The Cost of Responsibility

You want to know the most complicated moral decision I ever made? Is this for an assignment? No? And people tell me that teenagers will never show an interest in your life! Maybe I just have the best daughter. It’s a long story. So much happened the summer I turned twenty-seven. I died,  defended a corporation to protect the people they were hurting, and it snowed in the middle of July. I’m getting ahead of myself.

Did you finish your homework? Yes?

Do you need a cup of tea? No? Okay.

So, this all began when I woke up in the middle of surgery to my dead grandfather standing beside the operating table, looking impatient. I tried to ask what he was doing there, he usually only visited on Christmas, but the second he saw me move, he was disconnecting wires and yanking out tubes and catheters, rushing me off the table and down the hall. That’s the kind of man my grandfather was—always moving, always efficient.  I wish you could have met him.

Anyway, my grandfather was leading me through the hospital hallway. He hadn’t offered to tie the back of the gown, so I had to hold it bunched in my hand by my side to prevent everyone from seeing my bare butt.

It didn’t occur to me that I’d had massive abdominal surgery yet had no pain or post-anesthesia grogginess until one of the red doors to Afterlife was in front of me. Then I realized. My grandfather swung the door wide and pushed me through it before I could run screaming down the hall in search of your mother.

I’d imagined that there was a golden vortex on the other side of the Red Doors, but it was just a hallway. Grey walls, grey ceilings with grey pipes, and fluorescent white industrial bulbs. If I hadn’t seen the doorway myself, I would have thought I was still inside the hospital.  

As we walked, I rasped questions at my grandfather—how did I die? Why are you the one who came to get me? Shouldn’t I be allowed to say goodbye to my wife? What was the rush? But he either ignored them or had forgotten his hearing aids. If you knew my grandfather, you’d know either was possible.

Eventually, we entered a giant atrium, and he flashed a card at a man who seemed responsible for controlling entry into Afterlife. I’d imagined Saint Peter as a white man in flowing white robes in front of pearly gates. Instead, he was a broad-shouldered Black man with dreads in a police uniform standing in front of a metal detector. I would learn that Saint Peter was the least of my misunderstandings about Afterlife.

Once we were inside Afterlife, my grandfather’s shoulders relaxed, and he finally addressed me. He welcomed me with a quick, crushing hug, and winked that it was good to know people in high places when it came to getting into Afterlife. He gestured to the long line of people we’d just bypassed.

“Afterlife has a staffing problem. Can’t get people their entry paperwork fast enough. It causes all sorts of problems,” he said. “You’re only here for a little while, but you’ll notice the gaps caused by the dysfunction on Earth. I just popped down to grab you to help me solve a little work problem. I need to put that big brain to work.” Then, as quickly as his affection started, it ended, and he was shepherding me outside.

The street could have been any New England street in July. Flower boxes filled with herbs wilted, car horns blasted, and people rushed by in business attire.  I took it all in as we got onto the bus. I tried to ask more about the problem at work, but he cut me off. It wasn’t safe to discuss things around other people. He promised to tell me more at home.

The rest of that first evening was a blur. Over dinner, my grandparents told me I would go back in 3 months, which they assured me wouldn’t be three months on Earth. In Earth time, I would be in a limbo coma state for a very short while, maybe a few days. It would be worth it, they said. The Afterlife needed me.

I thought I would get more information on who ran Afterlife and how it worked, but the only practical piece of information I learned that night was about energy. Energy was how people paid for things in Afterlife. Although it was a literal measurement of how much energy was in the body, it was also payment. The body was, I learned, perfectly attuned to produce just enough energy for food, clothing, and casual pleasures by eating, hydrating, and sleeping.

I asked what would happen if I wanted to purchase something big, like a giant TV or a sports car. They looked at each other.

“People don’t really do that here, but energy debt is why I brought you here,” my grandfather said. “When I first came to Afterlife, I started a little business called Energy Lending. It was a way to give people the extra energy they needed to go back and forth to Earth. Earth travel is very expensive.”

And so, I spent my first night learning that my grandfather owned the biggest energy lending company in Afterlife and that he was facing a massive lawsuit alleging that he was causing a climate change disaster and more or less killing people who were already dead. I remember my face going numb as my grandfather said this.

“Are you?” I asked. He’d just shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t think so. At least, not intentionally. I know you’re an environmentalist, Quinn. I am hoping you can review all the research and find that answer.”

I tossed and turned all night.

