How Best to Avoid Dying

by Owen Egerton

  “What would you do if I died?” she once asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Cry, I guess.”

  “But what would you do with the body?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on. Let’s say you found me and I was still warm.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “Not for two consenting adults. Don’t be such a prude.”

  “I’d call 911,” I said.

  “So they could rush me to the morgue before I got deader?”

  “Why do you keep asking?”

  “Do you love me?” she asked.

  “I just met you.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m going to ask for a favor.”

  She was alive when I went to sleep. I’m almost sure. I sip my coffee.

  When I was nine a friend told me that a scorpion would rather kill itself than touch fire. I didn’t believe him. “Animals don’t do suicide,” I told him. We got a can of lighter fluid from his garage, trapped a scorpion under a paper cup and made a foot-wide circle of lighter fluid around it. We lit the circle and lifted the cup. The scorpion snapped its claws at the fire, scurried to one side, scurried to the other, returned to the center and in quick jabs, bent its tale and stung its back over and over. Its body twitched a little, then went stiff as the flames died out.

  “See,” my friend smirked. “I told you.”

  Jenny loved this story.

  “That sting always hovering,” she’d say, “like holding a gun to your temple twenty-four hours a day.”

  “What was worse,” I told her, “was the beetle we put in. No stinger. No choice but to wait for the fire. It freaked out, running in circles. I was about to reach in and grab it out when my friend squirted a line of lighter fluid from the circle straight to the beetle. It kept running while it sizzled up. Its shell cracked in the fire.”

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “I never told anyone about that,” I told her.

  She shrugged. “Some things are sins only if people know.”

  I think she’s smiling. Sitting on the couch and smiling at me. Just slightly. Almost a sarcastic smile. And she doesn’t want me to tell.

  Bury her? Maybe. But where?

  Drop her in the lake. No. They’d find her.

  Take her camping and leave her for the birds.

  Boil her flesh, feed the soup to the neighborhood cats, use the bones to make a wind chime.

  Take her to Mexico in the trunk of my car.

  She’s waxy. Her skin and her eyes. I guess the eyes go first, all water and all. I put Jenny in her pajamas. She usually sleeps in the nude, but she looks cold. Jenny would do this thing with her toes. While we were making love, which she liked to do often, she’d wrap her legs around my back and tickle my ass with her toes. It made me tense up and more than once ejaculate immediately.

  She laughed all the time. She wore these long cotton skirts and she’d run through the house laughing, pulling off her shirt and pushing down her undies—that’s how she let me know she was in the mood—but she left the skirt on. She liked that, the feeling of the cloth being pushed up, bunching around her thighs.

  Sometimes during lovemaking we’d put on music. Monk or Davis. Maybe Coltrane. She didn’t like Mingus. “It’s too much. Too many notes,” she’d say.

  “Coltrane’s got a bunch of notes.”

  “Different. Those are less planned. Mingus’ music is like a whacked out prophet screaming about the end times. Babble babble babble. But saying something.”

  “There’s no babble, if you listen.”

  “But I don’t want to really listen. I want to concentrate on you.”

  “Now you know how the toe feels.”

  It must be around four in the afternoon. I pick her up from the couch and carry her into the bedroom. Her body doesn’t want to bend and she’s heavier. I have to be careful walking through the bedroom door.

  “Carry me across the threshold,” she’d once said. “Like we’re married.”

  I put her on the bed, tuck her in. Pulling the sheets to her shoulders, letting her feet stick out at the bottom of the bed. That’s how she likes it.

  Mingus claimed he had banged twenty-three different women in one night. It was in a Mexican whorehouse. He said he just went wild. Couldn’t stop. One after another, after another, after another. If I go twice in one night, I’m a hero.

  I lay down next to her. Smell her new smell. I bet her insides are turning to liquid.

  “Do you ever just hurt?” she once said. “I mean for no reason. Or all reasons, in a way. Life just hurts. Even beauty hurts. And worse, I can’t get behind it. I know something’s there, but I can’t get to it.”

  “That’s what Mingus has been trying to say.”

  “Fuck Mingus. Fuck him up his Mingus ass.”

