Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sudden hearing-loss syndrome? S-H-L-S?’ He spelled it out for her again.

  ‘SHLS? Is that something real?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Frank, ‘but maybe I have it.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Just admit it’s possible.’

  ‘Of course it’s possible,’ she said.

  ‘Goodnight, Mom,’ said Frank, as though nothing had happened, not the hearing loss, not the plane crash, not his marriage, not this ridiculous phone call, nothing.

  He hung up the phone and turned off the light. He studied the darkness, the pulses of light inside of it, and he thought that it was getting darker; he was sure it was getting darker.

  He turned on the light to make sure he still had his vision. Everything was there, in colour. He let his eyes take in the details of the room, and for the second time in a week, since looking at the blue plate in his parents’ condominium, he felt the pure gift of sight. Everything had the aura of the greatest luxury. The brown imitation wood-grain veneer on the television cabinet had never been so rich, and not only that, but the right-angle around the door jamb had a precision that made his teeth ache, it was so beautiful, so appropriate, and it was white! He studied the far corner of the bed, with the rotten avocado-green blanket hovering above a canyon of shadows at the bottom of which lay the carpet, its brown nubs alive with vibrations that were as pure as any in the universe. Nothing is ugly if you really get to know it, thought Frank. He needed to call Lowell and tell him this thing he had finally learned. That might be the title for the poem about the pillow. ‘Nothing Is Ugly If You Really Get To Know It.’

  He picked up the phone, and after four rings the machine answered. He heard the message, but after the tone he hung up. Would he really tell his brother something he no longer believed?

  11

  Headlines

  In the morning Frank found two letters on the carpet next to the door. One was from Berberian, the other was from Dessick. Each letter urged Frank to make a decision. The letters were personally addressed to him, and at first he assumed that they had been composed on a computer, merging his name from a list of addressees. The text of each letter was directed at no one but Frank. Both identified him as the only hold-out among all of the relatives of those who’d died in the crash, and while those who had survived the destruction on Cohassett Street had not yet signed up, most had, and anyway, as both letters averred, the lawsuit for those who lived on the ground would be filed separately, in a different jurisdiction, and would be more complicated. Berberian said, and Dessick echoed this, that associated attorneys in San Diego would handle the Cohassett Street suits.

  Berberian’s letter, in its first paragraph, urged Frank to sign:

  We do not need to remind you of the importance of a fully pressed lawsuit. Worse than a lawsuit split between two firms, is a lawsuit not fully pressed by all of those eligible to sue.

  Dessick said:

  Of course I want you to join our lawsuit, but I understand that each of us has to make a choice. Not making a choice, in this case, would be a terrible mistake, one that would reflect badly, I think, on everyone else who has already decided which of the two teams to join. It is simply unfair to the rest of us for you to hold out like this.

  Frank heard himself talking to the room, ‘But I need more information.’ No, he thought, not quite sure of the idea, I need less. Berberian added a postscript to his letter:

  I have to inform you, Mr Gale, that your reluctance to press the suit against those individuals or institutions responsible for the deaths of so many people may put you in the position of impeding an effort to which everyone else is committed. If you are used by the airline or its representatives as a figure of compromise, if you make a separate settlement with the airline that forces all of those griefstricken survivors into settling the case themselves prematurely, then in our considered opinion this could be cause for action and we might be forced to find a remedy for our complaint against you.

  While it may have been sentimentally appropriate for the airline’s president to read, at a memorial service, that letter from the husband to his wife, I warn you not to succumb to those impulses to forgive and reconcile which everyone else connected to this incident, all of those who have so far joined one of the lawsuits, have admirably and with great difficulty, resisted.

  Dessick’s letter, in its second paragraph, had a similar thought:

  We have heard and read a lot in the last two days about forgiveness. Now this is certainly a genuinely admirable goal for all of us, and perhaps some day, when this is all over, we will, each of us, according to our consciences, which must always be private, forgive. But, Mr Gale, don’t be swayed by appeals to mercy until we know whom it is we ought to forgive. In other words, we need to know just who is guilty before we can forgive them, and the guilty will still have to accept their expensive punishment, not because we want to get rich, but because if we can scare the airline industry into cleaning up its shamefully lax practices, then the next time this happens, it won’t happen. Your current refusal to participate in this process will be held against you by the future. Do not give us cause for action.

  Frank held the letters next to each other. A pleasant smell came from them, and he sniffed Berberian’s. The letter smelled nicely of horses, blended with pine, or incense, or smoke, something of a forest above a desert. The smell was exciting, comforting, American, a pungent cowboy smell, the wide and wild West. He brought Dessick’s letter to his nose. There it was, that same remarkable spice! Some day I will have to ask these lawyers if any of their workers stuff envelopes next to a fire made from the logs of piñon trees. The smell was too strong on both letters to have transferred osmotically from one to the other while he had been holding them. No, he was sure, each letter’s smell was independent. And the same! And these were delivered by hand, presumably by two different hands. Again he missed his wife, who might have shown the two letters to their daughter and asked her to smell them.

