Dead is Better (8 page)

But these glowing orbs belong not to the wise and wraithlike Mr. and Mrs. Moishe Burnside, but to a pair of living, thirsty coyotes who are taking a shortcut from the dry hills through the cemetery down to Forest Lawn Road below.

“Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.”

—James Joyce,
Ulyssees

***

What I know and don’t know after my second visit to the cemetery:

The dead move among the living. Look at Rose. Look at me. That’s an expression. I know you can’t see me or Rose, but believe me, we are there right with you sometimes.

Unfortunately, I cannot see Rose now. Did she become lost in the world of life or did she choose to remain there? Did she run away? From me? After failing to summon my grandparents, I watched Rose vanish into the night, a graceful shade among shadows, a small silence in a greater one.

I need to find Rose, even if it is just to say goodbye.

And I’d like to know where all the others all are. By others I mean the dead in general, and specifically those I wouldn’t mind running into here in the Beyond: my maternal grandparents, Warren Zevon, Christopher Smart, Richard Brautigan, Otis Redding, Anne Frank, John Donne, Richard Feynman, E.B. White, Jim Morrison, Fred Neil, Lenny Bruce, John Keats, Richard Farina, Chaucer, Coleridge, Samuel Johnson, Sam Kinnison, Jesus, Lincoln, Sitting Bull, Einstein. No, not Einstein. Did you know he abandoned his own daughter and treated his sons like shit? I’ll take Lord Buckley instead. And some nice dead dogs—for Rose, perhaps—and some dinosaurs for me.

It’s like a fucking tomb here it’s so quiet, so empty. Hamlet, if he had paid any attention to his ghost father at all, would have known that death, whatever it is, does not involve dreaming. Thinking, yes. And remembering. There’s not much to it, really, just the act of knowing and of trying to know, and an unrelenting urge to find—okay, I’ll say it—the truth.

Expired Happy Andy Macaroni and Cheese wasn’t on the menu at Wings of Hope. That means the poor geezer in the ER got sick from something else.

“On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.”

—Woody Allen

***

I’m back at Memorial Medical Center looking for Rose, for Dr. Miller—for clarity. It’s daylight—but I’ve lost track of the living days. Was I buried two weeks ago, two months? Two years?

Without Rose I am, if this is possible, deader and more alone.

Rose’s shtick with my hospital I.D. bracelet brought me here before, but I got sidetracked last time searching for Dr. Miller.

Without Rose, I have fewer distractions but less sense of direction. I circulate slowly like bad air through the parking structure, then along the outside of the building, the roof, drifting down, peering into windows.

Inside I check out the exclusive top-floor private suites, float through the locked psych ward, oncology, nephrology, labor and delivery, through labs and operating rooms, waiting areas, nurses’ stations, and the ICU. Even the chapel. I’ve seen the living suffering in a variety of ways, many of them close, very close to death—but no cigar. I found the name “Dr. I. Miller” on a locker in the physicians’ changing room and written in blue marker on a dry erase board in Labor and Delivery—but didn’t see him—I learned the I is for Ian—and did not find Rose.

All that’s left is below ground and the first floor—cafeteria, pharmacy, gift shop, admitting, the ER, a suite of business offices and meeting rooms, security, a laundry, and the basement morgue and pathology lab, where you might expect Rose to be hanging out with a new companion, perhaps the infant I saw wrapped in a small, white sheet.

No Rose.

Just to finish what I started, I scan the people on the hospital’s busy first floor from above, looking for Rose’s sleek shape, until I’m in an area of carpeted offices and meeting rooms. Color photographs of men in suits shaking hands with well-dressed people dot the beige walls. A secretary in a pants suit sits at a triangular desk at the end of one long hall and speaks on a telephone. Behind her is a closed oak door upon which are shiny raised letters that spell out Frederick R. Nilsson, Chief Financial Officer, and through which appears the hazy figure of a dog.