  “Jenny!”

  “Don’t you ever feel a lonely so deep the whole world couldn’t help? And it doesn’t help that others feel the same thing. Doesn’t mean anything. In fact I hate them for trivializing my thing, my loneliness.”

  “Your thing? Loneliness is not your thing.”

  “See? You’re doing it. I’m trying to tell you, it is mine. But I can’t tell you anything without using these fucking words.

  “Someone’s feeling sorry for herself.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Jenny!”

  “Fuuuuck off.”

  “Okay, I’m going to sit outside and let you calm down a little.”

  “While you’re out I’m going to drink all the rubbing alcohol.”

  “Don’t make a mess.”

  “I’m going to drop the toaster in the bath.”

  “We don’t have a toaster.”

  “The hairdryer then.”

  The sun is setting behind the blinds. Still hot. I’m beside her. I sleep for a while. But not well. I think I feel her kick. I hear her fart. Hard to sleep with her here.

  Mingus froze up. That’s how he died. His arms and legs stopped working, his whole body died, but he was too stubborn to leave. Like the landlord turned off the heat and electricity to try and force the tenant to move out.

  I get out of bed and flip the light switch. There’s a roach on the pillow by Jenny’s head. It’s staring at me. Kind of twitching at me. Jenny would hate this.

  We had this one roach living in the bathroom drain. You’d see it anytime you took a middle of the night piss. We called him Larry. He was fast. We hated him, but with a kind of affection. One night Jenny yelled for me.

  “Larry’s moving all slow. He looks sick.”

  “Must be the bait,” I said.

  “Just catch him and take him outside. Let him live in the wild.” She smiled.

  “No, I’m going smack it,” I said. “It’s already dying.”

  “I thought you loved animals.”

  “Roaches don’t count.”

  “That’s like saying Jews don’t count as humans.”

  “It’s nothing like saying Jews don’t count.”

  Then she cried. I had thought the conversation was all easy. Just funny. But she went to bed weepy. I smacked Larry with an Entertainment Weekly and flushed his remains. Then I drank a beer on the porch. When I did go to bed there was a note on my pillow:

  Just for that I’m sending my whole family to lay eggs in your shoes.

  Love, The late Larry.

  Formerly of the Sink

  Jenny opened her eyes and giggled as I read the note. I giggled too. But my feet itched for a week.

  “Larry?” I ask the roach on Jenny’s head. It twitches. It moves on to her forehead and looks at me again. I keep waiting for Jenny to brush it away. It crawls over an eye. Come on, Jenny, brush it away. It’s on her lip. Twitching. Near her teeth.

  “Fuck off, Larry!”

  It speeds up the wall and is gone.

  I go to the kitchen and find a black roach bait box in the trashcan. It’s been cut open and I can see the f
ood. A beige, sweet smelling paste. Looks like marzipan. There’s not much left of it. How much does it take?

  The coffee is cold, but I drink it.

  I smell rot. Sick rot. Sad. Jenny hated the idea of growing old. Not of being old. She liked to think of herself being really old, a strange aged thing hobbling around town with a funny hat and a tendency to yell. But in between here and there freaked her out. She still had a decade before forty, but she was already noticing her body drop. She wanted to freeze it young until slam-bam she was ancient. No in between. But even death couldn’t stop her growing old, breaking down, wrinkling up. Process. Can’t stop it. Like running downhill, too fast, throwing your legs in front of you hoping you don’t fly head over heels. No control and no chance of gaining control. Like Mingus in some session, playing so fast, losing it, finding it, playing around a note, not on it, around and around and around till the note is clear because it’s the one thing not being played. Melody in reverse.

  I draw a bath for Jenny. Steamy water with lavender aromatherapy. I put a shower cap on her and prop her arms over the side. The arms don’t dangle, they stick out, palms down. I wet a white hand towel and fold it over her eyes. She looks fine.

  “Shower over a bath ten to one,” she had said. “Showers move. A bath is standing still. You can feel a bath cooling the moment you get in. A shower keeps giving hot. More hot all the time.”

  “Unless you’re second in line and your girlfriend takes half-hour showers,” I said.