The next morning my grandfather woke me and brought me into the yard just as the sun was cresting the horizon. My breath fogged the air, and I was shivering, wishing I had a pair of slippers. How much energy would a pair of slippers cost? How would I pay for them? The wooden deck was freezing under my feet.

“Watch your step, it’s icy,” he said, taking my hand and leading me across the deck and onto the lawn. The frozen grass burned my feet, and I gasped. “I need you to figure out why the grass is frozen in July. This is new. It started last year, and it’s getting worse. There are a lot of theories about what is causing the climate change, but…most of them say it’s my fault.”

I didn’t sleep well, and you’ve seen me in the morning before coffee; it’s not pretty. I snapped at him.

“Is that all? Did I have to be barefoot in the ice to receive the assignment?” I asked. His wrinkled face pulled together as he looked down at my feet. They’d gone totally red. While he was thinking, I headed back to the house, racing toward a hot shower.

“I thought you’d want to investigate the frost. It’ll melt in a few minutes. It only appears at dawn!” He called after me, but I ignored him. There would be another dawn tomorrow. After that, I had no early morning adventures, but my summer remained full of surprises.

My grandfather brought me into the office that day and every day that summer. The office was grand—all blocks of marble, gleaming hardwood, and deep plush red rugs. He set me up in a secluded back corner by a massive gothic window overlooking a courtyard with a bubbling fountain. There was a rolling bookshelf of material about Afterlife climate patterns beside the desk. If I needed anything else, I should let my grandfather’s secretary, Laci, know.

The material wasn’t different from what I had spent two years poring over on Earth, but suddenly I found myself on the other side of the table. Rather than proving the damage that corporations were doing, my grandfather was asking me to protect his company, to find data that showed he wasn’t the cause of the crisis.

I read about how he’d started the company, Energy Lenders, when he found he could borrow energy through a conversion system to make it back for my mother’s three-day wedding, scheduled a week after he’d died. That would have required much more energy than any dead human could take without the opportunity to “borrow” from the tree. The body can only take eight hours on a good day.

With an entrepreneurial spirit, he grew the idea.  He’d started by planting trees to grow more energy. Then he learned bamboo yielded more energy quicker than pine, but even the bamboo fields couldn’t keep up with the energy demand. About ten years before I got there, the company switched to mining oil and gas from the soil. That was when things got sticky.

Around lunchtime, there was an awful ruckus outside the building. I went in search of a new vantage point to see what all the shouting was about. It didn’t take long to find a room that looked out onto the street. Protesters lined the sidewalk, holding bullhorns and signs that read Defund EL, The Energy Crisis is Killing Us, and There is a Death Worse Than Death.

What would my colleagues at the EPA say about this? How many times had I been the one holding a sign, shouting along with a chant of Hey hey, ho ho, Big Oil has got to go. Now here I was behind plate-glass windows, looking down at the protesters.

Something was off about the scene, though. And I had to go down several flights of stairs before I could see what it was. The protesters here looked violently ill. Green-grey skin hung over hollowed-out cheeks. There didn’t seem to be a full mouth full of teeth between all of them. I don’t know how long I stood there gaping, but it was long enough that Laci came looking for me. She placed a hand on my shoulder and steered me away from the window.

“They’re here every day. The protests have been going on for more than a year, since before the frost, before the…” Her voice trailed off, her eyes staring over my shoulder out the window. Snow was falling outside, though it had been almost 90 degrees when I’d walked in less than an hour ago. But even snow in July couldn’t peel my eyes away from the protesters’ gaunt faces.

“What’s wrong with them?”

She was silent for a long moment, mouth ajar. I studied her—she was young, my age, probably in her early 30s. She had dreadlocks and bright red lipstick. Her hands twisted the badge that hung around her neck absentmindedly, so I had to work to see her name. When she finally spoke, her voice sounded far away.

“There is a steep cost to living in the past.” Then she was mumbling about Code Whiteout into a walkie-talkie.

I returned to my stack of books. I read throughout the day, getting up to peer out the windows whenever the protest reached a crescendo. It was nearly time for me to leave for the day, having learned nothing particularly interesting about the weather of Afterlife, when I noticed a trifold brochure tucked between the books. I slid it out.

The title, Energy Lenders Are Trying to Kill Us: How the Energy Crisis Is Ruining Afterlife, caught my attention immediately. There was a picture of two people on the cover—both with the same green-grey skin the protesters had. I read the tiny pamphlet quickly, then went back and read it again more slowly.

Dr. J. Evergreen, the creator of this pamphlet, argued that Predatory Energy Lenders (PEL) mined and burned natural materials to extract energy to lend to people at a severe upcharge. The charts were blurry, so I couldn’t understand the data he was presenting, but he seemed to argue that energy-depletion poisoning was increasing at the same rate as climate change.

