But I no longer want to disappear. Not when it seems so many people have forgotten me. Not when nobody knows my name.
Maybe Death Club is my chance too, Ruby.
My chance to be remembered. To have people know that I was here.
Here. In New York City.
To think Ruby and I both thought this was the adventure. We really had no idea.
FOURTEEN
DEATH CLUB WAS FORMED AFTER LENNIE FELL, BRIEFLY, IN love with a man. Josh was a tall, dark and handsome journalist doing a feature on the mortuary for a popular magazine, and he was especially interested in Lennie’s reconstruction work. He followed her around on the job for the better part of a week, and there was something about the direct way he asked his questions that made Lennie’s heart bounce out of rhythm. She found herself noticing his ever-dilated pupils and the white moons of his fingernails and the flat of his front teeth, and the specificity of these observations confounded her. Josh was definitely not her type—her last lover had been a petite hula-hooper she met at a burlesque show in the East Village—but there was definitely something buzzing between them. Or so Lennie thought, until she realised what she was really attracted to: Josh’s intelligent curiosity, and his respect not just for his own work, but for her work, too. As they talked about their respective careers, discussing the way he told stories for a living, he suggested her job was to un-tell stories, wind her dead bodies back to an easier time, and perhaps that meant they were coming at the same thing, just from different locations. It was the most thoughtful description of her work Lennie had ever heard, and she knew she wanted to keep this man and his way with words in her life.
‘I’d hate to think the most interesting thing about a person, what they’re remembered for, is how they died,’ she said at dinner after Josh’s last day at the mortuary, which is when her new friend shared his secret with her. A few years back he’d nearly died himself, after a bike accident in Central Park left him with a broken neck and severe concussion. He’d spent weeks in hospital; for a while, it was touch and go as to whether he’d walk again. Though he’d since recovered physically—‘Clearly,’ he said to Lennie that night, patting his legs—something about how he experienced himself in the world had fundamentally altered.
‘Sometimes,’ Josh admitted, ‘I struggle with the fact that I survived. Have you ever heard of Cotard’s Syndrome?’—Lennie shook her head, no—‘Well, it’s quite the trip. There are people out there who think they are in fact dead. Living, breathing people who feel certain they have shuffled off this mortal coil, and they cannot be convinced otherwise, despite … well, despite all evidence to the contrary. People with this delusion essentially think of themselves as walking corpses, the dead amongst the living, and no amount of reasoning can change their minds. It’s a fascinating condition, but also terrifying. Because, since the accident, I’ve sometimes wondered if I’m not something of a walking corpse myself. Dead on the inside, you know?’
As Josh shared this startling confession in his matter of fact way, Lennie’s quiet, bird-boned neighbour fluttered into her mind. She had known Sue for years now, ever since the older woman’s Persian cat had claimed Lennie’s couch as her own, one windows-open afternoon. They were almost friends, close enough to share a wine or two on warmer nights, but up until now, Sue had steadfastly refused any overture that might formalise their relationship. Gallery openings, cheap Tuesdays at the local oyster bar, food festivals down on the water—Sue said no to every activity Lennie suggested, and then one night she said something more.
‘I’m sorry but I don’t live in the world like you do, Lennie. Not really. When my daughter died’—a car accident nearly twenty years ago, Lennie knew minimal details at the time—‘the best parts of me died, too. No one wants to spend time with a corpse, and rightly so. I’ve learned to do things on my own, and now I prefer it that way.’
Sometimes, you just know what is needed.
‘I have someone I want you to meet,’ Lennie told Josh that night over dinner, and she told Sue the same thing, the very next day. Exactly what to do with this coupling came in the middle of the night, when she remembered a man at the mortuary who had just lost his daughter, a young woman Lennie worked her magic on, carefully erasing gunshot wounds and finger marks, so that an open casket might be possible.
‘I don’t understand what this means, where she’s gone, and why I can’t go, too,’ this father had said to Lennie, sobbing into her shoulder. ‘God doesn’t answer me. And none of my friends will look me in the eye, let alone talk to me. Who am I supposed to talk to now?’