Aftermirth (2 page)

MICHAEL

(good-naturedly)

Ow!

As he sucks his finger, there's a loud RUMBLE of THUNDER. Surprised, Michael glances at the open window in the living room. The sky is darkening, and the branches of the trees outside are whipping back and forth. The wind begins to MOAN.

INT. LIVING ROOM - DAY

Michael strides toward the window, but before he reaches it there's a loud THUNDERCLAP and it starts pouring rain. He closes the window then turns and looks back at the front door, worried now. A deafening CRACK of lightning sounds, followed by the unearthly HOWLING of a dog in the distance. Michael freezes and cocks his head, listening. Worry changes to recognition, then terror.

EXT. BROOKLYN BROWNSTONE - DAY

A torrential downpour. The door to the brownstone flies open and Michael runs down the steps. He takes off in the direction of the HOWLING. An ambulance SIREN wails in the distance.

EXT. CLINTON STREET - DAY

Michael, drenched to the skin, running flat-out in the pouring rain. The HOWLING fades away, and the SIREN gets louder. He sees a CROWD of a dozen people clustered on the sidewalk next to a smoldering tree that's been hit by lightning. He runs up and pushes through them. A FIGURE is lying on the ground, its face and torso covered by an orange windbreaker: a woman, wearing jeans and pink Converse sneakers. Michael falls down on his knees beside her.

MICHAEL

Jess! Oh no, oh please God no!

He reaches out to lift the jacket, but a burly GUY in gym clothes takes his arm, restraining him.

GUY

No, man, don't. You don't want to see.

WOMAN

(whispering loudly)

It's him, it's Michael Larssen!

In a frenzy of grief, Michael flails out, yanking his arm from the guy's grip, and starts to lift the jacket. His face contorts as the smell of burned flesh reaches him. He puts his hand over his mouth and nose and gags. With the help of a second MAN, the guy pulls Michael away from Jess's body. He doubles over and vomits. The guy holds his shoulders, not letting go.

The ambulance arrives, and Michael wipes his mouth with his hand and staggers to his feet. The ear-
piercing WAIL of the SIREN stops and two PARAMEDICS
leap out. As they bend to their work, the guy grabs Michael and holds him in a death lock, rocking him like a baby and muffling the sound of Michael's KEENING against his chest.

They found Izzy huddled in a stairwell almost a mile away, quaking and terrified. The police had to drive me down there to get him; he wouldn't let anybody else near him. It was weeks before he could go outside without shaking like an epileptic, and a year later he still whimpered and trembled in his sleep. I often wondered if I did too, if I kept him awake sometimes like he did me. But Izzy couldn't tell me, and there was nobody else I could ask.

W
E WERE IN
the middle of shooting the third season of
Trainers
when Jess died, and we still had four episodes left to write. The studio aired what we had in the can and gave me six months to pull myself together, and then another six after that. But at the year mark, compassion began to give way to pleading from my agent, manager, fellow writers and cast members, and impatience and talk of breach of contract from the studio brass and their lawyers. The show had won two Emmys the first year and four the second, including Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. It was an ensemble, but in the
Seinfeld
mode; without its outstanding star and head writer, there was no series.

I tried, I really did. I shot the final six episodes of season three, and I was prepared to man up and do four and five, but I didn't have to, because I was so spectacularly unhilarious that HBO pulled the plug and released me from my contract. One weekend, as an exercise in masochism, I sat drinking vodka gimlets—Jess's favorite cocktail—and watched the whole series from beginning to end, the thirty episodes that sang and the six that clanked. I started at noon on a Saturday and finished at dawn the next day. The Michael Larssen of episodes one through thirty was a stranger, a wise-ass doppelgänger who hailed from some other, weirdly gleeful planet. The Michael Larssen of thirty-one through thirty-six, the one who could have starred in
Night of the Living Dead
with minimal help from makeup and wardrobe, I knew all too well. The gimlets turned him into a merciful blur.

