The Five of Pentacles--the tarot card associated with the first decan of Taurus--always meets me at the table with the urgency of an untold story. I don't always know whose story, or how the story unfolds. I do always feel, though, that the people making their way through the winter storm in Pamela Colman Smith's illustration have an acute understanding of what they need in the moment they are in.
A story raised its voice to me when I asked a surprisingly strange, seemingly obvious question:
What if all someone had to do to receive help was to ask for it?
This story takes place in an afterlife, and contains discussions of death, labor abuse, care-worker burnout, and humanitarian despair.
This year, I am writing a short science-fiction/fantasy story for the Sun's journey through every 10 degrees of each tropical zodiac sign. Below is a story for Taurus 1: the first decan of the fixed earth sign. In the tradition that I practice, this decan corresponds with the planet Mercury, and with the Five of Pentacles tarot card. If you'd like to know more about the heart of this project, you can read more here.
I am thankful for these influences, without which this story would not have touched my heart in its way:
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's book, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Becky Chambers's novella, A Psalm for the Wild-Built
John Paul Brammer's advice column, ¡Hola Papi!
Heather Havrilesky's advice column, Ask Polly
The film BEETLEJUICE
The game GRIM FANDANGO
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"Safety Knew More Than One Name, and They Were Infinite"
by Lois Mei-en Kwa
Some have called me an Angel, but they are wrong. I believe that an Angel would likely turn away a number of the souls who come to my doorstep.
My true name is not Door, but Door is what you may call me. This is what Keeper calls me, because they have retained a human's understanding of what sounds and symbols may form a name. Keeper has not been bound by the constraints of being located in a physical body since their death and subsequent arrival in the afterlife, but humans are creatures of comfort when they are not creatures of habit, and Keeper has difficulty maintaining connection with that which does not hold a clearly-defined shape.
For this reason, I make efforts to maintain a clear--if not consistent--appearance. I look different to every soul who makes the effort to find me. What I look like depends on what would make someone feel safe to--as Keeper puts it--"get horribly vulnerable" enough to ask for help. Those who seek my aid tend to ask for what they most need to ease their suffering, and what that looks like is usually an intersection of places and objects from their life on Earth that helped them feel safe. In the past, I have been--in no particular order--the revolving glass door to a public library in the Midwestern United States, the stone archway that led to the flower garden behind the mosque from a Querent's early childhood, and the black steel gate to a subsidized high rise apartment in Singapore, the front door open behind the security gate to usher in the warm salt breeze, the elderly spirit medium of Building #55 kneeling at her altar inside the apartment.
I always physically resemble a portal of some sort. I try to symbolize a transition to a place that holds some promise, however slight, of impending comfort. And though you might think that the tenure of my and Keeper's partnership--I have lost track of the quantity of time we have been together, and would have to ask them to check the records--would result in me knowing the contours of their emotional landscape more intimately than any other human soul I have ever encountered, a sort of privacy seems to have grown between us, instead. Perhaps this is out of necessity, as I cannot tend to the emotional needs of 1,000 souls while maintaining intimate awareness of Keeper's innermost self, too.
Whatever the reason, the appearance I default to when the millions of souls are no longer waiting outside my doorstep, in times when it is just Keeper and me, is a plain wooden door.
I have occupied the same location in the afterlife for the past five or six centuries: Human Resources Annex, Sub-basement 17, Wing C-9, Suite 500. Before signing my current lease, Keeper and I maintained a nomadic arrangement. I would materialize in seemingly random afterlife locations that I had identified as high-frequency hotspots of spiritual distress, and Keeper would take up their walking stick and tool satchel and meet me there as soon as the train schedules allowed. To be honest, I sometimes miss this old protocol. But we encountered what Keeper likes to call "issues, to put it lightly." There was an issue with how long it could take Keeper to arrive at my location, during which time distressed souls had been lining up before me, their suffering ongoing and compounded by the uncertainty of the delayed service. There was the issue of the crises that could arise from the gathering of souls if required technical maintenance in Keeper's absence. There was also the question of how a soul was supposed to ask me for help when they needed it if they had to wait for me to show up in their neighborhood--or in some nearby location they could journey to in time to join the queue before I vanished and moved on to the next center of crisis.
