Stopgap

by Liam Card

  At thirteen, that’s just what you do.

  Try to please Mom.

  Back to my funeral.

  Instinctively, I managed to move from hovering over my open casket to moving directly above Reverend Rundle. He patted his forehead with a handkerchief embroidered with the cross.

  “It was those many years ago, as a young man, when Luke was confirmed and voiced that he had accepted Jesus into his heart as his Lord and Saviour. And before that, upon his baptism, in this very church, in the name of Jesus Christ, Luke’s spirit was transformed to that of God’s Children. In Roman’s 6:23, Paul tells us ‘the wage is death.’ In Jesus there is life. Luke chose Life. He chose an eternity in Heaven, where he is now at peace, sitting at the right hand of the Lord.”

  Some people said, “Amen.”

  “At times like this, in times of grief, we tend to question our faith, but God has a plan. He has a great plan for Luke, even in death. Mark my words, God called Luke for a higher purpose. In death there is life. Look around. God brought us all here today. Perhaps some of you may find life today at this tragic time.”

  Some people spoke out from the congregation.

  “Yes,” they said.

  “Amen,” they said.

  Someone rattled a tambourine.

  It was Mabel Albright, my neighbour when I was growing up. She brought it along to every service and funeral. She believed the sound of it punctuated the important messages, as if to advise that non-believers pay attention.

  “So I suggest that in this time of sadness,” he said, “we reflect on our relationship with Luke, and with God,” he said, as if he was a salesman tugging on the fear-strings of not having health or home insurance. “Because God is real, and death is real, and God is there for us in life and in death.”

  Mabel rattled her tambourine.

  Alice sobbed and asked for handfuls of Kleenex from my mother, who emptied her stash to help capture the ocular and nasal drippings of my former Earth-mate. She sure made a lot of noise given that only three of those tears were sincere.

  I know this because I read her thought projections. As it turned out, I could read everyone’s thoughts. In the Handbook, I had read that this was hardwired into every ghost: the ability to connect with the thoughts and visions, daydreams, fantasies, and nightmares of the living. They appear quite vividly.

  The whole thing is quite impressive.

  Thus, connecting with Alice informed me, in the highest of definition, that she felt she should increase her crying and wailing to cover up the fact she was having an impassioned affair with my childhood best friend, Geoff Black.

  And just like that, the first of the two burning mysteries was answered.

  Rage filled my new form presenting itself as a shift in my vibrational pattern. I felt radiant, as if glowing white hot. Like I might come apart in a million scorching molecules that would rain down on the congregation, curl hair, and burn scalps. Perspective flooded in shortly thereafter and did its best to smother the rage. Who was I to be enraged? The truth was, I had been an adulterer many times over living people’s lives in the Post-Death Line. What kind of hypocrite was I to feel this way?

  I moved to hover over the second offender.

  There sat Geoff Black.

  Three rows back on the far aisle seat.

  Geoff was wearing blue Adidas gym socks with his black dress pants and dress shoes. He was very self-conscious about this. He wondered if anyone would notice these athletic socks, since he was now seated, and his dress pants had crept slightly up his leg. He wondered if the pants had pulled up high enough to reveal the universally recognized white logo. Is there a band of hairy skin showing between the top of the socks and the bottom of my pants? He thought he shouldn’t have rushed to get dressed and concluded that the extra few minutes to find proper matching dress socks would be paying dividends at present. Above all, he feared that everyone would think Alice’s affected tears were just that, phony as a three-dollar bill. Geoff’s tears, as it turned out, were entirely genuine, albeit mostly guilt-driven, attached to apologies in my direction for being such a terrible friend and doing such a terrible thing.

  I replayed the best of our long history together and vibrated with anger at points where we had recently spent time together. Again, I had lived a life like this one in the Line. I had done this exact thing with a best friend’s wife. Perspective came pumping in hard now as I replayed those lives and felt the process of calming down.

  Anger slowed to annoyance.

  Annoyance to empathy.

