We now introduce our final witness, Megan Tso, on her flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver. She was pleased to be placed next to an empty seat. Since she’d been travelling so much, a thirteen-hour stretch without brushing elbows with a co-passenger, a place to put her laptop and e-reader, and a spare tray where she could leave her hot towel and glass of ice water—all of this gave her enough space to appreciate humanity.
She updated the talk she’d just given in Guangzhou. While there, she spoke about death as the impetus for ritual and then of its place in many civilizations, with references to social media. She took a selfie at her family’s ancestral home, which received her eight-hundredth “like” before the plane ascended. Her social media popularity was a dubious achievement, and at least five of those likes were from dummy accounts created by Markus.
Then she took a two-hour train back to Hong Kong, gave the same talk based on her book, The Meaning of Death, and had dinner with aunts and uncles and cousins, relatives on her mother’s side, eager to see her, and oversolicitous. Now she was on this flight for her final two engagements in Vancouver, which were spaced nearly a week apart.
Once she got home to Los Angeles from Canada, she would have been away for a month: L.A.-Chicago-Madrid-Seoul-Guangzhou-Hong Kong-Vancouver. She’d cycled through her outfits five times and had spent nearly a four-figure sum—an entire speaking fee—on hotel laundry and dry cleaning. She’d run out of toothpaste and lost her favourite notebook. Now she thought of getting home as the next stage in a triathlon—a chance to exhaust yet another set of muscles.
Before leaving, she’d quit her job of six years as an editor at an academic press. Tso had loved her job and hated freelancing and was barely afloat despite her book’s unexpected success, but she’d needed to quit. She needed the bandwidth.
After she returned to Los Angeles, she planned to move her belongings out of the storage locker. Her first temporary address, a dog-sitting stint, was in peril because the rescued greyhound’s owner, a documentary filmmaker, was no longer certain that funding was secure for his three-month stint in Appalachia.
Don’t think about stuff.
To soothe herself, in her head she tallied the air miles she’d accumulated and imagined them like stars in the sky. She fell asleep tracing them behind her eyelids. Airplane sleep was a fraction as restful as it was in one’s own bed, but when practiced well, it was a form of teleportation. One could nod off when the plane was lit like a cave, then wake with all the lights on and the flight attendants scurrying to their seats for touchdown. This time, Tso roused herself awake after forty-five minutes and watched parts of three movies. Her suitcase was the first of many black cloth bags to emerge on the conveyor belt; she grabbed it and dashed to the taxi stand. If traffic wasn’t terrible, if check-in didn’t take too long, she’d have enough time to take a shower and lie on a bed for another forty-five minutes before she was picked up and taken to the lecture venue.
She had been to Vancouver once before, a decade earlier, on a summer road trip with college friends. Tso remembered beautiful days and cool nights and seeing so many other Asians that she felt both comforted and swarmed. (She hadn’t been to Asia yet.) This time, she felt like she was seeing the city indoors under fluorescent office lights. The patches of lawn that she glimpsed driving across town even resembled grey carpeting. The hotel overlooked the beach and backed onto a park, but sat on the edge between quaint and grubby.
Her plan to rest was thwarted on multiple fronts. When she got to her hotel room, she knew something was wrong as soon as she lifted her suitcase onto the luggage stand. She unzipped it and found a package of Chinese sausage inside, not the silk pyjamas that she remembered placing at the top layer of her packing. While she looked for an ID tag, the phone in her room rang. Her event’s organizer started to apologize for arriving early. “I can wait in the lobby until you’re ready,” the woman said with the voice of someone preemptively disappointed. Tso told her that she would go downstairs immediately. She would have to deal with her luggage later.
Her guide—also the organizer of the event—was a woman named Janice Grossman. There was a look that people who organized death-related events cultivated. It wasn’t so plainly “alt” as a high-school goth aesthetic, though black was often a default clothing choice. White people liked to dye their hair black. (Tso had purple highlights.) Grossman’s frizzy hair was tinted grey, but she otherwise followed that look. She looked to be in her mid-forties, a decade older than Tso, and wore chunky brass rings that seemed to be refashioned from antique door hinges and brown leather boots. In place of a sign with Tso’s name, she clutched a copy of The Meaning of Death to her chest.
“Sorry again for being early—the traffic was better than I expected,” Grossman said, and Tso was reminded that “sorry” was a form of punctuation in Canada. Her talk was going to be at a converted adult cinema, followed by a reception at Grossman’s house that Tso had already been dreading. “Normally, the other promoter would introduce you,” she said. “But he’s come down with the flu. There’s something going around. He has a condo in the Annex—and that place is haunted. I’ll host, but I don’t enjoy the limelight.”