  If I had not written the letter, thought Frank, but I had still missed the aeroplane, what would have happened? I would have called Anna at the airport, she would have wished me a good flight, she would have let me talk to Madeleine, and then she would have died. Then I would have probably done everything as I did, except I wouldn’t have crapped in my pants, and I wouldn’t have collapsed at the memorial service, and there would have been no letter to publish. Or was I going crazy from the beginning because the existence of the thing weighed on me, because I felt the pressure of the letter, even before its discovery in print? No ... as soon as Anna discovered the letter, I was in trouble. And if I had never written the letter at all, and they had not died, what would Mexico have been like?

  We’re in Mexico. I get to the room, she’s happy to see me. Well, if not thrilled to see me, because there has been a strain in the marriage lately, at least she’s trying to be polite, because she wants a pleasant vacation, but she has not accused me of bad behaviour. She believes that I was late to the airport because business held me back, because I was working. She suspects something, but, for the good of the marriage, and for her daughter, asleep in the next room, she waits for me to confess, and she knows I will, because she knows I love her, or want to love her. She understands the reason for the trip.

  And then on the beach the next day, while I’m walking with Madeleine. No ... there is no walk with Madeleine designed to give Anna the time to read the letter and decide if the marriage will continue or stop. No ... I give her the time just to be by herself, so she can read, or shop. I tell her to go to town and buy something for a lot of money. She tells me nothing in Mexico is worth a lot of money. I tell her to buy a silver necklace, and she does, and she spends two hundred dollars. The necklace, a yoke of sterling, has an Aztec motif, a spiral made of right-angles with a turquoise chip in the centre. It is something she would never wear at home, and she tells me not to think of the necklace as something she’ll never wear
again, something she’ll come to regret, something that will embarrass her when she sees it in her jewellery box. ‘No,’ she says, ‘think of it as something I bought only to wear here, as a kind of costume.’ She tells me we would not begrudge each other a dinner that cost two hundred dollars if we had a bottle of expensive wine or champagne, and that the necklace, by virtue of the way it screams rich tourist in a resort, celebrates our vacation, that it is true costume jewellery, because in the costume she can just be the woman who came to Acapulco to be different from the woman she is at home. In the necklace she is no longer Anna Klauber from Los Angeles, but someone from another city, someone who would actually wear the necklace at home.

  And I will find this powerfully seductive, my wife’s tactics, because the new character arrives with the promise of a sexual challenge to me. She is telling me to be scared of the necklace. I will learn from this woman how to make love to my wife. She will teach me that the best technique is surrender, that I should let my weakness provoke her strength. Somehow it will all work out, the necklace says, there is no need to confess, if you let me punish you, and if you accept your punishment, you will see, so clearly, that after all, I truly really love you.

  But I wrote that letter, thought Frank. And she read it. And she died. My wife is dead. My daughter is dead.

  What if she had never read the letter but it had still been discovered in the wreckage? Did I go to Cohassett Street looking for the letter? Would I have gone there if Anna had not found the letter? Yes, no, yes, no. I can’t say. I would have forgotten it, probably. But then if it had been discovered? That is, if the letter had been discovered, though Anna had never read it. I would not have been quite so crazy, my grief would not have this current of panic running through it. I would have chosen a lawyer by now. I would have just been one of them, one of the indignant survivors.

  And if I had not written the letter and I had not missed the plane, and the plane had not crashed?

  Everything has happened as it has happened, thought Frank, and there is nothing to be done except to continue as I have, out of control, shredded by fear.

  He called his parents’ room.

  Lowell answered the phone.

  ‘We were going to call you,’ said Lowell. ‘It’s time to go.’

  ‘I can talk,’ said Frank.

  ‘Mom told me.’

  ‘It’s all better now.’

  ‘We figured it would be OK.’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘We go back to Los Angeles today.’

  ‘What about identifying the bodies?’

  ‘Why don’t you let the coroners do that?’

  ‘I want to know.’

  ‘Frank, please, not now, I don’t have time for this now.’

  ‘Time for what?’

  ‘Time for you to be crazy all the time.’

  ‘But I need to know.’

  ‘And we need to have some peace. You’re not the only one in this family who was related to Anna and Madeleine.’

  ‘I’m the only one who seems to be upset about it at all. I’m the only one really grieving.’

  ‘You can’t say that.’

  ‘I just did.’

  ‘Frank, what do you want me to do?’

  ‘I want you to call the coroner and find out if we can identify the bodies. I want to get it over with. This really means a lot to me.’

  ‘Let’s have breakfast,’ said Lowell.

  ‘I can order room service,’ said Frank. ‘We can meet in my room.’

  ‘Downstairs in the coffee shop in twenty minutes,’ said Lowell. ‘I have to help them pack.’

