Poe (2 page)

After my parents died and I flunked out of college, it was either this or the crab boats in Alaska, those being the best employment opportunities presented by my frazzled college counselor. She was obviously trying to rush me out the door—completely understandable given she had a long line of actual students waiting. And to be honest I was ready to grab onto anything. But whenever I push open the brass office doors and gaze upon the dusty metal file cabinets resting on the equally dusty olive carpet, with Myrna in the corner pretending to type when she’s really checking the clock for her smoke break, I imagine myself in one of those orange deckhand suits on the Bering Sea, my eyebrows singed with frost and realize I’ve made the biggest mistake of my young life.

But sometimes, like this morning, I have to face reality. For the third time this year I’ve been given my two weeks’ notice.

“Morning, Myrna,” I say, wondering if her optometrist has ever heard of those newfangled thin plastic glasses, as opposed to the glacier-thick glass ones she wears. Tinted a delightful gradient pink.

Myrna pulls a sheet of paper from her printer with a
snap
. “You’re gracing us with your presence today? Fired again so soon?”

“Is that a new sweater?” I say. “It really brings out the color of your eyes.”

Her sweater is red.

Myrna gives me a look. “Smart ass,” she mutters.

I head toward my ostensible desk, which doubles as a paper stand when I’m not in. I stack the reams on the floor and then look for my chair. Nowhere to be found. Myrna must know something, but she’s studiously applying Wite-Out to a sheet of paper, dabbing at it with a corner of tissue and pointedly ignoring me.

Which leaves Bob.

Bob has a gut that hangs over his leather belt, and his standard attire is tight oxford shirt and penny loafers. He prides himself on dated practical jokes. I’ve found all my paper clips hooked together, an actual pink whoopee cushion on my chair, and, on my very first day, I got an electric shock from the buzzer he had hidden in his palm. When Myrna’s on her smoke break, sometimes I’ll find a miniature plastic television on my desk with two large breasts poking out from the screen and the words “Boob Tube” at the base, which I think is Bob’s way of testing my heterosexuality, since my hair is on the shaggy side and there are questions. The local barber has one standard style, military buzz, so I pay my “bachelor” neighbor Doug twenty bucks every now and then to cut it. Doug’s an actual hairstylist and a refugee from a long-term relationship in San Francisco that ended badly. He says that if it weren’t for the dark circles under my eyes, I would have potential, what with my high Russian cheekbones and thick brows. Which gender he’s talking about my having potential with is unclear. All I know is that I’m the tall, thin, unnaturally pale and dark-haired sensitive-looking type, instead of the
rock-bodied, square-jawed testosterone type—a tragic genetic disadvantage that usually results in stilted conversations with girls, who smile politely while obviously clocking the muscular guys chugging beer through funnels.

My mind clicks through various places in the building where my chair could be—emergency stairwell, bathroom stall, the alley that smells of dead cat where the newspaper trucks pull up. Basically, a pain-in-the-ass way to start my day. I decide
screw it
and loudly pull my desk over to the Victorian metal radiator that hasn’t worked in, say, a century, balling up my jacket to serve as a cushion. Problem solved.

I pull out my laptop, a device that always causes a certain furrow in Myrna’s brow, she who swears by her antiquated IBM, because the Internet is causing the rapid degeneration of society’s youth, and wireless frequencies cause cancer. Unlike smoking, of course—her pack-a-day habit is perfectly healthy; Reagan said so.

Bob waltzes in. The cat-that-ate-the-canary metaphor applies rather well here.

“Nice chair,” says Bob, barely able to repress a chuckle.

“Yeah,” I say, “it’s so SAC.”

I enjoy making up nonsense acronyms that I know Bob will attempt to use with his ten-year-old niece in an attempt to be “down with the kids.”

“You know,” I add casually, “sustainable and cool.”

“Right,” says Bob, and I can tell he’s now feeling off his game, having been reminded poignantly that he is pushing his late fifties. I almost feel sorry for him, but then again I’m the one who writes the obituary notices, and I’m sitting on a radiator.