When my grandfather came in at the end of the day, I asked about the protest, about the mining, and the snow.

“I can’t help you if you’re hurting people or the actual habitability of Afterlife,” I said, all bravado and bluster. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, looking exhausted, then called his secretary to bring us The Consumer Files. He held Evergreen’s brochure.

“This is the man who is leading the lawsuit against my company.” My grandfather said, passing the brochure back to me. “His claims about climate change seem to be based on shaky science. He’s a medical doctor, not a climate scientist.”

“And the energy-depletion poisoning?” I asked. The secretary walked in, pushing a trolley of banker’s boxes.

 “It’s not as simple as Evergreen makes it seem,” was all he would say on the matter. He left the box with me. It took me weeks to read them all, though I read them at a manic pace.

At first, I didn’t understand what these documents had to do with climate change or Evergreen’s claims that PEL were destroying the afterlife. They were stories, hundreds and hundreds of devastating stories. Some were handwritten letters, some newspaper clippings, many were credit applications, and some appeared to be deposition transcripts, but each told a similar story.

 The people who were borrowing energy, or at least these people who were borrowing energy, were not doing so frivolously. Everyone in the box had borrowed energy to travel back and forth through the red doors to take care of lingering problems on Earth.

I spent the summer mired in the stories of dead single mothers taking care of their children outside of school hours to keep them out of foster care. Dead children were going through the red doors to feed ailing parents. I interviewed a dead judge who put on a judicial robe every day to ensure someone was still defending human rights.

My grandfather wasn’t running the profit to make a surplus of energy. If anything, he was at risk of energy-depletion poisoning himself. He barely turned a profit. He wanted to help these people, he said. They needed help. People on Earth would suffer without them.

Every day that summer, my grandfather looked paler, and his blue eyes were more bloodshot. The protests grew. The newspapers published op-ed after op-ed demanding that the government intervene, placing limits on the amount of energy my grandfather could lend to a single person. Some proposed locking the red doors entirely. Photos came across my desk regularly, showing hundreds of sick people lying on cots in a warehouse. The caption under the photos read, Hospitals have rented warehouse space to place the people who reach end-stage energy-depletion poisoning.

I was torn. The data was clear—the tree-planting missions were not producing enough energy. Mining and burning ore really were the only way to produce enough energy to get these people back and forth. But the data was also clear: the toxic byproducts of the process certainly caused the climate change. Young tech grads who’d died in their prime were working alongside former heads of industry to try to find a cleaner way, but we were years away from a solution.

Debtees tried to break in constantly, pleading for more energy, for help with their ailing bodies. Loved ones of those in end-stage poisoning screamed down hallways, pleading with anyone they came across to save their mother, brother, sister, friend from organ failure.

My grandfather seldom came out of his office.

A fleet of receptionists had a script they said to those who made it past the door: It is our policy to charge only a 2% interest rate on the lending. We made less than $5,000 in profit last year, a measly salary for a CEO. Organ failure because of excess borrowing is a bodily process, not a corporate policy. We are not responsible for how people accrue debt.

My grandfather tried to meet with the leaders back on Earth—he begged for healthcare reform, child support payment parameters, and elder care. But I knew it would be fruitless. The people in charge didn’t care about the impacts they could see. They relied on the labor of the dead without needing to see the cost.

It wasn’t my grandfather’s fault that our world is so fucked up that the dead have to come back from beyond the grave to take care of the living. It was an impossible situation.

He was my grandfather. His organization was trying to help. I believed that. I believe that.

So, I found the evidence he needed. That’s the boring part of the story—it was all data tables and math. I spent my days bent over my research, ignoring the way the snow fell onto meltingly hot sidewalks.

I returned to Earth before the trial went forward, but my grandfather came to visit me once after. The judge found insufficient evidence to prove that my grandfather caused climate change. But then there was a new lawsuit seeking restitution for more than 1 million people with energy poisoning.

I still think about those photos, all those bodies lined up. That’s why I went back to school to be a lawyer. It’s why I adopted you after your mother died. I wanted to alleviate the burden on Afterlife from this side. I guess we won’t fully know the effect of these decisions until I go back someday.

 Do I regret my decisions? No, I think I did the right thing, even though it was a complicated situation.

Can you go to the mall with Sara? You already told her yes? Did you only ask about my moral quandary so I would let you go to the mall when your mother grounded you? You're sneaky, ya know that?