After
Trainers
wrapped I took my career off the oxygen and let it die. I got a few calls from old friends offering me a toe back in the water, but I turned them down, as much for their sakes as mine. The reek of my misery would only have stunk up their clubs and writers rooms, just like it did the apartments of my friends and family. I quit answering the phone, and after a while it stopped ringing much. The ones who were persistent I shoved away with sarcasm and, when that didn't work, in-their-face rudeness. Their worry was a burden I couldn't carry, because the only way to assuage it was to fake an alrightness I didn't feel.

About a year and a half after Jess died my old friend Annie, with whom I'd periodically shared benefits in my single days, called and invited me over for a home-cooked meal, and afterward (I realized afterward), for mercy sex. Her bedroom was dark—she'd turned the lamp off in what I later understood was another act of kindness—but she felt wrong, smelled wrong. The little cries she made were too breathy and high-pitched. I soldiered on, determined to please her and to feel pleasure, and I guess I succeeded; at least, our bodies said I had. But as I lay spent beside her all I wanted was to go home and shower and fall into the oblivion of sleep, and Annie was a good enough friend that she understood and let me, sending me off with a pan of leftover lasagna and a chaste kiss on the forehead.

Izzy's was the only company I could stand, because he let me be as morose as I liked and never asked, “So, how are you
really,
Michael?” Still, he had needs, and there were times I resented him so much for forcing me out of bed, out the door and into the Jessless world that I would yank him away from his pleasures, at which point he'd give me this look that said,
What kind of jerk would deny his loyal, long-suffering—and you know how I've suffered—companion the simple joys of sniffing other dogs' butts and rolling in squirrel shit?
And I would be flooded with shame and let him walk me for a good hour and cook him bacon when we got home.

Home was still the brownstone, despite the efforts of my family and every other person who was still speaking to me to get me to move. They thought it was morbid that I would want to stay so close to the place where Jess had been killed. What they didn't understand was that it would have been even worse being somewhere she hadn't hung pictures and made pumpkin bread, watched
South Park
and done the Sunday crossword, slept and dreamed and waked and laughed and breathed.

Which is why, six weeks before the second anniversary of her death and a few days after my accountant called to inform me that I was nearly broke and would have to sell the brownstone if I didn't start producing some income, I found myself opening a newspaper for the first time in nearly two years in search of some sort of gainful employment. I didn't go straight to the job listings, though; I read the whole paper, feeling a lot like Rip Van Winkle. There'd been populist revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, apparently, and a second (and when was the first?) volcano eruption in Iceland on the same day that the world was supposed to end and hadn't (and why the hell hadn't it?).

And then I saw the headline in the Metro section:
WORKER KNEADED TO DEATH IN BREAD FACTORY MISHAP
.
Julio Santiago, forty-six, an employee at the Fulsome Grains factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey, had fallen into the giant dough vat unobserved by his co-workers. It wasn't until the machine jammed that they'd discovered his body. This was the
Times,
so the article was straightforward, with no snickering. Still, at the end it said that the cause of death had been asphyxiation, not pummeling by dough blades. So why that misleading headline,
KNEADED TO DEATH
,
with the cartoon visual it conjured? Was that not a sly attempt at humor? Feeling a growing anger, I went online to the
Daily News
website
.
Those pricks didn't even try for subtlety.
WORKER BATTERED IN DOUGH VAT ACCIDENT DOESN'T RISE
,
they quipped. I skipped the gory details and carefully scripted professions of regret by company officials and went to the end of the article. Mr. Santiago was survived by a wife, Pilar, and a daughter, Elena. The viewing was being held in two days at a funeral parlor in Passaic.

I would go and pay my respects.

As soon as I'd made the decision I was seized by restlessness. I straightened the house, throwing out months of unopened magazines and junk mail, long-expired food, plastic takeout containers and pizza boxes, desiccated flowers, ratty underwear and T-shirts. I hired a maid service to come and clean. I went shopping and bought some clothes that didn't hang on me. I took Izzy to the groomers, got a haircut, had the car washed and the oil changed.