  “It’s still moving. I’d rather have cold water moving than hot water sitting.”

  But she looks good in the bath, laying still. “Not so bad, is it?” I say. Then I give her some privacy.

  In the bedroom I put three Mingus CDs on shuffle. “Haitian Fight Song” starts and I move with it. Tempo keeps jumping, so I’m jumping. One speed, another speed. Hopping and jumping, dancing like I’m the stand up bass, sometimes popping, sometimes swaying, sometimes going faster than I can think. Eyes closed and sweating. And his notes are touching the melody in places it didn’t know it had, making it bend out of itself. And you can feel the melody’s pleasure. Hear her moan. Then comes “Slop,” “Passions of a Woman Loved,” “Blue Cee,” “Gunslinging Bird,” and then “Tonight at Noon”…fucking madness, that song. Horns like horses being slaughtered, and another horn hypnotizing a snake. The bass riff like an oversized spider goose-stepping in fast motion. The piano being stomped on, danced on. And behind it all Mingus is screaming. Then comes the drums, machine guns into a circus parade. Everything screaming. Everything dying. Everything moving.

  I fall on the bed. I close my eyes. I want to eat it all up. Gobble it down. Gobble her until there’s nothing left. Tell everyone she’s in Mexico, while all the time she’s in me. Too late now. Too far gone. Couldn’t salt the rot out of her.

  My shirt sticks to my skin. My hair sticks to my head.

  I go to collect Jenny, but she’s not in the tub. She’s gone. But I’m wrong. She’s there, just under the water. Must have fallen. Maybe my jumping jarred her. The white towel is floating, so is her hair. My first thought is to grab her, yank her back into the air. But I stop. ‘She’s dead,’ I tell myself. ‘Stop trying to save her.’ The surface is still. She must have been under for a while. I lean over and look at her, and my fingers touch the water. It’s cold. Maybe I could freeze the water, freeze her in a tub of ice. Thaw her out right along with Walt Disney. She looks pretty under the water. Blurry behind the soap. An air bubble slips from her nose and rises toward me. It shocks me. I grab her with both arms and pull her up. ‘She’s dead,’ I tell myself and I stroke back her hair from her face.

  “I can hold my breath for six minutes,” she’d said.

  “No you can’t. No one can.”

  “I can. I used to do it all the time. You just got to not think about breathing.”

  “That can’t be good for you.”

  “No worse than smoking.”

  “You don’t smoke,” I said.

  “So I can afford to hold my breath.”

  “Why do either?”

  “Shit,” she said. “You’ve got to do something.”

  I towel her off and dress her in her favorite blue dress. The crinkly one. I sit her on the couch again. Her skin is loose. That bothers me. And I can still smell her under the lavender. I sit across from her. The smile is growing. A sliver of teeth is showing. I close my eyes and take some deep breaths. Try and slow it down. Try and slow it all down.

  It’s dark outside. Night. Later we can leave. Maybe drive away. She just smiles.

  I turn out all the lights. First in the living room, then the kitchen and bedroom. All of them, till the whole house is black. Jenny loved this game. Hide and Seek in the dark. The seeker tries to make the others give themselves away. Make them snicker, then you find them.

  “Jenny?”

  I walk from the bedroom slowly. Hands out in front, feeling walls and doors in the darkness. Carpet to tile. So quiet. Just my feet on the tile and the refrigerator humming. Part of me doesn’t want to make a noise. Just wants to hide in the quiet. But that’s not how you play.

  “Jenny.”

  The idea is to make them laugh.

  “Jenny, Larry is upset that you ate his bait. He’d grown to like it.”

  I touch the couch arms.

  “Jenny?”

  There’s a hiss. An exhale. I step back. Legs hitting the coffee table. Reach for the lamp. I turn it on with a twist, but send it falling with the same motion. For a moment I see Jenny and her smile. Then the smash and the room is darker than before.

  “Jenny?”

  I take a step and trip on the lamp. I crawl. Hands on wood, plank by plank. My hands touch something small, smooth. The roach bate. I hold it hard, the torn edges cutting. Crawl. I touch feet.

