Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

  ‘This guy took his wife to Mexico so that he could try to get the marriage kick-started after he’d had an affair.’

  ‘What was in the letter?’ This was a stupid question to ask, and he knew it would come back to him.

  ‘I don’t have it in front of me, but it was, like, darling, I love you, I’m sorry I hurt you, and I fucked this other woman and it’s over and if you don’t want me, fine, I understand.’

  ‘Did they say anything about names?’

  ‘No. Can you imagine? If he hadn’t had the affair, maybe he wouldn’t have taken his wife on the trip, and then they’d both be alive.’

  ‘And their daughter?’

  ‘There was nothing in the letter about any children. Did you hear something?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m confusing this with something else. I know, the people who were killed on the ground.’

  ‘A lot of people were killed on the ground.’ But she didn’t say this to force him to clarify his meaning, only to show her awe.

  With the letter’s resurgence into the conversation, Frank thought he would stop breathing. He tried to swallow, but panic choked him. ‘I have to go,’ he squeaked.

  ‘Where?’ Why did she have to ask that? What business was it of hers?

  ‘Some kind of pre-memorial service downstairs.’

  ‘Good luck,’ said his cousin.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘We all love you, Frank. All of us.’

  Yes, but do you? He didn’t ask. He hung up.

  There were voices in the hall. He opened the door, and the woman he had seen earlier, arguing by the elevator, was talking to one of the other mourners.

  ‘I’ll get to you later,’ she said. And she smiled. He didn’t understand. She gave him a business card for Dave Dessick, Attorney at Law.

  9

  The General Theory of the Letter

  In the morning, the letter was everywhere. Frank woke up early, and the paper was outside his door with the continental breakfast he had ordered the night before. The letter he had written for his wife to read was on the front page. It was also the lead item on the morning television news.

  THE GENERAL THEORY OF THE LETTER:

  The author, as well as his wife, has died in the crash. Reporters are trying to find out who they were. There is a debate about the public’s curiosity, and the rights of the couple’s mourning relatives to keep this private. Women newscasters are asked by the men beside them if they would forgive an unfaithful husband if he wrote them in this way. Frank is grateful that they all say yes. A few of them add, winking at the camera, that they would easily kill their men, though, if they catted around again.

  Frank knew that the reporters did not know, did not know that the letter writer was alive, had not heard Mary Sifka’s name. It must be the airline, he thought, controlling the story. They’ll let Mary’s name out, or let out my name, when they want to destroy the lawsuits. He was thinking this, and chewing on a gummy room-service croissant, when the phone rang. It was Mary Sifka.

  ‘It’s you, isn’t it? That’s your letter, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frank.

  ‘So the name, the one that they’re keeping out, it’s mine, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was silence. He was trying to be kind, but nothing he intended mattered any more.

  ‘You stupid asshole, did you say “Mary”, or did you say “Mary Sifka”?’

  ‘Mary Sifka.’

  She screamed out, ‘No!’ And then, through terrible sobs, she said, ‘They’re going to find out, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. They’ll call you,’ said Frank. He could try to be as direct with his mistress as he had failed at being direct with his wife.

  ‘I know that. I think they already did. The phone rang last night, and my husband answered, but they hung up. They must know who I am, that I’m married. It’s not hard to find that kind of thing out. So they’re probably waiting until I answer the phone myself.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘What can I do? I can’t deny it. I can’t say that’s not my name. It’s my name. It’s not a common name.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘This is going to ruin my life.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Yours too.’

  ‘Probably.’ I could have said, Mine is already ruined.

  ‘No, definitely. I’m going to see to that. Your life is going to be destroyed in some way that you can’t even imagine. I want to see you die without dying.’

  ‘I don’t think we should talk now.’

  ‘I’m telling my husband.’

  ‘Maybe you should.’

  ‘He hates attention. He’s a quiet man.’

  ‘Will he leave you?’

  ‘You think that’s what I want? If I had wanted him to leave me, I could have arranged for that the first time we fooled around in your office. Do you think that’s what I want?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘If that’s all I wanted, to be without him, if I’d wanted to leave him, I would have already. Do you think I couldn’t leave him if I wanted to?’

  ‘Yes, I think you could.’

  ‘I can do what I want.’

  He wondered if this repetitive belligerence of hers came from vodka. ‘Well, since you love him, maybe you should go somewhere with him. To help him see that it was over with us, that you were back with him. Take him some place.’

  ‘Mexico?’ she said, with great bitterness, implying, and Frank thought this cruel of her, that if they got on the plane to Mexico, they would die in a crash.

  What if I volunteer to pay for the tickets? thought Frank. Would she try to kill me? ‘The name might not come out,’ he said. He was trying to convince himself of this, so he could go to the memorial service and not faint, or start barking. There was the picture in his head, he saw himself growling and yelping, rolling around on the floor, shitting his pants again, because everyone in the world knows his worst secrets.

  ‘You think so?’ She also wanted to believe this.

  ‘You might be able to deflect this. You may need a lawyer.’

  ‘A lawyer, yes.’ Frank understood that Mary was desperate, and she was hanging for her life on this raft of hope.