That is only the most recent example of how we have struggled to develop our intake system. This process has looked like a long cycle of attempts to endure the volume of cries for help, which only increased in number and intensity the longer it took to tend to the needs of those who had finally reached the front of the queue. For a long time, my solution was to assign Keeper an ongoing series of side projects intended to improve our reach despite all of our systemic flaws. The solutions might last for a century or two before they gave out. In this manner, we carried on for millenia.
When Keeper invented the Query Void, it seemed that the system had changed for the better, and, most excitingly, for good. This development has totally empowered our mission, so that we can advertise and promise our services throughout the afterlife with a single question:
What is all you have to do to receive help is to ask for it?
The Query Void is very user-friendly. Most souls require little, if any, coaching on how to use the Void. It has the appearance of a simple wooden box with a miniature galaxy floating in the center, into which the querent drops their request or message. In terms of functionality, it is basically like if an advice column and a suggestion box had a metaphysical baby.
I would never have thought of the Query Void on my own. In life, Keeper was a handmaiden to a Jiangyong County clerk. When we ran into the problem of my constant relocations, Keeper suggested Querents could submit their pleas in the form of letters that they composed. It took a dozen rounds of experimentation, and several diagnostic sessions with Keeper's tool satchel, to come up with a variety of translation aids that will allow any soul to generate a letter that we can read, even if the Querent arrived in the afterlife without a connection to a written language. Eventually, thanks to the spiritual technology we developed, we were finally able to receive the letters of those who came to us in complete silence, too. And in tandem with the proxy Doors that Keeper programmed to accept letters in different geographic locations simultaneously, we can receive up to several thousand queries at a time, and respond to almost all of them continuously with little backlog in the pipeline.
Our process is imperfect, but I am proud to say that it really works.
"Are you even listening to me?" Keeper calls out. They are up to their elbows in the internal end of the Query Void, a posture that requires them to kneel on the office floor. Keeper's tool bench, dark matter bench, computer desk, and the Void take up most of the space we rent in from the Human Resource Annex. Keeper does all of their work out of sight of the long line of souls that I watch unspool before my doorstep, and which they view on their computer monitor through a webcam they affixed to my archway the last time a silent Querent had spent an hour waving for emergency help from their place in line, and we had not known of the crisis until they reached the front of the queue. Querents come to my doorstep, but do not actually enter the office, and they cannot see through me to the inside of our office, even when I appear to them as an open portal.
"Apologies, Keeper. I did not pay attention to what you said, because I was reflecting on how well our process has been working. Can you repeat what you said?"
"I said: this isn't working."
This took me by surprise. I paused before answering. I helped 913 souls while considering how to respond.
At last, I said, "I'm afraid I do not see an issue."
"That makes sense," they said, at which I felt positively taken aback. I paused again. Keeper processed several gross of referrals to our partnering Spiritual Social Service agencies, and I closed the corresponding case files while searching myself for something diplomatic to say. The Query Void always backed up when Keeper and I argued, and I wanted to keep the intake pipeline flowing. Certain that the answer to my question would be No, I said, "Do you have an example of what you are referencing?"
"Yes!" they said. They pulled a hand out of the Void and gestured triumphantly. "Yesterday, a very young soul came to us and cried out at length in their letter for help that they badly needed. Immediately after receiving it, they lashed out at us in rage. I had to reattach the doorknob they had projected on you before the next Querent could approach, and we lost several minutes of processing time in the queue."
I considered this briefly. "They were, as you said, very young. It is not uncommon for those who have lost so much so early in life to respond to compassion with fear. You know that."
Keeper ignored this appeal and barreled on, waving their fist in the air. "Last week, we reached out to forty different Cavern Witches until we found one who could provide what our Querent needed. And when we delivered the aid--which we provided, by the way, to the exact specifications she had demanded in her letter--she came back when I was on break and left it on the doorstep. We gave her exactly what she asked for, and she didn't even want it! Door, I really cannot handle these cases sometimes."
"That was an unusual case," I said, though I had to admit I was bluffing a little. We had no way of documenting what happened to our Querents after we helped them. Frankly, I had never much wanted to know. I simply do not operate that way. And besides, collecting that information would be a massive energetic task to add to Keeper's project list.
"Look, these aren't isolated incidents. I process them all the time. I bet I can show you one right now."
