In some cultures, alluding to the dead is considered taboo. Even remembering them is forbidden. Above all, one must never utter the deceased individual’s name.
Now that I think of it, I have known a couple more people who’ve died. First there was Robert. It’s not like I knew him well or anything, but I did know him.
I used to work at this café in Santa Monica, Limbo, on Colorado and Thirteenth. This was the mid-1990s. I had moved to LA to be with this guy, Tim. The café doesn’t exist anymore, but it had burnt-orange walls and dark wood tables with green lamps and battered velvet chairs and sofas. There was a lounge upstairs, where bands played. None of them were very good.
This woman Katarina ran the place. She had white-blonde hair and claimed she was descended from the missing daughter of the last Russian tsar, the one people thought had escaped execution. There were all those impostors; I hear they found the tsarevna’s remains a couple of years ago. It was a good mystery while it lasted.
Katarina mainly hired foreigners—Russians and Israelis and South Africans and Poles; the accents were good for business. A few Americans worked there; Robert was one of them.
He wasn’t much older than me, three, maybe four years? Tall and sturdy, he had long, dirty-blond hair and pale-blue eyes and big features. When I describe people, I feel awkward, like I’m giving a missing persons report, which I suppose in this case is exactly what I’m doing.
Robert was handsome; girls were always hitting on him at the café, coming up to the counter and saying, Has anyone told you that you look like Brendan Fraser? It’s a dumb thing people do, using actors as a reference point, but all those girls were right; Robert bore a close resemblance to this actor. So close, that for a while he worked as a body double or stand-in.
I believe the difference between the two occupations is that a body double appears on camera, although his face is never shown, while a stand-in fills in for boring tasks that the actor doesn’t want to do and that will never be seen, like lighting setup. Robert was even a stunt double once or twice—I think he got knifed. Eventually they replaced Robert because they found someone who looked even more like Brendan Fraser, whose movies are all pretty forgettable.
So I worked at Limbo four or five nights a week, 8:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. I could never do that now. These days I go to bed early.
Robert and I did the Friday night shift. When I got there, he would be sitting at the counter, counting in the drawer. We would say hi, and not much else. He wasn’t much of a talker, and back then neither was I. I’m still pretty reserved. I don’t know what got me talking to you.
Unlike you, Robert made me nervous. He often had this sort of amused expression on his face, or bemused—I reckon those two states are connected. It was like he was keeping a lot in.
Apart from the acting, the only real thing I knew about Robert was that he used heroin but was trying to stay clean. That’s an important piece of information. Perhaps it’s the only thing you need to know. Like I said, Robert was quiet, so someone else at work must have told me.
We would close at three, and then there was all the cleaning to do: fiddling with the fixtures on the espresso machine and scrubbing the grill, bleaching the sinks, sweeping and mopping, and counting out the drawer. Robert did the money and left me to do the bulk of the work. It was a question of seniority. He would slip twenty bucks or so from the till. I’m not trying to soil his name. Just about everyone who worked there took money. It was the only way the job made sense.
By the time we got out, it was usually around four. Robert drove home. Or his girlfriend picked him up. She was Nordic; at first I thought she was his sister. He would give her a big piece of chocolate cake. Neither of them ever offered me a ride and I didn’t have a car so I had to walk down to Colorado and Third to catch the bus to the studio I was renting, in the basement of this old building on Ashland. I worked out a deal with a cab driver who was lonely and gave me free rides, but that came later.
Not too long after I started working at Limbo, that boy from UCLA disappeared. His picture was stapled to telephone poles all along Colorado. I took one of the missing posters down one night. The staples cut my finger.
I’ve forgotten his name but I remember his face. He was a good-looking kid, beautiful actually, short black hair, dark eyes, pale skin; he was dressed formally in the photo, in a black suit with a white shirt and black tie, the kind of suit you would wear to a prom or a funeral. He had a pure smile. His picture was on my pinup board, but at some point I filed it away.
I suppose I should have been slightly anxious, walking around by myself late at night in a foreign city, near a neighborhood where a boy had recently vanished, but for some reason it didn’t overly concern me.
Robert got the bus with me, once or twice. He must have had car trouble. He sat in front of me, listening to music on headphones. I wish I could remember if we talked about anything on the way to the bus stop. It was ten blocks, so we must have talked about something. Who knows; maybe we didn’t say a word to one another. We didn’t want to intrude on the quiet.