  I wanted to do something to put his grief to rest. To let him know that I forgave him. Fully. That I knew exactly how torn up his guts felt. But all I could do was hover and stream his thoughts. He called himself a pile of bad names over what he had done. He thought about going to a biker bar and picking a fight with someone far bigger just to seek sufficient punishment for his crime. Large fists beat his face to a pulp, and he spat bloodied teeth from his mouth but smiled widely the entire time, thanking the large biker. Geoff even paid the man’s tab. He picked his bloody Chiclets off the filthy bar floor and requested a glass of milk to put them in so the roots and nerves would have a chance to live. This was so that his dentist might hammer them back in to place with a mallet and no anesthetic. Geoff thought he’d never use anesthetic again.

  Even for heart surgery or any kind of surgery, for that matter.

  No more pain relief. Not for poor Geoff.

  He didn’t deserve it.

  His eyes crept to their corners, and he looked over to Alice who (in turn) looked over her shoulder at him. The two adulterers pulled forward their most recent sexual encounter with one another. Geoff buried his head in his hands and cried for thinking about something like that at my funeral. Eventually, I needed a break from his misery and moved on to someone else.

  Beside Geoff sat Annabelle, his unsuspecting wife, who was also quite surprised so many people had attended. She thought the turnout was due to Alice’s popularity and had nothing to do with me. She thought if people hadn’t shown up, Alice would have noticed and would have talked behind their backs. That she would have pitted other women against them in a fit of retaliation. Annabelle spent most of the ceremony terrified that the strange sensation at the tip of her nose could very well be an exposed and hardened booger peeking out for the world to see. How mortifying, she thought. She rubbed her nose with her hand and scratched the tip with her index finger every thirty seconds or so.

  Five rows back, Suzanne Leroux wondered how she might kill her husband, a chronic snorer, who refused to see a doctor about it. She thought that sleep deprivation due to snoring was a form of both torture and spousal abuse and wondered if she could plead insanity. She thought about smothering him with a pillow. Getting on top of him and pinning the pillow to the mattress with her knees. She thought about snipping her husband’s fingers off with garden shears, should he attempt to claw the pillow away. Snip, snip, snip, she thought, and the fingers fell on the white pillowcase, making little red circles start the process of expanding into one another. How am I going to get all that red out? Then she wondered why she hadn’t opened the strawberry jam she purchased at the farmers’ market for her toast that morning.

  My mother was torn to pieces over the fact that she hadn’t sent my birthday card earlier in the month, so I could have taken in what she wrote before the accident, but she thought about what she wrote, and because of that, I was able to read it. She wondered why Alice was crying so much and thought she didn’t believe a lick of it. She wondered what the little bitch was covering up and used those words exactly. She wondered if the little bitch had hired someone to smash into me and kill me for the insurance money. She wondered if people would enjoy the sandwiches she had made, and if the mayonnaise might give them all food poisoning. She wondered if she would care if everyone got food poisoning, because hardly anyone there was close
to me, besides Geoff Black. She was glad he was there. She would have to make a point of finding him after the service for a big hug. Mom looked over and saw how hard he was crying. Friends for life, those two, she thought, and welled up again. She wondered how her heart could possibly heal and under what conditions healing could occur after having to bury her son. She told God to go to Hell. She said to Him, If this is your plan … consider me out of the game. She wondered why she had bothered wearing Spanx to my funeral. She thought, What the hell do I care what these people think about my dimply ass and tummy?

  My father didn’t physically cry, but he sobbed internally. A series of swallowing and repeatedly clearing his throat was required to keep his tears trapped beneath the surface. A good man with a good heart who sadly subscribed to definitions of “manliness” passed down many generations.

  Light years off the mark.

  I’d love to be there when he stands in the Post-Death Line and gains perspective, as per the truth on the subject of gender. He wondered if he had been a good father or not. He thought, I could have been easier on him, but he wasn’t sure how to get my nose out of the fantasy world of books and into the real world. He thought he should have read the books I begged him to read when I was a teen, so we could’ve had something to talk about. He thought he would take Mom on a vacation and try to make her laugh more. He thought the brakes needed fixing on his Chevy Impala and shouldn’t squeak like they did on the way to the church. Certainly not on a car that age.