Bob, on the other hand, practically
is
the newspaper, especially since Mac likes to keep the writing staff lean (our value is slightly above janitor and way below the sales and accounting departments). Bob writes the local news, features, and sports; he even writes the occasional “investigative” piece that profiles our highest-paying
advertiser in glowing terms, neatly avoiding actual journalism while painting a portrait so rosy it would make Norman Rockwell vomit. A pale accountant fills in to cover the rare event of business news, usually a bankruptcy or store closing, which we call internally YABBTD (Yet Another Business Bites the Dust). Film reviews are written by Sandeep Banerjee, who charges five dollars an article and e-mails his copy from somewhere in the heart of Mumbai. Mac would probably love for Sandeep to write the obits, too—his new favorite acronym is ROI (Return on Investment)—but he knows that in a small, some would say close-minded (I would say borderline racist) town, nobody would want their beloved relative’s life-and-death story written by anyone other than a full-blooded American. Which is why my byline is D. Peters instead of Dimitri Petrov. Go figure.

And in New Goshen, where 75 percent of the local population is over sixty-five, there are so many obituaries they fill up two full pages of the newspaper—sometimes three, if we really stretch the prime advertising space. Death here is the proverbial cash cow. It wasn’t always that way—when industrialization hit New Goshen in the early twentieth century, it must have been a rocking place to be. Thousands of immigrants and children of rural farmers poured into the city to work in the mills. Fourteen was a great age to start, and if you lost a finger or two in the process, you’d have considered yourself lucky that you still had part of a hand. Of course, now all that manufacturing is done in China, which has an even greater and cheaper supply of fourteen-year-olds, so the mills here are boarded-up shells with broken windows. Anyone under thirty wisely got out while the getting was good, and the aging population has caused a boom in hospice care, funeral, and other “death industries,” including my own meager position writing obits.

Lucky me.

“Well,” says Bob, trying to salvage his dominant spot as chief jokester, “I’ll give you a hint.” He leans in close, and his breath smells of fried-egg sandwich. “Next time you want to take a
dump
”—he
whispers the word “dump” so he won’t offend the delicate sensibilities of Myrna—“you might want to use the stall by the window.”

He cheerfully gives my shoulder a punch, like he’s the coach and I’m the high school rookie, and then thuds over to his desk, where he has a grinding first-generation laser printer that makes more noise than an artillery range.

I look out the window and wonder if, assuming I survived a jump from the second story, I’d be entitled to disability payments.

This much we know about Muriel Sheridan. She died in her sleep at Crosslands Nursing Center at 1:05
A.M.
on a rainy Monday morning. At least we hope that she died in her sleep and didn’t wake up alone, unable to call the nurse because of her advancing Alzheimer’s, gasping for a last, rattling breath as pneumonia filled her lungs with fluid.

When I say we, I mean Lisa and me.

Lisa is the receptionist at Crosslands, one of four nursing homes that make up the Quadrant of Death. All four are located within the same city block, just a stone’s throw from the hospital, mortuary, and cemetery. Lisa is my main point of contact and supplier of scoops when it comes to the dead or nearly dead. She hears all the good gossip about the inmates (excuse me, residents)—things that of course can’t, but should, go in the obits.

“Relatives?” I ask.

“Bitchy niece who’s got her eye on Muriel’s Victorian,” says Lisa.

Lisa’s voice is smoky, and I know she’s about my age, but I haven’t yet gotten the nerve to ask her to coffee and meet her in person. I like to tell myself that I’m working up to it.

I tap my pencil on my desk. “So what’s the story?”

“Well,” says Lisa, and I can hear her pause as she checks to see if there’s anyone within earshot, “apparently Muriel was loaded. She was a burlesque dancer in Vegas.”

I drop my pencil on the floor with a clatter, causing Myrna to glare in my direction.

“No shit,” I whisper.

“But she really made her money playing poker. Word is she was a card counter, and when the Mafia found out, they got her a one-way ticket to New York and told her if they saw her again, no one would ever find the body.”

