How the Dead Live Read Online Free PDF Page A

transcendent banal. ‘But I’d rather set my heart on living again.’
    ‘We’ve got all sorts of new animating principles available, you know – fresh harvests of anencephalic stillborn infants coming through all the time – ‘ He broke off to address a passing clerk: ‘Mr Davis? You wouldn’t be so kind as to bring over the Roladex with the anencephalic stillborn infants’ animating principles on it, would you?’
    ‘Truly, I have no desire to be nyujo, and I’d rather counted on being me on the next go-round, as it were.’
    ‘You appreciate that you’ll actually be more you if you accept a new animating principle, hmm? There’ll be a more . . . how can I put it? ... porous barrier between your assemblages of memories.’
    ‘I know this, yes – but I won’t be me. Me. Me.’
    ‘Quite so.’
    Yes, I kid you not – this is the kind of dreck he tried to palm me off with. Still, at least I wasn’t among the living, stumbling about the joint imagining themselves painted up with the present, when it ain’t necessarily so. Their minds are full of dead ideas, images and distorted facts. Their visual field is cluttered up with decaying buildings, rusting cars, potholed roads and an imperfectly realised sky, which darkens towards the horizon of history. They take in all ages in the one frame every time they snap the city with their Brownie brainboxes. Their very noses are clogged with dying hairs, moribund skin, stratified snot – they’re smelling the past; and feeling it too between their toes, their thighs, the pits of their arms: ssshk-shk! Peeling back the years. Whereas we, the dead, are the true inheritors of the Modern. The live lot assemble time into lazy decadences – ten-year periods of conspicuous attitudinising, which are only ever grasped in nostalgic retrospect. My second husband was a profoundly ancient man, a Neolithic stone-knapper. But we . . . we see it all; anachro-spectacles are the only ones we wear. So these interminable branch offices that I’ve revolved through, while Lithy sat in my lap and Rude Boy ranted in the vestibule, trying to piss on back numbers of the Reader’s Digest, haven’t been so strange, or so different.
    Anyway, I’m getting off the point, which Canter never has. ‘Thank you, Mr Davis,’ he said, taking receipt of the relevant buff folder. ‘You see, Ms Bloom – or rather your death guide . . . Mr . . . Jones, ye-es Jones, may have told you – we have our own calculus here, our own ways of proceeding?’
    ‘I’m only too well aware.’
    ‘This isn’t’ – then he really did take off his wire-rimmed spectacles, and run his hand through his sparse, sandy hair, giving me time to appreciate, once again, that instead of being determined by the magisterially pompous English gentile who I’d thought was going to decide it, my fate was in the waxy paws of a ratty little Jew – ‘any longer a matter of how you conducted yourself on your last “go-round”, as you put it.’
    ‘Mr Canter, sir’ – such honorifics came naturally when I was addressing someone who hadn’t taken a shit since 1953 – I’m only too well aware of the implications of karma.’
    ‘On the before-death plane perhaps – but after death? You died, in 1988, owing over two thousand pounds to the Inland Revenue. Monies which had, subsequently, to be disbursed by your estate –’
    ‘Is this strictly relevant?’
    ‘Oh yes, accounts are accounts – and we are – ‘
    Accountants. Save for his peculiar colleagues, Mr Canter is well-nigh indistinguishable from Mr Weintraub, who, when I saw him for the last time – the cancer scooping out my left boob as if it were a fucking avocado – assured me he’d take care of the relevant returns . . . sitting in his aggressively Artexed office, off the North Circular by Brent Cross, playing with a Bic Cristal and annotating the accounts I myself had laboriously put together.
    ‘– concerned here with totting up all the relevant