waiting room limbo

In Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s Horse Legs (trans. Jay Rubin), a man dies thanks to a clerical error. He finds himself in an office building, where the heavenly clerks apologise and send him back to the living world. Thanks to some otherworldly red tape, he returns from this near-death experience with horse legs.

Funny how so many stories and myths depict the first stage of the afterlife as some kind of waiting room. In purgatory, you have to stand in line, take a ticket, fill out paperwork, etc. Details of your life are checked and double-checked. Sometimes details of your life don’t match up with details of your death. It’s frustrating and you just want to go home. Maybe, like in Horse Legs, you’ll end up alive again, but with the awful knowledge that someday you’ll have to go through all this again.

This part of the afterlife is just limbo. You’re supposed to pass through and reach somewhere else. But passing through could take a long time, and there’s also the worry that your final stop is worse. And what if there is no guarantee of leaving limbo? Maybe you’re stuck in a waiting room, with an aching back and people you don’t know.

At least in Horse Legs the process is quick. Other stories, such as Shehan Karunatilaka’s novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, or the 1988 film Beetlejuice, give us dead characters who spend a lot longer in otherworldly waiting rooms. These limbos resemble places they’ve waited in while living.

In Beetlejuice, recently deceased couple Barbara and Adam discover a waiting room limbo that is even more poorly managed. The staff they encounter are also dead people, not angels. It’s bad enough having to wait in purgatory, but working while you wait, sorting through other people’s paperwork, sounds worse. Everything and everyone in the afterlife is just a mangled, broken down, used up version of the living world. The only promise of something transcendent lies way off in the distance.

At least Barbara and Adam aren’t completely stuck; they can haunt their old house, and act as parents to Lydia, the new girl living there. They form something sweet in a bleak situation.