Lazarus is Dead by Richard Beard

Author:Richard Beard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2012-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

1.

A day goes by. Lazarus needs to stay alive for one more day, but his closeness to death is a glimpse of hell. Visions of hell are brought back to the living by the dying who are later spared. They remember how death feels—night pierces the bones, is inside the bones, and then the suffocation.

Lazarus struggles to breathe. Dragons squat round his neck and squeeze. His lips are sliced off and his tongue wrenched out. Flames scorch his nose and mouth, burning down his throat and splitting his innards.

He is stuck, always stuck, plunged so deep in a stinking pit of slime that even his clothes detest him. In a pit of slurry, of fire, in a pit of vomit or shit but always a pit because, come the end, the living look down from above. Mary and Martha look down at him, and he is below and he can’t reach up.

We all have to go through it. Hell is life in the instant before death. It is before, not after. This is how we know in such detail the logistics, transmitted from generation to generation. Sur­vivors come back with the horror.

Lazarus prefers to suffer than to die: hell is preferable to death. When his soul threatens to drift, Lazarus heaves it back. After a year of sickness he needs one more day. One day, is all. He breaks it up hour by hour, determined to keep breath in his body.

His soul sometimes escapes, rising high above the specific wreckage of his body, and he knows when this is happening because his soul has perfect vision. It appraises the loose yellow-black skin of his body, but his disembodied self feels nothing, smells nothing. There is no smell in the afterlife.

At least, no sense of smell has featured in the many documented instances of near death experience. There is a pattern. An out-of-body sensation is followed by the tunnel, and finally the bright white light. Lazarus has a soul and it rises up. His soul enters the tunnel, and at the end of the tunnel is a light.

He had not expected it to be like this.

Lazarus refuses the light, turns and slides down the tunnel and drops with a clout into his rotten body.

In his hellish pinhole vision he sees individual tears on Mary’s cheeks. She is wringing her hands, as if she wants to pray but can’t find the place to start. Something new is wrong, something worse than when she was last looking down. Yanav will have reached Jesus by the river, and Mary believes Jesus can heal at a distance, like he did with the nobleman’s son. Jesus knows, and Lazarus is not improving.

The bible has more precise information. The New Testament remains the first place to look for remembered news about Jesus, and in Bethany there is little that Mary can add:

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