Death Letter

Wednesday morning before work I felt a twinge of anxiety as I opened the mail. A letter should have come already confirming direct deposit of my paycheck. A day late shouldn’t have caused much concern, but it had arrived every other Monday as far as I could remember. The money wasn’t much, sure – enough to cover expenses, keep the cat fed, eat out once or twice a week, get drunk when I wanted. But I needed to know it was there.

I had meant to call the bank yesterday but never got around to it, and I was tired when I got home from the bar last night and tossed the mail unopened onto the kitchen table. There was a pretty good film on starring Humphrey Bogart as an unlikable fellow accused of killing some lady, but I missed the beginning and fell asleep on the couch before it ended. It worked its way into my dreams, though. I was climbing a lonely hill at night, and had a raincoat pulled tightly around me. It was windy and the clouds sailed past the moon at an insane speed. I wore loose dress shoes with poor traction, and I would periodically slide back a few steps and have to scramble to my feet. When I finally reached the top I came to a bus stop beside a deserted street, where dead leaves and plastic bags whirled past rusted cars. The weathered remnants of handbills for last month’s carnival were pasted to the reverse of the bus stop’s glass partition; the mirror image of a torn clown, its pointy-hatted head pinned in the jaws of a tiger, grinned obscenely at me. A payphone stood nearby, and though it didn’t ring I held the receiver to my ear. I could hear Bogie over the line, telling someone a good love scene involved him slicing grapefruit, dopey and half-asleep. I can’t recall how I reacted to hearing this, but when I woke the film was over and Lee J. Cobb was arguing with someone offscreen.

I flipped past a few envelopes destined for the junk pile – get this credit card, save that creature, elect some city councilperson – and found a letter from my job. This one felt unusual: my address and theirs were typed on the outside of the envelope rather than visible through a glassine window, and it weighed next to nothing.

The letter inside was terse:

Dear sir,

We regret to hear of your untimely passing. Effective immediately, all deposits to your account are hereby suspended.

Sincerely,

I held the letter towards the kitchen ceiling light, as if a change in angle would reveal new truths. The paper felt cheap, but the company’s logo was faintly embossed about two-thirds of the way down the page – a seal of authenticity, I supposed. But I didn’t feel dead. I pressed my thumb into each finger on one hand, then the other. Five fingers per hand, all with feeling. I cleared my throat, coughed; the sound was staged, hollow, but at least I had made it. I had seen enough bad comedy films to know better than to run face first into the bathroom door, but I did run my hand down its surface. Decaying paint was peeling off firm plywood – I scraped a few flakes off with my thumbnail. So I couldn’t pass through solid matter, anyway.

I imagined human resources could sort this out, but all of a sudden I didn’t feel like going to work. I lit a burner to put a kettle on for tea, and waved my hand into the flame, which if anything hurt more intensely than I expected. Apparently I could outwit the walls but not the stove.

Why, I wondered while holding my fingers under running water, would my job bother informing me I was dead? If they intended to reach a close relation I had none, and I lived alone, except for my cat. I actually half-suspected Baxter could read, but he in any case lacked the manual dexterity necessary to open an envelope. I hadn’t seen him this morning, but I didn’t seek him out. I felt confident cats could see ghosts, so a conversation with Baxter wouldn’t prove anything.

I sat staring out the window, nursing my tea for the better part of an hour. I wasn’t really thinking, just allowing my eyes to wander over the rooftops of shorter buildings in the neighborhood, watching weak sunlight reflect off miserable old patches of snow. It felt liberating to hear the clock strike nine – I hadn’t called in sick in years, and couldn’t remember the last time I was home when others weren’t.

At nine-thirty I reread the letter but discovered nothing new. Though I held the mail I wondered absently if the post office thought I was dead. I went downstairs to check the boxes and found my name below my mail slot, just the same as all the other residents. I leaned against the wall, not necessarily reassured, and noticed a lingerie catalog sticking out of box 3B. I wiggled it gently until it came loose and began thumbing through it. I didn’t feel particularly moved by the images, but I couldn’t say that meant much. One model was pretty enough, with a vaguely exotic face, generous curves, actual hips. The others looked unbalanced: stick frames, massive tits. And the airbrushing was out of control – the blemishes, the wrinkles and the stretch marks had been predictably erased, but so had the nipples, the pubic hair and the labia, the tiny islands in a sea of skin that could send nations to war. Or something. I dropped the catalogue on the floor and went back upstairs.

Though I had left my apartment just minutes before, an alien feeling came over me now, as though I had chanced upon a meticulous recreation of my living room in a foreign museum. I turned around slowly – with the bathroom door open I could see almost the entire space from where I stood. I could sense a labored authenticity in the most trivial details: the ten-and-two o’ clock arrangement of teacup handle and sugar spoon on a saucer left behind on the kitchen counter, the accumulation of dust on the books and records lining the shelves, the patterns of wear on the floorboards. I wanted to sit down but seemed unable to comprehend the utility of the sofa; the fabric bristled under my hand the way the skin of a frightened creature in some exotic petting zoo might.