There was no problem with traffic, and they had a parcel of time to kill that iPhone games and pocket novels had been designed for—a time best spent alone. Instead, Grossman suggested sushi. “Most of the sushi places here are run by Chinese, but this is Japanese,” Grossman told her. “Not that that matters,” she added quickly. “I live two blocks from here. My father and I come here all the time.”
“Do you two live together?” Tso asked, as she signalled the waitress for more tea.
“Yes and no.” Her father owned a large house that had been divided into apartments decades earlier. Since he was over eighty years old, she had taken on property management on top of her work as a guide on a city bus tour and volunteer for the arts community. “Downstairs in the house is a commercial space that used to be a corner grocery store. Across the hall, there’s my dad, and I share the upstairs suites with a tenant. I have the biggest place—until recently, I was living with my spouse.”
She let that last statement sit as she dipped her sashimi. People always wanted to confide in Tso, who considered a response. She decided to check the time on her phone. Finally, when that piece of sashimi was completely tanned in soy, she nodded and said, “My fiancé and I split up early in the year.”
Grossman’s face took on an energy that wasn’t there before. “It’s the worst, isn’t it?”
This woman probably meant something else by worst, Tso thought. It hadn’t been that bad, especially on the road. She could block Markus’s e-mails and he hadn’t yet learned her new cellphone number. He hated air travel, so the distance had made her feel safe. “I’m still processing it,” she said.
“It is a process.” She repeated, “Pro-cess,” Canadian-style. “Janet moved out six months ago.” Hi, we’re Janet and Janice, Tso thought to herself. “I called her so much in the first month that she changed all her information. Eventually, she wrote me a letter. And then two more letters. I haven’t opened them. Since she wanted more space, I figure I needed more time.” Grossman asked for the bill. “We should go. I’ll tell you more about it at the party.”
The converted porn theatre was entirely respectable, even with the vintage nudes in the bathroom and the old marquee above the bar. This would be the “fun” event, the one that brought her to the city early; another, more mysterious obligation paid much more and justified her extended trip. Tonight’s event was conducted like a lecture series with talks to be given by an embalmer and a spiritualist, as well as two others besides Tso. Grossman was, as promised, a jittery host, whose remarks tended to crumple in mid-sentence. Tso was saved for last. She felt like a jukebox, able to recite her speech, even the ad-libbed moments, as though it were etched into her throat.
As she gave her remarks, pausing for chuckles, a parallel talk took shape in her mind. This was the book I wrote after I volunteered for six months, writing down life stories at a hospice, she thought, but I got a nice book advance—one I had to burn through to pay for the lawyers to throw a legal firewall between me and Markus—and the marketing manager told me to tell funny stories about the mummies of the Atacama Desert to make you feel comfortable about turning cemeteries into picnic spaces and taxidermying your pets. This is one of the reasons Markus used to say I was crazy.
She got through the talk and signed forty-six copies of her book. This was pleasant. People spoke to her as though they’d read her book; they edged toward her like they were at a high-school dance. Their opening remarks felt rehearsed in their heads but not in their mouths. They posed for photos with her.
Tso watched Grossman strike down the stage and move folding chairs into the back room by herself. She meant to help, but one of the readers had bought her a glass of wine. The group of attendees, a dozen of them, had already been invited to Grossman’s reception, and they all piled into cabs. Tso was pulled along. They arrived at a big house with an abandoned grocery store on the main floor and a side door with three separate mailboxes next to it, each one a different shape and colour. Grossman hadn’t come back with them, but they pressed her buzzer. When there was no response on the intercom, another person in the group knocked on the door. An older man answered promptly. He had the same frizzy hair as Grossman, but he was bald on top and the hair cascaded from the sides of his head. This—and the buttoned-up pyjamas he wore—gave him the appearance of a mad inventor.
Someone that Tso recognized from the event emerged from a door upstairs. “Come on up!” she told them. Tso watched the group dash up past Mr Grossman until she was the only one left. The door was still open to his ground-floor suite.
“Where’s Janice?” he asked, tightening the collar of his bathrobe. His blue eyes were small, hooded, downturned.
“She’s on her way, Mr Grossman.” She held out her hand. “I’m Megan.”
