Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

  ‘You could talk to a priest. I mean a minister.’ She was a Methodist, although he didn’t know what that really meant.

  ‘This is too complicated for that. And it’s over.’

  ‘So see a therapist.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Mary’s reluctance annoyed Frank. She had taken his grief, equated it with her guilt, and forced him to goad her into seeking help, when it was his loss, and not the inconvenience of the long-held secret of her affair, and the intrusion of the disaster, that demanded the greater attention. Maybe this was why they had broken up. Maybe he had stopped liking her. And if he had not stopped liking her? Then they would not have broken up, and they would have continued seeing each other, secretly, happily, and he would have never taken his family to Mexico to make things better. There would have been no plane to miss. He would have been in Los Angeles now, fucking Mary Sifka in a motel.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ she said. ‘Anything I say will sound stupid.’

  ‘Maybe that’s all you need to say.’

  ‘I wish I could make this all better for you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘When my brother died, well, you know.’ She had a brother, two years older, who had died when she was twenty, killed in a car crash. He had been drunk. She told Frank about it one afternoon, in bed. The usual stuff: a year to get over it, always a little pain in the heart. Hard to look at any BMW 3201, the same kind of car he was in. Frank tried to comfort her when he said that the 3201 was an old model, and disappearing from the roads.

  ‘I’ve been drinking a little,’ she said. ‘I had a vodka an hour ago, and then another one just before you called. Stewart saw the first one. He thinks I’m relaxing, that I want to make love tonight. I guess I’ll have to.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to drink, I mean for me to drink. I want to stay on top of things.’

  ‘I can’t even come to the funeral.’

  ‘Well, we know each other from business. So you can come for that, you know, as business.’

  ‘I have to tell her I’m sorry. I’ll go to the grave alone, after.’ When she said ‘grave’ she added, so softly that Frank wasn’t sure if he’d heard it, a slight z, the afterthought, to make the singular plural. Graves. Mother and daughter.

  ‘You didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Maybe not, but I can tell her I’m sorry she died. Did she know about us?’

  ‘No,’ said Frank.

  ‘You’re lying. I can hear it in your voice.’

  ‘Maybe she did.’

  ‘She did, didn’t she?’

  ‘She knew. I told her.’

  ‘What did she say? About me.’

  ‘Nothing, really.’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘Mary, why do we have to do this?’

  ‘I need to know.’

  ‘Think about how I feel for a minute.’

  ‘Think about how I feel for an hour.’

  ‘She knew it was you. We were going on vacation to pull things together. She knew that was what the trip was for. And I really was trying to pull everything together.’

  ‘And she didn’t say anything bad about me?’

  ‘No. She had no reason to. It wasn’t about you, anyway, her anger. It was about me.’

  ‘So she was angry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She was angry at you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did she forgive you before she died?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘She didn’t say it.’

  ‘That was what the trip was for.’

  ‘Oh, my God. I’m sick. I feel sick.’

  ‘Maybe you should lie down.’

  ‘Maybe I should die.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Frank. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’

  ‘When’s the funeral?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. There’s this memorial thing here tomorrow. For everyone, for all the people, the families and friends. From the plane and the ground.’

  ‘Will there be something in LA?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll ask the airline. They’ll know. And I’ll be there, Frank. I’ll come to that.’

  ‘Thank you, Mary.’ But it was just something to say.

