The Deceased is a Total Asshole

“Oh, geez,” I say, peering into the open, empty casket. “So they never found his body?”

The grieving parents glare at me reproachfully. The mother is openly weeping and the father isn’t but his eyes are suspiciously misty.

“They didn’t,” he says to me politely. I want to laugh in his face but I don’t, because that would be rude.

“You sure he’s dead, then?”

Now he’s really glaring at me, so I decide it’s high time to beat it. I don’t really want to leave the premises yet, though, so I slink off into the crowd until my ears alight upon a conversation more interesting than the ones around it.

“I thought he said he wanted to be cremated,” the best friend of the deceased mutters. “He was always talking about, like— ‘oh, getting cremated is way cheaper than having a whole funeral, do you know how expensive that shit is? You might as well throw a fucking party and play pin the tie on the corpse!’”

“Did he really say that?” his girlfriend asks.

“He texted it to me,” his friend replies, and they both huddle over his phone to check it out. I peek over their shoulders; there the text is, clear as day.

I must be breathing too loudly, though, because his girlfriend turns around and stares at me with a look of bewildered confusion. “Um,” she says.

“Hey.”

“D- Do— I’m sorry, do I...” She’s looking at my face closely now. My eyes can’t help but skitter across her features slowly, like anxiety-riddled maggots. She looks nice. She used her expensive tube of lipstick. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to wear lipstick to a funeral, but damn if it doesn’t suit her complexion. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

My stomach twists disappointedly. I ignore it. “Probably not,” I say. “So, how’d you know the man of the hour?”

His friend is looking back and forth between me and her. He taps her shoulder and tells her to watch the video he’d just sent her. It’s a trick that would work on any other person, if I didn’t know it was a way for him to covertly send her a message under my nose.

If I had to guess, it’s probably something along the lines of, ‘don’t hook up with a guy you met at your boyfriend’s funeral’. I know I’m her type, but the idea sits weirdly with me. I worry my lip as her eyes flick over the words. She looks at him, and then back to me.

“Sorry,” she says, “But, um, this is... it’s for family and friends only, so...”

“I’m his classmate,” I say.

They both eye me suspiciously. I sweat a little in my rented suit.

“H- Honest.”

They whisper to each other more openly now. Shit. That old habit of never talking to anyone outside of class is seriously going to bite me in the ass now, of all times?

“Look,” I say, “I- I know that he went to the lake last week?”

They both stop and look at me.

“How do you know that?” his friend asks suspiciously.

I abruptly realize that was entirely the wrong thing to say, but now I’m stuck in this stupid hole I made and thus I have to keep digging it. “Because, like... fishing, y’know?”

“You know where my notoriously antisocial boyfriend went missing ‘because fishing’?” his girlfriend asks.

“...Yes?”

They both exchange a glance that tells me that if I don’t become one with the crowd in the next five seconds I’m losing my access to the venue, so I scram half-heartedly.

On the opposite side of the tiny yet crammed graveyard chapel is a gallery of photos I swear I have never seen before in my life. There are a lot of the deceased as a kid that are remotely familiar, but there are some I suspect must have been taken candidly, by other people. There’s one of him and his meagre friend group; his girlfriend, his best friend, and a third.

I make sure nobody is looking and swipe it. It fits neatly into my suit pocket, folded into a square. I head to the bathroom and rip the third out of the picture before flushing the scrap down the toilet— I only hung out with her because she was his friend’s girlfriend, but she’d always really creeped me out.

She was a goddamn social butterfly. The fact she could breeze through a conversation with anyone she wanted to always rubbed me the wrong way. She was so nice that it was hard not to hate her a little, or a lot, really. Maybe I was jealous. Maybe I am jealous now.

I stand in the stall for a while after the toilet finishes draining. My eyes are suspiciously misty, but I don’t cry. I don’t cry because my father has never cried, and I get the feeling he might be disappointed in me if I cried over something as stupid as this.

I look at the photo until I can bear it without tearing up, and then I shakily rip the deceased out of it and flush that too. I shut the stall behind me and don’t look back.

I run into the third when I leave the bathroom, because she’s leaving the women’s and I have shitty luck.

“Hey, Nickie,” I say to her, “How’ve you been?”

She looks right over me at first. I can see the blatant confusion behind the sweetness in her eyes when they finally lock on to me. “Um... Sorry, do I... know you?” she asks.

God dammit. “You might’ve forgotten,” I say bitterly. “I’m told I have a very forgettable face.”

She laughs. “Tell me your name? I’m super bad with faces.”

I tell her my full legal name. I can see the way it glides past her brain, past the parts of it that should light up when I say that sequence of syllables in that order.

“Sorry,” Nickie says genuinely. “Do you have, like, a nickname?”

I tell her the dumb nickname my friend group of three always uses for me and it shoots off into the abyss of her mind just the same.

