Luckless Homecoming E-Book

Zacharias Mbizo

• Herausgeber: LiteraturPlanet
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A dead man complains to the responsible angelic clerk in heaven for having been unjustly and far too early removed from the Book of Life. As a result, he is allowed to return to earth for a limited period of time to solve the murder he fell victim to. Unfortunately, his new form of existence is very different from the one he was used to. Although he is once again in the world, he no longer becomes a part of it.

Leseprobe

Zacharias Mbizo

Luckless Homecoming

The Dead Man who Solved the Murder of Himself

Literaturplanet

Imprint

© Verlag LiteraturPlanet, 2022

Im Borresch 14

66606 St. Wendel

http://www.literaturplanet.de

About this book:

A dead man complains to the responsible angelic clerk in heaven for having been unjustly and far too early removed from the Book of Life. As a result, he is allowed to return to earth for a limited period of time to solve the murder he fell victim to. Unfortunately, his new form of existence is very different from the one he was used to. Although he is once again in the world, he no longer becomes a part of it.

About the author:

Zacharias Mbizo debuted in 2015 with the present story (then only published in German). Eight years after its first appearance, it is now available in a completely revised version, which has also been translated into English.

In 2021 Mbizo published another fantastic story (The Agnes Well). He has also written a series of literary miniatures, of which he has released two anthologies with LiteraturPlanet. The Literary Corona Diary, published in 2020, was followed in 2022 by a collection of texts titled The Ukrainian Apocalypse.

Mbizo belongs to the so-called "Ecartists", a group of authors around the blogger Rother Baron, who published the philosophical Conversations with Paula with LiteraturPlanet.

Cover picture: Odilon Redon (1840 – 1916): Reflection (1900 – 1905); Wikimedia commons

1. Reality – a Dream

When I was thrown back into the world after my death, everything was as if I had never been away. A sunny October day enveloped the park near my flat in that milky light that frees all things from their outer appearance and opens them up to dream and transformation. In some places, the weary green of the leaves was already flecked with yellow and red dots, and the sun-dappled foliage was already quivering in that barely perceptible tremor that connects the eternity of the moment with the foreboding of its imminent passing. Drunk with death, the asters in the gardens glowed in their purple splendour.

Lost in thought, I strolled along the paths littered with fresh chestnuts. Flatteringly, they slid through my hands, awakening in me the memory of my mother's large, warming hand in which I had buried my fingers as a child. Immediately in front of me, a squirrel flitted across the path, flew up the trunk of an old oak tree on the other side and from there, with routine acrobatics, plunged into the branches of the neighbouring walnut tree. Probably it was just gathering its winter supply.

Distracted by the nimble rodent's tricks, I almost collided with an old woman who was dragging her morning prey behind her in a shopping trolley. She didn't pay any attention to me, though, but continued to plough the soggy path unperturbed.

I dropped down on a bench and squinted into the wide branches of the wingnut tree above me, from which the yellowed blossoms of spring were still dangling.

Yes, I thought, everything is like it always was. It was simply unconceivable to me that in this blissfully uniform normality, something as frighteningly abnormal as my own death could become reality. I was firmly convinced that I had only dreamed the unpleasant incident. This also explained my aimless wandering in the park, which was quite unusual for me – especially at this early hour. Obviously, the shock of the horrible dream had temporarily thrown me off track.

As I was not sure what day it was, I glanced at the newspapers on display at the kiosk on the corner where the park was intersected by a road. In unison they announced: Monday, October 6. For me, this was quite a welcome piece of information – because the Mondays were free of rehearsals due to the weekend performances. So I didn't have to go to the theatre and had the whole day at my disposal. Relieved, I made my way home.

I only had a few steps to walk from the park to the flat I shared with my friend Salvatore. At the crossroads where the road leading away from the park met the main road, the greengrocer was just dragging the last fruit crates outside. In front of the inn opposite, the kitchen help was wiping out the previous day's offers and scribbling the current day's menu on the blackboard: meatloaf with croquettes and salad, the whole thing for 9.50 euros. From the bakery next door, the smell of fresh bread rolls drifted into the street and awakened in me – although I had a strange lack of appetite – the desire for an extended breakfast with Salvatore.

When I arrived at my apartment block, I realised that I didn't have my keys with me. I supposed that I had left them in the flat on my hasty departure. No problem, I thought, Salvatore will surely be at home. After all, in his job as a copywriter, he enjoyed the privilege of working from home in the mornings. The creative meetings of the staff as well as the client meetings were usually scheduled for the afternoon.

