‘Is that what happened to you, Lennie? Why you go to a PTSD meet-up, I mean? Because of all the things you’ve seen in your work?’
Lennie considers the question, weighs the intent as if holding it in her hands.
‘Ever notice how it’s only ever women in those boxes?’ she says, finally. ‘The ones that get sawn in half. For a time, it got too much. I saw too many dead girls coming through the door.
‘But Ruby’—Lennie reaches across the table, takes Ruby’s hand, squeezes tight—‘I expect just one would be enough to break your heart.’
The invitation comes through just after 2 a.m. Ruby is awake, going over her night as if untangling a necklace, carefully picking at the chain of events, when the notification dings on her phone.
Dear Ruby,
You are cordially invited to join Death Club at 11 a.m. this Sunday. We will convene at Nice Matin (see map—it’s closeto you!), where mimosas and in-depth discussions await. The founding members of the club look forward to seeing you there.
The short message finishes with a quote:
‘The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?’ Edgar Allan Poe
Though the phone number is unfamiliar, Ruby knows, without question, this is the work of Lennie Lau, the dark-haired magician from Brooklyn who puts women and girls back together again. She remembers how Lennie took her hand at the restaurant. What was it she had said? Something about too many dead girls coming through the door. To have met someone who understands this particular type of haunting, the way dead girls can follow you home—Ruby can hardly believe her luck.
And now her mind is racing ahead to Sunday, to this mysterious Death Club and what it might mean. Perhaps this is her chance to find what she’s been looking for. She knows she shouldn’t get her hopes up, not after the PTSD meet-up proved such an ill fit. But, then again, look what came out of that. A new friend, and an invitation. There can be no harm in seeing where this takes her.
Besides, it isn’t like she has anywhere else to be.
Me neither, I whisper. The sound of my voice prickles on Ruby’s skin, and I know this is not entirely the truth of it. I know that dead girls are not supposed to haunt the living. That there is a somewhere else I should be. I sense it sometimes, almost like those whispers from another room that Ruby strains to hear. Far away, but also near—I think there is a place that offers disappearing. No more waves crashing, tossing me about. Just calm.
But I no longer want to disappear. Not when it seems so many people have forgotten me. Not when nobody knows my name.
Maybe Death Club is my chance too, Ruby.
My chance to be remembered. To have people know that I was here.
Here. In New York City.
To think Ruby and I both thought this was the adventure. We really had no idea.
FOURTEEN
DEATH CLUB WAS FORMED AFTER LENNIE FELL, BRIEFLY, IN love with a man. Josh was a tall, dark and handsome journalist doing a feature on the mortuary for a popular magazine, and he was especially interested in Lennie’s reconstruction work. He followed her around on the job for the better part of a week, and there was something about the direct way he asked his questions that made Lennie’s heart bounce out of rhythm. She found herself noticing his ever-dilated pupils and the white moons of his fingernails and the flat of his front teeth, and the specificity of these observations confounded her. Josh was definitely not her type—her last lover had been a petite hula-hooper she met at a burlesque show in the East Village—but there was definitely something buzzing between them. Or so Lennie thought, until she realised what she was really attracted to: Josh’s intelligent curiosity, and his respect not just for his own work, but for her work, too. As they talked about their respective careers, discussing the way he told stories for a living, he suggested her job was to un-tell stories, wind her dead bodies back to an easier time, and perhaps that meant they were coming at the same thing, just from different locations. It was the most thoughtful description of her work Lennie had ever heard, and she knew she wanted to keep this man and his way with words in her life.
‘I’d hate to think the most interesting thing about a person, what they’re remembered for, is how they died,’ she said at dinner after Josh’s last day at the mortuary, which is when her new friend shared his secret with her. A few years back he’d nearly died himself, after a bike accident in Central Park left him with a broken neck and severe concussion. He’d spent weeks in hospital; for a while, it was touch and go as to whether he’d walk again. Though he’d since recovered physically—‘Clearly,’ he said to Lennie that night, patting his legs—something about how he experienced himself in the world had fundamentally altered.
