34

ME: Who do you see there?

YOU: Why do you want to know?

ME: I’m curious.

YOU: You’re not jealous?

ME: No. I was never jealous. I don’t have a jealous bone in my body. Have you met anyone famous?

YOU: A few, but not many. The unknown dead outnumber the famous a trillion to one.

ME: Who then? Tell me.

YOU: Janis Joplin.

ME: Why? You were never a Joplin fan.

YOU: I didn’t want to meet her. I simply met her. Death is like life. You cannot anticipate what happens.

ME: So what’s she like?

YOU: Short. Much shorter than I ever imagined. And confused. She spends her time looking for her mom, whom she adores. But Ma Joplin is tired of Janis and hides from her.

ME: What about people we knew? Do you see our friends?

YOU: Oh yes.

ME: Who?

YOU: All of them. And more. Guys whose names I never knew.

ME: Allen?

YOU: Yes.

ME: Stan?

YOU: Of course.

ME: Cook? Ethan? Danny?

YOU: They’re all here.

ME: Phil Zwickler? Vito? Bob Chesley? Bob What’s-his-name, the actor with the two-toned ponytail? Charles Ludlam? Tim—not Craig’s Tim, but the other Tim, the Tim whose boyfriend died soon after he did and whose name I can never—

YOU: Tim Scott?

ME: No, he was a painter. This Tim was an actor. He produced the terrible plays his boyfriend wrote before they both died.

YOU: Whatever their names, they’re all here. Every last one.

ME: And you hang out with them?

YOU: Not anymore. The first two or three years I saw some of them regularly. Especially Stan and Danny. We were what we knew. We wanted to finish telling our stories. We needed to compare notes.

ME: Notes on what?

YOU: At first we talked about hospitals. It was like those awful parties where businessmen talk about their least favorite airports. But what we mostly discussed was what it was like to “pass over.” The fear, the pain, the exhilaration, the relief. We all needed to tell that tale, even though we were afraid we were full of clichés. It’s the dead person’s answer to the coming-out story.

ME: And how people treated you? Do you talk about that? Who loved you, who didn’t? Who was kind, who was cold?

YOU: There you go again. “What do the dead think of us?” The living are so biocentric.

ME: We think about you. We want to believe that you think about us. Even if you think about us badly.

YOU: The rules are like this: You have to think about us, but we don’t have to think about you.

ME: Hardly seems fair.

YOU: Death, like life, is not fair.

ME: But you don’t see our friends anymore?

YOU: No. I used to see everyone, then only Stan and Danny, then we grew tired of each other. Eternity is a long time. So I started meeting people I didn’t know in life but had wanted to meet. Like Anthony Reisbach.

ME: Who?

YOU: A beautiful kid at school. I didn’t teach him—he wasn’t smart enough for advanced math—but I noticed him. Sweet, apple-cheeked jock, soft-spoken and graceful. He drowned in a swimming pool the summer after he graduated.

ME: You were never a chicken hawk.

YOU: No, but one’s tastes get more diverse in eternity.

ME: Are you in love with him?

YOU: The dead don’t fall in love. Not in the way that you mean, lust and obsession. I enjoy his company.

ME: But you told the truth when you were alive and said you never fell in love with any of your students?

YOU: I told the truth. They were such babies. You would have heard about a crush if I had one, Cal. I always told you about each and every man I ever lusted after or tricked with.

ME: I’ll say.

YOU: Don’t pout. I never rubbed your nose in it.

ME: But you weren’t shy about it either.

YOU: I wanted you to know that it was only lust, only sex. Our love stopped being about sex long before I got sick.

ME: I know. I’m sorry.

YOU: Don’t apologize. I liked sex more than you did. It’s as simple as that. And there was too much other life between us. It crowded out the sex. You gave me enough love in other ways.

ME: I have to ask. Is there sex in death?

YOU: That’s funny. I’d made a bet with myself that your first question would be: Are there books in death? Libraries? Can the dead read?

ME: I’ll get to that. But is there sex in death?

