Death came for John Salibi late one night on a Monday.
He’d been preparing to meet it for a long time. How long? Was it since he’d stood in his bedroom, gripping a steel bat with both hands while creatures he called zombies tried to force open the locked door? Maybe. He looked back on those days as if they belonged to another person. The knowledge that he could die had been academic then, head-knowledge. He was too young and too healthy—his young wife with their little girl in the room with him—for that realization to sink deep into him, into a truth he believed in his heart.
And yet, within a week, a part of that innermost heart would be cut away from him when his daughter was killed. That too was a form of death.
But he’d clung to life, hadn’t he? Stumbled through the world with his cut-up, bruised, darkened heart. The Holy Spirit had empowered him then, casting out demons in Christ’s name, saving dozens of lives every week. And there was his church and her people, entrusted to him by Bishop Joseph, to minister to.
He hadn’t been ready to meet death then.
So when? When he made the difficult decision to follow the antichrist to Jerusalem to protect his flock? Yes, certainly—he’d been ready to die then, even accepted it as the most likely outcome. But it was Rebekah who had paid for his decision with her life.
Another partial death. More of his innermost heart hacked away.
He’d brought Rebekah’s body to Patmos all those years ago and buried her in the island’s soil. He’d lived in one of the caves up a narrow path of rocks, within view of her grave and the simple cross he’d set over it. Forty years, wasn’t it? Incredible to believe.
And lived in the caves? Prepared to die, really. He prayed almost all of the time, even though God had held back His presence. It didn’t matter. God had made Himself known when He’d wanted to, then He’d become silent again. John had come to accept that in time. So he’d prayed, eaten a little, slept even less, prayed and prayed and prayed.
Even in the midst of the zombie apocalypse, and its dark and anxious aftermath, death would’ve been a disappointment. The struggle, the desire to continue living, was so strong that even that horror couldn’t break it.
He’d been willing to pay the ultimate price to defeat the antichrist, and would’ve handed up his life without hesitation. But not without sadness, not without the sense of loss at the end of his earthly life. Of separation from Rebekah, primarily, but also from those he’d grown close to—Michael, Liz, Isaac, Steven, Theresa.
But now? He’d chosen to separate himself, hadn’t he? He’d lived alone for so long.
So now? With his faded vision and aching bones, his creaking joints, his lungs that burned when he made the trek up to his small cave every night, or even down to the sandy beach every morning? Now with his twice-lacerated, calloused-over, bruised-black heart? Now he was ready to die.
It did help him to know death was coming, that Izzy had appeared to Father Michael. Just like she’d appeared to John himself so many decades ago, to give John strength to do the impossible and let her die. And as she’d appeared to Rebekah before his wife’s death, to give her comfort no doubt. Rebekah’s last words in this life, which he replayed in his mind often: “My God. You’re all light. You look like an angel.” Forty years ago, but they rang crystal clear in his mind, in Rebekah’s own voice, weakened and fading, but full of wonder.
He wanted to die holding his wife’s hand. That was impossible, of course, but he’d decided to lie down next to her grave that night, the second one after the arrival of Father Michael and the delegation he’d brought to Patmos, because an angelic young woman had appeared to Michael in a dream and told him to seek out an old man on the island. Once he’d ordained the men who were ready to become priests, John had understood that he’d served his final purpose in this life and knew, with deep-down heart-knowledge, that he wouldn’t ever again see the sun rise over the sands of Patmos.
Somehow the strength was seeping out of him quickly, too quickly. As if now that he’d accepted he was dying, life was already leaving his body. He needed just a little more time, though. He wrote a short note to Michael, shorter than he’d wanted or than his friend deserved perhaps, and wrapped it around the golden cross he’d kept safe for all those decades, which he was glad to return to him and to St. George’s. Even the simple effort of writing a few sentences proved too much for him, so that he didn’t have the strength to unroll the sleeping bag he’d borrowed from Michael. Aware of how slow and labored his breaths were becoming, he lay down beside Rebekah’s grave. With the final bit of strength left to him, he stretched out his hand and curled his fingers around the base of the wooden cross he’d put up over his wife.
His eyes closed, they opened. How many times? His consciousness was fading, as if into sleep. He would become aware, dimly, that his eyes had closed only because they came open for a moment and he had a faded view of a blurry moon against the black backdrop of the sky overhead.
