You were right about one thing, Clive: Much as we like to think of ourselves as hydraulic elevators, we are traction elevators. A traction elevator is beholden to outside forces, like electricity, which the elevator requires to move itself up and down. In a functioning elevator, when the power is lost, there is an electromagnetic brake that gets automatically released. The brake stops the cab of the elevator. In a functioning elevator, there are inspections. Maintenance checks. Code standards. In a functioning elevator, the cab of the elevator has multiple ropes that prevent it from falling should the brake fail as well. It is not, say, an oversized dumbwaiter suspended by a single rope and maintained by a loopy teenager with a dishrag.
I popped my head off Max’s shoulder.
We locked eyes and jumped down from the platform in unison.
Once in the atrium, we saw glass everywhere, spilled across the floor as if the building itself had been holding a stack of it and tripped. The elevator door had automatically opened when the cab hit the ground. I gasped. Max put his palm over my face but released it when he realized there was nothing to see. No Wicked Witch shins flopped out on the marble, though two heavy brass pieces had spun out and scratched the marble floor, like it was a car that had been keyed. But there was no blood. No parts, not of you at least. You were inside the wreckage under a jumble of metal and glass.
We all die facing in a final direction, even if we are confined to beds. Perhaps with the exception of certain circus performers, who are afforded the opportunity to die spinning. You died facing east, toward the river. Apparently, it was painless. You hit your head when the elevator dropped, which knocked you unconscious. By the time you were smothered by your own creation, you were already gone. I know all this to be true. Still, it’s hard to believe in a painless death. There is pain, it’s just that your body doesn’t have time to dwell on it.
I don’t know why you came back or when. By the time the police retrieved the security tapes, all footage older than forty-eight hours had been automatically erased. Vadis knew I wasn’t coming in. Max was headed home and you had no plans to meet. Your army of fanatics didn’t convene in the middle of the night. None of us were supposed to be there. Had you forgotten something? Were you fighting with Chantal? Did you know I was there? Maybe you died satisfied that your scheming had been, in some roundabout way, effective. Maybe you just loved what you’d built so much, you woke up in the haze of the city’s small hours, desperate to crawl inside.
You ran out of money. That’s the other thing that happened. Zach couldn’t believe how much money you had and he was right. It was not believable. Your investors had cut you off and you’d burned the remnants of your war chest on apps and crystals instead of tedious little details like wiring. You were personally bankrupt, financially overextended. You were in the process of putting your apartment on the market. You’d borrowed money from Chantal. You were extorting obscene membership fees to defray increasingly absurd expenses while you held investors at bay with false promises about biofeedback that didn’t amount to much. Turns out that, despite all that glorious free labor, cults are a bad business model. In the traditional sense. You’d never in your life had something not work out, not had events break in your favor. Then the Golconda itself broke.
So now, on top of mourning you, I am left to explain the ridiculousness of your death to you.
Your official obituary was as dry as the coroner’s report. The picture they ran was from an old editor’s letter, the somber one of you sitting at your desk behind an actual human skull. It could’ve been worse—you could’ve been holding the skull. But for the tabloids, you were a dream: Guru Glenn Gets the Shaft. Cult the Red Wire. Glenn of Iniquity. And the saddest one, somehow: Clive in an Elevator. Here was the event for which the gossip world had been unconsciously waiting: A privileged dick had gotten what was coming to him after hoodwinking investors and viewing the world’s philosophies as his personal tapas bar. Even you have to admit you were an easy mark, a Fitzgeraldian figure with a horrendous carbon footprint. The media had a field day, trying to piece it all together before they lost interest. And yet, vicious as the papers were, you got off easy. I mean, not easy easy. You’re dead. But I imagine part of you, the old part, would have enjoyed seeing your name in the inky pages of local papers, exploding from sidewalk kiosks once more. That’s the part of you I will always miss.
But I missed it when you were here.
Clive 2.0, who died early that morning, should find relief in the fact that the Golconda never went public. Financially or physically. All the Google searches in the world wouldn’t reveal anything about who the members were or anything about me or Max. Even the business cards didn’t have words on them. All anyone knew was that your mutant clubhouse had killed you, Ex Machina–style. And they knew that much because of Chantal. She posted two photos within a day of your death. The first was from the night you went to see Hamlet, the two of you smiling with your Playbills as if they’re college diplomas. So many broken-heart emojis, rippling out as they do when a heavy stone is dropped into shallow waters. Then she added a stealth photo she’d taken during her tour.
