‘Don’t confuse liking your own company with doing nothing,’ she advises, when Ruby admits she is neither working nor studying while in New York. ‘You’re a designer by trade, yes? Well, in this day and age, there’s no excuse for not working from your own bed, if you have to.’
Ruby cannot imagine offering such unsolicited advice to someone she’s just met, yet she finds herself grateful for Sue’s polite scolding, considers laying out her whole list of problems, just to see what the older woman might say. （It’s Death Club, not Confession, she has to remind herself more than once when it comes to Sue.）
Josh, on the other hand, throws out statements like grenades. Sweeps up the damage himself if he sees he has gone too far. ‘Sorry,’ he says more than once as the night progresses, not sounding sorry at all. ‘That didn’t come out the way I meant it to.’
‘I write like I speak, but I don’t speak like I write,’ he will explain later. ‘Which is how I get myself in trouble sometimes.’
In addition to having firm opinions on almost everything, Josh is, Ruby can consciously acknowledge this now, undeniably handsome. He was born in Minnesota; Midwestern is the term Lennie would use for his physique, possessed as he is of thick limbs and a wide chest, his body calling to mind farms and machines, and long summers spent outdoors. To Ruby, who sees every man in relation to Ash, Josh is solid, sturdy, a rock compared to Ash’s cool, narrow river. Out of shape, Josh would say, if he knew of her assessment. Knowing, as Ruby does not, that before the accident he was thirty pounds lighter, easily buttoning himself into fancy suits or sliding into the beds of beautiful women, one of whom he married. He has not made peace with this new, heavier body, mourns the impression he used to make when he walked into a room, the way his wife would light up just to look at him. Ruby could have thrown herself across the table at Josh for all he would notice a woman checking him out these days: who wants to be appreciated for all you would change about yourself? After his wife left, he packed up what was left of desire, hid it away in the black. Content, he thinks, to leave it there.
（He doesn’t say any of this out loud, of course.）
Amongst the group it is clear that Lennie is the warmth, the home fire. I see bright oranges and golds spark from her fingers, settle on the shoulders of her friends when she talks, relaxing muscles, loosening bones. She has always had this gift, a kind of radiance soaked in by the people around her, from those doting waiters Ruby noticed their first supper after the PTSD meet-up, to Sue and Josh now, any tensions they brought to the table sliding off them as the evening progresses. Ruby cannot see the glow, but she too feels it; despite the intensity of Death Club’s conversations, she soon feels relaxed for the first time in a very long while.
I, on the other hand, cannot relax. On the contrary. I feel a growing sense of anticipation. Waiting as the group comes up against the single question that I want them to ask tonight, watching as they back away from it every time.
What happens after you die?
I could tell them, over this table cluttered with wine glasses and brightly coloured, half-eaten food, that you are indeed aware when it happens. I could explain that the black Josh can remember from the accident is simply where it begins. Death. It doesn’t happen all at once. We are not a switch flicked, a power source turned off. You are still right there at the start, as the pain intensifies, a string plucked over and over, pulled so tight that you flame under the skin, and it’s only after that—I don’t know if it’s choice or necessity at this point—you begin to leave your body. You retreat from the agony and the fire, and when you find yourself in the black, you know, instinctively, that you need to pass through it. The black is your waiting room, a brief pause in the night of your existence, before you stumble forward, searching for walls, a door, to get out. By then, nothing they can do to your body hurts you. Not in the sense of nerve and sinew and bone.
But you are definitely aware that you’re dead. It’s what happens next that I still don’t understand.
Josh came back. I did too, somehow. I know there are others, somewhere in this new distance made of space and time, who do not come back, people who quickly move on. More and more, I can sense their departure, like the click of a shut door, but I don’t know where they go, these dead who do not live here anymore.
What happens if you don’t follow them? What happens after you die, if you’re still aware? Josh had to learn how to walk again, after spending time in the black. Does that mean I can learn to speak and touch and be heard again, too? Do I get to send out that last human flare, to show Ruby I’m still here?