Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

  Sometimes, if enough time has passed between one girl and the next, a city will be shocked awake when it happens. People will take to the streets with their signs and their anger, a crowd surge of protest and grief as they send a message across the town: We don’t want to be unsafe here. The police will tell women to be vigilant, to avoid certain places, they’ll tell men to make sure their loved ones get home safe from any place—because nowhere feels safe in those days and weeks after a dead girl is found. Women will push back hard against this, say, Tell men not to rape and murder us! Have stronger sentencing for violent crimes! We should not be the ones changing our behaviour here!

  It might even seem that things will get better.

  But after a while, the city will go back to its rhythms, it will once again become a place where women walk alone at night, and talk to strangers on the street, and only avoid certain places. That girl, the one they marched for, won’t be forgotten, but her murder will stop being a fresh wound, eventually. It will settle on the city like a small, ugly scar.

  Then, when it happens again, the city will be tired. No one will march this time, or shout in the streets; their anger will be jaded, quiet. Flowers will be laid, and candles lit, but the death of another bright young girl will come more like a reminder from now on, an alarm clock ringing.

  The city was already weary when her body was found.

  Time and again they will come with their flowers and candles. From Mexico City to Madrid to Melbourne and Manila, these cities will be bone tired as they watch the flowers wilt and the candles burn down.

  Here lies the pain of another woman, another community, the flowers and the candles say.

  There is silence for a time.

  And then the alarm sounds out again.

  SIXTEEN

  WHEN HE WAS THERE ON THE GROUND DYING, DEATH DID not feel like he thought it would. In fact, it didn’t feel like anything at all. Time-stamps across his movements that night show two and a half hours passed between him leaving the restaurant to the west of Central Park, and his bloody, confused stumble into a bodega on the other side, where the terrified clerk used Josh’s own phone to call an ambulance. He remembers the sharp pain of coming to in the park, the disorientation of tree roots and rocks and dirt at eye level, and the outline of a bicycle wheel, strangely twisted. He remembers how the pain came flooding in as he looked at that circle of spokes, a dam opening, nerves gushing. Soon, his arms were burning, and his legs were bright red flames. He could taste blood, see it, and though he couldn’t make his arms reach up, he knew there was something wrong with his head, something exposed and broken. Before that—there had been nothing. Up to two hours of black, as he lay on a dirt path and his upturned bicycle wheel stopped spinning and lights went out in apartments on both sides of the park. Phones were turned to silent, laptops were clicked shut; neighbours and his wife on East 97th rolled over to face their bedroom walls. All that time, he was gone.

  As Josh recounts the story of his bike accident for Ruby, a muscle in his jaw twitches, betraying his impassive tone. She has been listening intently, can almost see the dirt and the tree roots and the upside-down, spinning wheel. What she cannot see, the way I can, is the man he was in the minutes, seconds, before the accident, how much lighter he was than the man telling his story now. Physically, yes, but something else, too. Josh’s heaviness comes from the way his body let him down after the fall, the way it refused to hold him up. With a fractured C3 vertebra—he places Ruby’s hand against the back of his neck, helps her fingers feel the grooves—he was kept in a brace for six weeks, had to be fed like a baby, have his ass wiped by a roster of nurses, remember how to walk on his own. It does something to your sense of location within your body, spending all those days and nights lying on your back, staring at the pock-marked ceiling of a hospital room. It changes you, when you find yourself so utterly reliant on strangers to take care of your most basic needs.

  He had, until the accident, somewhat thought he was invincible.

  (You’d be surprised at how many people think this way.)

  They are holding their first official Death Club meeting as a foursome at Gramercy Tavern—‘Farm to table is very New York!’ Lennie declared when choosing the restaurant—where Ruby has found she needs to query many of the ingredients on the menu.

  ‘They don’t have nice restaurants in Melbourne?’ Sue had commented when Ruby asked to be reminded what arugula was. Ruby soon learns this seemingly taciturn woman is an avid solo traveller, considers Melbourne to be one of her favourite culinary cities, and was merely teasing her. Never sure how to respond to ribbing (she has often wondered if there isn’t a touch of casual cruelty in it), Ruby was grateful when Lennie suddenly tapped on her glass with a fork, making a show of calling the meeting to order.