I pressed the signal button on the intercom – and indeed it wasn't long before Salvatore's familiar voice came out of the loudspeaker: "Hello? Who is it?"

"It's me," I replied. "I forgot the key."

But instead of the familiar buzzing – indicating that the front door could now be opened – an impatient grumble reached my ear: "Hello? Who's there?"

"It's me – Ahmet," I repeated, this time a little louder. "I ..."

But before I could finish the sentence, I heard Salvatore mutter angrily: "Those damn brats ..." Obviously he thought that someone had played a joke on him.

So I had to presume that the intercom was defective – though it was strange that I could hear Salvatore whereas my words did not reach him.

While I was fumbling for my mobile phone to call Salvatore, the front door suddenly opened and Mrs. Grabowski approached me. She lived in the flat below us and had complained many times about alleged noise nuisance from us. Once she had even asked us not to flush the toilet at night. For her, the nuisance probably simply consisted in the fact that two men were living together above her. But of course this was something she could not say openly.

"Good morning," I mumbled tersely as I tried to slip past the habitual nag. She, however, stopped at the doorstep without paying any attention to me and checked in a seemingly provocative manner whether the door had fallen back into the lock behind her.

Admittedly, I was used to being treated condescendingly by the lady. I would therefore have been prepared to counter a disparaging look or one of her usual nasty remarks accordingly. The demonstrative disregard for my person, however, baffled me to such an extent that I remained standing with my mouth open and only began to get upset when Mrs. Grabowski had already turned the corner.

Reflexively I pushed against the front door. Sometimes it didn't close properly, and if I was lucky ....

In fact, shortly afterwards I found myself in the hallway. But strangely enough, I couldn't remember opening the door. Rather, I had the feeling that I had slipped straight through it.

I attributed the odd impression to my fatigue, though, and didn't worry about it. Glad to be in the house at last, I climbed up to the fourth floor, where I lived with Salvatore. When I arrived there, I pressed the doorbell several times in a short burst of joy.

I heard footsteps approaching, and immediately afterwards Salvatore's muscular figure appeared in the doorway.

"It seems that the intercom is out of order," I said in greeting. "I could hear you very well, but you obviously ..."

I broke off in the middle of the sentence, because it was clear that Salvatore was taking as little notice of me as Mrs. Grabowski. He looked to the left, he looked to the right, he even seemed to look right through me.

"Really quite a great joke!" he then called out to the non-existent brats, who he probably assumed were hiding somewhere in the hallway. "Very funny! Never happened before!"

While he angrily slammed the door, I took a step forward. Without the door touching me, I got inside the flat. Now I was standing there, a burglar in my own home.

2. Eerie Home

Dazed, I stood in the flat where I had once been at home. How had I got here? And why did everything seem different to me, though obviously nothing had changed?

I let my gaze wander through the familiar rooms. The worn-out cushions of the TV armchair, the Harlequin calendar, the traces of the teacup on the table – everything was an echo of my existence. My presence had been etched into things, my existence was undeniable, and yet Salvatore stubbornly pretended I wasn't there.

Stunned, I watched him continue to treat me like air. Calmly, he went back to his computer, where he had obviously just been busy with something when the doorbell rang.

In the case of Mrs. Grabowski, I had somehow been able to understand the provocative disregard for my person – although I had of course been annoyed by it. In the case of Salvatore, however, I had no explanation for it. Was he trying to play a trick on me? Or was he angry with me for something? But what could that be? I couldn't remember any quarrel with him.

I followed Salvatore to the computer, stood behind him and skimmed the text of the email he was writing: "... am I really grateful for your kind words. The last few weeks have indeed not been easy for me. After all,  I was not prepared for such a blow of fate, I was numb for a long time. And then all the paperwork that has to be done in such a case ... It would be really nice if we could meet again. Why don't we just let bygones be bygones and start all over again? Since Ahmet's death ..."

That was as far as I got. My eyes were glued to these three words: "Since ... Ahmet's ... death". So it was true after all? Had I not only dreamed my death, but had actually died? But how could I be there and not be there at the same time? How was it possible that I felt my being here just as clearly as before, while for others I no longer existed?

My eyes fell on a newspaper page lying next to the computer, half-buried under various other documents. Someone – probably Salvatore – had marked an article with a highlighter: "Actor collapses dead during performance", I read.