Death:
The end of life. The cessation of life. (These common definitions of death ultimately depend upon the definition of life, upon which there is no consensus.)

***

My reunion with Rose is deeply moving and perplexing. Once we return together to our little corner of the otherworld, she leaps upon me and I embrace her—two flickering gray flames becoming one. The way she licks my pallid face with her dry tongue, you’d think I was the lost soul, not she.

Which leaves me where, exactly?

The doctor who pronounced me dead—I haven’t found him yet.

The geezer was a dead-end. He had no real connection to me or to AndyCo.

The CFO’s office at the hospital, why did Rose park herself there? I’ve never seen his name before.

Why would Rose run away like that, then return to the hospital?

Why wasn’t she looking for me?

What am I missing? What is it that I can’t see?

Rose assumes her patient pose again, her wise eyes wide. She reminds me of those small statues of Anubis, dog or jackal, in the British Museum that I liked to visit the summer I was twelve. My father was doing a summer variety show for an English television company. Every morning a car picked him up under the silver pergola of the Savoy Hotel and took him to the Pinewood Studios outside the city. My shit brother and I spent our days wandering London with our mother—and spent time fighting over our stamp collections in our suite overlooking the Thames and Cleopatra’s needle.

We returned to the museum often to see the Egyptian art and mummies—not just the humans, but cat and dog mummies too, their painted faces on the mummy cases animated and individual. I still remember a papyrus depicting Anubis with his dog head weighing a dead human heart during a ritual designed to test its purity: The heart, if it proved lighter than a feather, was the soul’s ticket into the afterlife. If the heart failed the test, Anubis fed it to Ammit the Devourer.

My own fat, twisted heart should make a nice snack for the Devourer. I look into Rose’s sweet and worried face and see in it the expression of a heart purer than Anubis’s lightest feather.

What’s troubling her?

Rose nudges my hand gently with her nose, as if to urge me to get going, to do something. I have no idea what she wants and, before I can stop myself, I pull my hand away, unable to suppress my irritation, my frustration at myself and the absurdity of my situation.

As Rose drops her head and almost cowers, I feel the weight of my own crass self-centeredness.

For most of my life and certainly since my death, I haven’t considered anyone except myself.

I pat Rose on the head until her body relaxes.

Stupid, arrogant fuck that I am, the possibility that Rose might have her own concerns—her own unfinished and important business—never occurred to me—not even once.

Because I died or was pronounced dead in the Memorial Medical E.R., I assumed Rose was nudging me toward my own truth.

Well maybe there’s truth to be had—but it doesn’t belong to me.

And if there’s meaning to be sought—it’s not located in my own death.

Maybe it’s Rose’s death that counts.

I look into Rose’s expectant and forgiving eyes. As she looks back at me with an expression of love and hope, I could kick myself.

I had everything ass-backwards, I see that now. I was completely mistaken all along.

The dog’s not here for me.

I’m here for the dog.

“Death is when the monsters get you.”

—Stephen King

***

Rose and I circulate inside the spacious office of Frederick R. Nilsson, Chief Financial Officer, Memorial Medical Center, a Medical Corporation. I’ve spent more time in this fucking hospital dead than I ever did alive, even when my mother was sick with her lengthy final illness.

Mr. Nilsson sits behind a very large desk, slipping papers and printouts into files scattered across his desk, and then shuts down a large desktop computer. He is in his thirties, tall, blond, with very pale blue eyes and slightly sunburned skin, as if he’d spent the weekend wearing sunglasses and water-skiing or playing volleyball at the beach. He wears a dark suit and a tie with a bright sunflower pattern. There is a silver-framed photograph on the desk showing him receiving an award from a gray-haired man in a white coat. A digital clock on the shelf behind him says 7 P.M.

I do not know why Rose has brought me here, but try to be vigilant. I have no idea what to notice or what to look for. I’ve never seen this perfectly ordinary, dull-looking man before—in my life or since my death.

