Dead is Better (4 page)

“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”

—Haruki Murakami

***

We’ve returned from Hollywood to our little corner of sweet nothingness here in Etherville. I sit cross-legged next to the dog, her head resting on my thigh. We both stare straight ahead into the blank unknown.

She likes her ears scratched, I’ve learned. So I am scratching the places where the fur looks short and downy. My bare left foot touches her fur—and I still expect to feel warmth, but of course, the dog and I are no longer warm. But she is soft and that is something. Funny that the tactile sense works here but not in the world of the living.

Death has a physics all its own.

Visiting my apartment told me some things: I wasn’t burglarized, then killed by a crazed addict desperate for something he could pawn for drug money—a scenario my family never tired of rehearsing for me, a first-floor resident of a seedy Hollywood flat who possessed neither a gun nor an alarm system.

“Death, in itself, is nothing; but we fear,

To be we know not what, we know not where.”

—John Dryden

***

After my parents died, Mark insisted on selling the house they’d lived in and in which we grew up. Our bedroom walls were covered floor to ceiling with murals picturing scenes from Happy Andy’s adventures, painted by studio artists and set designers who’d worked on the show. The kitchen, too, had murals and mosaics of Happy Andy and his pony. There was a large patio with a western-style bar, complete with swinging wooden doors. The house was off Laurel Canyon near Mulholland Drive, but on the valley side. In the fifties and sixties its four bedrooms and two baths (and one “powder room”—with lime green and brown wallpaper featuring lassos and cowgirls—) counted as a big fancy house, ranch style of course, a sprawling one story with a large kidney-shaped pool and a guest house out back that became my father’s office. The oaks—noisy with mockingbirds and scrub jays––were so huge that the pool man had to come three times a week.

After the sale, the trees were cut down and the ample lot divided into three narrow lots that now hold three treeless futuristic two-story stucco “residences.”

The dog would have liked that house, the large shady and green backyard, although I think that were she to return to life, she’d spend most of her time indoors. Right now she seems content with our deathy peace and to not be suffering—placid, humble, accepting of whatever is.

“Death will be a great relief. No more interviews.”

—Katherine Hepburn

***

My first wife, Julia is so unlike this dog in character—I was about to say “spirit” but even from this post-mortal vantage point, I still have no fucking idea what soul or spirit could possibly be or mean. Even if I am one or had one.

Which I seriously doubt.

Upon entering death’s kingdom, one is not given a mirror or a map. It’s get off your fat ass and muddle the fuck along—just like life.

Still, just to take the comparison to its conclusion, both the dog and my first wife are female, auburn-haired, delicate. Both have been my companion—but this silent dead, starved dog is more lovely, interesting and good than that warm, breathing woman could ever pretend to be.

In life, seeing, being around, or recalling my first wife Julia always put me in a black mood, a shitty funk that drove me to my dim apartment where I’d eat—swallowing my anger and humiliation as I swallowed my food—and listen to Tim Buckley—”I Must Have Been Blind”—and Jim Kweskin—”How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?”—The Chambers Brothers and Tim Hardin—and mourn the ratfuck that was our marriage.

The day our marriage died, Julia merely stopped speaking to me. After lunch that same afternoon—I remember it clearly—we ordered in corned beef and pastrami from Junior’s—I was served with divorce papers in my AndyCo. office—a public humiliation she’d engineered with the help of a lawyer my shit brother Mark had helped her find.

Our marriage was a ratfuck, did I say that? I did not become the person she thought I was going to be: thin, aggressive, important, cool—i.e. I did not become my shit brother.

If I could appear to Julia as, let’s say, Hamlet’s father appeared to him, literally the walking dead and wounded, still large, disheveled, and puzzled, a skeletal dog at my side—a weird canine Laurel to my Hardy—Julia would be neither impressed nor afraid, just smug and maybe a little bit amused.

For don’t the circumstances in which I find myself justify what she thought of me all along?

I was a failure as a living man. And so far I’m one massive fuck up at being dead.

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends and the other begins?”

