Wednesday morning before work, I felt a twinge of anxiety as I opened the mail. A letter should have come already confirming direct deposit of my paycheck. A day late shouldn’t have caused much concern, but it had arrived every other Monday as far as I could remember. The money wasn’t much, sure – enough to pay the bills, keep the cat fed, get drunk when I wanted. But its absence unnerved me.
I spent all day yesterday fretting about the missing deposit, then drank enough after work to chase it from my mind. A Humphrey Bogart film was on when I came home from the bar, but I fell asleep and missed the ending. It worked its way into my dreams, though. I was climbing a lonely hill at night, and had a raincoat pulled tightly around me. It was windy and the clouds sailed past the moon at an insane speed. I wore loose dress shoes with poor traction, and I would periodically slide back a few steps and have to scramble to my feet. When I finally reached the top I came to a bus stop beside a deserted street, where dead leaves and plastic bags whirled past rusted cars. The weathered remnants of handbills for last month’s carnival were pasted to the reverse of the bus stop’s glass partition; the mirror image of a torn clown, its pointy-hatted head pinned in the jaws of a tiger, grinned obscenely at me. A payphone stood nearby, and though it didn’t ring I held the receiver to my ear. I could hear Bogie over the line, telling someone a good love scene involved him slicing grapefruit, dopey and half-asleep. I can’t recall how I reacted to hearing this, but when I woke the film was over and static filled the screen.
I flipped past a few envelopes destined for the junk pile – get this credit card, save that creature, elect some city councilperson – and found a letter from my job. This one felt unusual: my address and theirs were typed directly on the envelope rather than visible through a glassine window, and it weighed next to nothing.
The letter inside was terse:
Dear sir,
We regret to hear of your untimely passing. Effective immediately, all deposits to your account are hereby suspended.
Sincerely,
I held the letter towards the kitchen ceiling light, as if a change in angle would reveal new truths. The paper felt suspiciously thin, but the company’s logo was faintly embossed about two-thirds of the way down the page – a seal of authenticity, I supposed. But I didn’t feel dead. I pressed my thumb into each finger on one hand, then the other. Five fingers per hand, all with feeling. I cleared my throat, coughed; the sound was staged, hollow, but at least I had made it. I had seen enough bad comedy films to know better than to run face first into the bathroom door, but I did run my hand down its surface. Decaying paint was peeling off firm plywood – I scraped a few flakes loose with my thumbnail. So I couldn’t pass through solid matter, anyway.
I imagined human resources could sort this out, but all of a sudden I didn’t feel like going to work. I lit a burner to put a kettle on for tea, and waved my hand into the flame, which if anything hurt more intensely than I expected. Apparently I could outwit the walls but not the stove.
As I rinsed my sore fingers, I contemplated the existence of the letter. Why bother informing me I’m dead? If my job intended to reach a close relation I had none, and I lived alone, except for my cat. I half-suspected Baxter could read, but he in any case lacked the manual dexterity necessary to open an envelope. I hadn’t seen him this morning, but I didn’t seek him out. I felt confident cats could see ghosts, so a conversation with Baxter wouldn’t prove anything.
I sat staring out the window, nursing my tea for the better part of an hour. I wasn’t really thinking, just allowing my eyes to wander over the rooftops of shorter buildings in the neighborhood, watching weak sunlight reflect off miserable old patches of snow. It felt liberating to hear the clock strike nine. I hadn’t called in sick in years, and couldn’t remember the last time I was home when others weren’t.
At nine-thirty I reread the letter but discovered nothing new. I wandered downstairs to check the mailboxes, searching for my name; it was there below my mail slot, just the same as all the other residents. I leaned against the wall, not necessarily reassured, and noticed a lingerie catalog sticking out of box 3B. I wiggled it gently until it came loose and began thumbing through it. I didn’t feel particularly moved by the images, but I couldn’t say that meant much. One model was pretty enough, with a vaguely exotic face, generous curves, actual hips. The others looked unbalanced: stick frames, massive tits. And the airbrushing was out of control – the blemishes, the wrinkles and the stretch marks had been predictably erased, but so had the nipples, the pubic hair and the labia, the tiny islands in a sea of skin that could send nations to war. Or something. I dropped the catalog on the floor and went back upstairs.
An alien feeling settled over me as I reentered my apartment, as though I had chanced upon a meticulous recreation of my living room in a foreign museum. I turned around slowly – with the bathroom door open I could see almost the entire space from where I stood. I could sense a labored authenticity in the most trivial details: the ten-and-two o’ clock arrangement of teacup handle and sugar spoon on a saucer I left on the kitchen counter, the accumulation of dust on the books and records lining the shelves, the patterns of wear on the floorboards. I wanted to sit down but seemed unable to comprehend the utility of the sofa; the fabric bristled under my hand the way the skin of a frightened creature in some exotic petting zoo might.
