“Waiting on the Bench” is an innovative, esoteric novel.
It combines two separate yet correlated works.
On the one hand, the novel consists of 22 chapters and presents the death and afterlife trials and tribulations of a man during 40 days, according to the Orthodox canons.
On the other hand, for each chapter, there is a corresponding so-called counter-chapter dealing with one of the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck.
“Waiting on the Bench” was inspired by my own near-death experience resulting from my encounter with the covid infection in October 2021.
Five years later, I almost finished the book—five years of my own trials and tribulations.
Today I offer you one full chapter.
Enjoy!
Chapter Eight
The dead of a party. Discovering the bench. A portal to the other side. A similar world but still different. Getting through the twenty customs.
The burial afterparty had ended. The last handful of mourners drifted away as the sun slipped behind the hills and the afternoon bled into evening. I felt hollowed out and frightened, though I couldn’t have said exactly what. Of whatever came next, I suppose. That’s the trouble with the end: it never turns out to be the end.
My legs shook. I sank onto a bench.
The bench held a peculiar place in the cemetery. Most visitors hurried past without a glance. Only now and then did I see an elderly widower settle there to mourn the one he had lost.
The cemetery sprawled across the hillside beneath a canopy of trees. Beyond the rusty wrought-iron gate at the main entrance, a cobblestone path climbed towards a modest mortuary and, behind it, an even smaller chapel. To the left, the hill of graves rose. To the right lay a few beds of colourful flowers and the lonesome bench, which faced the meticulously ordered, stone-cold plantation of tombstones. Row after row of them, like teeth. I never would have guessed that this bench would become the gravitational centre of my universe over the following weeks.
“So that’s what it was all about. I’m going to turn into worm food now, aren’t I?” I looked at my guardian angel, tormented.
“If you put it that way, physically speaking, yes. There’s not much left to do about it.” He sounded bored. Seizing his opening, he went on: “We should leave at once. A rather challenging task awaits us.”
“A challenging task?” Intrigued, I raised an eyebrow. “I never thought the afterlife could be more wearying than life itself.”
My irony sailed straight past him. Angels, as far as I could tell, are immune to jokes. Human humour, at least.
“Yes. We need to get your soul through customs,” the angel clarified, as though reading the next item off a shopping list.
With my guardian angel at my side and my accuser at my back, I walked to the chapel behind the mortuary. The place looked forsaken, abandoned to silence and sorrow. Soaked, fragmented bricks crumbled like the memory of dying leaves. A hollow aperture gaped in each of the four walls – windows that invited no light, only the impudent curiosity of the wind. A cross of iron stabbed the chapel’s jilted heart, corroded and trembling beneath the weight of its own rust. It leaned askew, a weary sentinel that had long ago stopped waiting for salvation and now kept watch only for the slow, inevitable triumph of decay.
“That’s the spot,” said the angel. We stopped in the shadow of the solitary building, and nobody spoke. The shadow stretched a little too far for that hour of the day. I decided not to mention it.
The two of them stepped aside, murmuring in voices too low to catch, and traced large, rotating gestures in the air. A luminous portal tore open beside the desolate construction.
“Team effort,” I muttered. The doorway to another dimension was genuinely spectacular, yet I still felt let down. I had expected astonishing machinery and dazzling wheels, something like the chariot Ezekiel described.
“Things change,” said the angel, without even glancing at me. His tone stayed indifferent. “Still,” he added, “the more they change, the more they stay the same.” I suspected another sheltered smile.
Without further discussion, we stepped into the light. The angel went first; I followed close behind, and the accuser sealed the line like a jailer. A powerful vortex seized us in the tunnel and, in the span of a single blink, spat us out on the other side.
We emerged from an identical portal, which snapped shut behind us the moment we cleared it, taking the last of the light along.
To my surprise, this side mirrored the one we had left, except that the chapel stood well-maintained, as good as new. Murals adorned its walls. A candle flickered before the shining cross, and sparks of light and elongated shadows danced along the stone. The whole place glowed with warmth and serenity. Persistent like a hand that holds yours a second too long.
The cemetery looked roughly identical, yet something about it felt off, a vibe I couldn’t name. Everything appeared newer, but the place itself seemed older – much older. A fresh coat of paint over something that had been rotting since before the paint existed.
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