How High We Go in the Dark(35)

“Thank you,” she’d say, barely looking me in the eyes.

“Don’t mention it,” I’d say. “Want some company?”

“I think I’m just going to eat in my apartment,” she’d say. And I’d watch her slink across the lobby into the elevator. It wasn’t until the company held a training seminar about our loyalty card program that Val apparently decided we could be friends again.

“Welcome back to the land of the living . . . sort of,” I said when she sat beside me during the lunch break. We ate our turkey sandwiches, shared our chips, and when I asked her if she wanted to marathon a few selections from the Criterion Collection, she didn’t run away.

My tenuous friendship with Val was a constant reminder of how close I was to being entirely alone, which I think made me more thoughtful 50 percent of the time, the kind of person Val might want to hang around. The only other coworker I talked to was Mr. Leung, our head janitor. He had a long, wispy beard and bushy eyebrows reminiscent of an old master in a seventies kung fu film. It made watching him work an almost meditative experience. I confessed as much to him once and was immediately afraid that I’d come off as one of those Asians who knew jack shit about being Asian, which was mostly true. But he smiled and a few days later asked for my help in providing under-the-table services for some impoverished families around Chinatown.

“We have bio bag,” he said in a thick accent. “We need to burn. No money.”

I spent that night mulling over Mr. Leung’s request, realized that I’d be helping someone while also sticking it to Mr. Fang, who hated the idea of assisting the needy or desperate. I almost didn’t tell Val about it at all, since she seemed like a rule-following whistleblower, but when she saw me passing a note to Mr. Leung, I let her in on the plan. We would wait until Friday evening to begin, when Mr. Fang went to see La traviata for the umpteenth time with his wife. I’d wait by the service entrance for Mr. Leung and his friends to roll in the bodies they’d been storing in the freezers of local restaurants.

“Den has a heart after all,” she said on the first night of our covert mission, climbing into the biohazard suit the sterilization techs wore when handling unprocessed bodies. And who wouldn’t want to help?

“We can only give you this,” a teenage boy with his grandfather told us after we presented them with a cardboard urn. He pulled out his phone and transferred fifty funerary tokens to my account, handed me a tote bag filled with food. After the initial group of families left, Mr. Leung, Val, and I ate the dumplings they gave us on the embalming table.

Everyone Mr. Leung brought to us over the next few nights was solemn and thankful.

“Is that enough?” they would always ask. “We’re sorry we don’t have much to offer.”

“It’s fine,” I’d answer. Because money was never the reason and, honestly, I would have done it for free if they hadn’t insisted. It made me feel good. They burned incense and held each other and cried while gazing at photos of their relatives. I bowed my head in respect. Once upon a time this was how we dealt with death. But something snapped in us when the dead could no longer be contained, when people didn’t really get to say goodbye. Cryogenic suspension companies proliferated, death hotels, services that preserved and posed your loved ones in fun positions, travel companies that promised a “natural” getaway with your recently departed. I remember Mr. Fang reminding us upon hire to always exude customer service, to never upset the guests, to remember that we were a hotel first and foremost, a funeral home second.

One night after helping Mr. Leung on my own, I grabbed my bourbon from the dryer and headed to the fire escape. Val was already out there, blowing smoke rings around the silhouette of a ballet dancer projected at the top of the Salesforce Tower. It was advertising the mayor’s Festival of Resilience, meant to boost city morale. Of course, most people just needed better support services—soup kitchens, counseling sessions, government-sponsored funerary packages.

Val wiped the tears from her face and handed me the joint. “I wonder if places like this will last now that they’re rolling out new treatments. People are lingering in comas. There’s hope. Maybe we’re all working on borrowed time.”

I shrugged and took a long drag.

“How’d it go today?”

“The usual,” I said. I felt a little bad saying this, but helping Mr. Leung dispose of the bodies had become a routine. “I mean . . .”

“Yeah, I get it,” Val said. “Don’t think too much about the job.”

“Do you like Starship?”

“The what now?”

“Like the band.”

“No feelings either way, I guess.”

“Do you mind?” I took out my phone and found the album Knee Deep in the Hoopla, and pressed play. My father had given me the cassette when I was little, and I couldn’t shake these tunes that I’d once fallen asleep to as a kid, no matter how hard I tried.

“This is really bad,” Val said. “But like in a good way.”

We dangled our feet in the air, draped a blanket across our shoulders. I continued to ignore my brother’s messages buzzing in my pocket, finally switching off my phone. I could tell Val wanted to say something, but she let it go for once. She rested her head on my shoulder, and we counted the tiny explosions from the welders attaching wind turbines that looked like gigantic tulips across the otherwise dark Financial District.