We were approaching the next house on our canvassing list. Val turned back, looking more than annoyed—and here I thought I was just fighting the man, shooting the shit with a coworker, but something I’d said had offended her, like I’d uncovered a deep wound.
“Yeah, it’s messed up,” she said. “Maybe we are company lackeys, but our potential clients have a basic right to process their grief with our help. If you’re not going to be serious about this, shut up and hang back.”
“It’s not that I don’t think people should be able to choose how to say goodbye to their loved ones,” I explained. “I was just trying to lighten the mood.” I rushed to catch up to her, but she was already knocking on the door.
“Not everything is a party, Dennis,” Val said.
I brushed my hand across her shoulder, tried to get her to turn back and listen to whatever excuse I could come up with, stepped back when someone answered. I waited outside on the stoop for her to finish, fumbling with my phone, wading through the swamp of my BitPalPrime social feed—ads for elegy hotels, vids of wealthy friends glamping on their quarantine retreats, notifications that profiles had been turned into memorial pages. My thumb hovered over a memorial for the father of a college friend who’d invited me over for Thanksgiving every year.
It seemed like Val was going to be a while, so I decided to head back to the hotel, taking the long way past the Ferry Building, down Market Street. When I reached Union Square, I sat and watched the city pretend to be what it used to be, realized it had been years since I’d seen a homeless person napping on a bench, panhandling outside a restaurant. No doubt, we failed them, too—did they die in shelters? In the street? Did we burn or bury them en masse? I searched my phone for a news article on the subject, found nothing except personal blogs and social media posts wondering the same— Where did the homeless go? Who will answer for their deaths? Outside the mall across the street, an LED billboard thanked everyone for doing their part: LIFE MUST PREVAIL. SPEND YOUR FUNERARY TOKENS ON THE LIVING. A new elegy-hotel-consortium-owned bank was being constructed next door to it, in the lobby of the old Wells Fargo building. I got up and walked for a while, let myself join the rhythm of shoppers and workers streaming in and out of buildings. I listened to a canvasser for a rival death hotel making his pitch— Sleep with your loved ones on their way to eternal slumber! I guess it didn’t sound so horrible if you had someone to grieve, if you knew people would be grieving for you. Sometimes I wondered if anyone would come when I died, dreamed about what my father’s funeral might have been like, how the crowd would have gasped if I’d entered the church, sat next to my mother, held her hand while my brother fought the urge to hit me. I would have waited to approach the casket until everyone else had paid their respects, and then stared down at some noble approximation of my father.
“I’m sorry,” I’d say. And maybe I’d cry or break down completely, my mother and Bryan picking me up off the floor. Everything was always so goddamn dramatic and perfect in my head.
When I returned to the hotel, I slipped in through the side entrance, hightailing it to the elevators to avoid another lecture from Mr. Fang. When I reached the fire escape, I had a blunt hanging from my lips. Val was there staring at me like I was the biggest idiot in the world.
“Den, it’s a two-way street,” she said, almost immediately. It seemed like she’d been waiting to give me this lecture. At first, I thought she was talking about my piss-poor performance at work, but she was a better person than me, always thinking about the bigger picture. “You can’t just wait for things to happen. You’re lucky your family is reaching out at all.”
“What if I bulldozed the street?” I said. “What if they’re only calling because they’re desperate?” I pictured holding a View-Master to my eyes, scrolling through all the times I’d let my family down—getting held back in third grade for not being able to multiply, cocaine in my backpack senior year, my dad picking me up from the county jail right after graduation, when my boss at Outdoor Outfitters called the cops after he caught me stealing from the register. The time I brought Nikki Ishio home and my family loved her. She was on the cheer squad, the honor roll. I took her to prom and my parents told me not to fuck it up—and then I fucked it up. And there was, of course, my father’s bloodied face. The funeral I never attended. All the times I told my brother that I hated him and meant it.