His eyes closed, they opened. It took him a moment to remember where he’d been, as if waking up suddenly in a public space, like a train. In the next moment he became aware of the dead body at his feet and he took a quick step back. Then he realized that the corpse, this incredibly old man with the wild and wiry white hair on his head and the cascading dirty-white beard down his chest, the deeply-lined and bony arm stretching out to grasp the wooden cross, was his own body—or had been.
John’s startled gaze swept over the shrunken husk. The difference between the man he remembered and the corpse he saw was stark. He didn’t have a mirror on Patmos, and so hadn’t spent any time in the past few decades seeing his own reflection. When had he grown so feeble? He resisted the urge to pick up the frail body and cradle it, but he couldn’t help but feel deeply sad, with an almost overwhelming sense of loss, at the sight.
He pulled his gaze away at a sound in the distance. Father Michael had struck camp on the shore near where their ship had docked. John could hear the whispering of a few who couldn’t sleep and had stayed up around a crackling fire. He couldn’t see them, his view blocked by an outcropping of rock a couple of hundred feet away, but even in the dimly moonlit darkness he saw every crystal and vein of the large rock as if he stood in front of it.
Two men approached from the direction of the camp, but he knew they weren’t from Father Michael’s party. Both were about the same height as John (at least his height during middle-age, which was still the mental image he had of himself). He saw them clearly, by a glow distinct from the dim light cast by the moon, not reflected light of reflected light. Rather, they seemed to glow with their own light, or perhaps they reflected a light he couldn’t see. Their faces were smooth, clean-shaven and without wrinkles. They were dressed in simple light-colored clothes, something like khakis and white short-sleeved shirts, as if they were beach-goers out for a stroll on the sand in the middle of the night.
John walked forward to meet them, studying their faces. They were both looking at him, and the one on the right raised a hand in greeting.
They could’ve appeared next to me, John realized. They’re approaching me this way to not frighten me. But I’m far from frightened.
Because something had changed in his perception. After the immense sadness of witnessing his own corpse—and not just his body drained of its life, but the sight of what his once-vigorous body had become—he now felt a wellspring of enthusiasm and excitement. His crystal-clear vision, his acute sense of hearing—it was like he’d gained superpowers in an instant. Even more than that, he thought as he strode along confidently to meet the two strangers: nothing in his body, if he could speak of this spiritual, immaterial existence in that way—nothing ached. Once, when he was too young and healthy to understand or care, someone had said to him: After forty, something hurts every day. Decades later he recalled the words, when he realized how true they were. As a kid, he could wreck his body during an overly competitive Saturday karate tournament, and be fine by the Monday. By fifty, turning his head too quickly or the wrong way could give him neck pains for a week.
By the time Father Michael appeared on the island, John’s days, if he’d allowed himself to dwell on them, which he never did, could have become a catalog of his aches and pains. His stomach was so often inflamed that he skipped meals rather than aggravate it further. His faded vision, even in full light, made him strain so hard to see sometimes that he gave himself headaches. His traitorous back hated the prostrations he made every day, and decided to punish him by hurting all the time, though he refused to adjust his discipline in any way. The climb up the hill at the end of the day made both his knees and his hips scream with pain even after he’d reached the cave, and always left him breathless and with his heart racing for a long time after. So his own life’s experience could provide an addendum to that dictum: After seventy, everything hurts all the time.
But now nothing hurt. No screaming back, no burning stomach, no aching knees. No sore neck or headache. No faded vision—the opposite. Even his mind felt sharper than it had ever been.
Then, with a shock of recognition, with only steps separating him from the approaching pair, he realized that the stranger on the right, the one who had waved in greeting, wasn’t a stranger at all.
Images flashed through his sharpened mind. Scenes from his life: a kind word when he’d desperately needed to hear one, an adult’s restraining hand when, as a child, he’d almost crossed the street at the wrong time. Spread out over a lifetime so that he’d never connected them before, but always featuring this same kindly, youthful, intelligent face. One memory rose to the forefront: a blinding snowstorm as a distracted and stressed-out John raced home from work, turned too quickly on a dark road and slid into the ditch; a young man—this young man—stopping to help him get his car back on the road, then, when John thanked him profusely for stopping for him when so many others had driven past, this young man telling him of course he’d stopped, wasn’t this the season for generosity and kindness? John, inspired or grateful, being much kinder to those around him that Christmas, and some of that kindness and generosity persisting for the rest of his life.