His nostrils flared as he looked at her hand. He bunched his collar more tightly. “Janice told me about her party,” he said. “Tell her she needs to check on Far-head. He’s still behind on rent and November is coming around. I never wanted to rent to him. And you know what? That doesn’t make me racist. I’m a good judge of character.” Without another word, he turned back into his suite.
The lecture was unexpectedly pleasant, but she’d reached her half-life of fun. The party upstairs wouldn’t have exceeded the delight she’d have unpacking her tightly crammed suitcase and slipping on her pyjamas. If only I didn’t have the wrong bag. Back in the hotel, she wouldn’t even be able to run her toothbrush across her teeth.
Grossman appeared at the entrance carrying a bag of ice under each arm. “Oh good, I was worried you’d left,” she said to Tso. “I’ve set everything up.”
“Do you always show up late to your own parties?” Tso asked. She followed her up the creaky steps.
“Who else is going to get ice?” she replied.
“I met your dad,” Tso said as they reached the landing. The door had been locked, and Grossman rapped on it and waited patiently to be let back into her own apartment. “He mentioned someone named Far-head?”
“Farhad’s our tenant,” she said, looking across the landing to another door. “Dad doesn’t like him, mainly because he’s Persian. Plus he’s rude and is always late with rent, so Dad didn’t totally miss the mark. He didn’t even have references when he applied. I guess I shouldn’t have taken him on.”
Tso looked at Farhad’s door. On it a piece of loose-leaf paper was stapled that read: Let this be over by nine. It was already nine-thirty.
“Why did you rent to him in the first place?”
“No one else would,” she said. It sounded like she’d heard this question before.
A party guest let them into Grossman’s apartment, which was lit entirely by what seemed to be an assortment of scented candles. Tso offered her shoes to the pile that grew by the door. Grossman threw her jacket on an air mattress in her bedroom. The apartment was ample but half-empty. Tso saw a home full of missing objects: a space where an armchair might have been placed, a vacancy on the kitchen counter from a displaced coffee maker. The heavy and severe curtains belonged to a night person.
At the kitchen table, Tso loaded her plate from a mezze platter and filled her plastic glass from a box of red wine. The Best of Leonard Cohen was playing on iPod speakers. In the living room, the dozen or so death enthusiasts sat in a circle on the floor, their eyes closed.
Tso thought they were conducting a séance, but it was a game of Werewolf that had just started. She’d played this game before; it was called Mafia when she participated, but it was essentially the same. The game’s narrator asked the two werewolves to open their eyes. Next they pointed to the villager they wanted to “kill.” Then the village doctor opened her eyes and tried to guess the next victim and save them. She failed. When this was done, all the participants were asked to open their eyes. “Dawn has broken,” the narrator said. “And there has been another casualty in the village.” Everyone else had to guess who the werewolves were.
Accusations, misdirection, and disavowals ensued. People have fled their homelands to escape such conditions, Tso thought. Anything can be passed off as fun and every nightmare must be play-acted afterward. Tso only editorialized when she was in a bad mood.
“I would have sat out this game even if they’d asked me to play. There’s too much tension.” Tso hadn’t noticed Grossman standing next to her. She held a glass of punch that was filled to the top with the ice that she had brought to her own party. The way she held the glass, at chest level, seemed to suggest she was holding it for someone.
“Is it hard to get a cab from here?” Tso asked. “I’m feeling the jetlag.”
Grossman said she would call one for her. “But first I need to tell you the rest of my story.”
She grabbed Tso’s upper arm and led her to an alcove with a computer. It was a quieter place to relate her woes, as “Suzanne” wafted in the background.
Tso was not particularly forthright about her own feelings. Friends described her default expression as haughty and disdainful, and yet people always confided in her. First, she asked questions (in order to avoid talking about herself). And she never passed judgement; to offer approval or criticism felt like overreach. For those who had guilty consciences, like a group of grave robbers she’d once interviewed in Arizona, she granted absolution. Their unhappiness was externalized into a paper ball, and she was the waste basket.
This was Grossman’s story: She had met Janet for the first time twenty-five years ago, when Janet was still in middle-school. “I was her camp counsellor,” she said. “I made sure she went to bed on time and was wearing enough sunscreen.” Grossman had recently come out and wore T-shirts that celebrated her newly acknowledged sexuality: one had a rainbow flag on it, another featured an illustration of Gertrude Stein. The morning after Parents Welcome Day, she was called in by the camp administrator, who suggested she make wiser sartorial choices. In a fury, Grossman quit.
