Dead is Better Read Online Free PDF Page A

jays––were so huge that the pool man had to come three times a week.
    After the sale, the trees were cut down and the ample lot divided into three narrow lots that now hold three treeless futuristic two-story stucco “residences.”
    The dog would have liked that house, the large shady and green backyard, although I think that were she to return to life, she’d spend most of her time indoors. Right now she seems content with our deathy peace and to not be suffering—placid, humble, accepting of whatever is.

21.
    “Death will be a great relief. No more interviews.”
    —Katherine Hepburn

    ***

    My first wife, Julia is so unlike this dog in character—I was about to say “spirit” but even from this post-mortal vantage point, I still have no fucking idea what soul or spirit could possibly be or mean. Even if I am one or had one.
    Which I seriously doubt.
    Upon entering death’s kingdom, one is not given a mirror or a map. It’s get off your fat ass and muddle the fuck along—just like life.
    Still, just to take the comparison to its conclusion, both the dog and my first wife are female, auburn-haired, delicate. Both have been my companion—but this silent dead, starved dog is more lovely, interesting and good than that warm, breathing woman could ever pretend to be.
    In life, seeing, being around, or recalling my first wife Julia always put me in a black mood, a shitty funk that drove me to my dim apartment where I’d eat—swallowing my anger and humiliation as I swallowed my food—and listen to Tim Buckley—”I Must Have Been Blind”—and Jim Kweskin—”How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?”—The Chambers Brothers and Tim Hardin—and mourn the ratfuck that was our marriage.
    The day our marriage died, Julia merely stopped speaking to me. After lunch that same afternoon—I remember it clearly—we ordered in corned beef and pastrami from Junior’s—I was served with divorce papers in my AndyCo. office—a public humiliation she’d engineered with the help of a lawyer my shit brother Mark had helped her find.
    Our marriage was a ratfuck, did I say that? I did not become the person she thought I was going to be: thin, aggressive, important, cool—i.e. I did not become my shit brother.
    If I could appear to Julia as, let’s say, Hamlet’s father appeared to him, literally the walking dead and wounded, still large, disheveled, and puzzled, a skeletal dog at my side—a weird canine Laurel to my Hardy—Julia would be neither impressed nor afraid, just smug and maybe a little bit amused.
    For don’t the circumstances in which I find myself justify what she thought of me all along?
    I was a failure as a living man. And so far I’m one massive fuck up at being dead.

22.
    “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends and the other begins?”
    —Edgar Allan Poe

    ***

    The dog stretches out on her belly, her back legs extended straight behind her, her front paws under her chin, a foot above Julia’s white marble patio—as if to savor the coolness of the stone, but I know this is not possible. Maybe she likes the smooth look of its surface. Or perhaps she is thinking about something else.
    Huge bougainvilleas vomit their pink against both sides of the peach-colored three-story faux French castle on a little manicured green hill above Sunset Boulevard from which I hear the traffic’s whisper and the angry buzz of nectar-drunk hummingbirds. I hover like a fat puff of steam above the dog.
    A short woman in her thirties with coffee-colored skin and wearing a white uniform—Serena—opens the French doors. Julia, my shit brother Mark, Helen, my shit brother’s wife, the accountant, my cousin Sheila, and my lawyer walk right through the dog and arrange themselves around the glass table set with silver vases of orange and red and pink and white roses, and crystal pitchers of iced tea. They are dressed in light colors, as if for brunch at the