‘Sometimes,’ Josh admitted, ‘I struggle with the fact that I survived. Have you ever heard of Cotard’s Syndrome?’—Lennie shook her head, no—‘Well, it’s quite the trip. There are people out there who think they are in fact dead. Living, breathing people who feel certain they have shuffled off this mortal coil, and they cannot be convinced otherwise, despite … well, despite all evidence to the contrary. People with this delusion essentially think of themselves as walking corpses, the dead amongst the living, and no amount of reasoning can change their minds. It’s a fascinating condition, but also terrifying. Because, since the accident, I’ve sometimes wondered if I’m not something of a walking corpse myself. Dead on the inside, you know?’
As Josh shared this startling confession in his matter of fact way, Lennie’s quiet, bird-boned neighbour fluttered into her mind. She had known Sue for years now, ever since the older woman’s Persian cat had claimed Lennie’s couch as her own, one windows-open afternoon. They were almost friends, close enough to share a wine or two on warmer nights, but up until now, Sue had steadfastly refused any overture that might formalise their relationship. Gallery openings, cheap Tuesdays at the local oyster bar, food festivals down on the water—Sue said no to every activity Lennie suggested, and then one night she said something more.
‘I’m sorry but I don’t live in the world like you do, Lennie. Not really. When my daughter died’—a car accident nearly twenty years ago, Lennie knew minimal details at the time—‘the best parts of me died, too. No one wants to spend time with a corpse, and rightly so. I’ve learned to do things on my own, and now I prefer it that way.’
Sometimes, you just know what is needed.
‘I have someone I want you to meet,’ Lennie told Josh that night over dinner, and she told Sue the same thing, the very next day. Exactly what to do with this coupling came in the middle of the night, when she remembered a man at the mortuary who had just lost his daughter, a young woman Lennie worked her magic on, carefully erasing gunshot wounds and finger marks, so that an open casket might be possible.
‘I don’t understand what this means, where she’s gone, and why I can’t go, too,’ this father had said to Lennie, sobbing into her shoulder. ‘God doesn’t answer me. And none of my friends will look me in the eye, let alone talk to me. Who am I supposed to talk to now?’
From this lament, the seeds of Death Club were planted.
We’ve each had our noses pressed up against death, Lennie wrote in her proposition. It’s this great big mystery, yet it clearly dictates how you—how we—live, at the same time. Maybe if we got to know it a little better, tried to understand it, we might find a way to break through the glass that separates life from death.
And who knows what we’ll find on the other side.
The other side. The place where you make sense of things. Where a daughter can die, and a body can return from the brink, and another comes in on a gurney, and people continue to wake up and eat and sleep and dream and love and fight and cry and conspire, as if their turn will never come.
Lennie finished off her earnest invitation with the same Poe quote she would send Ruby many months later, and an entreaty: Come explore the boundaries with me, please. It gets lonely out
here on my own.
Isolation makes everything less strange. You find yourself agreeing to things you might otherwise scoff at when you are someone who has regular plans on Tuesday and Thursday nights.
‘I’m a misanthrope,’ Josh said.
‘I don’t want to meet anyone new,’ Sue complained.
But they agreed to that first meeting of Lennie’s so-called Death Club, all the same. The first question, explored over tequila at a bar on Bedford, felt like the click of a padlock releasing: Is death the end, or the beginning?
That was nine months ago. By the time Ruby sits down with the trio at an outdoor table on a tepid spring day near Central Park, the founding members cannot remember life without Death Club’s weekly, winding conversations. Neither philosophers nor debaters, these three very different people come with their questions and their musings, their common ground a place most other people avoid in polite, everyday conversation. Most meetings take the members far from where they started, and every meeting involves food and libations. In other words, the members of Death Club generally arrive sober and go home drunk.