  Death Club, it turns out, is surprisingly easy to navigate. Once you get past the awkwardness of hellos, where to sit, what seasonal salad to order. Though Lennie was the official host, their newest member was granted the opening question of the night.

  ‘Any question about death you want to ask, it’s yours, Ruby.’

  Nervous as she was, she immediately knew what she wanted to discuss.

  Do you think people know when they die? As it happens. Are they aware?

  (What she’s really asking: Do those of us who die so violently get spared the knowing of it? This is something she can’t stop thinking about.)

  As soon as Ruby set down her question, something changed in the others, an immediate orientation toward her. Josh responded first, admitting his own experiences had made him wonder about this very thing. Did he die that night in the park, when his bike hit a tree root, and his neck broke as he hit the ground? Or did he nearly die, which isn’t the same thing at all. When he thinks back, he can only remember the nothingness of those hours he lay broken and bloody in the dirt. There was no light to walk toward, no grandfather telling him it wasn’t his time. No tunnels or feelings of peace, just a silent, black expanse he felt tethered to. A dark place to which he often, inadvertently, returns.

  ‘The thing is, once you start losing blood supply to the brain,’ he is saying now, ‘whether through shock, which is what happened to me, or strangulation’—he looks straight at Ruby when he says this—‘everything short circuits pretty quickly. Our most human characteristics are the first to go, apparently. Sense of self, awareness of time. Memory centres, language. Essentially, you reduce, getting more and more primal as things shut down. In that way, I’d say we might know when we’re in the process of dying. But by the time we get to death itself, we don’t know that we were ever alive.’

  ‘Although studies have shown,’ Sue picks up the thread, ‘that some people experience a surge of brain activity at the point of death. The complete opposite of an unconscious state. There was a moment, in the car with Lisa, where she came to, opened her eyes, looked straight at me. It was like she came back, like she was completely fine. And then, in a second, she was gone.’

  ‘You never told me that part,’ Lennie says softly, reaching over and squeezing Sue’s hand.

  ‘About what happened before they got me out of the car? No, I suppose I haven’t. I don’t, as you might imagine, like going over the specifics. At any rate,’ Sue dabs at her eyes with the corner of a napkin, ‘I don’t want to get too fanciful about it. An unexpected burst of brain activity right before death seems to be quite common. A last human flare sent out into the world, if you will.’

  Ruby soon understands that emotions move like water when Death Club gets going; sometimes there is a steady stream of words and ideas, sometimes a touched nerve blocks the flow. Even then, with a little pressure, something true and honest cracks through. Sue’s soft smile for Lennie now, Josh’s sheepish grin when the latter suggests the story of his accident seems to have gotten a little more dramatic tonight. Then, it’s like everyone is propelled by the same questions and anxieties, the same need to move past their current limitations. Ruby has never participated in a convers
ation that feels so raw and honest. Her friends back home are great, they’re funny and kind and smart, but they mostly talk about work and weekends. They plan parties, and group holidays to Thailand, and when they meet on someone’s couch, or in the dark corner of a city bar, they talk about everyday, ordinary things. Sometimes they argue about each other’s political leanings, or attend a march for this, against that. But for the most part, her Australian friends have an unspoken agreement to glide across the surface of things. None more so than Ash.

  ‘We don’t have to talk about everything,’ he once said.

  As if the little she said was too much.

  Ever since her seemingly unfounded panic the morning after the vigil, Ruby has been careful with Ash. While they still text most days, the majority of their messages have become generic, polite in the way of people who are busy thinking more about what they don’t say than what they do. After holding back so much from Ash—from everyone back home—it is exhilarating for Ruby to find herself in the middle of such rich, meaningful conversation, something she would have never thought possible with people she barely knows. Though, to be sure, this evening has given Ruby a chance to get to know her table-mates better, to catch pieces of them in the light, in a way she wasn’t afforded at brunch. For instance, she quickly comes to understand that Sue, with her cropped white hair and jutting cheekbones, projects a quiet, enviable confidence, whether choosing a wine, or setting down an opinion. She has travelled the world on her own, doesn’t find Ruby’s current isolation odd at all, and is only concerned for what she suggests might be a tendency toward aimlessness in her new acquaintance.