Nilsson stands, lifts his briefcase to the desk and snaps it closed, then takes a cell phone from his pocket and pushes a button.

“Hi, Mom. I’m leaving now. Need anything?”

Rose and I hear a female voice on the other end, but can’t make out the words.

“Okay. That’s good. How was physical therapy today?”

More female sounds, then Nilsson slips his phone back into his pocket, grabs his briefcase and exits the office.

Before I can give Rose a questioning look, she’s gliding after him—as if she’s a kite for which he holds very short string—and I follow her through the office door, past his secretary’s desk, down the hall, up the large elevator, and through the lobby into the parking structure, where he gets inside a white SUV and starts the engine. Along the way he greets or been greeted by a variety of people—nurses, janitors, volunteers. He has an easy way about him—friendly, relaxed, warm.

Okay. He’s a totally—and I mean totally—boring guy, I think. Nice enough, but how can this schmuck be in any way important to Rose?

But Rose isn’t finished. She jumps right through the rear door of the SUV into the back seat and looks at me. I slide in beside Rose after the SUV is moving, not difficult in my current condition.

Unaware of his two silent, invisible and weightless passengers, Mr. Nilsson turns on the radio to a country station and, as he drives, up Fairfax past the Farmers Market (one of my favorite places when I was alive, especially Bob’s Donuts), he sings along loudly to George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Not my taste. After a few minutes he swings his car into the narrow driveway of a two-story house on Circle Drive. I know where we are—Carthay Circle, a collection of Spanish style homes built around the famous Carthay Circle movie theater in the twenties.

Sprinklers are running on most of the front lawns in the neighborhood in the deepening twilight. The early fall heat wave must still be going on.

Nilsson parks, takes his briefcase from the front seat and walks quickly to the front door.

Rose follows, practically at his ankles. I’m behind Rose.

Nilsson enters a hallway with dark wooden floors. To the right is a living room. At the end of the hallway is a small den or family room. Nilsson goes into the den, but Rose doesn’t stop to observe him. She sails right over him through some shuttered French doors to the backyard beyond. Once again I follow.

The outdoor area is paved. Two ficus trees grow from large terracotta pots. There’s a table with an umbrella and chairs, some lounge chairs, and hand weights in the corner. Rose floats past these things and disappears around a low wooden fence at the very back.

I follow her into a small, treeless area of loose dirt that holds a defunct clothesline and incinerator.

And see a dog, one end of a dirty rope tied around its neck, the other to the clothes line pole.

“Death is part of who we are. It guides us. It shapes us . . .”

—Christopher Paolini,
Brisingr

***

Rose rushes to the living dog and tries to lick its face. Two plastic bowls lay on their sides in the dirt, both empty. Dried up dog shit lies in the dirt.

Does the living dog feel Rose’s presence? I can’t tell. It lies still in the dirt, not asleep, but unmoving, most likely thirsty and hungry. Like Rose this dog is much too thin, but this dog is black, with feathery fur and dirt-caked paws. I recognize the rope—it’s the same kind Rose had tied around her neck.

Can it be? Can this be where Rose suffered when she was alive? And is this poor creature her replacement?

I think about how hot it must have been out here today—it’s not unusual for early fall days in LA to be in the 100s—then turn back toward the house, its windows now filled with a soft golden light, and want to fucking kill that Nilsson guy.

Rose looks at me, her eyes imploring.

I return my gaze to the dog.

Summoning all my will, gathering up my anger and my strength I fly to the dog and with my gray dead fingers and try to untie the rope.

First I try to unfasten the rope from the pole, then to loosen the rope from around the poor dog’s neck, but my hands don’t work here.

My fingers pass right through the rope—the dog—everything—no matter how desperately hard I try to grasp it.

I am less than a shadow.

“This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.”

—Graham Chapman, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”

***

I can’t untie the fucking rope.

I cannot bring the dog food or give it water.

I can’t lift the dog, carry it to a car, and get her the fuck out of this hellhole.