So this, then, was his guardian angel.
And the one on the left, whom John now looked at and acknowledged with a nod, must be what was often called the meeting angel.
“Thanks for stopping for me,” John said, returning his gaze to the figure on the right and smiling widely. He couldn’t wait to get on with it. After an incredibly long and often painful journey, his airplane had landed. He wanted to walk up the aisle and down the stairs, and then run up to the security gates to see them part—and be reunited with the people he’d loved in his life, Rebekah and Izzy at the top of the list. And then—if he could allow himself to think it, but why not? Hadn’t Christ promised it? Even to the thief on the cross? Today you will be with Me in paradise. So—it wasn’t arrogant to think it—he would see Christ face-to-face, as he was now seeing his own guardian angel and recognizing him for who he was.
He felt euphoric. Of course he did. In the blink of an eye he’d shed a lifetime of aches and pains! His mind swam in clear water after so many decades of partial if not full submersion in sticky mud.
“It’s good to speak with you, John,” his angel said, his voice subdued, almost anxious.
John didn’t like it. Something wasn’t right. The two angels had stopped a few feet from him, as if purposely holding themselves back, although in his joy he’d been ready to launch himself into them and give them both a bear hug. And they regarded him now, with solemn, steadily staring eyes and thinned lips, like doctors trying to break the news to a terminal patient.
“What’s the matter?” John said.
“Nothing,” the other angel lied. “We just want to make sure that you’ve—”
The rest of his sentence was drowned out by a monstrous howling, followed by an even more frightening vision as John whipped his head in its direction. Large, shadowy creatures were rising from the dark sea. Each wave breaking on the shore was like a cracking egg, birthing another misshapen monster to join the horde that had already filled the shoreline. They ran in frenzied hatred toward John, howling in seeming unison, but as he focused on each disgusting voice John could make out distinct words. All ugly lies about him. Not all lies, maybe, but ugly things; ugly, dark things. Not lies at all, were they?
He stumbled backward, shaking his head to get away from each awful claim of the howling creatures, but finding only a new, often more heinous accusation wherever his attention landed.
The sharpened sense of hearing he’d delighted in moments before now revealed itself a curse. As the cacophony tumbled into his crystal-clear mind, the words separated so that he heard every one. The thousand accusations were terrible: gross, filthy, and slanderous, if only they weren’t true.
He began to run backward, unable to look away from the frightening sight.
They were almost upon him. Despite his sharpened vision, the shadowy creatures looked blurry, almost blending into one another where their flailing limbs merged. And no, not shadowy, really—much stronger than that. Light-sucking, light-crushing, darker than anything he’d ever seen, moving, howling, man-shaped black-holes. Each stood about his height, about his shape, but the way they moved their limbs was abrupt and chaotic, like rabid animals. Although he couldn’t see anything about them distinctly, he sensed gaping mouths in their heads, opening and closing as they screamed and hurled their insults, lusting with desire to consume him.
He tripped over his feet, fell to the ground. Instantly the creatures descended on him, claws tearing at his skin and eyes, their smell so acrid and strong that bile rose up to his throat, but then slimy hands stopped his nose and mouth so that he began to flail with a sense of suffocation. In the next moment, the ground cracked and crumbled, and he and this mountain of monsters on top of him began to free fall as the deafening cacophony of their hatred of him filled his ears.
Fear and panic had gripped his mind and held it back from reason or even the capacity to think. But by instinct more than by will, he prayed the words that had accompanied him almost his entire life, which he’d said so many times that the prayer had become the very pattern of his breathing. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
His back hit the ground or something else hard, which arrested their free fall. The demon hands hadn’t been removed from his nose and mouth, but in a moment of lucidity he remembered that he didn’t have physical lungs, didn’t need physical breath, had already died, in fact, and so couldn’t suffocate to death.