“Yeah, it’s not ringing any bells,” she says, shaking her head sadly.

“It’s not your fault,” I tell her.

I must look as disappointed as I feel, or maybe my nose is still red, because she gives me a kind of pitying look and takes me abruptly by the hand. “This place is kind of out of the way, so if you’re here you were probably close to him, right?”

I feel like I’m about to vomit. I nod.

“Let’s chat, then,” Nickie says, and then she drags me outside of the chapel through a back door. “You seem pretty nice, and if you knew him you’re probably super cool. I’d like to get to know you better.”

I can’t see her face, and I’m terrible at reading people. For some reason I get the impression that she’s trying her best not to cry.

There’s a small garden in the back. It’s kind of ugly in the way I always liked. When I was younger my parents would always lug me to these big, sweeping botanical things and I hated them— but this is tiny and private and a little poorly-tended. Some of the tulips are blackening at the edges and it smells overwhelmingly of pollen and weedkiller.

When we sit on the rusty bench on the side of the path I’m trying my best not to cry, too.

“So,” she says conversationally, “How’d you meet him?”

My mind goes blank. “Uh,” I say, “We’re... related.”

“Oh, like... a cousin or something?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

“Huh. He said none of his immediate family lived near here,” Nickie muses, and for a moment I think I’m about to get caught in my worst lie of the night. “Did you move here for college or something?”

“Pretty much. H- How’d you meet him?” I ask. That’s what I’m here for, dammit. I’m not here to get these people asking about me— well, not the me sitting in front of them, anyway. I already know what they’re going to say, the impossible way any truth will slide off and away from their consciousness. “You guys close, or something?”

Nickie shrugs. “Oh, we’re just friends,” she says. “I’m more curious about you. I’ve known him for years and he was always super secretive and closed-off.”

“He’s pretty anti-social,” I say drily. “I’d know.”

She purses her lips. “I mean,” she says, “I guess.”

I glance at her. She doesn’t usually react like that. “You good?”

She straightens up and looks at me, blinking and wide-eyed. “Yeah, of course. Why?”

“...Nothing,” I say awkwardly.

We both sit there for a while. It’s the most silence I’ve ever experienced from Nickie in my life.

“Hey,” I say after a moment, “Can I ask you something kind of fucked-up?”

She laughs good-naturedly. “You knew him, right? He was always kind of a gallows humor kind of guy. I’m sure you can’t cook up anything worse.”

If only she knew. “Are you sure about that?”

She snickers this time, and finally looks over at me. “Come on, try me.”

“Well, if you say so.” I look away from her so that I can pretend she’s not watching me. “So, like, that lake he went missing at, right? Apparently there’s, like, some stupid ghost story centered ‘round there.”

“Really?” she asks skeptically. “Also, that’s not a question.”

“It’s context, dumbass,” I mutter, nudging her. She gives me a sort of weird look, but I can practically feel her chalking it up to the fact I knew her name and she didn’t. “But apparently up there there’s, like, this cabin. And it’s a pretty good fishing spot, right? Got a dock and everything, you can cast pretty far from there.”

“Sure.”

“But like, the cabin’s old as hell. And obviously the number one rule of horror shit isn’t to go into the old as hell spooky cabin, but—” I fumble a little, trying to remember the details. “But, uh, like, if you did go in there you probably wouldn’t realize that it’s haunted.”

“Obviously it’s haunted,” Nickie says. “Or a serial killer lives there. Or both.”

I hadn’t considered the serial killer angle before, and feel supremely stupid for not doing so. “I- I... I guess? Um, but like— if you— in the upstairs bedroom, there’s, like, if you were to go up there, hypothetically, there’d be this mirror.”

“Okay, what kind of mirror? Like, vanity sized, or...” She makes a motion that encompasses her whole body. “Full-body, or in between?”

I have to think about it. “Kind of framed with gold? Expensive-looking for sure. And it’s full-body, obviously. What kind of haunted mirror isn’t full-body?”

Nickie shrugs. “Just checking.”

“But, um, if you wipe the dust off it— and obviously there’s dust, because it’s an old-ass mirror in an old-ass cabin— you see your reflection.”

“...Because it’s a mirror,” Nickie says. I can see she’s starting to lose her patience. “That’s what mirrors are supposed to do.”

“Well, yeah, but he’s— but it’s got, like— your reflection, it’s got this sort of look in its eyes. Like it’s pitying you. Like it knows something about you that you know too, and it’s— like it thinks it’s better than you for being able to confront its own, like... patheticness, or something. And it’s kind of just looking at you all weird like that, with a kind of, this sort of— this sort of weird... externalized despair.”

She seems more interested now. “Wait... What do you mean by ‘externalized’?” she says curiously. “Like, it was always there, but the mirror is doing that sort of spooky ‘showing you your true self’ thing?”