  They hung up. He supposed he did love her, there was something that they knew about each other, something in each that was unsettled, that wanted to travel but was afraid to go. It was the thing in her that glowed for him, and the thing in him that she had liked, or needed. So it was with Julia too, and it was really nothing more than the predictably feverish anticipation of sex with a new woman. And even as he told himself that this need for something wild was nothing more than a frenzy of despair, he asked himself why Lowell was permitted to heed the call of the orgy, and he was not. If homosexuals see something in each other, recognize the signs, then why couldn’t he, as this unsettled thing, recognize the signs of the same condition in unsettled women? Yes, the call of the orgy. Harder to just duck into an alley and grope, but not that much harder. How difficult had it been with Mary Sifka? They met twice for business, in his office, and then, at the end of the second meeting, they talked about marriage, and then sex. He had said something like, ‘I’m horny all the time,’ something that bold, and she had said, ‘Your wife is lucky,’ and he said, ‘What about you?’ and she said, ‘AH the time,’ and then they were both dizzy, and quiet for a moment as he watched her knees, she was sitting in her chair and she opened them and squeezed them, so she suffered the same tension as he, and then he got out of his chair and kissed her, and then he had his hand under her skirt, and he knelt on the floor, and she spread her legs, and he never saw her underpants, he just gave her a hand-job while she unbuttoned his shirt and kissed his chest. Then she unzipped his pants and gave him a blow-job, and then they kissed, and that’s how it began. The unsettled. Men and women with pornographic imaginations. She forced the kiss on him, his semen on her tongue, so he had to taste himself. And she smiled at the end of this kiss and looked him in the eye, and he could tell she was surprised that he accepted the dare, and that this amused her in no small way, because she gave her husband this test, to accept a swallow of his own sperm, and he always refused. Frank kissed her again.

  When he was off the phone with Mary, the front desk called to give him the name of a restaurant, L’Epicurean. He was encouraged by its pretension, but the number yielded a phone company message that the phone had been disconnected. He tried Information to see if he had the right number, and there was no listing. So L’Epicurean was out of business, and the hotel had it still listed on its register. And had no one been referred to this expensive place since it had closed, and had no one complained? He supposed they had, but then did the hotel erase L’Epicurean from whatever lists it kept for guests? This was another sign of San Diego’s stupidity, and he thought of calling the front desk and ranting about the place, but he hadn’t the energy. He took his shower, where, again, he dodged the cold condensation from the ceiling, and considered that since he wasn’t calling the desk to tell them L’Epicurean is dead, then in similar moments perhaps dozens of other hotel guests had not bothered to bring the bad news to the concierge of the hotel, and perhaps for years to come guests would call to make reservations, find out the place was closed, and then, exhausted from a day spent convincing themselves that this stupid city was actually interesting, they’d call for room service. Where would he go with his parents? He would let them decide. He put on the shirt and jacket that Lowell had given him and went to his parents’ room.

  In the hall he wondered to what restaurant had the head waiter of L’Epicurean gone, or was it an ancient restaurant that closed because its habitual patrons, the retired admirals and emphysemic politicians, had died?

  He knocked on his parents’ door; they let him in. His father was reading the afternoon paper. His father said, ‘Here, you should see this.’

  There it was, on the second of three pa
ges devoted to the crash: ‘LOS ANGELES MAN, LISTED AMONG THE DEAD, MISSED FLIGHT, ARRESTED FOR LOOTING’. And The Article, Brief. No Interview. No Picture. There Would Be More Tomorrow. A Few Of The Articles On The Page Had Jumped From The First. There Was One, Just Two Paragraphs, The Ending Of A Story Headlined ‘LETTER (Continued From Page I)’. The Story Referred To A Letter Found In The Wreckage. An Airline Official Was Complaining That The Letter Was Released Without Authorization, And The Paper Was Defending Its Right To Publish It. Frank Turned The Paper To Page One. Under The Headline: ‘LOVE LETTER FOUND IN WRECKAGE’, And Then A Short Introduction, Saying That A Name Had Been Mentioned On The Letter, But Was Being Deleted For Reasons Of Privacy, There It Was, The Entire Letter Set In Type, To Be More Easily Read.

  I love you. You asked me a few weeks ago why I was so desperate to take this vacation and I said that I needed to get away from the office for a while, and that’s true, but there’s more. For six months you’ve noticed that I’ve been distant, and I have been. You asked me if there was another woman, and I said no, but I was lying. I had an affair with [name deleted]. If s over now. I wanted to take this trip so that we could find a way to heal ourselves. I don’t know how you’ll take this, and all I can say is that I beg you to forgive me, but if you don’t want to, I will understand. I love you.

