Dead is Better (2 page)

Two plain-clothes police officers with matching salt and pepper mustaches who texted on their cell phones throughout. I’ve never seen them before.

My accountant.

The office manager from the family business, Lena.

My senile neighbor, his wife and his daughter-in-law, who must have come because the neighbor can’t drive anymore.

My hypochondriac cousin Sheila.

My barber, Tony and his ex-wife.

Margarita, my cleaning lady and her son.

Two coyotes.

The rabbi, provided by the cemetery, was a scarecrow of a woman wearing thick brown shoes. At the gravesite she recited the Kaddish as if she were addressing toddlers, first in Hebrew, and then in English:

Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di-v’ra chirutei, v’yamlich malchutei b’chayeichon uvyomeichon uvchayei d’chol beit yisrael, ba’agala uvizman kariv, v’im’ru: “amen.” Y’hei sh’mei raba m’varach l’alam ul’almei almaya. Yitbarach v’yishtabach, v’yitpa’ar v’yitromam v’yitnaseh, v’yithadar v’yit’aleh v’yit’halal sh’mei d’kud’sha, b’rich hu, l’eila min-kol-birchata v’shirata, tushb’chata v’nechemata da’amiran b’alma, v’im’ru: “amen.” Y’hei shlama raba min-sh’maya v’chayim aleinu v’al-kol-yisrael, v’im’ru: “amen.” Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol-yisrael, v’imru: Amen.

***

Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world,

which He has created according to His will.

May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days, and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen.

May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.

Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He,

beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

He who creates peace in His celestial heights,

may He create peace for us and for all Israel;

and say, Amen.

“The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.”

—Socrates

***

Suffering is finite.

The dog’s dry, fissured and muddy paws tell me that in life they touched nothing clean or green, lolls on her back in the freshly-mowed cemetery grass behind my brother, who is the first to take the shovel and drop chunks of the Hollywood Hills ceremoniously upon my casket. I study the backward looks bestowed upon the box under the dirt inside the hole that would have been full of abundant peace but for the angry hiss of Friday traffic on the 134 Freeway. The dog looks at the sky.

I learned some things at my funeral:

The thing about suffering.

That the dog isn’t going anywhere.

That my death was “a shock,” “terrible,” “tragic,” but not the details that made it shocking, terrible, or tragic.

That I’ve been dead for 24-48 living hours—Jews must be buried quickly.

I remove the rope from the dog’s neck and see where it has worn away the fur.

In the mourners’ faces I had detected neither triumph nor grief.

Oh, and the cops don’t have any idea who killed me.

“The present life of man upon earth . . . [is] like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter . . . The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.”

—The Venerable Bede,
Ecclesiastical History of the English People

***

The dog and I are outside the hall all right, somewhere between what is, what was and what will be. If you, the living, are the sparrows then the dead are the shadows of your wings.

Did I mention the boyfriends?—director of development at a private university. The chiropractor/nutritionist who works on the Kardashians. Not the girls. The mother. The pot doctor? The jock who owns gyms? Calling men in their forties and fifties “boyfriends” feels wrong but that’s what they are to my four exes.

I’ll just say the exes have moved on nicely since the divorces. They live in catshit yellow faux Tuscan villas or fake castles outfitted with bidets, pot fillers, and butler’s pantries that require an army of undocumented workers to maintain. Their men have their own exes and stepchildren whom they bring along to cabins in Arrowhead and mid-century modern Palm Springs palaces filled with Jonathan Adler ceramics. They play tennis and golf. They even fucking ski.

My ex-wives, they looked good. As if in shedding me they’d stepped out of fat suits they’d been wearing for a party. Some fucking party.

“The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,

Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars

Letting in the light, peephole after peephole—

A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.”

—Sylvia Plath

***

Here, knowing is free. In life, everything costs.

You’re probably wondering why the accountant to a fat-ass nothing like me would drive all the way from Montecito for a Friday afternoon funeral in Glendale. The answer is Happy Andy:

Happy Andy. As in (and feel free to sing along with me):

The Happy Andy Show, the most popular kiddie series in the early fifties. Happy Andy lunch boxes and thermoses, Happy Andy plastic Colt .45s and plastic horses, Happy Andrea Cowgirl Dolls. Happy Andy Action Figures, costumes, fringed leather jackets, cowboy hats, then Happy Andy Foods—Happy Andy Pops and Happy Andy Candy (milk chocolate balls with puffed rice and marshmallow centers), and Happy Andy Cereal (milk chocolate balls with puffed wheat and marshmallow centers); Happy Andy Yogurt, Happy Andy frozen Mac & Cheese, Happy Andy Juice Boxes; and Happy Andy Take Anywhere Cheddar Cheese Balls.

The Happy Andy brand has a half-life longer than uranium, emitting money and fueled by the animus of my late manic-depressive, paranoid, stingy, cruel, egomaniacal, man-, woman- and child-hating bastard of a father, Happy fucking Andy, the Jolly Rodeo Clown.

“We should keep the dead before our eyes and honor them as though still living.”

—Confucius

***

Is everyone who dies assigned a companion? I’ve heard of spirit animals, but there’s no way this gentle, graceful, beautiful skinny creature could be meant for someone like me.

The dog sits quietly. I don’t mean usually, I mean all the time—if we’re somewhere where time matters or exists. As if something is about to happen.

For all I know we’ve both been here for centuries, she sitting, me standing next to her, the person or persons who killed me in their own timeless otherworlds. Her calm, sweet brown eyes are open, and she’s always looking, though there’s nothing to see—at least with my dead eyes. I can tell she’s got something she’s thinking about or contemplating—a Buddha without a tree, much less a gingko, to piss on.

