally Hebrew, Arabic or Chinese. One of his colleagues had a penchant for the Ancient Akkadian cuneiform, but that was a bit of a bugger to learn, he informed me, before apologising for his immoderate turn of phrase. That was his explanation for why it had never caught on within the team. 

‘The team?’ I enquired. 

‘Oh yes, there’s a team of us, right enough. Been here for years. Apart from myself, there’s Michael, Raphael, Uriel, Sariel, Raguel, and Remiel.’ 

Gabe leaned in confidentially. ‘Mikey reckons to be in charge, but between you and me, the rest of us rather prefer a flatter hierarchy. Anyway, as I said, I am 

Gabriel, but you can call me Gabe. I shall be your guide for the next day or so.’ 

It was a lot to take in. 

I don’t remember drifting into and out of an ersatz sleep again, but I must have done so as I remember becoming aware, once more, of my new surroundings. I was beginning to form a theory about where I might be, but the décor threw me. No lustrous rays peeping out behind billowing clouds, no hanging gardens with fragrant flora. To be honest, it was all rather sparse, as though someone had nipped out to Ikea, but had decided that it was too ornate and had commissioned a greyer, plainer – might one say more sepulchral? – mode of furnishings. 

Gabriel went out of his way to put me at my ease, and I appreciated that. I was aware that he had many others to take care of, but I was, I admit, a little shocked to learn that there were at least 150,000 arrivals to his realm each day. 

Every day! 

‘So this it it, then?’ I asked. 

‘No, actually,’ he replied. ‘This is what you might think of as a temporary dwelling place, if that doesn’t sound too biblical. Short-term accommodation. You’ll be moving on soon, and, if I understand correctly, no more upheavals after that on the immediate horizon.’  

The penny was beginning to drop. I ventured to ask Gabriel if I was on the right lines. Some kind of half-way house, where my life was being weighed in the balance prior to onward dispatch? Swipe up for Heaven, swipe down for the other place? I didn’t want to think about it. I felt that Gabriel was getting bored and I got that. He must have been asked the same question countless times, but he recited the bare bones of the situation in a most efficient way. 

Thus, I learned that this was, indeed, an intermediate state that I found myself in. As for the next steps, Gabriel didn’t like to speculate about Heaven or Hell. It rather went against the grain of their inclusivity policy, as every culture on earth had its own views on where the dead might go, how the allocations took place and whether rebirth in human form was on the cards or not.  

‘Listen, Anastasia,’ said Gabe. ‘Even I don’t know the answers to these big questions. They don’t apply to me and the team anyway. We’re in it for the long haul (infinity, if you must know), so these questions are above even my pay-grade.’    I had never taken much interest in any of this until now. If I had thought about it, I’d have thrown in my lot with the early Hebrews. They weren’t sold on an after life, so they had no use for an intermediate state. But even they modified their views after a while. The pit of Sheol, from which no person returned, was simply too bleak for the masses to contemplate. I was beginning to understand their changed point of view.

Now I had skin in the game, so to speak, and I wanted to know whatwas going to happen. Gabe was getting a little testy, but he sighed and said he’d tell me what he knew about the protocols for processing each batch of the newly dead. 

What happened after that, my guess was as good as his.  

At the start of the current millennium, the Reformed Council of Archangels had decided to randomise entry for newcomers en route to the worlds ahead. No weighing up of good and evil earthly deeds. Definitely, no pandering to cultural or religious beliefs, although some people clearly hankered after the limited menu of Christianity with its binary forked path after Limbo or Purgatory. Recently, Gabe had noted that the Buddhist tradition of the Bardo was riding a huge wave of popularity, and he wouldn’t be at all surprised if that became the front-runner, the interim destination of preference. All in all, Gabriel reflected, the team was rather spoiled for choice, which was why they quite liked the randomisation system. Ancient Egyptians, Zoroastrians, Inuit peoples … How could one decide? Chance was as good as anything else. 

The intensity of the cold was getting to me once more. I was drifting, but I was startled back to awareness by Gabriel’s voice as he concluded his litany with the words, ‘but one way or another, you’re all going to have to say goodbye to the world you knew.’ 

And, of course, I knew he was right. But I had been a querulous person before I got here (even my friends said so), and a fragment of my former self seemed to have survived the journey. I wasn’t going to give up without a fight. 

‘Gabriel,’ I said as I tried to look him in the eye. Not easy as he shimmered in a way that made it hard to focus; every now and then the iridescent feathers of his wings fluttered in the brisk breeze. ‘Gabriel, I am asking you straight: is there any option for me to retrace my steps?’ 

I explained as plainly as I could that it was a matter of little importance to me where I was allocated. My issue wasn’t whether I might end up in a place of bliss or torment. I just was not ready to leave my world, my people, forever. I wanted to see if my grandchildren would have children. Would Leyton Orient get promoted? Would tigers come back from the brink of extinction? I needed to see if humans colonised Mars. How would global warming pan out? Would there be a cure for dementia? For cancer? For the common cold? 

I never thought I would see the tears of an Archangel. Gabe seemed genuinely moved by my plight, which was amazing for a celestial being of his experience. I was conflicted between wanting to comfort him in his distress or forging ahead with my own selfish agenda.  

He stilled his wings. ‘Anastasia, there is one teeny-tiny possibility, but it is rarely granted, and never just by one of the team acting alone. I could try to present your case, but you would need to be utterly certain that it is what you want.’ 

‘Please tell me about this possibility,’ I said. 

Gabriel explained that in the most unusual circumstances leave to remain in the intermediate state might be granted for a period before oblivion swallowed you up. Those given leave could glimpse the world from which they came but they would be an observer of that world and not a participant. 

I replied in a heartbeat (although I didn’t have one). ‘I want it. Please. I only want to know what happens next. Maybe a century or two, It doesn’t have to be for eternity.’ I was absurdly ready to make bargains that I knew were insincere.   

‘I would seriously advise you against it,’ Gabriel replied. 

‘Gabriel.’  

He understood from the tone of my one-word reply that I was implacable. He told me he was off to consult with whichever Archangel was on the duty roster with him.  

‘You’d better hope it’s Michael. He likes to throw his weight around and what he says goes.’ 

In an instant, Gabriel rose aloft and reappeared in a flurry of feathers. 

‘It’s done,’ he said.  

Gabriel handed me a pass dangling from a silken lanyard, valid for two hundred years. That seemed like a long time, but as I looked out I saw the flimsy pages of a multitude of calendars blur by. I knew it was too short a time to satisfy my curiosity and too long to be a spectator.

I turned to ask Gabriel if I could change my mind, but he had gone.