  ‘That’s so sad,’ said his mother. ‘I hope she read it before she died.’

  ‘They’re holding the name of the woman he was fucking.’

  ‘Leon,’ said Frank’s mother. ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘They shouldn’t have printed it at all,’ he said. ‘It’s an invasion of privacy.’

  ‘It’s on all the news now. It was on the national news already.’

  His father pointed to the picture of a black man on the front page. ‘There’s your Lonnie Walter. The cocksucker who killed your family. They found his note too, but they’re not releasing it. They say he carried a gun on to the plane, he used his airline security pass to sneak a gun through.’

  ‘Did he sneak on to the plane?’ asked Frank.

  ‘No, he had a ticket. The gate attendant knew him, and he told her he was taking a vacation. And she knew that the guy who had fired him was on the plane, and she mentioned that to a friend.’

  ‘She was worried that Walter was going to kill him?’

  ‘No, just that it was going to be embarrassing for the supervisor, to see this guy he’d fired on the plane with him. They think he shot the supervisor, grabbed a stewardess, and then he got into the cockpit and shot the crew.’

  Lonnie Walter was forty-five, light-coloured, bald. He had little dots around his eyes that were like raised freckles, or beauty marks. The picture was from an airline file. So he was dead too. Frank wondered if he had been listed among the dead in the long lists, if he had paid for his ticket. Of course he had, thought Frank. He had sneaked the gun past security at the employee entrance to the airport, and then again at the terminal. He had entered the main terminal from backstage, but they wouldn’t have let him on the plane without a ticket. Now all airports were sure to change their security systems. Everyone working at the airports would have to pass through those metal detectors. It would cost a lot of money. The price of travel would go up.

  How long will it take them to find me? he wondered. Of course they’ll find me. And they’ll find Mary Sifka. The paper assumed the letter writer was dead. ‘I guess he’s dead,’ said Frank.

  ‘Lonnie Walter, he’s in hell as we speak,’ said Leon.

  ‘Not Walter,’ said Frank. ‘The one who wrote the letter.’

  ‘Oh, God, of course,’ said his father. There was no reason to believe the letter writer had not died on the plane. And there was no clue yet to let them connect this thing to Frank. That six months’ distance was something only Anna complained about. To his mother and father he had always been distant. The attachment to Mary, which for so long gave him comfort, finally corroded all of his connections, even to Madeleine. This distance became a punishment. What else could he have done but confessed? But now everything was fucked up. How soon would everyone know everything?

  Why did Anna keep the note after reading it? If she had put the note in her handbag, which surely exploded with the crash, the paper would either have burned with the passengers or else would have been lost in the wet muck after the fire trucks had finished spraying the area down. But the existence of the note meant they would easily trace it back to Frank, because the police, or the crash investigators, or the county coroner had found it in his suitcase.

  And then Frank felt a terrible sadness for Mary Sifka, because even if the letter had been separated from the luggage, there was Mary’s name. It didn’t matter that the letter was so coyly un-addressed and unsigned; unless a little piece of hot shrapnel grazed the note card, scorching, beyond recognition, only her name, they were looking for her.

  ‘It was on the national news?’ asked Frank.

  ‘The crash? Of course,’ said his father.

  ‘The letter.’

  ‘That’s going to be the big thing from all of this,’ said his father. ‘You’ll see. We’ll know the girlfriend’s name by tomorrow. They can’t keep that stuff out of the news for long. It’s the papers that are holding back the names, I guess until they notify the next of kin.’

  Frank thought of telling his mother and father that the letter was his. What would it cost him? He had an answer: he wanted more than anything to keep their sympathy, for however many hours he had until someone restored the deleted name, because they would hate him once the world could say ‘Mary Sifka’. For the rest of their lives shame would dog their mourning. The mother and father of that man who wrote the letter. The adulterer. Mary Sifka’s real in-laws.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere,’ said his mother. ‘I’m hungry.’