A tiny shaft of light shot through the dark mass above him. The light grew larger, then larger again. The screams of the demons shifted in intensity but also in their target; before, they’d been cries of victory directed at John, filling his mind with their angry accusations and recriminations—a litany of John’s sins, everything he’d done and failed to do, everything he’d said and all the times he’d failed to raise his voice, a lifetime of sins, of hurting others, of wrongs, of putting himself first (first? If only! No, so often he’d treated himself as the one and only! As if only he, John, existed or at least mattered in the entire world, everyone else there to serve his needs, everyone else either in the way or an instrument to help him achieve his goals). But the shift: now the creatures wailed like convicted criminals, some pleading for mercy, some still arguing their case, some refusing to accept the judge’s finding. But who was the judge and what finding had been rendered? Then John saw a dark creature, screeching, be lifted up and thrown away. Someone was tossing off the demons that had piled on top of him, as if they were digging John out from beneath a pile of rubble.
An arm reached down to him, stretching an impossible distance between the top of the mass of demons and where John lay at the bottom. But he gripped it and was instantly lifted up and out, as if through a dark swamp, the refraction of the muddy water having played tricks on his vision.
John and the two angels stood on the sand, John’s old man corpse still at his feet, as if nothing had happened, no time had passed, and John had never moved at all.
“Why didn’t you listen to us?” the meeting angel said.
Bewildered, John almost spoke but the angel’s reproachful tone made him hold his tongue. He searched his memory instead, and uncovered the words that hadn’t found purchase in his mind when he’d been overwhelmed by fear and panic. The meeting angel, in his deep and commanding voice: “Whatever you think you’re seeing over there, ignore it and you’ll be fine.” And his guardian angel, the voice just as deep and reverberating, but also kinder and gentler, as of a father guiding their young son in a trivial task that nevertheless seems difficult for the child: “They’re trying to scare you. Stand fast and they’ll go through you like mist.”
“It’s all right,” his guardian angel said presently. “It’s done.”
The other angel’s blazing eyes turned away from John, to John’s relief. But as the angel’s gaze met that of John’s guardian, he spoke to him, in an almost imperceptible voice that John in his mortal body never would have heard, and which he now only understood in snatches of thoughts rather than words. The gist was clear, however: he’s not ready for this journey. Too arrogant, too proud. This will end in disaster.
John’s guardian shook his head slightly—we don’t have to worry about that right now. And something like: you’ll only scare him. Then, to John: “You’ve been through a very difficult transition. It’s a lot to take. We can stay here for as long as you need. Do you have any questions for us?”
Chastised, John shook his head. Did the angels know he had understood—to some extent—the brief exchange that had transpired between them? He recognized what they’d perceived in him, of course—the utter confidence, perhaps borne of the sudden euphoria of finding himself in a different kind of body, one without aches or pain; the eagerness to start the journey through what was sometimes called the under-heaven. Sure, he was eager—after decades and decades, he wanted to see his wife and daughter again! He wanted to yell out that defense against their nearly silent accusation, but he kept his mouth shut. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, but he’d only felt fear when the demons attacked him. So that more reasonable part of him recognized that these angels were his friends, not only his guardian who’d accompanied him his entire life, but both of them—shepherds gifted to him, guides to travel safely through unfamiliar and dangerous lands. From now on, he resolved, he would listen to them and avoid making the same mistake twice.
“All right,” his guardian was saying. “Would you like to see your home? Or St. George’s?”
Once again John shook his head—or tried to. He couldn’t move it. Couldn’t move his eyes either, or his mouth to open it and cry out for help. As his vision blurred, panic began to overtake him again, amplified by his inability to act and dispel some of the nervous energy.
“It’s all right, John.” He had to concentrate on the guardian’s dim voice to decipher the words. “The memory of a physical body is slipping away from your mind.” The voice grew louder the more John focused on it. “You’ll have to get used to this spiritual body for now. Don’t be afraid.”
Slowly the panic receded, but not the feeling of discomfort. John felt alternately too light and too heavy, at one moment at risk of floating into the sky, the next about to sink through the sand. “How long?” The effort to speak was almost beyond his power, pushing out the words like trying to push a heavy wheelbarrow stuck in mud.
His guardian angel spoke, but John didn’t hear the response as words, rather as something like sensations and images imprinted on his mind. Everyone walks their own path, his angel said. Then, as if they’d always been there, John saw people on the beach all around him, hundreds and hundreds if not thousands: some smiling, nodding, then rising up with their two angels until they escaped his sight; some shrieking, terror-struck, refusing to listen to the angels attempting to calm them; others dropping to their knees and trying without success to scoop handfuls of sand into their gaping mouths; others trying to do things that made John turn away in disgust, their angels pleading with them to stop, to listen. Then he saw again the vision that had terrified him earlier: waves breaking on the shore and turning into the dark demons, who swept across the beach like an invading army and carried away with them anyone who hadn’t managed to rise up, even as their angels struggled with them to hold back their charges.
