I See You've Called in Dead

by John Kenney

“You’re not. You’re just thinkin...

“Oh, life-affirming things like vodka.

“So … if I overstep, if I give advice and sound like I know what I’m talking about, it’s because you matter to me. That’s all. I have a hard time seeing the people I love unhappy.”

“So, I’m almost forty-five and I don’t really know how to live.” Tim stared at me, unblinking. “Then I would say you are officially a citizen of the world.”

Why is the girl laughing?” I stared at the painting. I waited. It seemed too obvious. “Because she’s happy?” I said. Tim turned to me and smiled. “Yes.” “That’s it?” “What else is there?”

They didn’t look like regular people. They looked better, like people from New York.

“How’s it feel to be eight?” Tim asked. “I’m not really afraid of the dark anymore,” Leo said. Tim nodded. “I get it. Although you know I’m almost sixty and there are nights I like to leave a light on. I think that’s okay, don’t you, Bud?”

🥹

“How do you leave Brooklyn?” Julia had asked.

“Seth,” Leo’s father said, extending his hand. “Leo is a big fan of yours.” “And I of him.”

it’s the people like this we have to live for.

“We’re setting off some balloons in a bit. It’s something we do on a family birthday. This … little tradition. For Leo’s older sister, Lucy, who passed away three years ago. Hope you can stick around. I know it would mean a lot to Leo.” “Wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

That’s the beauty of New York. If you pay enough, anything is possible. I couldn’t afford this, but that’s what high-interest credit cards are for.

How many days do you experience something for the first time?

We should be required to take flight from time to time, to see anew, to see how small and fragile we are.

The American belief that if you travel far enough physically you can escape yourself.”

“You wanted the pain to end,” Tim said quietly.

But … I didn’t care. I mean, I really didn’t. I was done. I overdosed on pills once. That was ugly. They had to pump my stomach. But I learned from it. So the next time I used a scalpel, which I had stolen. That’s the way to go if you’re serious. Were it not for a remarkable trauma surgeon who wasn’t supposed to be working that night, you’re sitting at a kitchen table in Brooklyn by yourselves.”

“To failed suicides,” she said. Tim swallowed with difficulty. We touched glasses.

nonononono

But you did nothing and so it festers. You and me and a billion others. We walk around with these deep wounds that alter how we think and what we say, the relationships we have, who we trust, the decisions we make. That keep us from really living.”

She said to tell you that except for you almost dying she had a lovely evening.”

Tim turned to look at Tara. “Tara. Would you wait for a guy for a year?” “Absolutely not.” “See? Tara would wait.”

i love him so much

“Now go. Also, no offense. But I’m tired of funerals,” he said.

Lives are changed by seemingly unconnected, random decisions that change everything. So it is also the detour to get a few slices of pizza and two bottles of root beer so we could eat

lunch. Which is why I wasn’t in the room when Tim died.

The call with Tim’s sister, Louisa, is hazy. She screamed. I remember that. She screamed and said, No, no, no. She said it three times. I think I said, I’m so sorry. Or It can’t be real. I don’t remember. She mentioned a flight. I was sitting in the car, with the box of pizza.

this is how i feel

Where was he, I wondered in a kind of confused shock. Because this wasn’t him. This bluish-gray body devoid of life. Where was my friend?

“Like, you knew him and isn’t that better than never knowing him even though he’s dead now?” I wanted to reach down and hold him, bony bird of a body, all eyes.

So. I just think Nope, nope, nope, nope when I saw their dead bodies because that’s not them. I have them in here.” He pointed to his head. “They’re all here. I talk to them all the time.” “You do?” “Course. My sister is always with me. Tim will always be with you.”

We sat, looking out at the street, waiting for life to continue, holding hands, holding on.

Nor did I know I was going to do that. It’s remarkable what you can do when you don’t care what anyone thinks anymore.

Where was he? Not this body. But him.

The thought came fast. Tie them together, he seemed to say to me. I dare you. He would have loved that. Standing, finally, in some distant place, some magical, stardust place where we go, when we go, if we go, Tim finally able to stand, to walk, the joy of it, the sudden desire, in his new sneaks, his handsome suit, ready to burst into a run, and then falling from the knot tying his two sneakers together. “That sonuvabitch,” he would have said, smiling.

How rude of the dead to die. How selfish. Wherever they are, no pain, in eternal darkness or wondrous afterlife.

What struck me most was how much people were laughing. The stories they were telling about him, Louisa in that fragile emotional place of vacillating between laughing and crying.

Little Leo. He offered a small wave and I waved back.

Good man, Bud, I could almost hear Tim say. Do not let them feel sad.

But in those seconds before the parachute opens, before it jerks you back up, you think, you feel, like you are going to die. And what is thrilling is that you don’t. He wanted that. That thrilling feeling of being alive.”

Tim saved my life because he showed me how to live.”

No one tells you about how, in the days and weeks after, when others have moved on, perhaps rarely thinking of the event, the passing, you sit there and think, How am I supposed to live?

Find a good tenant though, please. Someone a bit lost. Someone with a kind heart. Someone who can’t afford our lovely neighborhood. Don’t charge them much. Invite them down. Play records. Keep the salon alive. Start a new one. The lost souls are out there. And they’re always looking for free booze. Thank you for moving in. Thank you for being my friend. One last request. Please, please, please be happy. Try. You’re going to die, you know. Trust me on that one. Much love, Tim.

“Tuan,” I said. He stopped and turned back. “I just want you to know,” I started, pausing, wanting to find the right words, “that even if I was gay, I wouldn’t date you.” The hint of a smile on that beautiful face. “Bland white boy. Please.” He turned and walked away.

including but not limited to claiming you were a member of the Jamaican Bobsled Team, ninth in line to the British throne, and inventor of toothpaste.”

Beth, God bless her, said, “For what it’s worth, this was not an easy decision, nor a unanimous one.”

To do that, you have to go to the wake, the funeral. You have to watch and listen and see the grief and try to feel the pain. You have to get to know who they were and what they meant. Each life. We do it wrong.”

But an obituary, a good one, from a news company worth its salt, should owe him that. These were whole lives. They mattered. Don’t we owe him that?”

“Anyway. I’m sorry. As you are now no doubt acutely aware, I am an idiot. But I don’t care anymore. I made a mistake. I didn’t kill anyone but myself. And now, apparently, I’m alive again. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with that. I am going to start by stealing a Coke from the kitchen as well as several notebooks and pens for my eight-year-old friend Leo.”

omg thank god

Do not ask a man to write about sex, to explain sex. It will be boring and expected. It will lack nuance. It will make you wince with embarrassment.