I’m in it, actually, but just my elbow.
Errol arrived before the paramedics and the cops. He tried to maintain an air of professionalism, but he was blotting his eyes with a pocket square. Max and I took one look at his face and helped him get everything incriminating out of there. All the binders and folders, all of Jin’s equipment, all the tapes. Well, almost everything. Max shoved a laminated menu up his shirt. Errol could not do the same with the coffee machine. That was sold at auction, along with the furniture.
The Golconda would not become a nightclub. It would become an office space—several office spaces, actually, occupied by mid-tier companies, none of which I’d ever heard of. It would be used by people who’d never set foot inside the place when it still resembled a temple. The Magritte painting went back to whoever had lent it to you, to be hung on some private wall where it would no longer be imbued with nefarious meaning, where it would just be a rich person’s prize, its men floating, unaware, as they’d done for generations.
And here’s what I really wish I could tell you, because I know how much you’d enjoy this part: Amos, Willis, Dave, Jonathan, Howard, Cooper, Oscar, Aaron, Phillip, Knox … I heard from every last one after you died, their avatars popping up in little circles on my various screens. None of them called, I didn’t know any of them well enough anymore for that. But also, none of them knew me without you. Even if they knew me before I knew you, they had an inkling that I’d worked at the magazine, that there might be a connection. They were sorry for my loss.
I thanked them, said you were special, and hoped they were having a good summer thus far. Xo. Some of them, the ones with whom I hadn’t even interacted, reported that they’d just been thinking of me when they heard about what happened to you. Wasn’t that strange? They’d seen something that had made them want to reach out again. A song had come up on their playlist, a photo on their feed, or the wrong book had been sent to their home. They’d already forgotten whatever it was that triggered those thoughts, but what were the odds? What were the chances?
Your funeral was Vadis and Zach’s first date. Vadis loves her drama and her rituals, Zach his morbidity and solemnity. I suppose they are both living in preparation for tragedy, just in different ways. A funeral might be the only setting in which they thrive as a couple. It’s too early to say. Zach put his arm around Vadis, and Vadis smacked it away out of habit before apologizing. She’s working on affection. Maybe she got something out of the Golconda too. Maybe it worked on her the most.
And maybe you know all this already because you saw it. Who knows what the dead know? It behooves the living to maintain a one-way street of curiosity. We want to know everything about you, but pray that you are not watching when we’re picking at and rubbing ourselves. But I hope you heard Vadis speak. She was eloquent. Zach made a big deal of telling everyone how he had not helped her with the speech, which she had to explain to him was just as bad as telling everyone he’d written it for her. She said that we should try not to think about what we had lost but that we were lucky to have known you at all. Your loyal servant until the end.
I avoided your ex-wife, whom I’d never met. I don’t think she knows who any of us are. Over the years, you got very good at dividing your life into quadrants. She brought a friend for moral support, hugged your mother, kissed your coffin, and left. She was beamed in from a different time. Cherubic, good-natured, and collegiate, she represented a former version of you. A black cardigan clung to her ass and she wore lanyard jewelry braided by a child. She pulled her hair back when she kissed your coffin. It made me think of her in college, blackout drunk, holding her own hair back over a toilet. Maybe you helped. What a sight it would’ve been to see you at twenty! Your first wife fell for baby Clive, who was surely ambitious, even then, but who could’ve been a congressman or a professor.
Chantal avoided your ex-wife too. She was near catatonic in the corner. Though, I will say, when she could speak, she made sure everyone knew about the beauty conference in Europe that she’d pulled out of to be there. There were other women, too, women I didn’t know. In the end, there’s one surefire way to pull one’s exes into the same spot, one package that never fails. It’s free but it’s permanent.
Errol distributed packets of tissues to anyone who didn’t bring their own. He was obsessed with the tissues. It was his way of maintaining control. He also put “reserved seating” signs on some of the chairs, but no one wanted to sit in the front row, not even the celebrities, who congregated in the back and never took off their sunglasses. Jin is the only one who cried. Really cried. She understood that you were gone at a point when no one else seemed to. Maybe because of her own history, because of her dad and the hunting knife and the garage. She cried like she knew what death meant.
I held it together until the reception, where I felt, for the first of what would be many times, supremely paranoid. Like maybe I’d be shoving quiche into my face and a ghost from my past was going to pop out at me on a spring. Anytime someone approached me to talk about how great you were, I found myself looking over their shoulder. It didn’t help that you were right there, only a parlor away. Eventually, I told Max that I had to use the bathroom. He nodded and kissed me on the cheek, pinching a strand of hair from my dress.