  ‘Don’t confuse liking your own company with doing nothing,’ she advises, when Ruby admits she is neither working nor studying while in New York. ‘You’re a designer by trade, yes? Well, in this day and age, there’s no excuse for not working from your own bed, if you have to.’

  Ruby cannot imagine offering such unsolicited advice to someone she’s just met, yet she finds herself grateful for Sue’s polite scolding, considers laying out her whole list of problems, just to see what the older woman might say. (It’s Death Club, not Confession, she has to remind herself more than once when it comes to Sue.)

  Josh, on the other hand, throws out statements like grenades. Sweeps up the damage himself if he sees he has gone too far. ‘Sorry,’ he says more than once as the night progresses, not sounding sorry at all. ‘That didn’t come out the way I meant it to.’

  ‘I write like I speak, but I don’t speak like I write,’ he will explain later. ‘Which is how I get myself in trouble sometimes.’

  In addition to having firm opinions on almost everything, Josh is, Ruby can consciously acknowledge this now, undeniably handsome. He was born in Minnesota; Midwestern is the term Lennie would use for his physique, possessed as he is of thick limbs and a wide chest, his body calling to mind farms and machines, and long summers spent outdoors. To Ruby, who sees every man in relation to Ash, Josh is solid, sturdy, a rock compared to Ash’s cool, narrow river. Out of shape, Josh would say, if he knew of her assessment. Knowing, as Ruby does not, that before the accident he was thirty pounds lighter, easily buttoning himself into fancy suits or sliding into the beds of beautiful women, one of whom he married. He has not made peace with this new, heavier body, mourns the impression he used to make when he walked into a room, the way his wife would light up just to look at him. Ruby could have thrown herself across the table at Josh for all he would notice a woman checking him out these days: who wants to be appreciated for all you would change about yourself? After his wife left, he packed up what was left of desire, hid it away in the black. Content, he thinks, to leave it there.

  (He doesn’t say any of this out loud, of course.)

  Amongst the group it is clear that Lennie is the warmth, the home fire. I see bright oranges and golds spark from her fingers, settle on the shoulders of her friends when she talks, relaxing muscles, loosening bones. She has always had this gift, a kind of radiance soaked in by the people around her, from those doting waiters Ruby noticed their first supper after the PTSD meet-up, to Sue and Josh now, any tensions they brought to the table sliding off them as the evening progresses. Ruby cannot see the glow, but she too feels it; despite the intensity of Death Club’s conversations, she soon feels relaxed for the first time in a very long while.

  I, on the other hand, cannot relax. On the contrary. I feel a growing sense of anticipation. Waiting as the group comes up against the single question that I want them to ask tonight, watching as they back away from it every time.

  What happens after you die?

  I could tell them, over this table cluttered with wine glasses and brightly coloured, half-eaten food, that you are indeed aware when it happens. I could explain that the black Josh can remember from the accident is simply where it begins. Death. It doesn’t happen all at once. We are not a switch flicked, a power source turned off. You are still right there at the start, as the pain intensifies, a string plucked over and over, pulled so tight that you flame under the skin, and it’s only after that—I don’t know if it’s choice or necessity at this point—you begin to leave your body. You retreat from the agony and the fire, and when you find yourself in the black, you know, instinctively, that you need to pass through it. The black is your waiting room, a brief pause in the night of your existence, before you stumble forward, searching for walls, a door, to get out. By then, nothing they can do to your body hurts you. Not in the sense of nerve and sinew and bone.

  But you are definitely aware that you’re dead. It’s what happens next that I still don’t understand.

  Josh came back. I did too, somehow. I know there are others, somewhere in this new distance made of space and time, who do not come back, people who quickly move on. More and more, I can sense their departure, like the click of a shut door, but I don’t know where they go, these dead who do not live here anymore.

