How High We Go in the Dark(65)

Salads Finger Foods Baked Goods Chips & Dip _ Mains

Dear Neighbors,

This is an invitation the old me never would have sent. You know the sky-blue Cape Cod in our cul-de-sac with the flower boxes that my wife, Shelley, your friend, planted with tulips. You knew my daughter, Nina, from Girl Scout cookies and sleepovers. I was her husband and her father or Mr. Paul—never Dan, the lawyer who barely got home in time to read Nina a bedtime story while my wife sequestered herself in our home office to code some new phone app. But my associates are gone now, as are most of our families. My home is a museum, as are most of your homes. And I realize we could go on, peering through our windows, avoiding each other, or you could come to my block party before we lose ourselves completely to the illusion of who we used to be.

I woke up in a Boeing hangar outside of Seattle, where spillover comatose plague patients were being stored. I walked past dozens of rows of cots in a hospital gown searching for Shelley and Nina, surrounded by confusion and heartbreak. Some patients reached out, as if I could help them—strangers, people I’d seen at cafes or Fitness Universe. Others looked at the empty beds, the body bags being carted away, those the vaccine could not save. After waiting in a processing tent for hours, I was given my wife’s wedding band, a charm bracelet I’d bought for my daughter’s sixteenth birthday, and two small boxes of ash. I spread their remains near the pier where Nina used to feed the seagulls her french fries, where I once hid an engagement ring in a basket of fish-and-chips. There are barely any seagulls now without the tourists of Pike Place Market to sustain them, the carrion along the shorelines already desiccated by the heat or washed out to sea. Every morning since leaving the hospital, I have woken up on my side of the bed and pretended my wife and daughter were home. I make them pancakes like I used to years ago, close my eyes and kiss the air above the kitchen stools. I play cartoons in the background as I wash the dishes, or Shelley’s crime dramas while I slowly work my way through a stack of mail—utility bills, insurance statements, letters from relatives sharing the news that they’re okay. Cousins Candace and Siri are gone. Aunt Sylvie and Uncle Jay are still receiving treatment. I write them back. I tell them I survived. I know that when they read my words a part of them will wish that I was the one who died.

At night I grow tired of pretending. I watch infomercials showing the old elegy hotels, how they’ve been turned into condo communities with names like Vitality Towers. It seems like every other retired athlete is on television, telling me to reclaim my life with funerary-bank-sponsored drugs, and while I watch this garbage, I use the coupon book for the recently awakened and order pizza delivery.

There’s a nationwide climate campaign to phase out gas vehicles. I take the new light rail to our local reassimilation center, my old high school gym. It’s strange seeing the empty roads; the city streets buzz with the low hum of early morning throughout the day. The Japanese restaurant where I used to get lunch is boarded up, the corner stores where I bought cigarettes transformed into information kiosks for people looking for work or missing family members. Billboards atop buildings project updated numbers of the newly recovered. Sometimes crowds of people stop and look up at the scroll, as if they can feel the world beginning to breathe again.

It’s been two months since the first plague patients were released from hospitals and overflow centers, and I’ve begun to develop a routine. At the reassimilation check-in office, I tell my case worker about my new job—approving memorial profile requests, answering messages for the deceased on WeFuture (previously known as BitPalPrime, before they were acquired by the funerary banks). It can be emotionally draining work, though I still take pride in helping people through their pain. My floor supervisor is named Dennis and he has a tough role, managing shadow profiles. He assumes the personality of the deceased and continues to post updates and chat with their friends and family.

“You learn the most insane shit pretending to be other people,” he told me once during our lunch break. “K-pop crushes, who’s cheating on their spouse.” He used to be a bereavement coordinator at an elegy hotel, which makes sense, since he seems to have a way of handling people in crisis, those who come into our offices looking like they’re about to crumble.

“You need to talk really slow,” he said, when I asked to bum a cigarette once. “I know I sound like an ass, and I really do care. But it’s also a job, and if you allow yourself to feel everything all the damn time it’ll wear you down.”

I don’t want this letter to turn into a novel, but I need you to know who I am. It took me weeks to get this far. I’ve been too afraid to knock on your doors, certain I was too much of a stranger for any of you to care. For an introvert who hated social niceties, who always said no to invitations, I have begun to crave any kind of human contact at all. I want to know if you still see your family in your homes, walking through the halls as if caught in a moment. I want to know how you are nourishing your bodies—food or alcohol or photo albums or maybe with the scent of unwashed clothes in the hamper. I want to know if you remember anything from our time away from the world, if the dreams I had while I was comatose were anything more than dreams—a dark place where we didn’t feel like strangers, where we could witness past moments from other lives. When I look out the window, I feel like we’ve shared a lifetime of memories together in a dark womb: a first kiss relived forever, a long-dead grandparent returning from war, our secret histories becoming our shared pastime.