(Perhaps the only thing they’ve never managed to agree on is the name—‘Death Club? Really, Lennie?’—but their founder has steadfastly refused to change it, which is something I can appreciate.)
‘Don’t expect anybody else to understand,’ Lennie advises Ruby with a smile, as she comes to the conclusion of Death Club’s origin story. ‘This is definitely not most people’s cup of tea. Not when we live in a culture that likes to pretend the most obvious things aren’t real if they’re the slightest bit unpleasant. Most people avoid talking about death, they find it confronting—or scary. And if they think they’ve found a way to reconcile their fears, through religion, say, they’ll go out of their way to shut down any questions that might threaten that safety. The only rule of Death Club, therefore, is that a hard question is more important than a simple answer. Until one of us crosses over and comes back—for longer than Josh did, sorry—all we can do is keep asking our questions, no matter where that leads us.’
Ruby is following along eagerly, albeit anxiously. It hasn’t helped that, since arriving at brunch, circumstantial evidence would suggest neither Sue nor Josh are particularly enthusiastic about her presence. While Lennie chatters away, Sue’s lips remain pressed together, and Lennie’s former crush barely looks up from his phone. Next to Lennie, they come off as clouds, drifting toward the sun, and it is only when a Bloody Mary is set down in front of Josh and he pounces on it, hands clasped around the tall glass as if in prayer, that Ruby realises he is in fact extremely hungover. Sue, on the other hand, is simply tired today. A lifelong insomniac, she was working online until 3 a.m. Meeting at this time, she says, feels like getting up in the middle of the night to eat dinner.
‘My apologies,’ she says to Ruby, when a series of small yawns overtake her. ‘I am not used to being out at this time. Unlike my companion here’—she nods her head at Josh—who probably hasn’t gone to bed yet.’
‘Well, not to his own bed, at least,’ Lennie adds with a wink, causing Josh to stick his tongue out at her, mutter ‘I wish’, and just like that, the table brightens, shares its first rays of genuine warmth.
How easy is it, Ruby will think later, back in her studio, to assume you are the cause of another person’s discomfort or disdain, when the reality is, we all show up with our night befores, our midnight hours and too-early mornings. She had forgotten that making new friends is one of those confounding things, like picking up a second language or learning the piano, that seems to be much easier done when you’re a kid. By the time people get to thirty-six—Ruby feels every inch her age for once—most people already have their friendships locked down. They have kids and partners and cousins and careers and mortgages that allow for kitchen renovations and a holiday in Fiji every two years. They have well-practised stories and roles to play, and any existential crisis they might experience is generally felt as a tremor, when Ruby’s experiences are more like large earthquakes, rearranging everything.
People her age don’t do the things she does.
(Same, I whisper, but she is too busy thinking about Death Club to catch the way my sigh makes the blinds in her room flutter.)
‘I’m not entirely sure why I chose New York,’ she said at brunch, when the question came up again. But she might as well have said Because I could. Because her life was so empty of the usual trappings, so accidentally unconventional, it was easier to take a gap year at thirty-six than it was to stay put and be reminded of everything she didn’t have. She wonders if anyone at the table had thought, How could she leave a whole life so easily? and they were too polite to say it. Then again, the existing members of Death Club did not seem to have many of the usual, grown-up ties to the living, either. Perhaps they understood, without needing to push.
‘Divorced,’ Sue answered when current relationship status came up.
‘Divorced,’ Josh nodded when Ruby turned to him (noticing, for the first time, the slate grey of his eyes, the glassy ocean of his stare).
‘Anxious-Avoidant,’ Lennie added, making them all laugh, so that Ruby’s pause went unnoticed before she answered ‘Terminally single’, her hand reaching for her phone, which hadn’t buzzed in twenty-four hours.