The morning of the viewing, I shaved and dressed with more care than I had in two years. It was about forty-five minutes to Passaic—double that in traffic, but this was the middle of a Saturday—and as I crossed into Jersey I felt a queasy mixture of excitement and dread. I had absolutely no idea what I would say to these people once we were face to face. I only knew that I had to go and meet them.

The funeral home was in a working-class neighborhood, and my BMW 650i convertible with its YUKYUK vanity plate was conspicuously out of place among the Kias, Hyundais and older-model American cars that filled the parking lot. I sat with the engine running for a long while, studying the black-clad people entering and exiting the building. Most went in pairs or groups, arms intertwined or locked around each other's waists or shoulders. With few exceptions, the ones coming out looked less sad than the ones going in—which made no sense to me at all. Either Tuccelli & Sons was actually a massage parlor fronting as a mortuary, or some other mysterious force was at work.

Finally I screwed up the courage to get out of the car and go inside. The foyer was dimly lit and smelled overwhelmingly of flowers. I sneezed, and someone said, “God bless you.”

I turned and saw a kid in his late teens standing to one side of the doorway. He wore an ill-fitting black suit, a white carnation boutonniere and a lugubrious expression that looked incongruous on his pimply face. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said, giving me a solemn nod I would have bet a hundred bucks he'd practiced in the mirror. His voice was young and thready, trying desperately for gravitas. I figured him for one of the advertised Tuccelli sons, wearing one of his older brothers' suits. No other kid his age would have taken that job.

“Are you here for the white viewing?” he asked.

I shook my head, confused. “No, he's Hispanic.”

I'll hand it to the kid, his face didn't change an iota. “You must be here for Mr. Santiago, then,” he said, gesturing to the left. “He's just down the hall, in the Chamber of Boundless Serenity. Mrs. White is upstairs, in the Bower of Everlasting Peace.”

In the old days that would have sparked enough material for a whole new act. Now I could only mumble embarrassed thanks and head in the direction he'd indicated.

Vaguely celestial organ music issued from the open doorway of the Chamber of Boundless Serenity. In a frame beside the door was a printed paper sign that read
SANTIAGO
.
It was a little askew, and the tip of one corner showed above the frame. I straightened it, feeling a sudden fury at how flimsy it was, how easily replaceable.

The room was packed with people; that was all I registered before I was stopped by an extremely short, brown-skinned older man standing just inside the doorway. “Hello, señor?” he said, craning his neck to look up at me. “This is the Santiago viewing.”

“Then I'm in the right place,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.

His face showed surprise, along with something else I couldn't identify, but it sure didn't look like welcome. I felt other eyes coming to rest on me, heard a wave of whispers travel across the room and then drop into silence. I looked over the man's shoulder into a sea of black and brown. Black clothes and hair, brown skin and eyes, all trained on tall, blond, blue-eyed, whey-faced me. I might as well have been standing there in a horned helmet and chain mail waving a battle axe. I'd never felt whiter in all my life.

A guy about my age with a face like a clenched fist detached himself from a clump of people near the coffin and strode toward me. “Get out,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me. You're not welcome here.”

“Look,” I said, bewildered by his hostility, “I just came to pay my respects.”

He stepped closer, angling his head forward. His face was so close to mine I could smell his wintergreen breath mints. “You think by showing up here and proving how much you
respect
us
,
we're gonna sue your gringo asses for any less, huh? Now get the fuck out.”

He was almost a foot shorter than me, but he was coiled and wiry and full of enough rage to quail even my strapping, pillaging ancestors. I held my hands up and started to back away.

“I'm not mugging you, asshole,” he said contemptuously. “Just turn around and walk out the door like a normal human being.”

“Wait.” A woman wove through the crowd and came over to us, placing a hand on my antagonist's arm. She was in her late twenties, petite and slender, with large, almond-shaped eyes that were swollen from crying and a prominent nose I recognized from the photo of the deceased. I guessed this was the daughter, Elena. Her expression was appraising but not unfriendly.