  ‘A lawyer could, you know ...’ He didn’t finish the sentence, because then she could say, ‘A lawyer could threaten to sue if they print my name without permission. But you’d have to claim the letter from them, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Maybe I could do that.’ It was a possibility. What had started as something to keep Mary Sifka from going out of her mind had come back to him as a way through this mess. If he asked for the letter back ... but what would that do? They’d know who he was, they’d know Mary. And the letter had been in his wife’s possession, and she was dead. The letter had been discovered in a public place. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that won’t work. We can’t do anything about this.’

  ‘This is my fault,’ she said. ‘If I hadn’t sucked your dick, you wouldn’t have made this trip. If I hadn’t let you give me a hand-job in your office.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ Actually he wanted her to say that; it was giving him an erection.

  ‘We’re the most miserable animal in the world,’ she said. Philosophy. He hated this. ‘Whatever we touch, it turns to shit. There’s really no such thing as love, is there? Deep down?’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Frank.

  ‘Because if there was, then we really would hold on to each other.’

  ‘I held on to you. We held on to each other.’

  ‘But we weren’t supposed to. We’re supposed to hold on to the people we married. There’s a commandment about it.’

  ‘I guess we’re going to be punished,’ said Frank.

  ‘Don’t you think that this is the punishment?’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Frank. He wished that he had thought of that line, it would have impressed her.

  ‘I wonder if we’ll have any fri
ends left.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mary.’ He said her name, trying to find a way out of the conversation. ‘The roof will fall harder on me than on you.’

  ‘They’ll see me as the whore who stole the husband.’

  ‘They’ll see you as the woman who was seduced.’

  ‘Or the businesswoman who sold her pussy to get a deal.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘No, you just hope they won’t tear us apart like that.’

  ‘Just think about other scandals. How long do they last when nobody famous is involved? A few days? We’re not the news, we’re just a human-interest story. And when the whole story comes out, what really looks that bad? We had an affair. We broke it off. I went back to my wife, you went back to your husband. I think it makes us look sort of good. Maybe even noble. We could be heroes.’

  ‘Frank, no, the only way you could have come out of this a hero would have been if you had died with them. And the letter was found. And with my name in it, I’d have to be the Jezebel. You know that.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  They were both calm now. Frank knew they needed this moment of peace, because when it ended, they would say goodbye, and it wasn’t likely that they would talk to each other soon, or even again, ever.

  It was time to say goodbye.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘that we had some nice times together.’

  She snapped back at him, ‘They weren’t nice, Frank. What we did was cheap. It was dirty. Death in life for you, Frank, death in life.’ And then she hung up.

  And then the phone rang again. It was Lowell, calling from the lobby.

  ‘How are you feeling today?’ asked his brother.

  ‘Much better.’

  ‘We have to decide on a lawyer now. Everyone involved is choosing now, and there are two guys people are gravitating to. I have to check them out. They both sound good. But there happen to be differences of opinion. Has anyone talked to you about Dessick or Berberian?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Frank. He didn’t want to say anything about the lawyer’s card.

  ‘The two lawyers. Different styles, but similar results. And they’re experts at this sort of thing.’

  ‘No one has talked to me, but I thought you wanted to hire an independent lawyer. I thought you were going to hire Aaron Waramus.’

  Lowell made a sound of discouragement. ‘These guys are good. I think it’s better to join the fold.’

  ‘But I want to make the final decision.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ said Lowell. ‘And maybe also a publicist.’

  ‘Good,’ said Frank.

  ‘I thought you said it was a bad idea.’

  ‘It might be good for the family.’ Meaning: once the world knows the letter is mine, we’ll need a press officer to keep the reporters and the cameras away from us. Could anyone buy this as a movie? Or is it too internal?

  ‘She’ll call you later. Anyway, I’m coming up. I brought you a jacket and tie.’

  He put the receiver down and the phone rang again. This time it was Bettina Welch. She told him that the buses would be leaving in half an hour.

  ‘Buses?’ Frank said. ‘I thought you said we were going to get limousines.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Frank,’ said Bettina. ‘I tried.’

  Frank made a face, but he didn’t know what it looked like. He supposed the airline knew that anyone’s protest over the switch from limousines to buses would look awfully bratty, and this was a day for everyone to appear so occupied with grief that the material world was momentarily dissolved.

  ‘We’d really appreciate it if no one talks to the press today,’ she said.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘We just think that with everything that’s going on, people are losing sight of the tragedy, of the lives that were lost, of the respect that we should be paying to the victims of this terrible tragedy.’

  He knew that she was really saying that the airline was trying to keep the families of the dead from taking centre-stage.

  Lowell was at the door. Frank let him in while he was on the phone.

  ‘What’s going to happen at the memorial?’

  ‘The governor will be there, and the mayor of San Diego.’

  ‘Why isn’t this happening in Los Angeles?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ll have a memorial in Los Angeles too, maybe even a funeral, if I can say that, but this is where the tragedy occurred. And if we have a memorial service in Los Angeles, we’ll be missing the opportunity to complete our bereavement for the innocent victims who died on the ground.’