  Frank showered quickly, and as he dressed he turned on the television. The crash was still in the news, because another thirty bodies had been found. Police dogs searching through the wasted zone had found them in burned cars and flattened houses. The work crews now wore gas masks to protect themselves from the smell of death. A few neighbourhood dogs and cats that had wandered into the zone had been shot by police, and their owners had filed complaints. The mayor, whom Frank, with an annoying shiver of unnecessary excitement, recognized from the memorial, defended the police, saying they were protecting the bodies of the dead, and protecting the city from the spread of disease by contaminated animals. The owner of one of the dead cats was interviewed. He said that cats were free animals, that it was hard to keep them inside if they wanted to go out.

  He heard something drop outside his door. He opened it. The San Diego paper was on the carpet. Frank unrolled it. The headline was simple: HER NAME IS MARY SIFKA.

  Someone had given Mary’s name to the local television station that had first revealed the letter. Once the station broadcast her name, the night before, the paper felt that it no longer needed to keep the name hidden. No one had answered at Mary Sifka’s phone number in Los Angeles. She was missing from work. The identities of the letter writer and his wife were still a secret.

  At the same time, on television, Frank heard the newswoman say, ‘Mary Sifka’. And a shot of her house, which Frank had once driven past, just to see it, a blandly modern wall in the Hollywood Hills.

  He called Mary Sifka. The line was busy. He called the front desk, to see if she had called him, but there were no messages from her. Another five reporters had called, also Julia Abarbanel, to say she was in Los Angeles, and Frank’s secretary had called. Karen would know everything, wouldn’t she? She knew who Mary Sifka was, and wouldn’t she make the connection between Mary and the plane crash, and the letter?

  He called her at the office.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you,’ said Karen. Had she been talking to someone from the airline, or was that the appropriate thing to say?

  ‘We’re coming back up today. I just have to identify the bodies.’ He said those last words quickly.

  ‘Have you seen the paper today?’ she asked, without acknowledging the grotesque formality he had described to her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mary Sifka, that’s who the letter is about.’

  ‘Really.’ So Karen didn’t think it was Frank. Because she accepted what the papers all said, that the writer of the letter was dead.

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  ‘Poor Mary.’

  ‘She’s married. So her husband knows all about it now.’

  ‘He must feel awful.’

  ‘I hope he doesn’t have any guns around the house.’

  ‘Maybe he already knew about it.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, that marriage is finished.’

  ‘Do they know who wrote the letter yet?’

  ‘That’ll come out. What’s really sick is that the guy who wrote the letter gets made into a saint, and poor Mary Sifka gets the shaft for all of this. This is so sexist.’

  They’ll know my name by the evening news, thought Frank. My life is finished.

  ‘What did you need?’ asked Karen.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Frank.

  ‘You were just checking in?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Frank. There was a knock on the door. He excused himself to Karen. ‘Someone’s at the door. I have to go.’

  ‘Check in any time, Frank. You need the continuity with your work, I understand that. It helps you get over the pain.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Frank. ‘What are you telling people who call?’

  ‘I’m telling them that you’ll be out for at least a month. Is that OK?’

  ‘That’s fine. Thank you.’ The conversation was over. He opened the door. It was his family, with their bags.

  ‘Lowell called,’ said his father. ‘The coroner’s office says they think they have the bodies ready for identification.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means they have bodies which they think are Anna and the baby. And they’re ready for you to come down. Are you ready?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frank. He took a few dollars out of his wallet and tucked them beneath an ashtray, for the maid.

  In the
coffee shop, after they ordered breakfast, Frank’s mother asked if he really needed to go to the morgue.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s important.’

  ‘Why not let the doctors make the identification? It isn’t natural for you to see.’

  ‘I need the closure,’ said Frank.

  ‘Closure,’ said his mother, with disdain for the grief counsellors. ‘I can’t think about you seeing them like that.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘I’m not in control of the things that trouble me, not all the time.’

  Lowell said, ‘That’s quite a confession, Mom.’

  They were quiet, until their father said, ‘Mary Sifka. That’s an amazing story. I can’t believe they released her name.’

  Lowell turned a suspicious face to Frank. He looked ready to punish him. ‘Yesterday, when you were talking about lunch with Mark Sifka, the name rang a small bell, because Sifka is sort of a familiar name. Mary Sifka works for Jack Ney, doesn’t she?’

  ‘If it’s the same one,’ said Frank.

  ‘You think there’s two Mary Sifkas in Los Angeles?’ said Lowell, cutting Frank with his scorn.

  ‘Maybe one of them lives in the Valley,’ said Frank.

  ‘So you had lunch with an insurance agent named Mark Sifka, and then there’s a Mary Sifka who also works in insurance, who you know.’

  ‘It’s a strange world,’ said their father, and Frank wanted to kiss him for distracting Lowell from the truth. ‘Touched by tragedy and coincidence. What would the Talmudists say about that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Frank.

  ‘What’s Mary Sifka like?’ asked Leon.

  ‘I only know one of them,’ said Frank. ‘And I don’t really know her.’

  ‘The one you do know,’ said Leon.

  ‘She’s nice,’ said Frank.

  ‘Nice,’ said their mother. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means,’ said Lowell, ‘that she may have been having an affair with a married man, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t also be nice. She’s not a vampire. And it was over, remember. The affair was over.’