Could it have been for money that I was killed? There have always been shitloads of Happy Andy bucks to go around—in trust funds, from the buildings on Wilshire, stock, the house and vineyard in Napa, a house in Santa Barbara, the Manhattan apartment, the condos in Scottsdale, the movie theaters. Enough for my father, who wanted to be a mathematician, not a fake rodeo clown with a puppet and a miniature accordion. Enough for the exes, the parasite stepchildren’s private schools, tutors, horseback riding lessons and college funds. Enough even for the boyfriends, the pool men, the plastic surgeons, landscapers, decorators manicurists, personal trainers, private chefs, etc.

Enough for my mother and that snake, my former business partner. Even enough for my brother.

“Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.”

—Leo Tolstoy,
War and Peace

***

I need to figure out what happened to me. Maybe that’s why I’m here.

I can see before. And I’m up to my ass in the after. But the dying and the arriving here involve information unavailable to me—at least right now. I wonder if it’s the same for the dog.

Is she thinking, too, about how she died and when?

As she rests her chin upon her paws, her face is sweet, kind, intelligent, thoughtful, and inscrutable. I suspect she’s trying to figure shit out or waiting. But for what? Maybe she’s wondering what she did to deserve me.

I discovered that she likes her forehead scratched. Sometimes she rolls over to expose her gaunt belly for a rub. She doesn’t seem uncomfortable, but I wish there were a way I could fatten her up.

How long does it take a dog to die without food or water? How long for a man to starve to death? I read that the IRA hunger strikers took 20 or so days to finally die. How long does it take to bleed out, to die from a bullet or from loneliness or failure?

The dog rolls over and holds me in a sad and serious look.

I realize that for her the days are not exactly numbered and that dying must have taken what felt like a very long time. Hunger. Thirst. Then numbing cold and weakness. And the worst must have been the sensation of being absolutely forgotten and alone.

I was far luckier in death, I can tell. I’m wearing street clothes, not a hospital gown. My shirt is unbuttoned but I’m wearing one. I think it’s safe to assume that my brain didn’t go first and it didn’t take months or years for the rest of me to go. That’s how my mother went and I do not recommend it. My father died all at once, like a flower blooming in reverse, folding back into his then frail self, becoming something small, hard, seed-like, oozing brown urine, fighting for air. All this on the morning of my mother’s funeral. You’d think having made her life hell, he’d let her go. But out of malice or habit or some kind of twisted love, he followed.

“Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person’s life its true meaning.”

—Paulo Coelho,
The Pilgrimage

***

The beautiful dog beside me is dying proof that nothing goes justly, peacefully or kindly. Everything is royally, magnificently, thoroughly fucked up. I’m sure I’m mucking things around right here right now. Not that there are any “things,” or any “now,” but you know what I mean.

The same force that instills our cells with life makes them cancerous. The qualities that make us love someone eventually limit them and deaden us. My four failed marriages and abortive “careers” in—real estate, the FM Jazz station (KBop), the dating service for atheists, and being Senior Vice-President of AndyCo.—show me that we don’t make mistakes—we are mistakes.

“Call no man happy . . . until he is dead”

—Herodotus

***

My nothingness became complete the moment I gave in and joined the family business. I was a loser working for his wildly successful father, then for his brilliant older brother.

If it wasn’t for money that I was murdered, then why? Resentment?

Why go to the trouble of killing a failure, a nothing?

Above us jets roar in and out of LAX. If we were visible, we’d be shadows blurring the entrance to AndyCo.’s “world headquarters”—not a total joke, but come on—the “world” seems unaware of this nondescript silvery low rise that seems, in early morning haze, to be constructed of blocks of smoggy sky instead of glass and steel. Out of nowhere a skateboarder with his baseball cap on backwards and wearing a backpack and iPod ear buds clatters right through us, producing in me the tiniest of tiny shivers—but does not interrupt the dog’s composure. She’s like a still pool into which you can throw stones as long as you want—no ripples.

Look where you’re going, asshole, I yell. Fuck you!

He doesn’t hear me.

That guy would have killed us if we’d been alive. Shit.

We are not blobs of ectoplasm that float around the living like spectral jellyfish. We are something else, maybe something electromagnetical—that’s what it feels like, anyway. Whatever thought or pain is made of—that is what we seem to be. Still, I wish there were some grass for the dog. There isn’t. Just those lunar white landscape rocks piled around the elephant-skin trunks of three anemic palms. There are gum wrappers and cigarette wrappers on the rocks, even a crust of hot dog bun. The dog ignores them.

The dog looks in the direction of the parking lot entrance. My brother Mark arrives in his black Ferrari, and straddles the parking space marked “Reserved for President M. Stone” and the one next to it (“Reserved for Vice President C. Stone”—that’s me—Charles Stone) occupying both. I watch him pull his tall self in skinny jeans and dark shirt (My mother was slender and tall, my father was short and fat. I’m sure you can guess by now which one I resembled.) from the sleek, low vehicle, then reach in to grab his bottle of SmartWater and a briefcase. He walks gracefully, on the balls of his feet—he has his own Bikram Yoga studio built into his home in Benedict Canyon—to the glass door, unlocks it, and steps inside the building.

A moment later a blue Nissan Leaf pulls into the lot and parks two spaces over. A young African American woman in a linen black pantsuit and shiny blow-dried brown hair gets out. Don’t know her. She also has a briefcase, but hers is on wheels. She follows Mark inside. The dog trots to the middle of the parking lot, lies down and shuts her eyes. I follow, then stand next to her wondering if Lena and the others will soon arrive.