2020

The Grateful Dead

Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs.

—Shakespeare

Though the dead forget their dead in the House of Death, / I will remember, even there, my dear companion.

—Homer
Iliad
XXII

I.

W
E WERE JUST SITTING THERE
in the boardroom, Max and I, our black Italian wingtips propped up at one end of the long slate table, our backs sunk into charcoal velour. We were watching the Obituary Channel scroll by on the wallscreen. That’s really when it all began: during one of those moments of stasis which originates a seminal, life-altering sequence of events, an otherwise preternaturally calm patch of time in which the tiniest seed of chaos fractalizes into a full-blown reordering of the cosmos. It goes without saying that what happened from this quiet beginning unalterably changed my life. It changed yours, too, I apologize to admit, as you will recognize once you fully understand what I am revealing now, publicly, for the first time.

To the industry, watching the Obits scroll by is “trolling.” Different-sized vessels troll for different catches: the small firms troll for individual clients, those recently deceased for whom the mauve icon in the encoded rainbow of the color bar across the top of the screen indicates a still-open service contract. On our level—GD Inc. has six hundred franchised Homes nationwide and operations in Canada, Mexico, and Korea—we’re more interested in demographic shifts, tracking market share, the kinds of data indicated by the shape of the color bar itself, its waves and fluctuations.

We started doing business even before “Elliott Anderson’s Obituary Channel” was first bounced down from a satellite. Our genesis lay in the demise of the 20th Century “baby boomer” generation: as that population died off early in this century, the demand for funerals increased so rapidly the deathcare industry grew like bread rising under the action of yeast. We were the first chain to go interstate, the first to use CDC statistics to locate new Homes, the first with group plans (beginning with our benchmark contract with AARP). We shaped the franchise system of funeral homes you see today. So when Max minded the boardroom wallscreen, he eyed it with a proprietary air, like an institutional investor watching the big board dance before his or her eyes.

I confess I wasn’t paying attention. I was staring past the wallscreen through our eightieth floor window at the mustard-colored atmosphere of downtown L.A., wondering whether or not I was going to be able to sight Object 21/3847—a new comet, just named
Virgilius Maro
—as it finally hove into earth’s sight next week. My hobby is imaging astronomical objects with VHD clarifying video. I was concluding that the only way I was going to be able to see
V. Maro
for the full fourteen seconds it would take for me to properly capture its image was by leasing space on Mauna Kea. This gave new meaning to the phrase “visible to the naked eye.”

“Pass the fucking embalming fluid,” Max growled. “They’re killin’ us.”

“Mmmm. Us?”

He pointed at a new symbol, an ideograph, showing up in the color bar of the Obit Channel screen. “Like who’s this new outfit, Ancestors?”

“Asian specialists. In from Beijing,” I said, stretching, sitting up. At least I’d been keeping up with
Post Mortem
, our trade magazine. “They started out as All Friends Mortuary Society. Special noodle feature on all banquet menus, monk’s food, saffron theme. Niche market. Specials include ancestors appear in holocube. . . .”

“They’re not the only ones.”

“Com’on, Max. We’re still doing close to three billion a year.”

Max took a deep breath, rubbed his eyes, and spoke softly. “Not anymore. Two-eight is what we billed last year. This year we thought two-six. Now look at the way the market’s turned on us. We’ll be lucky to hurdle one-five.”

“Really?”

“Your head’s been in the clouds, Coop. Ever since Harriet took off last year.”

“I am reading the trades.” I could feel myself blush. My divorce aside, the truth is, the business end of things had never seized me the way it had Max—a business which, I recalled with a pang of guilt, had treated me very well (ask Harriet, whose settlement included a condo
complex
in Cabo). Lately I had been acting like the numbers had little to do with me.

“We were the first with drive-through viewing,” Max said, “the first with unit pricing, the first with mobile embalming centers. . . .”

My implanted pager hummed against my heart. I used the excuse to ease myself out of my chair. “Cheer up,” I said without conviction. “We’ll think of something.”

“Well, you’re the artist, Coop,” Max said with a crooked grin. “Right?”