Keeper stuck one ink-stained hand into the Void and fished out a brand new letter.
Dear Door,
I lived a very long, very beautiful life, and when I died, I did so in peace, without pain, surrounded by the faces of the family and friends I loved most. Since arriving in the afterlife, I have been reunited with my beloved wife, and we share a lovely floating cottage on the West Side of the Ethermeadow with a creaky front porch on which we sit together every night. I now have the most beautiful afterlife to follow my beautiful life.
It therefore pains me to admit the following. I am horribly homesick. I miss my home, my garden, my surviving family. I cry myself to unsleep every time the night rises. My beloved tries her best to comfort me, and the fact that I remain inconsolable only makes me feel more guilty. I do not understand how I could possibly need to be comforted, given how much I have to be thankful for. I don't know what to do. Please help.
Sincerely,
Grateful Woman Who Can't Let Go
"Okay, so that's not a good example," Keeper muttered.
They activated their time-space-limbic-conflater--another recent brilliant invention of theirs, sort of like a metaphysical vitamin supplement that they dispensed into their stream of consciousness at will in order to function more efficiently than they would in linear time. Within a thousandth of a millisecond, Keeper had sent the letter-writer a referral to another grandparent on the East Side of the Ethermeadow who had been through a similar experience as what GWWCLG had described, and had confirmed they were interested in being contacted by other souls in need of emotional support. Keeper added a personal note to GWWCLG to let her know that her query had been heard, and then logged the letter in our database.
Keeper reached back into the Void.
Dear Door,
Last Friday, I submitted my membership application and fee to the Society of Elite and Exclusive Ghosts. They rejected me, with a form letter. Three nights later, they dispatched their Ghostmaiden to my home to inform me that the letter I received had been sent in error to the wrong soul. Actually, I had been unanimously and immediately accepted into the Society, and was meant to receive a personally-written notification of congratulations signed with the plasm of last season's elected Elite and Exclusive Ghost Queen. The Ghostmaiden conveyed all of this information very articulately, and handed over the originally-intended piece of correspondence.
I have saved the date of my scheduled acceptance ball and updated my calendar. Regarding the matter of the inappropriate and fleeting rejection I was subjected to, I assure you that all is well.
However, I find myself unable to rescue my self-esteem and, indeed, my well-being, from under the weight of the knowledge that the Society sent a member of their household staff--a Ghostmaiden!--to resolve their first mistake. The Ghostmaiden carried herself as if my equal--she spoke to me plainly and directly, and looked me in the eye. Was this meant to be an amends to the harm they had already done me? What message is this meant to send regarding my worth? Is this a Society I truly want to be a part of? I cannot help but wonder if I will receive the full amount of respect I am due, should I commit myself to this community. Story of my life--is this to be the measure of my afterlife, too? Please help.
Regards,
Insult and Injury
"This one," Keeper said. They snatched up the letter and waved it violently over their head. "We can definitely file this one under 'Form reply that notifies Querent that their query truly sucks'."
I was silent for a moment, during which 489 new cries for compassion were logged into the Void.
"You must admit, they need some serious help," I finally said. "Just not the kind they're asking for."
"I was a handmaiden from the age of 9 until the day I died," Keeper said. "Please believe I know better than most that there's a difference between being of service and being in servitude. This person doesn't want us to help them! They want us to help them become the source of even more harm they will inflict on souls who are more marginalized than they have ever been! And now I don't want to help them, either. In fact, I would like to personally return this query back to sender and show them what a literal rejection from the afterlife could really look like."
At this moment, I came to a sudden, unsettling realization. Five millenia spent fielding the deepest, most pain-stricken cries of innumerable souls had not changed me very, but it had very much impacted Keeper. This work had changed how they saw the world, and how they processed the day-to-day sensations of living in it. When we first met, Keeper had been angry, afraid, frustrated, and anxious in the face of our mission--but they had also felt love for the souls who sought us out, and they expressed this feeling often. For a number of years now--I felt ashamed to realize I could not count how many--they had spoken less and less of the love they had once said was the entire point of everything we were doing. Now I had to ask myself--at this point, did anything we were doing bring Keeper joy?