  My sister, Brooke, cried real tears.

  All of them.

  She wished we had spent more time together and felt frustrated that, after I had met and married Alice, she saw and heard less of me. Which was true. Tear production increased when Brooke wished she had said something about it, which might have inspired one or both of us to try harder to connect more often. Of anyone in the room, Brooke felt the deepest sense of loss. She thought her heart would never heal. She wondered why so many flakes had shown up to the funeral and then assumed they were here for Alice and not for me at all. She held the hand of her husband, Taitt Champion, a stockbroker for a local money management firm called Reliance Asset Management. She worried Taitt was pulling away from her. He isn’t the same, she thought. Something is wrong, she thought, and decided to bring up her concerns on the drive home from the funeral.

  It was true, and she was very right — something was wrong with Taitt. He was not in good shape at all. As the stock market continued to crash outside the confines of the church, Taitt sat quietly at my funeral with charts, numbers, and red arrows flying through his mind. A flood of images attached to sound bites of client voicemails played in a loop in his head, some livid, some terrified, many weeping. Some trading off between weeping and yelling, since their life savings had been wiped away by Taitt’s efforts. I connected with Taitt for quite a while during the service. As his forthcoming nervous breakdown rapidly approached, Taitt constructed an animated children’s story in his mind involving a Sea Snake named Snee.

  You see, the Land Snakes, who were poor swimmers, needed a Sea Snake to navigate them to Retirement Island. So Snee volunteered to lead the journey to Retirement Island, since he was an excellent swimmer. All of the Land Snakes who had signed up to make the trip were in agreement — Snee would be the leader. All was going quite well. He was doing a fine job, but an unexpected storm arose that took Snee and the Land Snakes by surprise. The Land Snakes asked Snee to turn back, but Snee was sure that he could navigate them through the storm to safety. “Keep going!” screamed Snee. “We can’t deviate now!”

  Sadly, all the Land Snakes drowned.

  Snee, now overcome with guilt, fell limply to the dark depths at the bottom of the sea. He dug deep into the mud of the ocean floor to be far from the blaring noise of blame and disappointment. But the noise followed him in his head, and his thoughts became louder and louder, and deep in the mud, Snee the Sea Snake wriggled and writhed painfully at the bottom of the sea.

  That’s where the story ended for Taitt.

  The nervous breakdown was on a mean countdown. The only question was if it would play out during the ceremony.

  Don and Nancy Greene sat, hand in hand, behind my sister and Taitt. Nancy dabbed at tears, mainly because she felt she had to, but a few sincere tears were shed over cursing me for being late for my own birthday party and calling me an asshole for making her roast dry. She wondered who Alice was screwing, based on all those phony tears of hers. She wondered what Alice might buy with all that insurance money. How the hell am I going to come into a million just like that? she wondered. She speculated on the cost of flights to Hawaii this time of year. She wondered how many Air Miles points Don had racked up and how many he’d be willing to part with to get her there. She wondered if she’d rather have a diamond tennis bracelet or a new watch, since things were sure to go on sale at my store. She wondered why the little twat who did her nails at the salon pushed the bubble gum colour on her when it wasn’t really the colour of bubble gum at all. And then she started picking away the polish so she could go back in, post-funeral, complain, and get the little twat to redo the job with different polish. Those were her words.

  Don Greene sat quietly next to her with his arms crossed, wondering why he hadn’t made a move on me earlier. I’ve wasted the greatest opportunity in life, he thought. To tell the one you love that you love them a great deal. He reviewed all of the moments in which he believed I had given him a sign or a green light. He argued with the voice in his head about those moments, and whether they were false signals or not. He continued to debate the official status of my sexuality, and where I might fall on the spectrum of it all. Undecided, he wondered if it even mattered. Don came to the conclusion that, if propositioned, I would have jumped at the chance, not as an act of homosexuality but simply out of a desire for raw human contact, given my imprisonment of a marriage. He was now more certain than ever that he should have made a move; that he should have just put it out there and gone in for a kiss or an ass grab in my shed and just played jazz from there. He wondered when he would come out to Nancy. Given my death, was this a sign to actively get out there and find a guy?