The clock radio was playing quietly in my bedroom, though I couldn’t remember turning it on. A voice as flat as newly minted paper money announced that today was the anniversary of the death of a certain jazz trumpeter. It seems his wife shot the poor bastard following an argument outside a club where his band was relaxing between sets. A curiously mid-tempo number followed the story; it was neither an upbeat celebration of the trumpeter’s life nor a mournful reflection on death. Just a song.

Baxter emerged from behind the bed, brushed across my legs. “I am here,” I told him, louder than intended. He looked at me funny, then wandered off to the kitchen and stuck his face in his food. “I am here,” I said again, softly this time.

The phone rang. I almost didn’t answer, thinking it was my job investigating today’s absence. But they thought I was dead, didn’t they? I picked up after six rings.

“Hey.” This was a voice I hadn’t heard in some time. Jane and I were longtime friends, almost-lovers, occasionally at each other’s throats. She split for Michigan years ago when things got too weird between us.

“What time is it there?”

“We’re in the same time zone, mister. What’s with asking me that, anyway? Not happy to hear from me?”

Ordinarily I wouldn’t have known the answer. I needed Jane, but talking to her always made things hard for me. I assumed she felt the same. “You don’t know how glad I am.”

“Yeah?”

“Jane…I think I might be dead.”

“How so?” She answered calmly.

“It’s my job. They sent me this letter canceling my paychecks. It said I was dead.”

“But you’re talking to me.”

“I know it’s absurd, but it sounds plausible. How do I know I’m living?”

“Does your heart beat? Are you breathing?”

“Ghosts breathe.”

“I wonder. You can’t talk to someone at your job?”

“Who am I to stand against a tangled bureaucracy? I can just hear them ordering me from one department to the next, insisting their computers don’t make errors.”

“You could try.” Her tone was one I knew well – she was losing patience with me. “How many people work in your office, anyway? Fifty? It’s not like you’re taking on the government.”

“But who goes to the office to prove they’re alive?”

There was a long silence as we considered this. When she finally spoke it was to ask if I’d been outside today.

“I went down to the mailbox, but I suppose I haven’t properly left the building, no.”

“Do. Walk around, interact with people. Call me later.”

She hung up. I grabbed the barest necessities – coat, keys, wallet – and, after a moment’s hesitation, folded the death letter into my pocket.

The streets were relatively empty for a weekday. I saw no one I knew, and nobody paid me any attention. People bought their groceries, walked their dogs, hailed their taxis, hurried one place after another. I hate winter in the city because everyone moves like they have somewhere to be. In summertime the parks swarm with people killing time, usually in entertaining ways. On the other hand, I told myself, winter’s probably not a bad time for a ghost. A chill shot through my body as I had this thought, but it left as quickly as it came.

I trudged down familiar avenues for hours, never once considering where I was going. I stopped once for coffee and a sandwich, but the guy serving me moved so swiftly, so mechanically, that I felt less than certain I was present at the meal. The coffee warmed me, but I couldn’t taste the sandwich. I wasn’t hungry when I ordered it and I wasn’t full after I finished it. I wanted a cigarette afterwards – probably the strongest sensation I had all day, and the strangest. I’ve never been a smoker, but a slow, satisfying post-meal cigarette, the kind Humphrey Bogart might have in the movies, sounded like just the thing. The craving lasted only as long as an empty plate was in front of me; by the time I left the café and walked past a market I desired nothing.

Soon I reached the park. It was dusk and the light was pathetic; the stripped branches of the trees bent forward like talons, low and sharp. A fog enveloped the east end of the park, and as I moved towards it I could hear voices, murmured conversations. I stood closer; the words grew louder but I couldn’t understand a thing. The sound was like the tower of Babel, a confusion of tongues. And yet for a moment I distinctly heard the voice of my grandfather: as an old man suffering from dementia he told stories of his youth during Prohibition, of moving cases of bootleg liquor on the Philadelphia trolleys. “Bring me my gangster hat,” he once insisted in a state of confusion, and this is precisely what I heard in the fog: “Bring me my gangster hat.”

The murmuring resumed. I stood still for a time, facing the fog. I listened but didn’t recognize another word. My hands were in my pockets and I felt along the folded edges of the letter with my fingertips. I thought about my grandfather, about the fog; I thought I could take another step forward and maybe disappear forever.

I thought about it, but in the end I didn’t. Baxter needed me, and I owed Jane a phone call. I turned around, away from the fog, and started walking home.