The clock radio was playing softly in my bedroom, though I couldn’t remember turning it on. A voice as flat as newly minted paper money announced that today was the anniversary of the death of jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan. It seems his wife shot the poor bastard following an argument outside a club where his band was relaxing between sets. A curiously mid-tempo number followed the story; it was neither an upbeat celebration of the trumpeter’s life nor a mournful reflection on death. Just a song.
Baxter emerged from behind the bed, brushed across my legs. “I am here,” I told him, louder than intended. He looked at me funny, then wandered off to the kitchen and stuck his face in his food. “I am here,” I said again, softly this time.
My cell phone rang. I almost didn’t answer, thinking it was my job investigating today’s absence. But they thought I was dead, didn’t they? I picked up after six rings.
“Hey.”
“Jane?”
“Yeah.”
“What time is it there?”
“We’re in the same time zone, mister. What’s with asking me that, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
“So how are you? You busy?”
“No. I’m not at work.”
“You sick?”
“No.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“Jane. I think I might be dead.”
“How so?” She answered calmly.
“It’s my job. They sent me this letter canceling my paychecks. It said I was dead.”
“But you’re talking to me.”
“I know it’s absurd, but it sounds plausible. How do I know I’m living?”
“Does your heart beat? Are you breathing?”
“Ghosts breathe.”
“I wonder. You can’t talk to someone at your job?”
“What for?”
She was silent. Through the wall I could hear the muffled sound of radiator pipes banging in my neighbor’s apartment. It sounded like chains clanking on a jailhouse floor.
“I wish you were here, Jane. Since you left the city I can’t seem to figure anything out.”
“So go to the office.” Her calm sounded forced now. “Let someone there figure it out for you.”
“I don’t mean just the letter. It’s–”
“I know. But you have to start somewhere. There must be someone at work who can explain the error.”
“But who goes to the office to prove they’re alive?”
There was a long silence as we considered this. When she finally spoke it was to ask if I’d been outside today.
“I went down to the mailbox, but I suppose I haven’t properly left the building, no.”
“Do. Walk around, interact with people. Call me later.”
She hung up. I grabbed the barest necessities – coat, keys, wallet – and, after a moment’s hesitation, folded the death letter into my pocket.
The streets were quiet for a weekday. The few people I saw hurried one place after another, eyes down, shoulders hunched against the wind. I tried wishing it were summer, but it was impossible; I couldn’t remember how it was to feel the sun.
I trudged down familiar avenues for hours, never once considering where I was going. I stopped once for coffee and a sandwich, but the guy serving me moved so swiftly, so mechanically, that I felt less than certain I was present at the meal. I felt warmed by the coffee, but couldn’t taste the sandwich. I wasn’t hungry when I ordered it and I wasn’t full after I finished it. I felt like a cigarette afterwards – probably the strongest sensation I had felt all day, and the strangest. I’ve never been a smoker, but a slow, satisfying post-meal cigarette, the kind Humphrey Bogart might have in the movies, sounded like just the thing. The feeling lasted only as long as an empty plate was in front of me; by the time I left the café and walked past a market I desired nothing.
Soon I reached the park. It was dusk and the light was pathetic; the stripped branches of the trees bent forward like talons, low and sharp. A fog enveloped the east end of the park, and as I moved towards it I could hear voices, murmured conversations. I stood closer; the words grew louder but I couldn’t understand a thing. The sound was like the tower of Babel, a confusion of tongues. And yet for a moment I distinctly heard the voice of my grandfather: as an old man suffering from dementia he told stories of his youth during Prohibition, of moving cases of bootleg liquor on the Philadelphia trolleys. “Bring me my gangster hat,” he once insisted in a state of confusion, and this is precisely what I heard in the fog: “Bring me my gangster hat.”
The murmuring resumed. I stood still for a time, facing the fog. I listened but didn’t recognize another word. My hands were in my pockets and I felt along the folded edges of the letter with my fingertips. I thought about my grandfather, about the fog; I wondered what it would be like to take another step forward and maybe disappear forever.
I was still thinking long after the fog pulled away from me, receding like the remnants of a wave, leaving behind damp, clammy ground. I was alone and I was cold and I had nowhere to go, nothing to do. No – I corrected myself – Baxter needed me to feed him. And Jane asked me to call her back. That was at least something.
I turned around, away from the fog, and started walking home.