  What happens if you don’t follow them? What happens after you die, if you’re still aware? Josh had to learn how to walk again, after spending time in the black. Does that mean I can learn to speak and touch and be heard again, too? Do I get to send out that last human flare, to show Ruby I’m still here?

  The way I see it, Death Club holds the answers. The truth will reveal itself, soon enough. As long as these four questioning minds, these four sets of past experiences, future hopes and current complications, keep pressing their noses up against death, keep trying to break through the glass.

  With Ruby there in the middle.

  And me, their fifth member, waiting on the other side.

  Best Death Club ever!!! Josh has never talked so much about the accident. And Sue—OMG she loved you! Her turn to host next, will send you the details asap. Thank you. Mwah xoxox

  Lennie’s text comes through early the next morning. Ruby, half asleep, smiles as she reads the message.

  Ask if the dead can talk to us too, I whisper in her ear. But she has already gone back to sleep, my words sounding like the soft metal clang of the venetian blinds against her open window.

  Sue chooses Patsy’s as the next Death Club destination, an Italian restaurant on West 56th where Frank Sinatra used to dine at his favourite table back in the day.

  ‘Lisa’s favourite movie was On the Town with Sinatra and Gene Kelly,’ Sue explains when they first sit down, ‘and she used to beg to eat here whenever we came into the city. It might not be one of Lennie’s over-priced, over-hyped tourist traps. But there’s a little bit of New York’s history here—and a little bit of mine.’

  It is a week since they met at Gramercy Tavern. In that time, with some help from me, the four members of Death Club have thought about each other, gone to sleep with fragments of each other’s stories and felt a peculiar longing for each other’s company, in ways they never would have expected. And though no one is quite sure how it happened, it is Ruby the three original members keep coming back to most of all. So that by the end of the week, Sue can’t stop thinking about
how close Ruby is to the age her daughter Lisa would be now if she had lived, rolls the thought around and around until it is shiny, a pearl between her fingertips. Her daughter in New York. Her daughter eating at fancy restaurants and drinking fine wine. Her daughter—but her imaginings are cut off every time, because she does not yet know enough about Ruby, does not know enough about who her own daughter may have become. With so many gaps, Sue finds herself endlessly ruminating, looking for hints, for clues. What does a woman in her mid-thirties make of life these days? Ruby seems to have sprung, fully formed, from Lennie’s forehead, but she must have left a whole life behind. Lovers, family, friends. A career back home in Australia. What movies does she like, what books does she love? What ideas does she have about men?

  (If she had lived, who might Lisa have become?)

  It took me a little longer to capture Josh’s attention, or rather, to figure out how to direct it. He was not interested in why Ruby came to New York. Did not ponder her living arrangements or how she filled her days, or what she left behind in Australia. Over brunch, he had completely missed the slant of her cheekbones and the map of her mouth, remained unfazed by the smallness of her hands, the way her fingers wrapped around whatever glass she was holding, or her habit of pulling at her earlobe when she was deep in thought. None of this interested him, none of this came home with him when they parted, which wasn’t exactly unusual for Josh, because not much at all about the opposite sex interested him these days. Lennie and Sue were different, he made time for Death Club because he liked the way their minds worked, the things they didn’t shy away from. And because his agent agreed he might get a book out of it someday. Which is how I figured it out in the end. The hook and the reel.

  Me.

  Riverside Jane.

  He had heard about me, of course. But after meeting Ruby, he started paying more attention to the details. And that’s when he began to notice the jogger reference in every blog post or news article he read. The body was found by a jogger. A jogger made the unfortunate discovery, just after 6 a.m. Jogger encounters dead body in Riverside Park. How many times had he read a variation of this sentence and not stopped to think about this ubiquitous jogger, present in so many tales of woe? How, as a writer, had he not considered what finding a dead body must be like, especially if the discovery made the headlines, led to a massive investigation like this one. How odd that Lennie’s new project, this Australian woman she’d insisted he meet, should turn out to be one such jogger. The jogger in fact. Out of this spark of fascination, a small fire for Ruby was started, a wondering, and that is where I came in, tending those flames until they licked at his dreams.