  Lowell made a face: who are you talking to? And Frank said, ‘Goodbye,’ and hung up.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Lowell.

  ‘The front desk.’ Frank didn’t want to talk about anything.

  ‘What did they want?’

  ‘Do I have everything I need? Is there anything they can get for me?’

  Lowell handed Frank a garment bag. Frank took it to the bathroom and put on the shirt and tie, and the jacket. While he was in the bathroom the phone rang, and he let Lowell answer. Frank heard him say, ‘Hello, Mother,’ in a loud voice meant for Frank, and then his voice dropped.

  Lowell knocked on the bathroom door to tell him that it was time to go.

  They met their parents in the hallway, by the elevators. There were others there, new faces, and some Frank recognized from Los Angeles, late arrivals who had missed the morgue.

  Someone said that they really shouldn’t be going to this without first checking with a lawyer, someone else said, with tears, that this was no time to worry about the suit, that the suit would follow its own course whether or not the airline was managing this memorial. Someone added that there were already a few groups of lawyers circling the event. Yes, someone said, there’s Dessick and Berberian. The Barbarian, someone else said, that’s his nickname. And who was going with them? The people in the elevator called out their choices: Dessick Berberian Berberian Dessick Dessick Berberian. Frank had not made his choice yet. Someone told him that he should. Then another person said that he knew that the airline had been warned about this nigger, and someone said that wasn’t nice, and the person who said ‘nigger’ then said he didn’t have to protect the niggers when a nigger killed his daughter and son-in-law on their honeymoon. Someone else said there were black people on the plane too, and the man who said ‘nigger’ said, So what?

  They took the elevator to the mezzanine floor, where they met Bettina Welch and Ed Dockery, and others, and were introduced to the president of the airline, Dennis Donoghue. Frank had seen the man’s picture in the paper a few times. He lived somewhere else, maybe Texas – Frank vaguely remembered that he had worked at a few other airlines – and had rescued this one during difficult times. His confidence was so practised that he wasn’t really there in the room, he projected an image of himself; this was a hologram Dennis, not the real thing. When Bettina introduced him to Frank, Donoghue’s smile changed. Something that looked like satisfaction replaced his relaxed concern,

  ‘Yes, Mr Gale. You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘No false humility here, Mr Gale.’ And then he said, quietly, with a threat, ‘We know what happened.’

  ‘I just meant that I’m still alive.’

  ‘You don’t really wish you had died, do you?’

  ‘It’s very difficult.’

  ‘But you’re not going to kill yourself over this, are you?’ Where were these questions coming from?

  ‘It doesn’t seem fair, does it?’ asked Frank, drawn into Donoghue’s orbit.

  ‘If you don’t believe in God, these things have no meaning.’

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Of course,’ said Donoghue. ‘And I know that He’s not fair.’

  Frank turned to Lowell, panicked by this conversation. Why were they talking this way? Donoghue had dropped all pretence of grief, or interest, and the impatience with w
hich he talked to Frank was personal, was directed at Frank as though he knew who he really was, as though Frank deserved a harsh judgement.

  Lowell wasn’t listening to him, any more than in the big room when that unhappy couple pressed Frank on his relationship with the insurance agent, and Frank had added to his lies.

  ‘What about you, Frank,’ said Donoghue, ‘do you believe in God?’

  ‘I guess if you really believe in God, then you have to pray.’

  ‘And you don’t pray?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Not even when you’re alone? You don’t hear yourself begging the Creator of the universe for mercy?’

  ‘I don’t have an answer for that,’ said Frank. Again the picture came to him, of getting sick like a dog. What did this mean, this urge to roll around the floor, shitting and pissing?

  ‘Start thinking of one,’ said Donoghue, leaving Frank for someone else as Bettina came over and took his arm. She looked back at Frank, and Frank knew, without doubt, that she knew the letter was his.

  What grace this knowledge gave her! And Donoghue, nothing else could explain how miserably he treated Frank than the power he obtained from knowing Mary Sifka’s name. He will turn this against me, thought Frank. Somehow this will be used to help the airline. He gave the letter to the press. He will give away Mary’s name when he needs to.

  Donoghue shook hands with Frank’s parents. His mother showed him a picture of Madeleine, at a year old, lying on a Mexican blanket on the beach. Anna’s foot was in the corner of the picture. He thought of her foot severed from her leg, sitting in a bin of feet in that cold warehouse by the bay.

  Bettina asked everyone to start on their way down to the buses. Donoghue shook hands with Frank’s father. Whatever secret feelings he held for Frank, they were not extended to his parents. Frank thought this was odd, but could not explain it to himself.

  How did Frank feel? This is how he felt: tie a man’s wrists to two posts. Nail his feet to the floor. Take a razor blade or a scalpel, and cut the skin in a circle around his neck. Then, from his neck down to his waist, cut a series of strips, an inch apart. Then pull each strip away from the body, and let them fall, making a loose skirt of flesh. Then throw boiling ammonia on this swamp of blood. Wait three minutes for the blisters to rise. Rub them with hard salt. This should overload the myelin sheaths that protect the nerves from agony. Better yet, don’t find a surrogate, do this to yourself, or ask a friend to help.