* * *

Right, I suppose. I started out as a videographer, got into deathcare by scanning in sample make-up treatments on a part-time basis for Max when he was still Sczyczypek Family Funeral Home. I stuck with Max when the business took off. It was I who unified the company image with the Angel® theme when we went national, I who selected the Mozart Requiem® as the signature for our international line. It was I who designed our logo, the gilt letters G and D surrounded by a gold, O-shaped frame, spelling in an oblique way a sacred three-letter word to those of our customers who wanted reassurance that they’d chosen the right provider in their time of need.

My only disagreement with Max had been over the name change, from Sczyczypek to Grateful Dead. Not that I didn’t think Sczyczypek couldn’t be improved upon, but how could the dead—let me call your attention to the operative noun here—be Grateful®? Oh, I know the history of the term, its use by a 20th Century rock group, its source as a descriptive term for a British ballad in which a human helps a ghost find peace. But we’re talking about corpses here, not ghosts. Max pursued the fiction of their satisfaction as our trademark marketing strategy. Another one of our signatures became the Mona Lisa® smile on the face of each of our clients. (True, I was the one who fabricated the mold for the plastic insert—who was I to argue with success?) But aside from giving the franchise its name, Max mostly stuck to the books and left the rest to me.

Which meant that I was the one who was paged that morning. I had a warrantee problem to deal with.

In the previous month the Westwood Grateful Dead had cremated the remains of a prominent judge. His widow had called the Westwood facility to report that the urn containing her husband’s ashes had been—stay with me here—making noises. I mean producing sounds: creaks, pops, strings of rapid ticks, little noises like that. The Westwood unit had sent their man out, but he’d come back baffled. They’d kicked the problem up to the franchise level, where it bounced over to me.

You may already know me well enough to know that I prefer to work away from the boardroom. Yet that day the relief I felt in walking away from Max’s news was balanced by a chill that ran down my spine when I identified the gray cast I’d been seeing over our flotilla of maglev Fleetwoods in the motor pool, limos whose paint usually gleamed so black they shimmered in the light. They’d started looking like funereal battleships.

I hadn’t understood what was turning them that color: they were gathering dust.

* * *

It took me twenty minutes to drive to Westwood.

I found a pastel mansion at the address, all flat planes and glass walls. When I activated the residential scanner the door was answered by a tall, leggy blonde in a microskirt, hair all frizzed out, green lipstick. “I’m her niece,” she said, then promptly disappeared.

She left a rich cinnamon odor in the air.

Then Keiko MacPhee appeared in the foyer, dressed in black. She was younger than I’d expected, thin but sturdy, with dark eyes and full lips. Her long hair was pulled back in an austere way. I was struck by the way I could see her bones beneath the spare flesh of her shoulders, her forearms, her long elegant fingers, as if her mortality lay waiting just beneath her skin. Which of course it did. I found her very attractive.

“I’m Cooper Boyd,” I said. “From GD Inc.”

“This way,” she said, turning and pulling me in her wake into a living room with a vaulted ceiling, faux rustic furniture, and a stark stone fireplace, a tribal hearth in the Nomad style that’s been so big for the past few years. I recognized the pyramid set like a trophy in the center of the rough mantel as a customized Model 986 Solid Titanium Urn, our finest unit—a phoenix sculpted in bas relief on its front.

The leggy blonde slipped through the room, now with a jacket over her shoulder, pecking her aunt on the cheek. “Back about midnight,” she said. Then she smiled at me through her green lipstick. “My name’s Unix. Nice suit.”

“Italian,” I assented, pleased. I watched her leave. “Mrs. MacPhee,” I said, turning my attention back to the widow, “you don’t look old enough to be her aunt. And yet the judge . . .”

“. . . was a hundred and seventeen when he died. I’m . . . thirty-nine. The judge spent a lot of money on life extension. And the dear man, he insisted on spending some on me.”

We made small talk about adjusting to the loss of a loved one, about the house, about the noise she’d been hearing. Judge MacPhee, I confirmed, was the elderly gentleman in the nearby holopix. Big ears, a rapacious smile, the red and white plaid pants only judges can wear with impunity. Mrs. MacPhee—call me Keiko, she insisted—explained with quiet intelligence how the judge, whom she’d met clerking out of law school, had died during his third artificial heart installation. She’d had him cremated on his instructions, against her own wishes for cryogenic preservation in an elaborate home sarcophagus offered by one of our competitors.