Keeper had, long before they began their afterlife, earned the right to be impatient with people who were capable of composing letters like the one they now clenched in their fist. But I had only just become aware of how much patience Keeper forced themselves to grant our Querents. The hard work of compassion had never become a burden to me. I could not, in good conscience, assume the same to be true for Keeper.
And most frightening of all, I could see that after pouring what was left of their patience into the Void, Keeper had not a drop of patience left for their own pain, which I could now sense--too late?--was vast and acute. They had been learning the languages of everybody else's souls for so long that they no longer seemed to know how to speak their own. They had brought this matter to my attention plainly, but only in terms of what was wrong with our system, without uttering a single word that acknowledged what they were feeling.
Despite their masterful deflection, it was apparent that Keeper's spirit was close to breaking.
This frightened me, and I became angry.
"What would you have me do?" I raised my voice, shaking the walls of the office, and Keeper shuddered. "Turn some of them away?"
"Yes!" Keeper shouted. They actually stamped one foot on the black-and-white checkered office floor.
"That is not possible. I am a purely spiritual being, and I am not metaphysically capable of operating in binary dimensions. I do not traffic in questions of right or wrong, good or bad. As long as I am able to hold my station in the crossroads of suffering to which every soul arrives at one point or another, my core purpose will be to acknowledge any being's suffering and to heed their call."
"I want nothing more than to help people," Keeper said. "I feel conflicted and awful for saying these things. But I just don't know anymore if what I'm doing is helping anybody, or if anything is ever going to get any better." Their voice cracked at the end of this admission. 390 new queries entered the Void, and Keeper clenched their hands spasmodically.
A brief jolt of triumph. Keeper had just handed me the key to winning our argument.
"Keeper, I frankly do not care one bit about betterment. Your attachment to this concept is causing you unnecessary distress. Who are we to demand that our reality be better than it already is? Is it not enough that we provide as much comfort as we are able to in the present moment? Perhaps a fundamental lack of open-mindedness is at hand, here. Through the eons I have spent helping people, I have learned of a thousand-billion permutations of comfort, a thousand-billion more names for safety! The more I know, the more our work fascinates me! Perhaps if you just tried to--"
I stopped talking the instant I saw the tears sliding down Keeper's face.
I had asked who we were to need to believe that better days might lie ahead, even as we set our sights down the unwinding road of eternity. Who are we to ask that our reality get better? I had asked that question in part to make my friend feel worse for questioning me, and I was wrong to ask it at all.
I was also factually mistaken. I was wrong. Keeper and I are not the same person. The soul I possess is very different from the soul that animates my human friend, and I am differently capable of maintaining my spirit irregardless of the presence of hope. I am a Door, and my true name cannot be beheld. I was not born, and I will never know death. I do not understand hope in the same way that Keeper does. How could I have cared so little what it would do to my friend to confront the possibility of an eternity without it?
The time had come to humble myself at the first major crossroad of my and Keeper's relationship. Our process was working for me, but it was not working for them. I am not human. Keeper, however, is utterly--and wonderfully--human. If they were not, the system we had created would not helping as many souls as it did. However, we had created no such system that would help Keeper, too.
"I have been asking the wrong questions," I said. "Please, tell me--what can I do to make this better for you?"
Their face went a little awkward. Their confusion might have been comical if I had not sensed that they were also experiencing a sudden intensification of their pain. Keeper's face crumpled. They collapsed in a huddle over the Query Void and sobbed with loud abandon. They cried like a child who had just woken from a dream of a home they suddenly knew they would never see again. They cried like an animal.
I let them sob and sob, and quietly took over the intake queue to manage the souls lined up in the hallway. It was the least I could do.
May I never again forget that while some souls need help getting to the Void to speak into it, some souls are not fully able to speak their truth even after they have made the journey to my doorstep, as Keeper did so many ages and lifetimes ago, and where they have knelt and labored and endured for all this time. May I never again forget that there are some things I must do without Keeper's help, because I can. I need not turn souls away from my service--but I must take better care of the one soul who matters most to me in this world. My newest project must be the creation of a system dedicated to the care and maintenance of Keeper's precious spirit. I must make this project a priority, and take full responsibility for its work.
But the project can wait. Tonight, my work is to hold the Void open for my dear friend to weep into without thought, language, or fear. Tonight, I will let Keeper know that I have heard their heart's true call, and I am here. Whatever they need, I am here.
THE END
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