Having scrawled a suicide note on a paper placemat, over its depiction of “Fruits of Malaysia,”
and recorded his goodbyes on an audio cassette, Woolworth’s brand with orange stickers, labeled:
Soul – various,
my brother Eddie died in the course of a massive epileptic seizure.
He was on a small island off the coast of Peninsular Malaysia. He was thirty at the time, although he looked much older. No one was with him.
His body lay on the white sand beach, with the sea approaching and retreating, making a fringe of white bubbles and absorbing it into the dark water again, as if thoughtfully.
Eddie had made a mark like a snow angel, flailing, before he suffocated. Then a damp stain of urine and dilute feces. Found by an early swimmer, an Australian who reported that the sand was bright yellow like dyed hair at sunrise and my brother was like a few stones in his dark suit and it was, like, a spooky postcard. Closer, you could see the insects, so many they made a heat shimmer. You were aware of your bare feet suddenly and saw what that was and then you stopped as if hurt.
“And I just thought, you know, shit, that’s a dead guy. You know. That’s a corpse. Cause they were all crawling round in his eyes.”
There was sand in the briefcase the tape was in. Not much, but I could feel it when I handled things. The placemat smelled of food. At first I thought that meant he was alive although I already knew and I don’t know why really. Then I put the tape on and listened to his voice.