  I did my best not to cause a disturbance when Alice stood next to my processed corpse and attempted her sham of a speech about loss and how we must “all come together” throughout this difficult grieving process. During this speech, many attendees thought her dress was cut inappropriately low on the bustline. My friend, Dan Pizzuto, thought the exact opposite. Dan, who sat next to his pregnant wife, Davida, constructed a vivid fantasy involving a hardcore scene with the grieving widow that turned quite violent near the end. I did not see the choking or face-slapping with bare feet section coming at all. Neither did he, but he went along with it in his mind, and his arteries filled his penis with blood. He wondered what daydreams like this meant. He wondered if he was cut out to be a good husband and father with such thoughts. Moreover, would he go to Hell for managing to boast a massive erection at his friend’s funeral? That was a legitimate concern for Dan. He thought about open-heart surgeries, roadkill, and having his fingernails pulled from the quick with pliers. All of this in an attempt to deflate the situation. No such luck.

  My uncle Phil had arrived late and spent the entirety of Alice’s speech worried about where he had parked. The church parking lot was full, so he left it around back in the reserved spots for the reverend and the choir, exclusively. He had fifty pounds of marijuana in the trunk and was terrified of getting towed. More than that, he was annoyed with the timing of the funeral and that he hadn’t been able to deliver his product beforehand. He wondered if his criminal activity was oblivious to the entire family or if he was paranoid, and if he was paranoid, should he lay off smoking his own product? You see, Uncle Phil worked day in and day out on the assembly line at the Ford plant in Oakville and was desperate to kiss that life goodbye. As Alice delivered her eulogy, he continued to weigh the pros and cons of his
marijuana-dealing side gig. But time and time again, he reached the conclusion that the rewards outstripped the risk. He imagined that jail would be better than the assembly line. He began to sweat profusely. His face ran with salt water, as if an invisible showerhead, piped straight from the ocean, poured down on his head from above.

  His wife, Charlene, thought the sweat was due to emotion. She rubbed his arm and grabbed his hand in support. She whispered that she loved him. She meant that with every fibre.

  Bob Graham, Bob the Bully, well, he sat in the back row, where bullies instinctively know to sit. He sat there thinking about how he treated me in grade school and high school. He imagined saying sorry to me, but he had a great deal of difficulty doing so, even within the safety of imagination. He saw me taking the apology really well and then asking him to go out for a beer. He said he was too busy, but maybe sometime. He thought that there would never be a sometime to share a beer with me. He just wanted to get the apology off his chest. He thought about the fact that he needed a college degree to apply for a sales job at Snap-On Tools he really wanted. He wondered when he might run out of money. He wondered how he was going to pay for cancer treatments and wondered how people his age could possibly be diagnosed with cancer. He decided it wasn’t a bad form of cancer, because it was the skin variety, but he couldn’t remember the proper term. He thought it started with an M. He sincerely hoped I was getting laid in Heaven, but that was more about men getting laid in Heaven, in general. If the cancer was serious, he wanted Heaven to be about getting laid. He knew that’s why suicide bombers did that sort of thing. For the heaven part and the girls, the virgins, and the getting laid, but he couldn’t recall for the life of him how many virgins they were promised. Was it ninety-nine or a hundred, or nine hundred?

  Lucky bastards, he concluded. No wonder they’re so eager to off themselves. And then he thought about converting to the Muslim faith just so that he might be able to do the same and get all those virgins. In his mind, he fired an imaginary spitball and hit the casket dead-centre. Hit it so hard, it cracked the wood and would stick there forever to decompose alongside me. Gotcha one last time, Luke, he thought.