  Frank said he didn’t know where to go. His father said that Lowell had made reservations for them at an Italian place he liked. Awful San Diego Italian food, with rancid oil, and badly chopped stalks of parsley drowning in the salty tomato sauce.

  ‘Is he coming?’ asked Frank. Frank didn’t want Lowell there, since his brother was sure to be obsessed with the letter and would want to talk about it.

  His mother said that he wasn’t. I should tell them the letter is mine, thought Frank. His feet were cold. Cold feet. It was true, the blood was somewhere else. Where? What was the evolutionary function of cold feet? Where did the genius of adaptation decree that some protection from predation derive from cold feet? How could he run from danger with cold feet? And what was the danger in the truth, if he told the truth now?

  His HEAD WAS SPINNING. And just as something in him shrieked when he made the leap into that first pornographic tableau with Mary Sifka, now the ice-flow moved from his feet up his legs, and then, without warning, he was scared shitless. So even that exhausted phrase came from experience: before he could look down, he knew that he was standing in a puddle of his own shit.

  His guts had opened. Everything inside of him was sliding into his underpants, his boxer shorts, not even jockey shorts with an elastic at the thigh to hold the crap in, like a diaper. So the shit dribbled down his legs, and out his cuffs, over his shoes.

  He cried, ‘Mom!’ and his mother looked down at his feet, trying to understand.

  ‘Frank?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me,’ he said, lurching into the bathroom a few steps away. His parents rushed towards him, but he shut the door.

  ‘Frank, what happened?’ asked his mother.

  His father said, ‘Jesus.’

  I’m sick,’ said Frank. He wondered if they were standing in his shitty trail. Someone would have to clean it up tonight, it would smell, or else they would have to change rooms. He could go to a market and buy rug-cleaner, the spray kind, and a sponge or paper towels, whatever the directions on the rug-cleaner package said was best for cleaning it up. Maybe there was something in a pet store for cleaning up cat and dog shit, deodorizing a carpet.
He would let his parents sleep in his room tonight, he would stay here. The shitty imprints of his shoes, like the shoe shapes used to plot dance steps. And what steps had he described? A straight line. A cha cha without the return. A cha!

  He stepped into the bath tub and turned on the shower. It was hard to adjust the temperature, and he settled for too cold, something to wake himself up. He had to untie his shoelaces, smearing his fingers, but he washed them off. His mother or father had taken a shower already, because the little bar of soap had been unwrapped. He took off his pants and tried to wash the legs out by putting the shower head through the top, but the pressure wasn’t strong enough. San diego conserves water. So he changed the stream from shower to faucet, and pulled the pant legs inside out. He opened the complimentary shampoo, and worked up a lather. Glops of loose shit collected in the tub’s narrow drain. He used a wash cloth to scrape the pants clean, and the job was done. He washed his shoes out, cleaned the soles, and put them on the rim of the tub. Then he turned the handle to change the stream from faucet back to shower, and, taking off his shirt, he washed himself. He made the water warmer, and when the temperature drifted to cold, he turned it up, letting the water burn him, so he could sterilize his skin, so he could soap, and soap again, and rinse off, and soap again, using the hotel’s inexhaustible supply of hot water, to make himself clean.

  One of them knocked on the bathroom door. His mother.

  He told her he was feeling better.

  She asked for his room key, so she could get clean clothes for him. Did he want a doctor?

  ‘No.’

  Was it something he ate?

  ‘Maybe, yes. But it’s over.’

  He apologized. She asked him why.

  Because you wanted a nice dinner tonight.

  She said it had been selfish of her to think of going out.

  He said they could still go out. Whatever it was, was over.

  No, she said, she had already ordered from room service. And she had spoken to Anna’s parents, who were coming in to Los Angeles tomorrow, from Philadelphia. Her two sisters were already there. Somehow they had missed the news that Frank was alive. When he could, they wanted to talk with him. They sent their love. They were so sorry for him.