“Um,” I say, having not wanted to consider the implications of that particular idea yet, “Maybe? I’m not sure. I think it was, um, that it was supposed to be like, this, sort of, this kind of projection of the soul. The spirit?”

Nickie frowns like the story isn’t really adding up, but she doesn’t interrupt, so I keep going.

“But, like, the you in the mirror just looks kind of miserable. Smaller than you are for sure. And you get a feeling that the way it’s looking at you is— it’s like watching someone do a line of crack in front of you for the first time, or something. Just— Just totally repressed disappointment, sort of watching them shove their life down the drain like that. And you know what it’s disappointed about because you’ve been disappointed about it too but you’ve been—” I have to take a breath. My chest hurts. “You’ve been trying not to think about it.”

“Okay?” she says. I’m totally starting to lose her.

I can’t stop myself now. “And you, like, you’re an asshole so you can’t stand this guy with your face looking at you like he knows any better, and you’re not really a violent guy so you think about punching him but you realize it’s a mirror made of glass, so instead you just try to wipe him— wipe it away like dust. Like the dust from before.”

I’m not looking at Nickie anymore. I don’t want to see what sort of expression she’s making. I’m starting to wish I never came to this funeral after all.

“And he just, he starts disappearing. Bit by bit by bit. You have to scrub at him for a while, and it takes like thirty minutes and you get a great workout and all, but it’s— it’s tiring. So, like, you just, you just drive all the way back home after and sit in your apartment for a while and do nothing.”

“Is this still about the lake?” Nickie asks, bewildered.

“It’s context, okay? I’m getting there,” I snap.

“A- Alright.”

“And the next day you get up and go to, like, you go to lecture and leave and when you get home you realize your professor marked you absent. And you go ‘oh, that’s normal I guess, I’ll just shoot her an email’. But then she emails you back like ‘you’re not on my roster’ and you’re like ‘what do you mean I’m not on your roster, you literally emailed me about my missing work last week’ but she’s totally forgotten—” My throat feels tight. “She forgot who you were somehow. Just over the weekend. Poof, gone.”

“...Sure?”

“And, um, like, and you keep reaching out to people you know, your girlfriend and your best friend and the like but they just, they don’t recognize you. They remember who you were, but they’re like— they can’t connect you to that person. It’s like you’re two... two completely different people.” I take a few slow breaths. “Y... Yeah.”

“And?” Nickie prompts.

I look at her, frowning. “And nothing?”

“That’s it?” she asks. “Wait, so what was the question, then?”

I look at her. I look at the garden, and at the chapel, and at the gravestones littering the ground nearby. I feel so choked it’s hard to breathe. The torn photo is burning a guilty hole through my pocket.

I don’t really know what to say.

“W- Wouldn’t that, wouldn’t it be, um, like... fucked up?” I ask.

Nickie looks at me with an expression I’ve never seen her make, full of genuine exasperation. “I guess?” she says. “I- Is that even really a question?”

I shrug. My face is red. “I- I guess not,” I say.

“What was the point of that?”

“Nothing, I guess,” I tell her.

We sit there in silence for a little while longer. Usually I’m the first one to leave, but this time it’s her. She doesn’t even say goodbye. I think she’s gotten fed up with me by now, which is fair. I’d probably have been fed up with myself. I am fed up with myself.

I touch the photo in my pocket. My mouth tastes bitter. I walk back inside five minutes after Nickie ditches me and flush it the same way I did the other scraps. I sit at the pews for a while and stare up at the casket.

It’s a whole lot of kerfuffle over a guy who hardly knew anyone. I seriously have no clue why any of these people bothered coming. It unsettles me a lot. I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.

Most everyone has left by now. The parents are still crying behind the casket. For a moment I think the father is still standing there all stoic but he’s not, he’s got the back of his hand pressed to his face and the mother is reaching out to comfort him and the scene makes my heart stop because I’ve never seen my father cry before.

Before I can stop myself I'm standing in front of him.

“Hey,” I say. I can see the irritation on his face at the sound of my voice. “Sorry about earlier.”

His expression doesn’t soften. He’s not a soft person, never has been. He looks softer with tears running down his face. His wife glares at me over the empty casket. I feel the overwhelming urge to crawl into it, but I can’t.

I want to say something more, like ‘I love you’ or something similar, but it’s too late.

“Well,” I say instead, “Have a nice day.”

Before they can respond, I turn away and walk until I’m so far from the chapel I can barely make it out amongst the graves. Holy shit. ‘I love you’? What the hell was I thinking? Thank God I hadn’t said that. It’d be creepy as hell to hear from a stranger at your son’s funeral.

Then again, it’s creepy as hell to be treated like a stranger at your own funeral, so… I’ve totally got it worse.