’Burgatory

No matter where you live in New York City, you always end up in Queens. Departed souls outnumber the borough’s living two to one.

Some say you’ll find me about a three-day tunnel from Houdini’s oft-vacant crypt, underneath the stone inscribed Furness. The same true believers who celebrate the resurrected Elvis, read the Times, or attend funerals. Yet here I sit, breath and circulation enough to plead my case.

______________

The keynote speaker was droning on about subrogation. Or maybe spendthrift clauses. I broke chunks off the snickerdoodle on my knee and chewed in stealth, applause an excuse to brush off crumbs. The thrift-store suit in the next row shook my hand like it was a ketchup bottle once the house lights acquainted us. “Max Pooley. Good to meetcha–” he scanned my lanyard for vitals, “–Clay. So how’s that Big Apple territory treatin’ ya?”

“Eh, same as everywhere,” I said. “More pulses than payouts, so I can’t complain.” We funneled into the atrium for a cocktail reception.

“Well, welcome to Kansas City, try the barbecue. Good flight?”

______________

Elton John’s “Rocket Man” coursed between my ears as I auditioned colors for the pie chart on my laptop. A million acres of corn crawled below the wing out the window. I changed my display from Eastern Time to Central.

Demonic ink sleeved up an arm attached to a stick of misanthropy in the aisle seat. He pulled a shrink-wrapped CD from his backpack and slid it across my tray. The vampire on the cover gnawed at the sinews of its conjoined twin’s shoulder. Feasting Priests.

Our passenger grinned through filed-down incisors. “Tonight, we rock The Beaumont. And dine upon charred swine. If you’re looking for something to do.”

______________

Four days later, I baked curbside at LaGuardia for forty-five minutes at 103 degrees, baggage wrecking months of chiropractics. Stood up by my own wife.

Odd that my cell phone was dead, as I’d preserved its battery in flight the past six hours. I weighed my chances of missing her drive-by and shuffled back into the terminal to a pay phone. Direct to voicemail, where her frayed throat thanked everyone for their calls of support and flipped my jitters switch. No answer at her mother’s, either. Hannah’s father “fell” from the Brooklyn Bridge two years ago, and her mother’s pining had kept us on watch ever since.

In any other family they’d be ideal clients.

I stepped in front of a cab and ordered Park Slope. The mobile-phone commercial on the backseat television compelled my muting finger until the driver’s own Arabic cellular bellowing replaced it. I exhumed my laptop, jacked my wireless card inside, and rifled through new e-mails. Only spam and subscriptions – nothing personal for the entire week. Even the seminar follow-ups and networking handjobs I’d already read were missing. Nothing mistakenly filtered as junk.

The local newsblonde interrupted my search. “New developments in Monday’s Rikers Island crash.” A jet-engine graphic extruded over her shoulder. “Authorities have confirmed that mechanical failure, not pilot error as initially reported, is to blame for flight 1185’s left wing clipping the tree line shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia airport. A spokesperson for Heartland Airlines says the Kansas City-bound 737 had previously failed–”

My destination. My airline.

I poked my head through the partition. “Hey, you know anything about this plane crash?”

He met my eyes in the rearview, phone still to ear. “Why? Just because I am Saudi, I am to be responsible for every act of–”

“Come on, that’s not what I meant. I been outta town.”

He hacked a string of consonants into his phone and set it down. “It was very bad. Eighty-something people.”

“What, hurt? Dead?”

“A few survived.” He praised Allah in his native tongue.

1185. Couldn’t be. I scrolled through e-mail subject lines from weeks prior and found my trip confirmation. Right there in twelve-point Helvetica:

1185 LGA to MCI

Still, not every flight number is unique. It’s just a trajectory, a schedule – not the airplane itself. There’s probably an 1185 every day.

But I left on Monday.

His eyes returned in the mirror. “Did you know someone?”

The New York Times Web site loaded into my browser, placeholders filling with ads and columns. I clicked the Obituaries link. Headlines mourned citizens of purpose: Broadway producers, math teachers, activists. The death of a life insurance salesman, however, cost seventy-nine bucks per listing.

Among at least a hundred others, Clayton Furness, 37, laid immortalized just above an animating phone ad. His wife and son’s survival of him topped his list of achievement, all at an economical 450 words under the limit.

“Okay, $31.25,” the driver said. “Swipe your card if you like.”

Our familiar brownstone cast the street in shadow. I don’t know whom I’d expect to find inside, given Clayton’s memorial service was listed for … an hour ago. “Change of plans. Forest Green Chapel in Flushing. Fast. Take the Jackie Robinson.”

This should’ve been a time for reflection, a few minutes to cobble some eulogy, or the mass retractions I’d demand tomorrow. Instead, I prayed to St. Christopher for working brakes and intestinal fortitude as the driver tore through the borough like a Hazzard County fugitive.

______________

I burst through the doors and a solemn bouncer with a name tag gestured to the parlor on the left. I patted down the remnants of my hair and marched inside, hands clasped at the waist. Heads turned my direction without fanfare as light organ music piped through the room. A salmon-hued bulb flattered the pallor over the open casket of … a boy in Army dress, with an American flag draped over the wooden lid.

The lobby marquee read Schultz.

Name Tag said the Furness service had already proceeded to Muelbach Cemetery. A strain of recognition drained his face with no salmon lamp to compensate. He measured me at arm’s length in disbelief. The meter still running in my chariot.

______________

Washed cars lined the street outside the gate. Through the trees, a cluster of dark figures gathered around a plot. Earth-moving equipment lurked at a respectful distance. A priest dabbed sweat from his brow as he spoke in proverbs.