—Edgar Allan Poe

***

The dog stretches out on her belly, her back legs extended straight behind her, her front paws under her chin, a foot above Julia’s white marble patio—as if to savor the coolness of the stone, but I know this is not possible. Maybe she likes the smooth look of its surface. Or perhaps she is thinking about something else.

Huge bougainvilleas vomit their pink against both sides of the peach-colored three-story faux French castle on a little manicured green hill above Sunset Boulevard from which I hear the traffic’s whisper and the angry buzz of nectar-drunk hummingbirds. I hover like a fat puff of steam above the dog.

A short woman in her thirties with coffee-colored skin and wearing a white uniform—Serena—opens the French doors. Julia, my shit brother Mark, Helen, my shit brother’s wife, the accountant, my cousin Sheila, and my lawyer walk right through the dog and arrange themselves around the glass table set with silver vases of orange and red and pink and white roses, and crystal pitchers of iced tea. They are dressed in light colors, as if for brunch at the beach, not a hot (I know it’s hot not because I feel it but because I see Serena dabbing her forehead with a tissue) morning in September.

Julia wears tight very white jeans that, from the rear, reveal a white thong, high heeled sandals that show off sapphire blue nail polish on her toes, and an oversized yellow silk shirt. Her red hair is pinned up in a loose bun and she wears sunglasses with rhinestones set into the rim. My shit brother Mark must have just come from yoga. His leather flip flops make sucking noises on the stone as he passes under me in sleeveless t-shirt and—get this—purple drawstring cotton pants.

The clown gene will, despite everything, express itself.

“No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.”

—Plato

***

I try to catch their murmured small talk, but am distracted by the dog, who suddenly ascends onto the slick and crowded surface of the glass table, among the glittering glasses and vases, just as a strong and gritty gust arrives from the hilltop, blowing leaves and dust into the pool. If I didn’t know better I’d think the dog had something to do with the wind, but that’s impossible.

The scene is like a double-exposure: what I realize now are the major stockholders of AndyCo. sitting around an outdoor table with a spectral dog superimposed upon their crystal glasses, flowers, diamond rings, shiny watches—a dead dog staring right in their faces if they could only see.

“Thank you all for coming,” Alan, my lawyer says. “I know a meeting this early on a Monday morning is highly inconvenient, but now’s as good a time as ever to go over Charlie’s estate, and MultiCorp has requested that the papers be signed as soon as possible to expedite the sale of AndyCo.”

“Was there anything about Charlie that
was
convenient?” Julia asks, then laughs.

If it were possible to redden in anger and humiliation, I would, but my deathly pallor is permanent—I haven’t the blood required to blush. And Julia has earned her laugh—she’s the only one of my ex-wives who received AndyCo. shares in the divorce.

I float closer to Mark, right next to the dog, and the glass table parts for me like butter.

“Charlie’s business is pretty straightforward,” Alan begins, looking through his file of papers. “ I couldn’t prevail upon him to make a will, so he died intestate.” Supreme dope-smoker Alan, my roommate at UCSB who only wanted to be an actor, instead joined his father’s law firm where his greatest role is to pretend to give a shit about his clients.

Intestate. Mark blinks as this little nugget of information sinks into Julia’s brain, and then a frown appears between her slender, manicured red brows. My cousin Sheila takes a sip of iced tea and stares at her watch.

“Because he declared no heirs, Charlie’s shares of AndyCo., and of the rental properties and other real estate holdings and family investments all go to Mark, his brother.”

Jesus. What a dumb schmuck I was. I didn’t expect to die. Not so soon. I am or was only 38 when I left that world and entered this one. And to be honest, I didn’t give a fuck. Or enough of one to think about leaving what was mine to KPFK or the UCSB English Department or to have had the energy to try to thwart my shit brother in death as he had thwarted me in life.

Another gust blasts the patio, rattling silverware, blowing loose leaves into the water glasses, and making the shiny green stone earrings tremble beneath Julia’s small perfect ears. The dog moves close to my lawyer, almost nose to nose. Luckily she isn’t breathing, or he’d feel and smell her gamey presence upon his just-shaved face and wonder if he were about to be kissed or bitten.

