“Fuck you,” I whispered, just to see how it sounded.
I wanted to be like Jin, to understand your death so immediately, but I was not like Jin. I was starring in a play about a girl who goes to a funeral. The velvet curtain would be closing soon and then what? I’d have to leave you at the theater.
“It didn’t work,” I said.
But this was a lie. The Golconda did work, just not in the way you intended it to. You thought I could be cured by confrontation. But the past is too deep a hole to be crowded out by the present. I think, if closure exists, it’s being okay with a lack of it. It’s to be found in letting the doors swing open, in trusting that if hinges were meant to be locks, well, then they’d be locks. You brought Max and me together, which is what you wanted, for me to choose the future instead of having it choose me. Somewhere, buried beneath those layers of delusion and capitalism, was a generous thing you did.
So shines a good deed in a weary world.
It’s funny, the night before last, I was cleaning the apartment and found a whole pile of Modern Psychology back issues. I’d saved them even when I didn’t have a byline, just because my name was on the masthead. Vadis’s and Zach’s names appeared too, farther down the pile. One of the issues was from early in your tenure, when you were still contributing to the magazine, and it included my favorite story you ever wrote, about the sociological implications of island burial practices. Because places like Turks and Caicos aren’t getting any wider, the majority of their residents get buried on top of each other with a layer of dirt between the coffins, up to five per plot. Every few decades, a groundskeeper digs up the whole thing, takes out the bottom coffins, and chucks the remains back into the ground. It’s Death Tetris.
Do you remember this? The magazine ran a photo of a leathered groundskeeper leaning on a shovel, looking like he couldn’t care less about you following him around all day, asking him questions. He explained that most people on the island spend their lives looking at the person next to them at the market or bus shelter, knowing there’s a decent chance they’ll be buried one on top of the other. But the question the magazine asked—the question you asked—is how would you treat other people, knowing the next person you see could be burrowing holes into the back of your head for eternity? For the most part, it deepened the sense of community. But there was also a “see you in hell” undertone to it all.
The groundskeeper told you about the hurricane that blew through years prior and flooded his burial plots. Coffins got mixed up in the mud, and the old groundskeeper, his incompetent cousin, had managed to put half of them back upside down. Strangers were not just lying on top of each other but facing each other. It was ages before they figured it out.
You called me from your hotel while you were working on this story. I was so excited because there you were, in this pink-sanded paradise with an ocean-view suite, where you could be with anyone, talking to anyone, but you chose me. It was some hour so late, it seems possible they don’t make it anymore, and I could hear the sound of the ocean, beating against rocks. At one point, you picked up the hotel phone to order room service. I found it intimate, listening to you ask a stranger for something you wanted, being so regular. That was the height of my romantic feeling for you （it was all downhill from there）。 But I remember wanting to tell you right then that I loved you, wanting to address the tension. Even if you denied all emotions and nipped all confessions, I would get more out of talking about it than I would by saying nothing.
But the moment never presented itself. You were going on and on about the groundskeeper, about the upside-down coffins, about the unremarkable buzz of death.
“It’s just skeletons,” you read from your notepad, quoting him, “all skin gone, all muscle gone. All memories gone. It’s man skeletons and it’s woman skeletons and they almost the same.”
Then you flipped the notepad closed.
“And that, my friend,” you announced, “is the kicker.”
I worried it might be too morbid, even for a piece about death. It might upset advertisers that we could not afford to lose. It might also upset Modern Psychology readers, who, let’s face it, were already subscribing to a magazine called Modern Psychology. They had come for insight and practical tips and perhaps did not want to read about floating bones. This came out harsher than I meant. I was mad at you about a conversation we’d never had and never would have. At first, you didn’t say anything. Then I heard you slide the screen door open, walk onto your balcony, and light a cigarette. I listened for the ocean, to know I hadn’t lost the connection.