Xibalba by Vivek Shah Chapter 1 What do you do for a living? Work in a bank? Teach children? Stride about in huge corporate offices in pristine suits? Are you an artist? Do you write? Or do you indulge in the darker side of human nature to put food on the table? Do you sell women from the villages to the men in the cities? Do you indulge in the narcotic trade? Do you take money from strangers to do jobs nobody else will? Do you kill people for the right price? Or worse, are you a bureaucrat? I only ask because I know your answer isn’t going to change the way I look at myself – I won’t grieve over the difference in the size of our wallets, I won’t feel envy as you drive your sleek and powerful Mercedes into the parking lot of a new high-rise in the heart of town and then take the elevator to a new house whose price could buy entire villages in the countryside. Or even if you don’t spend your spare time sucking on a silver spoon and are one of those on the lower rungs of society, I won’t feel sorry for you. You see, I don’t envy the rich because no matter how much money they have, what I do for a living everyday is much more interesting than anything they will ever do. I don’t pity the poor because what I do for a living is much more soul-wrenching than any pain they have ever felt due to the lack of access to the right kind of greenery. What I do for a living, is calculate how much time it would take for me to destroy a person, to ensure that every trace of each of their atoms, their hopes, their dreams and even their fears cease to exist, as they were. I work in a crematorium and I earn my bread by calculating
how much time each cadaver will take to turn into nothing but ashes and dust. Death. Death is what I do for a living. 3 hours. Today was another usual day at work. Two cadavers showed up. The first arrived at the crematorium just as I did, early at seven in the morning. He was a forty-year-old morbidly obese man. My guess is that it was his girth that killed him. ‘Huh, maybe all those advertisements about exercising and eating healthy aren’t the usual consumerist hype.’ His family had come to see him off, as the families always do. When they were done saying their final good-byes, they sent him my way. This is where I play my glorious part. I have to estimate how long the body will take to go from flesh and blood to ashes and cinders. The cadavers arrive on a trolley, and I put them into the furnace, which I have named Xibalba. It’s named after the dying star that the ancient Mayans found in the night sky, and thought it to be their underworld. It looks golden from Earth, but that’s because it’s wrapped in a nebula. Soon Xibalba will burst, and from that starburst, a thousand new stars will be born. Of course, rebirth is not so much of an option for the occupants of its namesake, but I think the name becomes the furnace. Looking at the dead man, whom I had named Leviathan, I was sure he could not have been more than 5’10” and not less than 160 kgs; I allotted him a four and a half hour slot in Xibalba. Now for the main perk that comes along with this job. Whenever Xibalba is devouring her prey, I go to the Waiting Room and make up a story about the deceased and his family. Fabricating stories about people I’ve never met is almost as exciting as burning them. 3 hours. Entering the room, I saw that Leviathan had a wife and two children, a girl and a boy.