The wind is stronger now, and, I can tell from the way the palm trees at the edge of Julia’s property are bending, and from the way the living dab their damp faces, hotter. I realize a Santa Ana is blowing in from the desert, maybe even Death Valley, that will, before the living day is over, parch these hills and ignite the dreams of sleeping arsonists.

“The 2006 Volvo station wagon and the contents of the apartment at 1826 North Cahuenga also go to Mark.”

Someone titters.

“That just leaves the irrevocable trust.”

“What trust?” Mark asks. “I never heard about a trust.”

Alan moves some papers around and drinks some water, looking tired. “About six months ago Charles established an irrevocable trust, for a single beneficiary—” here Alan squints at the page, “one Señorita Luz Maria of Mexico City.”

Mark blinks again, but when he’s done, his eyes remain slits.

“Señorita?” Julia asks.

Alan nods.

“How much?” Sheila asks.

Alan looks down for a moment. A small teardrop of sweat travels from his forehead to his chin. “Two hundred grand a year.”

The dog’s tail is wagging now. If she were palpable, the thumps would be audible against the glass table, the silverware and glasses, even in this wind.

“Goddamn his fat dead ass,” Julia shouts, “He must have been fucking her, too!”

“Death is contagious . . .”

—Madeleine L’Engle

***

A brief silence follows Julia’s outburst. Even the wind fails. Mark knows who Luz is but his expression reveals nothing about her or the arrangement I made—without telling him—for her care. My cousin Sheila taps something on the keyboard of her cell phone, and Alan busies himself with distributing pens and papers for the assembled living to sign.

“Please sign and date—month, day, year—with your full name on the sections flagged. You’ll see there are 18 pages total and 7 require your signature, but there are four copies. Two for AndyCo. and two for MultiCorp.”

The living lift their pens and bend their faces toward the papers as if they have begun a difficult spelling test.

“And one more thing,” Alan says, loosening his tie. “As your family representative, I received a call from Detective Lee at LAPD about Charles’s fatal uh, incident.”

Did he say accident? Or incident? What does “incident” mean?”

Serena enters carrying a tray on which glistening berries, toast triangles, and sweating slabs of butter lay on delicate green china plates. She places the plates on the table and refills empty water classes.

Julia looks at her and says, “Coffee.”

“Detective Lee brought up the possibility that a reward posted by the family, a substantial reward, might help the police in their effort to gain information. Someone who knows something might be incentivized to come forward.”

“What about the gun?” Sheila asks. “Can’t they find fingerprints and other information from the bullets?”

Alan nods but looks at Sheila as if she’s a moron.

“Good question Sheila, but unfortunately, bullets don’t hold prints. I think you mean casings, but the police didn’t find any. Or the gun. The bullets removed from Charles’s body were distorted, but according to Detective Lee’s partner, Detective Sullivan, they came from revolver. A .32. Six shots at close range.”

I hadn’t thought about the holes in my gut until now. Six. That’s overkill, isn’t it? Whoever shot me wanted to make sure I’d never get up again. I study the living faces but their placid self-interested expressions remain opaque.

The dog sails from the table and drifts down onto the lawn like a butterfly or a feather, and then she begins to roll. There is a rustle of papers as the wind and Serena reappear, she with a silver tray holding coffee cups, cream and sugar, the wind with a filthy plastic bag that has risen from the streets far below us and positions itself in the thorny bougainvillea, then flaps around.

“The reward. How much? Five,” my shit brother Mark says. “Five” is statement, not a question.

Alan stands as he gathers the papers into his briefcase. “Fifty. Fifty might shake something loose.”

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”

—Oscar Wilde

***

There is no up or down. No here here. No molten center or electromagnetic north to guide or anchor me or the dog who sits in her watchful pose, her gaze planted firmly on my forehead, where the third eye would be if I had one. Which I’m sure I don’t.