I sized up the turnout from the rear. Friends, coworkers, family. Strength and sorrow. No grand drama or girl-that-got-away outbursts like in the fantasy.

When the holy man finished, I strolled, hands in pockets, to the front. My shirt, soaked through. Hannah stood with her head down, hands on Dougie’s little shoulders. His finger firmly rooted in his nose, squirming in his first suit. “Daddy!” He pointed his excavating finger at me.

The collective gasp at graveside surely inhaled a few bugs. Murmurs, rustling. Hannah raised her head and I winked back. Her twitching lip said what her sunglasses could not.

I squatted next to the lowering mechanism. “So let’s see him, padre.”

“Pardon me?” The priest bookmarked his page and closed the volume.

“I missed the visitation.”

A hand touched my shoulder with a whisper. “Sir, please. Now’s not the time.” Another name tag. He mimicked the gesture I’d seen at Forest Green, inviting me to rejoin the black mass. And then that same face of disbelief.

“What.” I challenged him.

“I … I wasn’t aware Mr. Furness had a brother.”

Hannah remained rooted in her perfect posture, cheeks streaming and mouth agape, restraining Dougie by the shoulders.

“Open it,” I said.

“It’s already been sealed, sir.”

“Open it.”

“Sometimes there’s shifting–”

I knelt on the apron, rubbed my hands together, and drew a breath. The steel lid would not budge under my fingers, and the casket rocked in its harness. Name Tag threw Hannah a look of hostage guilt, then produced an Allen wrench from his keychain and twisted it into the foot end. He nodded to me, grinding his jaw. The lid hinged open with ease and locked into position.

No death rattle or gusts of supernatural wind. More like new-car smell.

And there I rested before myself. Gravity had been rude to the face, but I was otherwise in far better condition there on my back than here on my knees. I’d never wear a suit to bed, though. Hannah had ignored my burial wishes for pajamas and a snoring sound loop. I touched my doppelganger’s hand with a smile, tracing the flesh-colored skin to my matching wedding band and scarred knuckle. No dentist would be needed for verification.

Several mourners had flocked near the priest, witnesses to some miracle of spontaneous reincarnation. I reached for the other lid, but Name Tag held it down in protest.

“Clay, no–” Hannah’s voice.

Name Tag relented after a staredown, and the opening revealed my shoes missing. And my feet. And legs. Only suit pants, laid out like tomorrow’s wardrobe. Like some botched magic trick.

“The seatbelt, sir, it …” Name Tag struggled for the right gesture, but I waved him off.

The next half hour was a blur of tentative hugs, eye drying, and prayer. We left the grounds crew and name tags to do as they pleased, given the forensic and religious can-o-worms unearthed.

My boss caught up to us as we headed for Hannah’s minivan. He suggested I take a couple of days off to let all this sink in. “And … you do know you can’t process your own claim, right?”

______________

We drive home in silence. Not reverential silence, but pick-up-from-where-we-left-off silence. This was no second chance, no heavenly intervention. It was science. Some multiverse, quantum physics, converging dimensions thing that Hannah’s father would’ve written about. Or is writing about.

I’d called her from my hotel in KC many hours after the crash. I tell her I remember she’d said Dougie had a bloody nose from raiding a box of Q-tips at day care.

Dougie makes raspberry sounds in his car seat.

“No,” she says. “The last time I heard your voice, you were joking about packing some rubbers. I said no such thing.”

“But you would’ve is the point.”

“Has it occurred to you that maybe you’re dreaming, Clay?”

Who thinks to propose such a thing? “Well … that is the kind of line I’d assign you if that were the case. But it’s also how your conscience might reassure itself in its own dream.” Everyone stars in their own reality.

“Oh, well, thanks for letting me drive, then.”

“Wait, wait. I can prove it,” I say, snapping my fingers. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

She sighs. “I buried you an hour ago.”

“I just pootered,” Dougie says, full of accomplishment.

“No, like a formula or something. Math, technical.”

“Jesus, okay. Umm … you can print any color by using some mix of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.”

I tap my temple. “See, we can’t learn in our dreams. I couldn’t have just made up something that complex – that provably works – on the spot. Much less a word like cyan, right?”

“You are not the man I married. The man I married wasn’t even the man I married.”

I pull a business card from my wallet. “Right here: Max Pooley, Kansas City. But I’ve never been there, you say.”

She reaches a manicured hand for the radio. I dig into my attaché and hold up the Feasting Priests disc.

“We’re not listening to that.”

“Gimme your phone.” In her cell’s browser, I key the Web site listed on the back cover and play the first video clip that appears. Her speaker overloads with evil.

“So? You return from the underworld with a taste for death metal. Mm, convincing.”

“So … they never made it past Rikers, either. But look, this is dated last night. At The Bottleneck in Lawrence, Kansas.”

Silence again. Like a cornered animal.

I turn to the back seat. “You miss Daddy, dontcha?”

Dougie shakes his head with that gap-toothed grin and buzzes my airspace with a toy plane.

“I mean, shouldn’t a wife get a free pass?” Hannah says. “To start a new life, not make the same mistakes?”

“What are you saying? You wanna use my death as an excuse to divorce me? In front of our son, no less?”

“My husband,” she tears up, “is dead.” She pulls into a convenience store lot.

“Licorice!” Dougie kicks my seat and singsongs an ode to his favorite candy.

“In fact,” she says, regaining composure, “I think this is where you get out.”

“Oh, come on, don’t get melodra–”

“Out!”

She pops the rear hatch and climbs out long enough to toss my bags onto the pavement in front of some whistling vagrants. I don’t even have time to tell my son I’ll see him soon before the van disappears around the corner with echoes of skidding brakes and a metallic crash.

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