I mean, have you ever walked around Santa Monica at 4:00 a.m.? It’s so empty. Like being in outer space, if outer space had gas stations and 7-Elevens and homeless people curled up in doorways. There was one guy who lived a few doors down from the café. He didn’t have legs, well, not complete ones. His legs ended at the knee. He had these cheap-looking silver prosthetics, but I never saw him wear them. He kept his silver legs neatly beside him. Everyone else was sleeping, but he was always awake.
That was my routine, or I should say our routine, for a few years. Then one Friday, I came into work and Robert wasn’t there. The Hungarian girl, Reka, was counting in the drawer. Katarina was dropping off some supplies. I think I commented on the fact that Robert wasn’t working and Katarina gave me a strange look.
“So you didn’t hear?”
“Hear what?”
“Robert died.”
That’s about as much of the actual conversation I recall. Katarina filled me in on the details. Robert’s girlfriend had gone out for the night, to stay with her parents, and Robert stayed in. When she came home the next day, she found Robert lying on the living room floor. He had OD’d. It seems he wanted to shoot up one last time, before he kicked dope for good. Just like all the others who want one more taste. His death was a question of either quantity or quality. He had shot up too much, or the stuff he bought must have been too strong, too pure.
I sort of understood why Robert . . . risked his life to have that experience. I tried dope when I was a teenager, just a couple of times—I tend to get hooked on things that have no substance, but I could see the appeal. The hype was fairly accurate; the effect was like bliss incarnate—once the puking was over. Like floating in the warmest, darkest sea imaginable, down in Hades or wherever. The nearest you could get to Death’s rapturous oblivion, without the drawback of being stuck there. Coming down from the rush and that all-consuming sensation of . . . serenity—or do I mean stupefaction?—was like dying and being reincarnated, albeit into the same old worn-out self.
Still, I didn’t believe it. How could Robert . . . stop, vanish, just like that? This was the emotion that overwhelmed all the others: disbelief. Is that even an emotion? Sometimes I get mixed up, trying to distinguish between my thoughts and my feelings. After Katarina told me, I started my shift. Everybody talked about it for the rest of the night. Did you hear, did you hear?
Katarina had a memorial for Robert at the café the week after he died. There was a good crowd, mostly staff and regulars. Robert’s mom and girlfriend came; they sat together on one of the couches. I considered going up to them to convey my condolences. They were both very . . . subdued.
Memorials are odd occasions: people talking solemnly, laughing warily. At least at a funeral there is something to see, a corpse, or its reduction, even a casket; something material.
There was sadness floating around the room, but there was also an undertow of . . . excitement, the thrill, the flutter that accompanies the self-destruction of a fucked-up young man.
A few people spoke, but the only one I remember is Robert’s aunt.
“Don’t check out,” she said. She was standing behind the counter, near the cake display case. We should assume she was wearing black. “Robert checked out, and all I can tell everyone here,” she said, looking around, “especially those of you who are young and struggling with life, is don’t do what Robert did. Don’t check out.”
This would have been 1998, August or September. Somehow, as I listened, I felt like Robert’s death was an essential part of a decade that was nearly over, a late-century thread of young icons annihilating themselves—River Phoenix collapsing outside the Viper Room, Kurt Cobain blowing his brains out in Seattle, Richey Edwards probably jumping off the Severn Bridge in Wales, Jeff Buckley accidentally drowning in Wolf River, repeating the fate of his father, Tim Buckley, who was around the same age when he OD’d in the 1970s—so I guess every decade is a perfect time for the young to self-destruct.
Even though Robert wasn’t an idol or a public figure, the aunt’s words made quite an impression on me. Some words can do that. I’ve checked out frequently in my life, more than I care to remember, in more ways than I want to go into right now, but not permanently.
That afternoon I felt like I was part of something. I never feel that. Most of the time, it’s like I’m a body double for myself, or a stand-in, and the real me is off . . . somewhere else. I’m experiencing this sensation right now with you. But at Robert’s memorial, I felt like I was there.
A couple of days after the memorial, I had a little dream of Robert. Dreams are a chance for the dead to say hey, to let you know how they are. I had come to work, and Robert was counting in the drawer. The espresso machine was acting up; dark, wet espresso grounds were leaking everywhere.
“I thought you were dead,” I said to Robert.
He looked up from his counting and began to explain that he hadn’t died; his girlfriend had. There had been a mistake.
I was about to say that was it, that’s all I have to tell you about Robert (it’s not much, barely worth the telling), but I should mention something that happened a few months before Robert died. I wasn’t going to, but I feel like I can tell you almost anything.
I ran into him by accident; actually, I found myself at his apartment. I . . . well, basically, I hooked up with this guy. I haven’t done that in a long time, but I was restless when I was younger. I suspect I still have this restlessness inside me.
