Paying the Price

“Passage is not free. Payment is required.”

“B-But... we were t-t-told to bring only what m-matters to us.”

“And I would accept nothing less.”

The boatman, a shade of a thousand tattered grey rags, his hood full of a hundred changing faces, holds out his hand. I wonder if he is Charon, though I see more moorings, more boats, more boatmen. Maybe Charon is a breed of thing.

The stuttering, complaining man ahead of me thrusts his hands into his suit pockets. It might be an expensive suit, but what do I know? Maybe it was the suit he was buried in, or the one he lived in, or both.

“Well... W-what if I refuse? Isn’t it your j-job? Don’t you... have to t-take us across?”

The boatman looks back over his shoulder at the churning waters. They are roaring rapids, or would be, if all sound here wasn’t built of muted echo.

“It is my job, yes, just as it is my job to take payment. You are entitled to refuse. They did.”

He gestures with one fluttering, gusting arm. Further from the river, behind us, we see a ramshackle shantytown. We must have passed it but I don’t recall seeing it, memory and time are broken things here. I have been waiting behind the haggling, awkward spirit forever, perhaps, or it might be that I just arrived.

In the shantytown I see people, listless and flighty. Every so often they glance towards us, towards the river and the boatmen. Here there is nothing but eternity, across the other side is the unknown, the boatman will not say. Is it worth giving up something precious for? Is it any different to this side?

The man in front of me relents. He takes a raggedy doll from his pocket, one of the eyes is missing and steamy puffs of stuffing escape from loose stitching.

The boatman takes it in one gnarled hand; he regards it for a moment then tucks it into the multiverse of his changing robes. He nods gravely and lets the man pass. This is the first lesson in death: the time for accumulating memories, experiences, relationships, is over; in the afterlife those things are all that have value. Money is meaningless.

He holds out his hand to me.

“Passage is not free. Payment is required.”

I think about what I have in my own pockets. A photo booth image of my school friends, five of us crammed in. Both wedding rings. The creased birth certificate of my daughter. A ring of keys, one from each job, each home I ever had. I cannot bear to part with any of them.

I give him the memories of all my kisses, from first to last.