I’ll get to know them all, Ruby thinks from her bed tonight, plucking at the strings of her strange afternoon, allowing herself to feel excited at the prospect of the next Death Club meeting. Her first official one, as Lennie pointed out over brunch, before rattling off a list of fancy places they might choose to meet at. Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle, Oyster Bar at Grand Central. The recently reopened Tavern on the Green, or that hidden prohibition bar with the bathtub, which no one could remember the name of. Restaurants and bars Ruby had read about in top ten guides, and seen little point in visiting on her own.
‘Pass,’ Josh had said to most of the suggestions, rolling his eyes. ‘Will you ever stop thinking your life is an episode of Sex and the City, Lennie?’
‘No,’ she’d answered with a grin. ‘Besides, it’s better than thinking it’s an episode of Law and Order—which used to scare the shit out of me when I was a kid, by the way. Ruby just found a dead body, people. We need to lighten things up a little here.’
‘Says the woman who started a Death Club,’ Josh had snorted, and I thought, in that moment, that I might be a little bit in love with all of them. The way the Death Club members teased each other, the way they all listened intently as Ruby told them about finding my body, even Lennie, who had heard the story just days before. They never once looked away from Ruby’s earnestness, never dismissed her feelings when she admitted she would give anything to know more about me, and I liked that so much. I liked the way they didn’t judge her or tell her to get over it, not even Sue, who seemed more serious than the other two. It made me think of those friends I’d imagined for myself, the people I was supposed to meet, and I was glad for Ruby, at least. To get to tell her stories, make her plans.
Something else, too. They know things, Ruby’s new friends. Maybe not as much as Noah does, but a lot—about New York, and death, and dead girls. Josh, especially. When Ruby said she struggled to understand how no one had come forward to identify me—‘Surely somebody misses her?’—and Lennie wondered about how anyone could remain anonymous in this age of social media, Josh informed them that more than half a million people go missing across the country every year, with many disappearances initially unreported.
‘If someone is estranged from their family,’ Josh continued, ‘if they don’t have many close ties, or it’s simply assumed they’re off somewhere doing their thing, it might take a while for someone to raise the alarm. It’s unusual to have a contemporary Jane Doe case, for sure. But not impossible.
‘You’re just lucky she’s white,’ he added, as they were packing up to leave the restaurant. ‘With that whole “Missing White Woman” thing, your Jane is getting a lot more media attention than most, Ruby. Someone is bou
nd to make the connection soon enough.’
Given the look on his face, Ruby wasn’t sure if Josh meant this to be of comfort to her; she is reminded of his words now (perhaps I gave her a nudge), and she opens her laptop, types in the phrase he’d put air quotes around. The first search result is for something called ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome’, followed by dozens of links referencing variations of this term. Ruby takes a deep breath and dives in.
Here’s what we learn: A disproportionate amount of media attention is given to incidents of violent crime involving middle to upper class white girls. Turns out, when something bad happens to young women, race and so-called class play a part in how, or even if, our stories get told. As she trawls through research papers and political blogs and protest pieces, a bleak reality is laid out for Ruby; it’s likely this Jane is receiving media attention, including the growing interest of national news outlets, because she is young, pretty—and white. As if that combination is the best proxy for vulnerability and innocence. As if skin colour might determine how sorry we should feel for someone, and how much justice they deserve.
Ruby’s stomach churns as she comprehends the significance of this insidious bias; she should have known that even death would have its hierarchies and prejudices.
As she reads into the night, Ruby also thinks about her own complicity here, confronts it, as she recalls those high-profile crimes that have made the front pages not just across America, but back in Australia, too. In every case that has seeped into her consciousness—enough for her to remember a name, a face, a story—the victim is a young white woman.
How had she not noticed that only some people are deemed worthy of having their stories told? There must be so many biographies buried in the ground, she realises, so many unspoken names. All because an arbitrary line gets drawn between the right kind of victim, and the wrong kind. And that ‘wrong’ kind of victim becomes invisible.
Before You Knew My Name Page 15