Gentle Tweeter, how peaceful is a world where everyone gives offense but no one takes it. Within my circle of vision everyone is littering and spitting, and no one seems put off by those uncivil acts.
What’s more, I shudder to say, fat people are holding hands with thin people. Mexican tongues share ice- cream cones with white tongues. Homosexuals are being nice to other homosexuals. Blacks are happily rubbing elbows with Jews. My hero, Charles Darwin, would be so ashamed of me. My meddling has so destroyed the entire natural order of living things.
“The whole fucking world loves you, little dead girl, for showing us the righteous fucking path.” As Mr. Crescent City says this, we’re gliding down an escalator. We’ve no luggage to collect. Below us, our chauffeur waits among a bevy of other uniformed chauffeurs. One snaps his fingers, drawing our focus. He holds a clipboard hand-lettered with the name
“This is us,” says Crescent to the chauffeur, gesturing to nothing and then to himself. “We’re going to the chopper.”
The chauffeur turns to look his sunglasses directly at me. “Why, if it isn’t the angel,” he says, his breath scented like a hard-boiled egg. He drops to one knee. “Our most glorious redeemer.” With one gloved hand he sweeps the cap from his head and brings it to cover his heart. A mocking tone in his voice. That familiar methane stink to his words.
For my part, I don’t need to see a name tag. As he kneels before me I can see the twin tiny points of his horns buried deep in his thick blond hair. The crowd of chauffeurs surges forward to meet their respective passengers, and a jolly Falstaff wearing a blue serge uniform stumbles over the man kneeling. Both drivers sprawl. The mirrored sunglasses tumble, and I get a glimpse of yellow goat eyes. The bumbling Falstaff climbs back to his feet while our malodorous, supplicating driver scuttles on his belly to retrieve his fallen hat as it rolls away. Standing now, the Falstaff offers the fallen driver a hand up, saying, “Sorry, buddy.” He laughs and says, “Can you fucking forgive me?”
Another driver stoops to rescue the sunglasses, but their lenses are shattered, already broken by the tread of a scurrying air traveler. Yet another driver catches the rolling hat and returns it to the crawling man, who yanks it firmly over his head and pulls the brim low to hide his strange eyes. He reaches up to accept the Falstaff’s helping hand. Their two hands touch, like something depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or the floor of an upstate public toilet, and the fallen man says, “I forgive no one.” His voice a hiss. His uniformed body moving against the LAX carpet like a serpent.
With his free hand the oafish assailant is already slapping dust from his accidental victim. His mitt swats the shoulders of the wool coat, brushing the sleeves. “No harm done,” he says, but as the fallen man stands, the larger man sinks to his knees. Their hands unclasp. “Fuck,” says the Falstaff. Drops of sweat appear along his hairline and run down as if his forehead were a corn-based biodegradable plastic cup containing an iced soy latte. His goofy smile turns to gritted teeth, and so much blood rushes to his cheeks that he looks sunburned with agony. Clawing at his chest, he topples to make the shape of a fetus on the floor, and his legs run sideways against nothing, going nowhere fast. His Falstaff mouth stretches to turn his red face inside out while his hands dig at his jacket like a dog digs, like he can’t wait to rip out his own heart and show us. The brass buttons of his uniform pop and fly. His fingernails are through the skin, digging up blood, before he shudders and stiffens.
And yes, Gentle Tweeter, I may occasionally confuse dog excrement and male genitalia, but I can recognize when a man is suffering a massive heart attack on the floor at my feet. By now this is a familiar sight.
Under fluttering eyelids, the dying Falstaff looks back at the gawkers who surround his final suffering, staring down upon him with their eyes of awe and jealousy. He’s hemmed in by the toothy chrome zippers of all their roller bags. This bon voyage crowd, their envy is undisguised. No one dials 911. No one steps forward to administer heroic measures. The dying man whispers, “
Some voice among the assembled passersby shouts, “Hallelujah!”