“Why did they do that?” Each monosyllable took great effort, but was as much as he could manage.
His guardian understood the question and said, in the wordless communication John was growing more accustomed to: “Some people are not able to forget the pleasures of the flesh. Their greatest fear is that they’ve lost that pleasure forever, and they do whatever they can to try to recapture it. Their frustration at their inability to satisfy their particular desire drives them mad, and they become very difficult to reach.”
“For us to reach,” the meeting angel clarified.
“Correct. Much easier for the demons to reach.”
John looked around at the clear, calm beach, the still water like dark glass, glowing with highlights of blue moonlight. “And the demons can’t be stopped from taking them?”
The meeting angel: “No one is carried away unless they consent to it. Otherwise we will fight for them.”
John shook his head before he’d realized that he could move again. And then he spoke, more naturally now. “But why would anyone consent to go with the demons?”
This time his guardian angel responded. “Not everyone can see things so clearly, John. Some shut off their hearing to our warnings; some will follow anyone who promises them fulfillment of their desires. The demons can be very persuasive for those who have ears to hear them.”
It didn’t escape John’s attention that he, too, when overcome by fear at the first sight of the demons, hadn’t been able to hear the angels’ warnings.
And, again, that mantra, which seemed never to be explicitly expressed by his guardian angel, but was always an undercurrent of everything he said: Everyone walks their own path, John.
The conversation had helped him acclimate to his new body, at least to some degree. Initially after his death, the delightful realization that he felt no more pain had obscured the stark fact that he felt no sensations at all. That lack, that disconnect from reality, continued to be uncomfortable and disquieting; but the sudden awareness of it had been so destabilizing as to immobilize him. Now the feeling had settled into its own kind of strange sensation: a hollowness in his stomach, like he might’ve felt in his earthly life after a great loss.
Regardless, he had learned to control this body, to move his mouth to speak, which just meant focusing his attention on the speech act, or to move his eyes to look around, which just meant focusing his visual attention.
The angels waited for his response.
“I’m ready,” John said.
Again that discouraging exchange of looks between them. He’s not ready.
“There’s no rush, John,” his guardian said. “Would you like to visit St. George’s? It might do you well to see your old church.”
An understanding dawned on him. “Is that the purpose of souls being allowed to visit the places they loved and remembered? To strengthen them for the journey ahead?”
The guardian seemed reluctant to respond, but the meeting angel said, “It is for you.” Everyone walks their own path.
“No, I’m ready,” John repeated. Impulsiveness? Perhaps—whenever there had been a difficult task ahead of him, he’d always wanted to jump in. To begin. To outrun his own fear before it stopped him, but also to quiet the internal, anxious voice through action. In this case, though, there was more than that: a great sense of reluctance to visit his old church community. A much greater sense of distaste over seeing the bungalow he’d first shared with Rebekah and Izzy, before the world had collapsed, and then lived in with just Rebekah as they’d tried to rebuild their lives.
He’d left that part of him behind when he’d come to Patmos, hadn’t he? Was that the reason? But why this nervous energy urging him to start the journey as soon as possible?
Even as a distant part of him remembered that he’d committed to listening to these angels who’d been appointed as guardians and guides, he heard himself say, “I don’t want to delay anymore. I want to start.”
Again that exchange of looks between the two angels. Did they also have an unspoken (and, this time, unheard by John) argument? The look only lasted a moment. As they turned their attention back to John, he thought they were going to refuse him, insist that he wasn’t ready. A deep sense of frustration and anger welled up inside of him, the counterarguments riding on top of the geyser, about to explode from him: they were his guides, but the decision was his. He had to do what he thought best for his own soul, and who were they to stand in the way of that? Then he could throw their own words back at them: Everyone must walk their own path.
His guardian had placed a hand on his shoulder, as if aware of the tumult in John’s heart and trying to calm it.
When John met his gaze, the angel said, “Very well, then. Let’s begin.”