 

Caleb looked up from his notebook. The rain beat against the casement window. The traffic slurred in the street far below. The lamp cast a halo on his desk. He tapped the eraser end of his pencil against his mouth. Should there be sex after death?

He didn’t know what he was writing here, if these night thoughts were therapy or a verbal exercise or useless nonsense. They definitely weren’t art and would never become public, although his sense of craft could not stop him from revising and improving sentences. Last night, when he wrote the first pages, had been eerie and exciting, not eerie like ghosts but like what he had felt when he was sixteen and wrote his first paragraphs of pornography, creating bodies out of air and words. He returned to the spiral notebook tonight feeling slightly guilty, like a kid who was about to jerk off. Writing and sex and necromancy were hopelessly tangled together.

But should the dead have sex? He didn’t know. He decided to skip it. In his head he heard Ben toss out the next question.

 

YOU: When you remember me, do you think about the sex?

ME: Very rarely. Or no. Never.

YOU: How then? What do you remember?

ME: Strange. I’ve never sat down and tried to remember you on paper like this.

YOU: So try it now. What do you remember?

ME: Your smile. I know it sounds sappy, but the first thing I remember is your smile. Like when you laughed at a good joke. I knew you were happy, which made me happy, and the world was right with itself.

YOU: I’m like the Cheshire cat? Everything has faded except my smile?

ME: Don’t put words in my mouth.

YOU: Why not? You’re putting words in mine.

ME: Fair enough. But I remember your smile first because I’d prefer not to remember some of the other things.

YOU: Like?

ME: Your bad moods. Your bossiness. Your bully tendencies. Your habit of playing the schoolteacher even at home.

YOU: But you liked being bossed.

ME: Sometimes. I liked having someone make my decisions. So I could save all my thinking for my work. It wasn’t good for me.

YOU: You should’ve bossed me back.

ME: Maybe. But it wasn’t in my makeup. I thought you were so tough and wise and together.

YOU: I wasn’t.

ME: No. But I didn’t know that. Not until you got sick.

YOU: We don’t have to talk about that.

ME: You want to avoid that, don’t you? Because you were embarrassed to be sick. Humiliated. I remember the first or second time you were in the hospital, before we knew it wasn’t a onetime thing but was going to be our life for three years. And you shit on yourself. Big deal. So what? You were in your hospital gown. You couldn’t get to the bedpan and you let out a squirt. Bright orange—

YOU: Don’t!

ME: Shit. Highway-safety-orange shit. You got a splash on your nice argyle socks, and you went nuts. It was like the end of the world. You tore off your socks and told me to throw them, toss them, you never wanted to see them again. As if that would solve anything.

YOU: I wanted things to be clean. I needed things to be orderly.

ME: You were afraid of confusion. You were terrified of mess. Which was why you loved math. And Bach. And Japanese food. But you contradicted yourself, Ben. You taught math to teenagers. And you loved me. Who was a total mess. Emotionally, physically, mentally. You scolded me like I was ten years old, about leaving papers around or needing a haircut or not changing a dirty shirt—

YOU: You miss me, don’t you?

ME: Of course I miss you. Why else would I be wasting my time on this stupid writing exercise? I thought I could write myself out of my bleak mood, but it’s not working. I’m tired of being sad, I hate myself for being unhappy.

YOU: Why do you think you need to be happy?

ME: Aren’t we supposed to be happy? Isn’t that why we’re here? We’re obligated to be happy like we’re obligated to succeed. Happiness is the point of life. Are the dead happy?

YOU: We transcend happiness. Unhappiness too.

ME: Wait a minute. “Why do you think you need to be happy?” I know that line. It’s Osip Mandelstam. His wife quotes him in Hope Against Hope. They were sent to Siberia by Stalin. They were feeling suicidal, and Osip told her, “Why do you think you need to be happy?”

YOU: Death is a kind of Siberia. But you get used to it.

ME: No. Not that. What I’m saying is that you didn’t make it up. You’ve been reading over my shoulder.

YOU: Yes. And you read such gloomy books. No wonder you’re depressed. You need to lighten up. You should go to the movies. Or the theater. See a nice comedy. I hear this new musical, Tom and Gerry, is very funny.