Dead for One

Truth be told, I was unimpressed to learn how similar death is to life. Woke up in an apartment that was a near-identical replica of the one I’d left behind, only to discover a "rent due" notice slipped under the front door. Discovered I worked at a dead-end job for an apathetic boss doing pretty much the identical drudge work I’d done in life, down to the same Manila file folders in my same gray cubicle.

The main difference was my coworkers. There was Chip, who’d died several years before in a head-on one rainy night, but most of the others were people I didn’t know. They didn’t seem to want to get to know me.

Although they mimicked the way my living ones had sounded. Gathered around the coffee pot, bitching about their roommates, or their mothers-in-law, or the traffic. Dear lord, the traffic.

I didn’t receive any type of warning or wake up call or explanation. I was just thrust into the thrum of the afterlife, stumbling my way into work like a zombie, returning home to the crypt in the evenings, watching brain-dead TV until I passed out on the sofa.

Then one evening, Harry came knocking.

Harry had been my best friend from elementary school through college, until at age 26 he’d killed himself over a girl. Harry was a loss I’d never gotten over, and the guilt I’d felt at not being able to save him had stayed with me until I kicked the bucket myself at 37 when a twinge turned into something inoperable.

I almost knocked him over with the hug I gave him. He looked the same. He looked like Harry with his open-collared shirt over a tee, and his cargos, and his beat-in sneakers, and the scar he’d gotten when he’d told me he could jump off the highest part of the playground structure, which he could and did, but didn’t stick the landing.

“Harry!”

“Dude!” 

I let him into my studio, told him to make himself comfortable, got the generic beer from the unstylish fridge. Everything in this afterworld was generic, I’d learned. I wouldn’t have thought that would be the way. But the grocery store was filled with items that simply said: sauce, beer, pasta, cat food. Turns out, there are a lot of stray cats in the hereafter.

“So how are you?” he asked, and he was the first person I felt really saw me since my end. “I mean it, George, how are you?”

“Well, dead, obviously,” I said, and I chuckled and reached for my crumpled pack of generic cigarettes. “Dead for one.”

“What do you think about the place?” he asked next, and he waved away my offer of a cig.

“Kind of… well… depressing.”

“You thought it would be what?”

“Different.”

“Different how?”

I exhaled smoke and “breathed in” (out of habit more than anything else), and then sighed and said, “I thought there would be more… angels.”

Harry grinned at me and said, “Dude, you never knew where to look, did you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You see what you see. But you don’t look beyond that. Try again tomorrow.”

“Try what? Try how?”

“Don’t look down. Look up.”

“I missed you,” I said.

“Yeah, I know.” He seemed sheepish. “I fucked up. But it’s okay. I promise, man. It will be okay. Trust me.”

The next day when I went to work I tried to remember what Harry had said. I looked up, and then stepped off a curb and was almost pasted by a gray taxi. I wondered what would happen if I died while dead. 

A woman gripped my arm and yanked me to safety at the last possible second, and then she and I just stood there for a moment in the shock you have when you survive a near-death-death experience. 

“Thanks,” I said.

“You gotta look where you going.”

“See, my friend said I ought to look up.”

“Did he say that while you were crossing the street?”

I shook my head. 

“Maybe he meant it like smell the flowers or spot the glimmers.”

“Glimmers?”

“You know those tiny moments of joy you can sometimes have in a dreary day.”

Other pedestrians were annoyed with us now because the light had changed, but we weren’t moving. She seemed to sense I wasn’t fit to continue on my commute, and she led me into a coffee shop and ordered us two Americanos and found us a seat in the window. “Name me the last nice thing that happened to you.”

“Before I…?”

“No, since.”

I couldn’t think of anything except the stray cat that had followed me home and was now living in my tiny apartment and enjoying generic tunafish twice a day.

“What’d you name him?”

“Cat,” I said. I’d thought it was funny. Everything being generic and all.

“He deserves a better name.”

She was right. He did. I’d been a wiseass. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Eleanor.”

“Have you been… here for long?” I wasn’t exactly sure what was acceptable in polite dead society. 

“Long enough.”

She had hazel eyes and hair the color of caramel, and there were freckles on her cheeks. She wore delicate gold earrings, and her dress was tastefully simple, pale blue with white flowers.