The guy lived in West LA, just off Venice Boulevard, in this pastel apartment complex. He was small and pale with black hair; he looked like the kid from UCLA, though not exactly, more like his brother, but there was something unusual about him, something . . . illegible in his dark-brown eyes.
Toward the end of our encounter, he looked up at me. “Want me to finish you off?”
I wasn’t going to say no, but as he asked, I heard those words that had on every previous occasion been magic to my ears and for the first time ever I took them literally. When the guy swallowed me, he made a strange noise, guttural.
And it occurs to me now that when we die, when the world . . . swallows us, it’s possible we’ll feel intense pleasure, and, by extension, the world will also find the event of our death pleasurable. The world’s pleasure might be even greater.
Afterward, the guy wouldn’t let go. I had to practically . . . detach myself from him.
I left in a hurry and was feeling a bit jumpy, when whom should I run into, right outside the door, but Robert.
“Alistair?”
He looked confused. I must have looked confused too, though I couldn’t see my own face. He was holding a dustpan and broom, like he had been doing some cleaning.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
I said I was visiting a friend. But you know how in hookups you don’t use real names? I gave him the name the guy had used, and Robert appeared to be even more mixed up. Then slowly, he got it.
“Oh, you mean Piotr?” There was that smile of his again.
“Oh yeah,” I said, trying to wrangle my way out of it. I was startled. All my life I’ve felt I have to keep things hidden from everyone. As though I have these secrets that can’t be revealed to anyone. Not that I know what my secrets are; most of them are concealed from me. Nevertheless, I sense this confidential material has changed over time and today is of a different nature.
But Robert was cool. “Hey, I’ll walk out with you.”
He went inside his apartment for a moment; he didn’t invite me in. The door was ajar and I could see the place was very neat. A crème lounge. A glass coffee table. A glass dining table, some Impressiony prints, though I could be making that one up. Then he came out with a garbage bag and walked me down.
I’ve thought about that encounter a lot. In all the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of pastel condos in LA, I end up in the apartment next door to Robert. What are the odds?
I’m probably reading too much into it—I do that sometimes, see magical connections, find significance where there is none—but it reminds me of that Poe story “The Masque of the Red Death,” one of my favorite stories as a kid. I haven’t read it in years, but I seem to recall a prince holding a masked ball in his castle. There’s a plague going on, so he has this party to take everyone’s minds off death. His guests arrive and his servants bolt the doors, but Death finds his way in. Death comes disguised as himself. Everyone thinks it’s a terrific and gruesomely realistic costume, but when the prince tries to rip the intruder’s costume off, there’s nothing beneath it, pure formlessness. The prince drops dead, along with all his friends.
It’s like Robert was holed up in his condo, hiding out, then Death turned up and his own death began. But wait, that would mean I’m Death, so ignore what I said. Our encounter means nothing; there’s nothing beneath it, raw chance, pure formlessness.
While Robert was alive, I worried that he might talk about me at work. But then Robert died. I think I felt a shred of relief that he took my secret with him.
Maybe that’s why we bury people deep in the ground, to keep the things they know about us locked away. Or better yet, we cremate them, and at the same time burn this information.
Perhaps we should still be worried about the dead, the dirt they have on us. Perhaps we should be even more concerned about the dead than the living, what they know, the intimacies they could use against us.
Robert’s been dead for almost thirteen years. The café’s been closed almost as long. I hadn’t thought about it in ages, but then I saw Katarina on the street the other day. She had the same white-blonde hair. I pretended not to see her and I don’t think she saw me, unless she was also pretending.
Anyway, seeing her reminded me of Robert. His funeral was on a boat. I had a prior engagement, but I remember Katarina told me his girlfriend sang the Kaddish beautifully; she didn’t know she had such a lovely voice. Robert was cremated and scattered at sea, in the Santa Monica Bay.
How long do you think it took for his ashes to disappear? They must have floated for a while, before the fish got to them, with their unblinking eyes, their mouths in a constant state of opening and closing. Robert’s ashes must have drifted before they settled in the bellies of a thousand fish. Like Jonah in the whale, but dispersed and distributed among sea creatures of various shapes and sizes, all over the Pacific.
Thirteen years, that’s a considerable length of time. I wonder how Robert feels about his scattered state? Most likely, he doesn’t feel anything; there’s no trace of Robert anymore, but bear with me. Does he miss the world and its requirements? Does he miss doing boring activities like cleaning? Did he acclimate to nothingness quickly, or did it take some adjusting? Was he at home immediately; was the void what he wanted all along? I mean, how long does it take to get used to being nothing?