When she met Janet in a bar nearly a decade later, she neither recognized nor remembered her—that came later. What drew Grossman to Janet was her strong nose, dark unruly eyebrows, and a resting downturned mouth—features that would age well. “She looked like the younger version of a portrait that might hang in a haunted house,” she said. “She seemed mature beyond her age, but she was being herself.” They had, Grossman admitted, a blisteringly sexual relationship in their first couple of months. “It was hot,” she said. “We were two people used to getting sex twice in one week and then living off the crumbs of those memories for another eight months until our next opportunity.” They bounced between hostels and beachside campsites in Mexico for two months. Then Janet fell ill with Lyme disease, and they grew closer during her recovery. Grossman loved caring for her. She even considered training as a nurse, but she didn’t want to go back to school.
Janet, however, still wanted to learn. She was a painter, and Grossman supported her through her MFA. She deferred her own creative dreams for her wage-work in tourism. Grossman’s father needed to be cared for, so they arranged to live with him. This saved them enough money that Janet no longer had to toil as a teaching assistant. By watching YouTube videos, Grossman learned how to fix leaky faucets and replace toilet bowl stoppers. After the corner store downstairs was closed, Janet used it briefly as a studio space, but the light was poor, and it was like trying to see to the bottom of a bowl of chicken broth.
At the beginning of the year, Janet’s career had broken through to find an audience. After nearly two decades of painting, she won a major award, was profiled in an influential glossy magazine, and found a New York dealer. It all came at once. “In some ways, she no longer needed me to care for her. If we were eating out, I didn’t have to pick up the tab,” Grossman told Tso. “But then there would be a deadline for a big show, and the dealer was a shark who would drop her if she flopped. Her anxiety levels peaked. So she needed me more. However, now she resented it. One time, the day before one of her openings, we had a big fight because I wanted to wear the same suit I’d worn for her last show. When the exhibition turned out be a hit, she apologized. She moved out a few days later.”
Unlike most of her contemporaries who explored mixed media and abstraction, Janet was a figurative painter. Her watercolours were inspired by both comic books and Mexican folk art, and her subjects were entirely young women—friends and family members in outdoor landscapes inspired by trips along the province’s north coast. Grossman appeared in a number of Janet’s paintings, but only as a stylized version of herself. She was painted in the Gertrude Stein T-shirt, but not in the way she looked when she was a camp counsellor. “My hair is asymmetrical in those portraits, but I didn’t have that hairdo until years later,” Grossman said. “Plus, I’m the only one who is fully clothed. Everyone else is topless or pant-less. It’s like she doesn’t want to imagine me naked. Either that, or she doesn’t want to show the world the woman who she saw naked.”
Tso shook her head. “I don’t think that’s what she meant,” she told Grossman. It’s exactly what she means. She realized again she was in a terrible mood.
Now that Janet was gone, Grossman said that she volunteered for many community arts events. “I’m taking a comedy course, too,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to try stand-up.”
Tso noted silently that Grossman had not attempted a single joke that night while introducing any of the presenters and that she seemed almost divorced from any sense of humour. Months later—when she had a standing order at a restaurant in Vancouver, when the city had been quarantined and she had seen people seriously ill—Tso remembered the restlessness of her first night with yearning. (She yearned for her agency.) By that time, she considered Grossman hilarious and endearingly damaged.
Someone at the party found Grossman and asked her to change the music to something more upbeat. Tso chose this moment to leave the party without a farewell. She crept to the front hall where she attempted to find her shoes from the bottom of the large pile. She took a picture of the shoes and would post it when she got home. She thought of a pithy caption: “This party is ghost-busted.” Once she was outside on the landing, she glanced across to the door of Grossman’s neighbour, Farhad Khan. The door was slightly ajar and the note had been changed.
I have killed myself, it read. Call the police. You do not need to see this.
The floorboards creaked as Tso inched toward the door. She could hear someone groaning. That meant he—Farhad—was alive. She heard a crash, the sound of feet, a body, and then the smack of a head hitting the floor. She jumped back. She would return to Grossman’s apartment and make her go in and see what had happened. Her heart outraced the lazy beat of the eighties party music that had followed Leonard Cohen. Tso spotted Grossman at the far end of the living room, her glass full of ice.
Tso needed to get to her, but the people in the room—and the jovial, tipsy mood within it—made that distance feel impassable. She edged around the wall toward Grossman as the game of Werewolf finally concluded. The remaining participants opened their eyes. The final innocent villager had been killed, and one party-goer, the remaining werewolf, still looked circumspect. “I warned everyone,” one of previously eliminated players complained. “But now we’re all dead.”