From this lament, the seeds of Death Club were planted.
We’ve each had our noses pressed up against death, Lennie wrote in her proposition. It’s this great big mystery, yet it clearly dictates how you—how we—live, at the same time. Maybe if we got to know it a little better, tried to understand it, we might find a way to break through the glass that separates life from death.
And who knows what we’ll find on the other side.
The other side. The place where you make sense of things. Where a daughter can die, and a body can return from the brink, and another comes in on a gurney, and people continue to wake up and eat and sleep and dream and love and fight and cry and conspire, as if their turn will never come.
Lennie finished off her earnest invitation with the same Poe quote she would send Ruby many months later, and an entreaty: Come explore the boundaries with me, please. It gets lonely out here on my own.
Isolation makes everything less strange. You find yourself agreeing to things you might otherwise scoff at when you are someone who has regular plans on Tuesday and Thursday nights.
‘I’m a misanthrope,’ Josh said.
‘I don’t want to meet anyone new,’ Sue complained.
But they agreed to that first meeting of Lennie’s so-called Death Club, all the same. The first question, explored over tequila at a bar on Bedford, felt like the click of a padlock releasing: Is death the end, or the beginning?
That was nine months ago. By the time Ruby sits down with the trio at an outdoor table on a tepid spring day near Central Park, the founding members cannot remember life without Death Club’s weekly, winding conversations. Neither philosophers nor debaters, these three very different people come with their questions and their musings, their common ground a place most other people avoid in polite, everyday conversation. Most meetings take the members far from where they started, and every meeting involves food and libations. In other words, the members of Death Club generally arrive sober and go home drunk.
（Perhaps the only thing they’ve never managed to agree on is the name—‘Death Club? Really, Lennie?’—but their founder has steadfastly refused to change it, which is something I can appreciate.）
‘Don’t expect anybody else to understand,’ Lennie advises Ruby with a smile, as she comes to the conclusion of Death Club’s origin story. ‘This is definitely not most people’s cup of tea. Not when we live in a culture that likes to pretend the most obvious things aren’t real if they’re the slightest bit unpleasant. Most people avoid talking about death, they find it confronting—or scary. And if they think they’ve found a way to reconcile their fears, through religion, say, they’ll go out of their way to shut down any questions that might threaten that safety. The only rule of Death Club, therefore, is that a hard question is more important than a simple answer. Until one of us crosses over and comes back—for longer than Josh did, sorry—all we can do is keep asking our questions, no matter where that leads us.’
Ruby is following along eagerly, albeit anxiously. It hasn’t helped that, since arriving at brunch, circumstantial evidence would suggest neither Sue nor Josh are particularly enthusiastic about her presence. While Lennie chatters away, Sue’s lips remain pressed together, and Lennie’s former crush barely looks up from his phone. Next to Lennie, they come off as clouds, drifting toward the sun, and it is only when a Bloody Mary is set down in front of Josh and he pounces on it, hands clasped around the tall glass as if in prayer, that Ruby realises he is in fact extremely hungover. Sue, on the other hand, is simply tired today. A lifelong insomniac, she was working online until 3 a.m. Meeting at this time, she says, feels like getting up in the middle of the night to eat dinner.
‘My apologies,’ she says to Ruby, when a series of small yawns overtake her. ‘I am not used to being out at this time. Unlike my companion here’—she nods her head at Josh—who probably hasn’t gone to bed yet.’
‘Well, not to his own bed, at least,’ Lennie adds with a wink, causing Josh to stick his tongue out at her, mutter ‘I wish’， and just like that, the table brightens, shares its first rays of genuine warmth.
How easy is it, Ruby will think later, back in her studio, to assume you are the cause of another person’s discomfort or disdain, when the reality is, we all show up with our night befores, our midnight hours and too-early mornings. She had forgotten that making new friends is one of those confounding things, like picking up a second language or learning the piano, that seems to be much easier done when you’re a kid. By the time people get to thirty-six—Ruby feels every inch her age for once—most people already have their friendships locked down. They have kids and partners and cousins and careers and mortgages that allow for kitchen renovations and a holiday in Fiji every two years. They have well-practised stories and roles to play, and any existential crisis they might experience is generally felt as a tremor, when Ruby’s experiences are more like large earthquakes, rearranging everything.