I whistle through my teeth. Go Muriel.

“So she just settled down and got married, never had kids, and played Suzie Homemaker until after her husband Harold died. Then she went back to Vegas one last time.”

“No one would recognize her,” I say.

“Exactly,” says Lisa. “Who’d suspect a nice little old lady with permed gray hair? I wouldn’t. Bitchy niece said she made over two hundred grand her first week, but the thick-necked guys started following her with walkie-talkies, so she decided it was time to clear out. A year later the Alzheimer’s started.”

I jot notes as we talk. Not that any of this will make the paper. But still.

“Anyone else close?” I ask. As in close to dying. I like to keep track so that if there’s a flurry of deaths in a short period of time, I can have some prep work done and easily make my deadline. I’m that sick.

“Umm…” says Lisa. “Mrs. Jameson has been dying forever… She seems close, but then I think I said that last month.”

“Two months ago,” I say. I already have a file on Mrs. Jameson with some preliminary research, so I could wrap her up fairly quickly. “Nothing new?”

“No,” says Lisa with a sigh. “I found out she did some charity work at the hospital, nothing else.”

I make a note to do some digging. There’s always “the thing” that separates a person out, makes them unique, different. It’s not always stories about Vegas gambling, although you might be surprised at the
number of adulterous relationships, incarcerations, and illegitimate children of the Greatest Generation currently stationed at Crosslands. Sometimes the thing is as simple as a mastery of French cuisine, a collection of rare butterflies pinned on a piece of velvet in the living room, or a stay in the White House during the Nixon years. Finding the thing gives me a strange kind of thrill. It’s finding the story behind the façade, even if I have to spin it so that the raging alcoholic was “the life of the party” and the drug addict dies “suddenly of heart failure.” I know the truth. Someone knows the truth before they’re buried. I think everyone deserves that.

“Dimitri, you there?” says Lisa.

I have once again completely spaced out. This happens often in my line of work.

“Hey Lisa, I wanted to ask you—”

Suddenly the line is dead, and I see a large, familiar, thuggish index finger pressing the receiver’s button. Fuck. Nate.

“Talking to your girlfriend on company time?”

I look up to find Nate, Mac’s son and the senior editor, aka Senior Asshole, or Senior Douche Bag, or Senior Beneficiary of Nepotism, standing in front of me. There is a characteristic dumb smirk on his squarely-jawed face, and a gleam of unexpressed sadism in his eye. If there was a nuclear war and people resorted to a
Lord of the Flies
barbarism complete with cannibalism and rampant destruction of whatever civilization remained, it would not surprise me in the least to find Nate at the head of the ruling clan with a scavenged thigh bone in hand and automatic rifles strapped to his back, screeching through the ravaged streets in some kind of assemblage of truck, a la
Mad Max
. As it is, Nate’s proclivities toward violence are limited to editing my writing with bloody, indecipherable marks made with a red Sharpie.

“She’s a source,” I say.

Nate hugs himself and makes obnoxious kissing noises. “Just kidding, slugger,” he says, giving my other shoulder a punch, so now I’ll have a bruise to match the one Bob gave me.

I try to hunch over my laptop, like I’m right on the verge of something truly incredibly important or at least more absorbing than starting a discussion. Nate, as usual, misses (or ignores) the cues. He settles on the corner of my desk, his balls frighteningly close to my stapler.

His eyes furrow in some kind of bad caveman impression. “I don’t get it, Shakespeare. Why do you spend so much time on this crap?”

“Crap? What crap?” I say.

Nate pulls out a handful of crumpled and sweaty-looking obits from his back pocket. Nate likes to edit while he’s on the treadmill at the gym. He’s often said he does his best thinking while pumping iron. Seriously.

I hate to admit it, but I’m a little jealous of his ability to work the phrase “pumping iron” into everyday conversation. I wish I could randomly drop lines like, “Yeah, I was in the middle of a triathlon,” but I have a long-standing aversion to any activity that involves pain and an increased heart rate.