  “Jenny?”

  Climb to her knees. Crawl up, on to the couch, beside her.

  “Jenny?”

  I take her hand. My other still holding the bait. I squeeze her hand.

  I don’t move. I don’t breathe. In the room black changes to different shades of dark. Outlines and objects. I wouldn’t move. I wouldn’t breathe. Jenny, I wouldn’t even breathe. I don’t want to die, Jenny. For no good reason, I don’t want to die. And even if I did, I don’t think I could. Stop squeezing, Jenny. You’re hurting my hand. Let’s just sit here in the dark. My heart is popping like a stand up bass, Jenny. We’ll just sit here and listen to my heart. Just be still. In a few hours we’ll leave. I’ll put you in the car and drive you to Mexico, okay? The sun will be up by then and it will burn all the black away. Okay, Jenny? Okay?

  CHALLENGING, REPULSIVE, AND AWESOME

  Did you find everything you needed?

  Good.

  Diet Coke, Twix, Camel Lights. I’m surprised you smoke. Your teeth are so pretty.

  More gum. Already? You bought some this morning.

  I remember. You came in this morning. Last night, twice. Four times yesterday and three times the day before, once at three AM. That’s a lot of Stop&Shop.

  I understand. It seems like I’m always here, right? Like I never leave? Well, it’s true. I am always here. I never leave. I’m the only employee of the 24 hour Stop&Shop.

  Really. First I was hired by a tall man originally from Nigeria. I don’t know who hired him. Someone who lives somewhere else.

  I was made night manager in December. I called my father to tell him. He was in a nursing home and didn’t understand any more. It didn’t mean much, night manager, just that I worked nights, ten to six. At six in the morning the tall man from Nigeria came in for his shift. One day he didn’t. I waited, but nothing. And the customers kept walking in—morning rush for coffee and energy bars. So I served.

  The afternoon woman came in at two and I went home to sleep. But I couldn’t sleep. I fed my cat and sat on my couch and waited for eight PM and the Stop&Shop. It was growing then, the idea. So simple. Great ideas are simple, like Slim Jims. I worked that night and
by morning I was hoping, maybe praying, the Nigerian wouldn’t show. But he did. So I fired him. I fired him with a strong voice claiming authority from someone who lives somewhere else. And the Nigerian left and didn’t come back.

  For four months my life was two shifts and an empty third. My father died in his sleep.

  One day the afternoon woman came in crying. I told her she could go, I’d cover her shift. My first consecutive twenty-four hours in the Stop&Shop. Sometimes you see the change your life can be. You see it right before you. When the afternoon woman came in again the next day I handed her five hundred dollars and told her to find a good man.

  Then it was just me. That was half a year ago.

  I lost the apartment, I’m sure. I’m sure they raised voices and taped warnings to my door.

  I think about my cat—I liked the cat. But the cat never liked me. It only came for food and water. That’s all gone.

  Stop paying rent. No home.

  Stop feeding the cat. No cat.

  These are the bonds we build a life on.

  But you see, I am doing something here. You smile, but listen.

  This used to be a job. My hours had a price tag and it was small. I was as bad as the cat that stayed for food. Now I burn my paychecks in a metal trashcan. All my needs are met. Slim Jims and powdered-sugar donuts and sugar-free Rockstar Energy Drink. I eat in the quiet hours. When I’m alone and the ice machine hums.

  Sleep? No, not really. I don’t lie down, that would be inappropriate.

  I used to take quick naps behind the counter. But that was silly. Shameful.

  With discipline, the mind can do amazing things. Don’t smile. Really. Let me explain.

  My father owned a book, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. He loved the saints. Do you know St. Simeon the Stylite? He was a pillar hermit. He lived on the top of a forty-foot-high column in the middle of a city for thirty-seven years straight. Had a platform up there, about the size of this countertop.

  They called him holy. Bishops and emperors visited him. They’d yell up questions to him—bishops and emperors! And at Lent, just to make it harder, he would spend weeks without sitting or lying down. Just standing up there, praying. This is real. Documented history. The book said he “provided a spectacle at once challenging, repulsive, and awesome.”