Above the low hum of the house’s climate control, I was startled to hear a pop that definitely seemed to have come from the urn; it was followed by a long, low whistle, mournful and remote.

Keiko shivered. “It’s . . . Now he’s started doing that.”

When I looked at her in silence, she sighed.

“Oh, I understand,” she said. “Those are only ashes and an urn.”

“Cremation is very conclusive,” I nodded slowly. She’d beaten me to where I had come to try, for her own good, to take her. I admired her good sense. “So there’s probably a fairly . . .”

“. . . pedestrian explanation,” she completed my sentence. She took a deep breath. “I’m trying to live with that. What I can’t live with,” she said, smiling wryly, “is a noisy urn.” She looked away. “I loved him dearly. It’s like he’s still here somehow.”

The urn made another pop. Keiko and I stood together in the ensuing silence and raised eyebrows at each other, then she looked away again. There was a sensuous quality to the way she filled out her dress, to her scent, to the way she worked her lower lip with her teeth.

I inspected the unit, which appeared to be capable of surviving its three-hundred-year warrantee: terrific heft, perfect seams, that quality anodized titanium finish. “I’ll take it in,” I suggested. “Do some scans, replace the urn, see what happens.” I pictured myself returning the unit personally.

“I’d be grateful,” she said. “I’m sure you understand. How can I let go?” She sighed, then bit her lower lip. “When you come back, come for dinner.”

“I’ll call you just as soon as I know something,” I said, my heart flooding with joy.

* * *

I stopped by Max’s spread in Santa Monica. I’d been avoiding my own home since Harriet left. I set my Lotus on auto-park and ducked in the kitchen door after acknowledging the residential scanner. I was whistling as I walked into the den.

Max’s son Lance—a pudgy kid, pale as a mushroom—was home on spring break from Cal Tech. He was as smart as his dad was savvy, but to Max’s dismay he was utterly indifferent to the funeral business. Max had no other kids.

“Well, you’re happy,” Lance said, looking up from the green glow of a holocube game he’d reconfigured. “Did you see your comet?”

“Something like that.” I smiled, realizing that I’d forgotten my sighting problems, forgotten the problems at work.

“Maybe you can cheer up dad. He’s really a case.”

“Never fucking mind,” Max said as he shuffled into the room. He was already wearing his bathrobe, a bad sign.

“What happened?” I asked.

“We lost the regional contract for Triple A.”

There goes all that holiday business
, passed through my mind.
There goes 500 mill
.
There goes 1-800-FATALITY
. I cleared my throat, tried at least to speak positively. “Max, you know, when we started, there were six billion people on the planet. Now there are twelve. I don’t care what contract we lose, potentially . . .”

“What do you want us to do, start bumping people off?” Max had migrated to his bar, behind which hung my videograph of a slowly rotating Jupiter. He poured himself a tumbler of the green Japanese melon liquor he favored. “We need a new idea. Something big.”

I was thinking about Keiko and her niece, about her late husband, about life extension. “Immortality,” I mused.

“What?” Lance said.

I paused. “Convince the market that you can provide clients some way to live forever.”

“We
had
a plan once,” Max told Lance, his face crinkling with a memory from our early days, and now I remembered too, to my embarrassment. “We planned to holotape people,” Max told his son, “You know, like a presentation thing about them,
THIS IS YOUR LIFE
, they signed on when they were alive. Once they died, we’d broadcast the tape on the anniversary of their deaths. The idea was, we’d beam it down from a satellite on Fox, say, or Disney, or Fiat. Like during halftimes, or even in commercial slots. It was perpetual care, see? Every year you’d come back. We called it
IMMORTALITY NOW!
”

“Cool,” Lance said. “Technology’s a little dated, but still . . .”

“ ‘A holographic eternal flame; electrons and photons dancing to the virtual reincarnation of your self . . . ’ ” I quoted from the brochure we’d worked up.

“Very cool,” Lance said. “There’s your lost market share.”

Max’s eyes gleamed. “Market share? Did you hear this kid? Market share?”