The Return of Papa Gampu
by Charles C. Cole
I practically oozed into the couch in my den, under a comforter yanked from my bed, cozy and self-indulgent. During a commercial in a fairly balanced football game, the hairs on the back of my arms stood up and there was a loud electrical SNAP. A short, chubby, retired professor-type suddenly appeared, standing directly between me and my dear TV. He was dressed formally. Funeral attire, I suspect now.
“Yes! I’m back!” he exclaimed.
“Down in front!” I instinctively blurted. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“Sorry. Of course, there’s somebody here. What year is this? Nothing’s ever easy. There was a screw-up. It was obvious: I wasn’t supposed to die. So, we kept appealing until we won. I’m really back!”
“From where?”
“Whatever the place is we go to when we die. Nobody ever calls it by the same name. I’m Papa Gampu. This is my house.” He glanced about dismissively. “Though clearly not my furniture.”
Fighting words. “Congratulations on beating the system, Mr. Gampu, but—”
“Papa, please.”
“Papa. But this is my house. I paid for it. I’m still paying for it. My signature is all over the loan documents.”
“All part of the mix-up. We’ll figure it out. This is what happens when you’re dead and come back. Miraculous, but a logistical nightmare.”
The commercial was over, but Papa wasn’t moving. I turned off the TV. I chose to humor this stranger until I got my bearings. “So, what if your case is overturned on appeal?”
“Can they do that?”
“I’m just asking. I know nothing about cosmic jurisprudence.”
“I don’t think they’d send me back if they weren’t sure I could stay.”
I was still thinking. “Maybe, assuming something highly improbable just happened, we can find you a living relative, someone to take you in.”
He looked beyond me, into the kitchen. “I liked it here! Even if you have... redecorated. Where’s my stuff? Storage?”
“Papa, the world moved on while you were gone. You may be back, but I assure you that your belongings are long gone. Distributed among the masses. I’m pretty sure they had an estate auction before I bought the place.”
“How long?”
“Have I lived here? Fifteen years.”
“Fifteen years!”
“Look, you’re welcome to stay the week, acclimate, that sort of thing. I’ll make up the guest bedroom.”
“But I won.”
“Over there, sure. Not over here.”
He glanced out the picture window, turning away from me, getting a lay of the landscape, I suppose. “Where are all my trees? The monster oak, the messy willow, the linden I planted?”
I was, surprisingly, a little defensive. “The twenty-year shingles on the roof were growing moss, deteriorating. I needed to let the sunlight in, let the place breathe. Blame the insurance company.”
“And I have neighbors? Since when? I had woods! My own little private wilderness! What happened?”
“When I bought the place, I was pretty much land-rich and money-poor for a while. I sold off parcels, wood lots, to make ends meet. It’s become a family-friendly neighborhood, I’m proud to say. We paved and widened your private drive and named the new street after you. You’re not forgotten, if it means anything.”
“It doesn’t seem fair,” he mumbled.
“It would be next to impossible to undo all the changes.” I needed to distract him! “Do you have a job to go back to?”
“Retired.”
“A wife? Kids?”
“I mostly kept to myself. Too introverted for my own good, my therapists said.” Therapists, plural?
“Are you hungry? I could make a sandwich,” I offered, twitching to move. “Who can think on an empty stomach? It’s probably been years since you last ate.” He looked smaller. “How did you die, originally, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Open heart surgery. Not an emergency: preventive maintenance. The cavalier surgeon had a heart attack while operating on me, on his fortieth birthday. I know: even God agreed, eventually, it was far-fetched.”
I was genuinely curious. “Was death a bad place?”
“No, but it’s the principle of the thing.”
My thoughts ricocheted between this world and the next. “Is it possible you have money in a bank account? How will you make ends meet? You probably don’t have any possessions except the clothes on your back.”
“I had a girlfriend, a lovely woman. Wanda. She’s probably moved on.”
“And is fifteen years older, if she’s around. I imagine you haven’t aged, right?”
He glanced at the mirror over the fireplace mantel. “This really sucks! I was on a softball team, in the land of the dead. Everyone liked me. No egos or backstabbing. I was bettering myself. Age and disease and judgment: we had no place for the nastier sides of being human.”
“Plenty of that here. I see it every day.”
He looked at me, right at me, for the first time. “Are you happy?”
“Sure. I don’t know an alternative,” I said. “I like the weather, the sounds of the kids playing, the convenience of technology, my cats. But I could do without rheumatoid arthritis in my hands and petty arguments with my ex-wife and her adult kids.”
“What would you do, in my place?”
“You won,” I said. “They can’t take that away. But at what price? Me? I say go back. I mean it. Enjoy the comforts of the other side; you’ve earned them.”
Papa looked at my ceiling and called out: “God, respectfully, can we talk? I want to renegotiate. You always say rule number one is man has free will. What do you say? Is it too late?”
And, like that, he was gone. No ZAP. The TV turned back on by itself. Another car commercial. I turned it off with the remote and crossed the room to look out the window at my immediate world.
Bye, Papa Gampu, if you were ever really here. Thanks for the life lesson. It’s not enough to know what you deserve; you have to know what you want. Here’s hoping I don’t forget.
Copyright © 2021 by Charles C. Cole