“Go,” he said, watching the hair drift to the ground, “go say goodbye.”
I slid the dividing doors closed behind me. There were flowers on top of you, arranged in a long bouquet like a fleur-de-lis. Someone, probably Jin or Errol, had crammed a single bird of paradise in there. I heard your mother and the funeral director talking logistics in the hallway. I pulled up a chair and spoke, at eye level, with your coffin. But I didn’t know if I was talking to your head or to your feet, so I moved the chair once more, splitting the difference by addressing your torso.
“Fuck you,” I whispered, just to see how it sounded.
I wanted to be like Jin, to understand your death so immediately, but I was not like Jin. I was starring in a play about a girl who goes to a funeral. The velvet curtain would be closing soon and then what? I’d have to leave you at the theater.
“It didn’t work,” I said.
But this was a lie. The Golconda did work, just not in the way you intended it to. You thought I could be cured by confrontation. But the past is too deep a hole to be crowded out by the present. I think, if closure exists, it’s being okay with a lack of it. It’s to be found in letting the doors swing open, in trusting that if hinges were meant to be locks, well, then they’d be locks. You brought Max and me together, which is what you wanted, for me to choose the future instead of having it choose me. Somewhere, buried beneath those layers of delusion and capitalism, was a generous thing you did.
So shines a good deed in a weary world.
It’s funny, the night before last, I was cleaning the apartment and found a whole pile of Modern Psychology back issues. I’d saved them even when I didn’t have a byline, just because my name was on the masthead. Vadis’s and Zach’s names appeared too, farther down the pile. One of the issues was from early in your tenure, when you were still contributing to the magazine, and it included my favorite story you ever wrote, about the sociological implications of island burial practices. Because places like Turks and Caicos aren’t getting any wider, the majority of their residents get buried on top of each other with a layer of dirt between the coffins, up to five per plot. Every few decades, a groundskeeper digs up the whole thing, takes out the bottom coffins, and chucks the remains back into the ground. It’s Death Tetris.
Do you remember this? The magazine ran a photo of a leathered groundskeeper leaning on a shovel, looking like he couldn’t care less about you following him around all day, asking him questions. He explained that most people on the island spend their lives looking at the person next to them at the market or bus shelter, knowing there’s a decent chance they’ll be buried one on top of the other. But the question the magazine asked—the question you asked—is how would you treat other people, knowing the next person you see could be burrowing holes into the back of your head for eternity? For the most part, it deepened the sense of community. But there was also a “see you in hell” undertone to it all.
The groundskeeper told you about the hurricane that blew through years prior and flooded his burial plots. Coffins got mixed up in the mud, and the old groundskeeper, his incompetent cousin, had managed to put half of them back upside down. Strangers were not just lying on top of each other but facing each other. It was ages before they figured it out.
You called me from your hotel while you were working on this story. I was so excited because there you were, in this pink-sanded paradise with an ocean-view suite, where you could be with anyone, talking to anyone, but you chose me. It was some hour so late, it seems possible they don’t make it anymore, and I could hear the sound of the ocean, beating against rocks. At one point, you picked up the hotel phone to order room service. I found it intimate, listening to you ask a stranger for something you wanted, being so regular. That was the height of my romantic feeling for you (it was all downhill from there). But I remember wanting to tell you right then that I loved you, wanting to address the tension. Even if you denied all emotions and nipped all confessions, I would get more out of talking about it than I would by saying nothing.
But the moment never presented itself. You were going on and on about the groundskeeper, about the upside-down coffins, about the unremarkable buzz of death.
“It’s just skeletons,” you read from your notepad, quoting him, “all skin gone, all muscle gone. All memories gone. It’s man skeletons and it’s woman skeletons and they almost the same.”
Then you flipped the notepad closed.
“And that, my friend,” you announced, “is the kicker.”
I worried it might be too morbid, even for a piece about death. It might upset advertisers that we could not afford to lose. It might also upset Modern Psychology readers, who, let’s face it, were already subscribing to a magazine called Modern Psychology. They had come for insight and practical tips and perhaps did not want to read about floating bones. This came out harsher than I meant. I was mad at you about a conversation we’d never had and never would have. At first, you didn’t say anything. Then I heard you slide the screen door open, walk onto your balcony, and light a cigarette. I listened for the ocean, to know I hadn’t lost the connection.
“Lola,” you said, as if you were already looking into the future, “sometimes people just need to be told what they want.”