The Dead Celebrities Club

by Susan Swan

  Yesterday somebody sent a smuggled note reminding him that the account is his if he drops the attempted murder charges against his old cronies. Will he do what they’re asking? He can feel the clammy perspiration at the back of his neck, the signal that he’s beginning to feel stress, but there’s no point worrying about it now. His son is walking back to their table. He puts the ring away and starts peppering his boy with questions. It turns out his son works in the IT department at a Long Island college. For a while, they chat about teaching, and then his son clears his throat: Hey, I didn’t mean to go through with it. The idea of killing myself started as a joke. I intended to go back and pick up my bike, but when I returned to the bridge it was gone … I guess I got carried away …

  Easy to do.

  No, really, it was wrong.

  I’m sorry too, son.

  You seem different, Dad. Has prison changed you?

  The great Bergler would say — if he even believed what a shrink would say — that he is riding the tail end of another cycle until his masochism propels him to start all over again. But he doesn’t answer to Bergler. He answers to his son, and what he tells his boy is the answer he’ll give you.

  He has no idea if the change he’s experiencing is long-lasting because he, too, is often awash with doubts and self-suspicions. Sometimes the doubts dwindle into nothing, but other times he’s overwhelmed by fears that these changes will morph into the opposite of what he hopes for himself, and, despite his best intentions, he will return to being who he was. So, in the end, hand on heart, he cannot give you an honest answer.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book has had many helpers. I’m particularly indebted to Ricki Gold and Rehabilitation through the Arts so I am thanking Ricki Gould and Rehabilitation through the Arts; Ed Bales and Charlie Schrem for their information about US federal prisons and for Charlie’s first hand knowledge of bitcoin. I would also like to thank my agent Samantha Haywood; my husband Patrick Crean; my insightful editor Marc Côté; Mariel Marshall for her drawings and Tom Dean whose thoughts about doodles have been expressed through the novel’s protagonist.

  I am also grateful to the following for their help: Liz Ruork and Brian St. Amant for their business expertise; James Bannon for his help with betting formulas; James Ponzo for his knowledge of Afro-American street dialect; Margaret Atwood; Sheila Heti; Judy Rebick and Barbara Gowdy for early and invaluable reads of the novel; editors Heather Sangster and Janice Zawerbny; Sylvia Fraser for her knowledge of ghost writing; Jane Urquhart; Matt Kassir; Ron Graham; Kara Brown; Shelley Hassard; Douglas Gould; John Fraser; Katherine Ashenburg; Marni Jackson; my brother John Swan and the late John Nix who piqued my interest in celebrity dead pools.

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