The dying man whispers, “
Everyone present, including Mr. Crescent City, whispers, “Amen.”
Like a chime, a small voice calls, “Bye.” It’s a little boy with a saddle of pink freckles across the bridge of his nose. With his whole arm extended straight out from the shoulder, he wiggles his wrist to flop his small hand. At the same time, he says, “We’ll see you in Heaven!”
Following his lead, other hands wave. Slow waves. Beauty pageant waves. The crone wearing outdated Liz Claiborne blows a kiss. A choir of sphincters tootle sadly, a chorus of lamenting “Hail, Maddys.” Onlookers belch in solemn respect.
The gasping man goes still. The blood stops flowing from the hole he’s torn in his chest. Here’s my chance to set things right, to return the Earth to its natural unhappy order. It’s only when the paramedics finally arrive that I make my move.
DECEMBER 21, 10:22 A.M. PST
Returned to Life!
Gentle Tweeter,
By now I’m well accustomed to men falling dead in front of me. I’m not thrilled, not about seeing grown men wither and die at my feet, but neither am I paralyzed by the event.
To comprehend what happens next at LAX, you future-dead people need some fresh insight into the nature of your physical being. Until now you’ve largely conceived of your earthly body as a human-shaped utensil you use for having sex. Or for gobbling up Halloween candy. Yes, your fleshy self is the application which allows you to interface with automobile steering wheels, teams of oxen, embroidery hoops, trained dolphins, hair spray, cricket bats, rectal thermometers, hot-stone massage therapists, saltine crackers, Chanel No. 5, poison ivy, contact lenses, prostitutes, wristwatches, riptides, tapeworms, electric chairs, chili peppers, oncologists, roller coasters, tanning beds, meth, and cute hats. Without a corporeal self, all the preceding would be rendered moot. In addition your body is the canvas needed to express yourself in the world. At the very least, it’s the only avenue that allows for acquiring a truly rad tattoo.
Besides being a tool and a means of expression, the third truth is that a fleshy corpus acts as a cuddly, warm security blanket. Imagine a comforting suit of armor, i.e., you as your own teddy bear. A body is the Marc Jacobs shoulder bag that contains all the junk that constitutes you. And at this moment, an unoccupied body lies dead on the airport floor right in front of me. No, as bodies go this would not be my first choice—a largish lumpenprole chauffeur, a middle-aged male whose last meal was a take-out lunch of beef curry—but beggars can’t be choosers. Dead on the LAX carpet, he wears a driver’s uniform of worsted serge, and it appears that he’s been killed by clasping the hand of Satan. He’s rolled onto his back and frozen into a still photograph of a massive heart attack victim. His entire face, moments before, it was the color of a tongue. Now his face, his hands, all of his skin is the pale color of chrome. His desperate fingers have clawed open his coat and shirt, and his panicked fingernails have torn his chest into a vivid pizza margarita of shredded skin, red glop, and tangled black body hair. Dashed with hemoglobin red, his chrome name tag sags near his armpit. It says, HARVEY.
Dismal as he looks, it’s no worse than I looked dead on the floor of a Beverly Hills hotel suite surrounded by leftover room service meals. Do not, Gentle Tweeter, imagine that you’ll look any better.
I watch the spirit rise from his corpse, but not the way your eyes see smoke or mist. It’s more the way your nose sees a smell. It’s the inside way your whole head feels a headache. The way blood has poured from his chest, pooling on the floor, his soul drains upward in a flood of blue as thick as liquid, collecting in the air against the ceiling. At first the blue forms a lump, a clump, a cloud, but that quickly takes the shape of a textbook embryo, then a fetus. It hangs there. The blue is the blue your tongue sees when you eat whipped cream. Not an instant passes before a full-size blue version of the man is staring down at his dead self.
He gapes at his own mortal remains, working his mouth like someone choking on a fact too large to swallow. The assembled mob of airport strangers, for their part they study his final moments as if a quiz will
