Grim

Grim is a functionary. An evaluator. For longer than the universe has had a name, he has stood at the edge of human lives, opened his scroll, turned his wheel, and sent the dead on their way. He does not question the machinery. He does not ask where they go. He has been doing this since before the first human word for death existed, and the work has always been sufficient.

Then he starts watching where the sendings go.

What he finds does not match what he was told. The souls are not reaching their destinations. Something vast and indifferent — something that has existed since before the universe itself — is consuming them. The machinery Grim has operated across geological time is not a system of judgment and redemption. It is a harvest. And the harvester does not know the souls exist. It does not know anything exists. It simply draws, and consumes, and grows stronger.

Told through thirty-eight chapters spanning forty thousand years of human history, from a Neanderthal hunter dying on a frozen lake to the final human soul assessed at the edge of the universe, Grim is a novel about consciousness, complicity, and the weight of a job that never ends. Each chapter follows a different soul through death, through the long awareness of physical decay, and through the assessment that determines what comes next. A Plague Cart driver in 1348. A conquistador who spent forty years staring at a child’s face. A literature teacher in Auschwitz. A Siberian woman held in permafrost for three centuries. A slave trader whose scroll will not stop writing. Churchill. Stalin. An ordinary farmer who loved the smell of rain.

Through all of it, Grim watches. And follows. And begins, for the first time in the existence of the machinery, to push back against it.

The question every soul asks is what happens next. Grim has been answering that question since before language had a word for next. Now he needs to know the answer himself. What is on the other side of the door?

The answer is worse than nothing. And the work continues anyway.

Questions

Read the Opening

Chapter One

Hunter on the Ice

He is to my left when we spread across the ice. He has always been to my left. We have run together since we were boys at the edge of the group, too small to hunt, old enough to watch. I do not think of him with a name. He is just him, the specific him, the one whose throwing arm I know the way I know my own.

Eight of us. Four pairs. We build the fire small on the bank above the frozen lake, small enough that the smoke will not carry to the animal before we are ready, and we pass the ochre around in a piece of folded hide and mark each other in pairs the way we always mark each other before a hunt.

My pair presses his palm against my chest and leaves the red there, over my heart, and I do the same to him, and we look at each other. There is nothing to say. We have done this enough times that the doing is the saying.

The mammoth moves the way I said it would move. I am right about this. I am right about everything until the moment my left foot goes through.

Not the deep ice, the edge ice, where the shore meets the lake, where I have crossed a thousand times and where the thickness is less than I read it this morning. I read it wrong this morning. This has never happened to me before.

The cold arrives before I have time to be surprised by it. It is total, not cold the way the air is cold but cold the way the water is cold, which is every surface of the body at once, every boundary between the inside and the outside going the same direction at the same time.

My pair shouts my name. I hear it. I hear everything clearly. I cannot make my arms do what arms do in this situation. I have told other people what to do in this situation. I told a young man last winter. The instructions are correct. My arms do not receive them.

The cold takes the breath. I was the best reader in the group.

The tusk finds me in the side. The impact is not like anything I have a comparison for. Then I am on the ice and the sky is above me the color of old bone. I breathe. The air goes in but not far enough, stops somewhere in the middle of my chest where something is no longer the right shape.

My group finishes the hunt without me. The calls between them, the sounds of the animal going down, the sounds of a kill made well. They did it. The meat will carry the children through the worst of the winter. I was right about the animal. I was wrong about the ice.

My pair is beside me before the sounds have stopped. He puts his hand over the red mark on my chest, his palm exactly where I pressed it by the fire in the dark, and holds it there. I feel the warmth of his hand and I hold onto it. The warmth is the realest thing left.

I want to tell him something. Something about the ice and the one step and his hand on my chest and the children who will eat this winter. I look at him. I think he reads me the way I read ice. I think he gets most of it.

My pair is last. He stands over me and I watch him memorize me, the way you memorize the safe crossing, the reliable water source, the things you will need.

I stop.

Then I am above the body. Looking down at the hunter on the ice beside the hole he fell through, my pair kneeling over him, his hand on my chest over the red ochre mark.

I do not feel the cold anymore.

I do not disappear. This is the first wrong thing and I have no word for wrong in this way. I stopped. I felt myself stop. The breathing, the cold, the hand on my chest, the sky, and then none of those things, and I was certain that was the end of it because everything I have ever known about dying tells me that is the end of it.

I stopped and I am not gone.

There is no body. There is no cold. There is no sky. There is only the knowing that I am still here, without anything to be here in, without any of the things that here has always required. I have no word for this.

Something comes when the last of me is gone. The birds stop moving. A fox near the bank sits down and faces toward where I am most concentrated and does not move. The animals read something the way I read ice, something that should not be here.

I read it too.

Vast. Patient. The attention of something that has been doing whatever it does for longer than I can hold as a thought. It stands where nothing was standing. It does something I cannot see with eyes I do not have.

And then it is interested in me specifically and the interest of it lands on what I have become and I feel it the way I felt the spotted hunters reading me on the ice, the decision being made.

The vastness does something with what I have become. I cannot see what. I cannot understand what. The fox moves. The birds move. The thing that was here is not here anymore.

I am not here anymore either.

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