I checked my old Timex watch and realized I was going to be late, but I wanted to see her again. There were no cell phones, I’d discovered, but I did have a landline. I gave her my number so she’d feel no pressure. She could call me if she wanted. I thanked her for the coffee, and as I left the cafe, she said, “Remember. Glimmers.”

The rest of the way to work, I tried to find anything that sparkled. Most of the people I passed were as gray as I had felt. But then I noticed a pop of color on a woman’s jacket. She’d pinned a little red leaf to her collar. And when I looked up, I saw a sliver of blue in the uniformly gray sky.

Work wasn’t as depressing. I managed to finish one of the endless reports, and when I went to get a snack in the break room, there was a red mug amongst the gray ones in the strainer.

Back in my cubicle, I noticed a postcard pinned to the wall. It hadn’t been there the day before. And below it was a Polaroid of me and Harry.

That night, on my walk home, I saw some crocuses poking up on the edge of the sidewalk. When I walked into my apartment, Cat was waiting for me. I tried out a few new names, but he didn’t respond.

There was nothing on TV, so I went to the lobby and found a book in the free paperback shelf. As I was opening up my apartment door again, the phone rang. It was Eleanor.

“Meet me in the park,” she said. “We can walk around the lake.”

“There’s a lake?”

“I just found it the other night.”

We met up at the green iron gates outside of the park near my building. She said, “When I first… arrived, I walked past these gates every day without seeing them. Then one night, they were open.”

“I didn’t even know the park was here.”

Slowly, we started walking through the darkness, staying on the path. It meandered through a grove of trees and opened up to a lake. We stood in front of the water, watching the reflection of the moon rippling, and she slipped one hand into mine. 

“It wasn’t like this last time.”

“What do you mean?”

“The lake was… smaller.”

In silence, we stared, and then she said, “How did you…?”

And I shook my head and said, “I didn’t take care of myself. And you?”

She said, “Wrong place. Wrong time.”

In life, I might have pressed her. In death, I was starting to understand when to let things go.

We walked around the lake, and the water glittered, and the weight of her hand in mine was anchoring me somehow to the earth. Tethering me so that I didn’t fly away. We walked the entire loop, and then kissed by the gates, and she said she’d meet me at the same time.

“Tomorrow,” she said, and she stood up on her tiptoes to kiss me once more.

“Tomorrow.”

The next day, there were more photos in my cubicle, and the walls weren’t gray, but a subtle pale blue, the color of her dress, and there were more mugs in the cupboard of other shades, and when I sat in the break room, I didn’t notice people complaining as much. I heard one man talk about fishing, and a woman discuss a painting she’d seen at the museum. One she was trying to replicate with watercolors each evening when she got home. “I’m not very good,” she said, “but I’m learning.”

Harry was waiting for me outside of my apartment building after work. Harry said, “Did you take my advice? You looking up, man? The only way to see the angels is if you look up.”

“Do you want to come in?” I asked him. But he shook his head. “I got my own angel to find.”

At 8, I went to meet up with Eleanor. At first, I worried she wouldn’t show up. Maybe I’d dreamed her. But then she came down the block, her hair flowing, her dress tonight made of yellow silk like the inside of a daffodil.

The lake was bigger this evening. It almost felt as if we were standing on the shore of the ocean. In a cove. There was fine white sand and sand dollars gleaming. She picked one up, and blew off the granules, and slid it into my pocket.

We walked along the shoreline, and the bioluminescence twinkled and she said, “Is it what you imagined?”

And I remember telling Harry I had thought there’d be more angels, and now I’d found one.

“The thing is,” I said, “the thing is that even before, I’d…”

“You’d…” she prompted.

"I’d been dead for so long,” I told her.

We were on the path back to the gates now, and we walked together across the boulevard. She rode the elevator with me to my apartment, and she waited while I slid my solitary key in the lock and opened the door.

In the center of my studio, she kissed me, and the walls in my apartment turned pink, and there were flowers blooming on my patio, and my cat’s name was Jojo, and I didn’t smoke anymore. Out the window, the sky was midnight blue, and the taxis were bright yellow, and maybe I’d find a new job. 

And maybe I wasn’t so dead after all.