I will try harder next time.
See, Ruby didn’t recognise that Latin motto. Unable to translate the words, she had no idea it was a promise. But I know what it says, there on the wall above my dead body:
Let Conversation Cease, Let Laughter Flee. This is the Place Where Death Delights to Help the Living.
I do want to help the living. But I’m not yet ready to see where he goes.
They come for us all over this world.
Sometimes, if enough time has passed between one girl and the next, a city will be shocked awake when it happens. People will take to the streets with their signs and their anger, a crowd surge of protest and grief as they send a message across the town: We don’t want to be unsafe here. The police will tell women to be vigilant, to avoid certain places, they’ll tell men to make sure their loved ones get home safe from any place—because nowhere feels safe in those days and weeks after a dead girl is found. Women will push back hard against this, say, Tell men not to rape and murder us! Have stronger sentencing for violent crimes! We should not be the ones changing our behaviour here!
It might even seem that things will get better.
But after a while, the city will go back to its rhythms, it will once again become a place where women walk alone at night, and talk to strangers on the street, and only avoid certain places. That girl, the one they marched for, won’t be forgotten, but her murder will stop being a fresh wound, eventually. It will settle on the city like a small, ugly scar.
Then, when it happens again, the city will be tired. No one will march this time, or shout in the streets; their anger will be jaded, quiet. Flowers will be laid, and candles lit, but the death of another bright young girl will come more like a reminder from now on, an alarm clock ringing.
The city was already weary when her body was found.
Time and again they will come with their flowers and candles. From Mexico City to Madrid to Melbourne and Manila, these cities will be bone tired as they watch the flowers wilt and the candles burn down.
Here lies the pain of another woman, another community, the flowers and the candles say.
There is silence for a time.
And then the alarm sounds out again.
SIXTEEN
WHEN HE WAS THERE ON THE GROUND DYING, DEATH DID not feel like he thought it would. In fact, it didn’t feel like anything at all. Time-stamps across his movements that night show two and a half hours passed between him leaving the restaurant to the west of Central Park, and his bloody, confused stumble into a bodega on the other side, where the terrified clerk used Josh’s own phone to call an ambulance. He remembers the sharp pain of coming to in the park, the disorientation of tree roots and rocks and dirt at eye level, and the outline of a bicycle wheel, strangely twisted. He remembers how the pain came flooding in as he looked at that circle of spokes, a dam opening, nerves gushing. Soon, his arms were burning, and his legs were bright red flames. He could taste blood, see it, and though he couldn’t make his arms reach up, he knew there was something wrong with his head, something exposed and broken. Before that—there had been nothing. Up to two hours of black, as he lay on a dirt path and his upturned bicycle wheel stopped spinning and lights went out in apartments on both sides of the park. Phones were turned to silent, laptops were clicked shut; neighbours and his wife on East 97th rolled over to face their bedroom walls. All that time, he was gone.
As Josh recounts the story of his bike accident for Ruby, a muscle in his jaw twitches, betraying his impassive tone. She has been listening intently, can almost see the dirt and the tree roots and the upside-down, spinning wheel. What she cannot see, the way I can, is the man he was in the minutes, seconds, before the accident, how much lighter he was than the man telling his story now. Physically, yes, but something else, too. Josh’s heaviness comes from the way his body let him down after the fall, the way it refused to hold him up. With a fractured C3 vertebra—he places Ruby’s hand against the back of his neck, helps her fingers feel the grooves—he was kept in a brace for six weeks, had to be fed like a baby, have his ass wiped by a roster of nurses, remember how to walk on his own. It does something to your sense of location within your body, spending all those days and nights lying on your back, staring at the pock-marked ceiling of a hospital room. It changes you, when you find yourself so utterly reliant on strangers to take care of your most basic needs.
He had, until the accident, somewhat thought he was invincible.
（You’d be surprised at how many people think this way.）
They are holding their first official Death Club meeting as a foursome at Gramercy Tavern—‘Farm to table is very New York!’ Lennie declared when choosing the restaurant—where Ruby has found she needs to query many of the ingredients on the menu.