I winced: Just like in my dream! So had everything really happened the way I thought I had dreamt it? I looked at the date above the article: Monday, September 1. This meant that I would have died five weeks ago.

Or was the whole thing possibly a misunderstanding? Had I perhaps been mistaken for someone else or prematurely declared dead – and now the whole world was afraid of shaking up the tableau of the living once again?

I decided to abandon all restraint. At least I wanted to be certain about my situation now! I tapped Salvatore on the arm – but he continued writing undeterred. I poked him in the side – he continued to look at the monitor unmoved. I shook him with all my might – he remained sitting bolt upright.

In a last, desperate attempt to draw attention to myself, I finally hit the screen with my hand. But it too disregarded my existence and did not retreat a millimetre from me.

Strange, I thought – why then had I been able to ring the doorbell? It took me a while to realise that I could apparently only intervene in world affairs if it didn't affect anyone else's view of the world. Indirectly, I could obviously enter the scene. But as soon as I came into direct contact with another being through my actions, everything that happened through me was automatically erased from the book of life.

While I realised this, Salvatore got up and went into the kitchen to get himself a coffee. I watched him take a cup from the sink, wash it briefly under the tap, take the coffee pot from the coffee machine's hotplate and pour the black liquid into the cup.

And suddenly, without me even noticing it right away, my despair turned into anger. At first I explained this to myself with the disappointment that Salvatore was apparently already consoling himself over the loss, just a few weeks after I had disappeared from his life.

Of course, Salvatore could not spend the rest of his life grieving and renouncing all the pleasures of life just because I was gone. That was the way it was, I said to myself, at some point you had to leave grief behind – how else could you go on living?

However, that was only the language of reason. My feelings told me something quite different. They were more in keeping with the behaviour of those bird species in which the surviving part starves itself to death when its mate has died. So was love a stronger bond here, did it cause a more unconditional attachment to another life than it did in humans?

But perhaps the disappointment over Salvatore's infidelity was not even the decisive spark that ignited the fire of my rage. Probably even stronger was the feeling of powerlessness and exclusion, the embitterment at being reduced to a mere spectator of the world theatre, while Salvatore was still allowed to act on its stage to his heart's content.

An instinct stirred in me that I had never felt before, an instinct of which I knew immediately that it was not that of a living being. An almost uncontainable desire for destruction rose up in me, directed indiscriminately against all life around me.

Without knowing what I was doing, I moved towards Salvatore, I raised my hands, they were already fanning his neck ... And interestingly, now that I was drawing my energy from my will to destroy, he seemed to suddenly sense my presence. He shivered as if a cold gust of wind had seized him.

I realised that apparently my destructive instinct alone could give me the power to take shape in front of others – and that at the same time I would drag those who witnessed this act of transformation down with me into the abyss of nothingness.

It was by no means a sudden sense of pity that prevented me from following the unfamiliar instinct. Rather, I was struck by a hunch, a semi-conscious memory of the goal associated with my return to the world. And just as intuitively I realised that this goal would have remained unattainable for me if I had given in to my desire for destruction.

Immediately afterwards, I found myself outside on the street again. I say "outside", although this time there could be no doubt that I had slipped seamlessly from one sphere into the other, that there was no longer an "outside" and an "inside" for me. However, without such categories, inner-worldly events cannot be described.

As if in a dream, I staggered back to the nearby park, where I sat down on a bench and consciously let the misty memories that had haunted me since my return to the world pass before my inner eye once more.

3. The Waiting Room of Death

Gradually, all the images that I had taken for dream sequences trickled back into my memory. I saw myself sitting in an immense hall with thousands or even tens of thousands of decrepit figures huddled on worn-out benches.

The whole thing was vaguely reminiscent of the desolate waiting rooms that used to exist in the railway stations of the big cities in former times. It also looked a bit like a gigantic soup kitchen. A kind of fog, a haze like after a dying thunderstorm, had spread through the room, so that the individual figures were only dimly discernible.

Although from the outside the scenery reminded me of a railway station, I rather felt as if I were in the waiting room of a doctor or a public office. Involuntarily, I looked around for a machine where numbers had to be drawn in order to call the people waiting one by one.

But when I reflexively wiped my forehead with my hand in the stuffy air – which didn't make sense because I wasn't sweating at all – I noticed that a number was already engraved on the back of my hand: 4995.

---ENDE DER LESEPROBE---