THE NECROLOGIST (Pt.1)

Bill Canarsie knows a consummate professional makes a good first impression. His appointment is at 2:30, so he pulls into the driveway at 2:28. His car, the luxury sedan of the upper middle-class, is sparkling obsidian, freshly washed and waxed. His jacket, freshly scoured with a lint brush, sways on a hanger in the backseat. Standing next to the car he slides into the jacket and smoothes it out with the flat of his hand.

He reaches across the backseat and retrieves his briefcase. It wouldn’t appear to you as anything special. It’s a handsome briefcase, no cheap knockoff or a bushleaguer’s attempt to outkick his coverage, but nothing remarkable at first glance.

Rebecca Musgrave would never call herself wealthy, but when it comes time to draw up the new class borders, she’ll end up squarely on the side of affluence. The Musgrave house brings to mind words like sumptuous and decadent and other adjectives that pepper commercials for purportedly gourmet chocolate. Burnished arabesques, crystalline panes, molasses-thick tapestries—think Louis XIV ruling over Krypton.

Bill walks the whitewashed path of brick that winds around the side of the house. We never use the front door, Musgrave told him on the phone call. She answers the door in high-income casual, clothes that cost top dollar to look unimpressive. He says no thank you to coffee, and she leads him into the dining room. They sit across from one another. He rests his briefcase on the floor, against the legs of his chair.

“I want to apologize for my husband’s absence, Mr. Canarsie,” she says. “He’s at work right now. He’s been handling most of the arrangements, and I think he just needed a day away from it all.”

“Understandable, Mrs. Musgrave. Have you told your husband about this meeting?”

Her fingers jitterbug around themselves. “I… thought it would be best to take the meeting and then decide if a conversation was even necessary.”

Bill nods. “So you understand, Mrs. Musgrave, if you choose to engage my services, this will be a legitimate business agreement. If you wish to make anyone else, including your husband, a party to it, that is entirely your prerogative.”

“Well,” she says, “I am little concerned about payment. I don’t even know how much you charge. My friend made a point of talking around that.”

“What will happen is I’ll listen to you, and once I have all the pertinent information, I’ll name my price.”

Musgrave swallows.

“But you’re more concerned,” he says, “with your husband seeing the bank statement.”

“Yeah.”

Bill gives her the same smile the sun splashes on the morning horizon. “We have ways around that. We understand how at times like these emotions run high, and we’re very sensitive to our clients’ desire for privacy. As I said, if you decide at any point to inform Mr. Musgrave of our agreement, you have the right to do so at no risk of incurring any kind of penalty, monetary or otherwise, from us. As far as I’m concerned, your husband has nothing to do with this.”

She and every muscle under her skin exhale. “Thank you,” she says. “So, uh, where should I start?”

“Just one moment.”

Bill retrieves his briefcase and sets it on the table. It has no lock, but it knows to only open for Bill Canarsie or his employers. What he takes from it and sets on the table looks so conspicuously mundane, Musgrave wonders if it’s a recording device. She doesn’t ask if it’s a recording device because it so clearly has to be a recording device. And were she to ask, Bill would say that, yes, it is, a proprietary recorder that allows for easy uploading of uncompressed audio files to his company’s secured servers via satellite. He would tell her this, and she would accept it without question as many others have. If he did tell her what The Ear really was and where it had came from, she would ignore it for the sake of her own sanity.

Bill says, “Why don’t you start with how you came to hear of me?”

“Well,” she says, “this woman—she’s one of my oldest friends—she’s married to someone who… knows people the rest of us never learn about. Not that she’s gossipy. She’s not. Well, not about… this. But she’s hinted before about—”

“I understand, Mrs. Musgrave. Tell me about your son.”

The woman’s been steeling herself for this all day. “Eric was our only child,” she says. “We wanted to have more, but there were complications with my pregnancy, and we were told it would be too risky. So, Eric became my world.” Tears threaten to burst loose. “You spend every minute worrying about your child. I use to tell myself it would prepare me in case something ever did happen. But you can’t prepare yourself for the end of the world.”

Bill always keeps a pristine handkerchief in his breast pocket. He’s handing it to her before the first droplet crawls down her cheek.

“Thank you. My friend told me about the service you provide. She explained how to contact you, which to be honest would’ve made me laugh if I wasn’t convulsing every hour. But… I figured, why not try. So, I performed the ritual, and a day later—”

“Protocols, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“I’m sorry?”

“We prefer the term protocols. I’m sorry to sound hung up on nomenclature. I know it’s not what you care about now, but the word ritual gives the impression there’s something mysterious and sinister about what I do.” He shakes his head. “I provide a service to people, one that is intended to provide those in mourning with some modicum of peace, and I take that responsibility seriously.”

“That’s what my friend said, which is why I decided to contact you.”

“What have you heard about the service I provide?”

“That you’re a necrologist.”

“Do you know what that is?”

“A fancy word for someone who writes obituaries.”

Bill smiles with a hint of laughter. “That’s right. Mrs. Musgrave, before we go any further, I want to be clear about what it is I can and cannot do. An obituary is meant to function a lot like a monument. It’s meant to celebrate someone who’s left us and remind us of all that was special about them. About why they were so loved and valued. I’m exceptional at doing that, but what I can’t do is turn back the clock. What happened has happened. I can’t do anything about that.”

“But you can make people forget? The parts we don’t want to celebrate?”

“I once wrote an obituary for a man who was killed in a drunk driving accident. He was the drunk driver, and he took half a school bus worth of children with him. When people remember him now, they remember a civic-minded teetotaler who called his mother every Sunday.”

Musgrave grips Bill’s handkerchief for dear life. “Eric never had much time for me, even when he was little. You know, you replay incidents, things you haven’t thought about in years, things you thought you forgot, as if you can spot the pattern after the fact and somehow change things. Last night my husband and I had a fight. I told him that if he hadn’t given Eric a sip of his beer when he was nine… like that would’ve changed anything.”

Bill reaches across the table and lays his hand on Musgrave’s. A perfect touch at the perfect time. “How bad did it get?” he asks.

“We knew he had a problem in college. You know, when you find out you’re pregnant for the first time, along with all the doctor’s appointments and classes and shopping and everything, you should have to go to a therapist and learn how to combat denial. We kept making excuses to ourselves for years until it got so bad we couldn’t deny it anymore. He stole from us. Cash out of our pockets, the debit cards out of our wallets. He totaled his car. Thank god no one was hurt. We tried talking to him, we tried interventions, my husband had a fistfight with him in the kitchen at three in the morning one night. Everyone kept telling us we had to kick him out. He had to hit rock bottom.

“He got his girlfriend addicted too. Then she stole from him, and he beat her. When we confronted him, he… he scared us. That’s when we kicked him out. ‘Eric, you either leave this house right now and don’t come back until you’re sober, or you’re going to jail tonight.’ He would call sometimes, try to make us feel guilty. But we wouldn’t budge. Not as long as he was using. The police said that he had spent the last couple months prostituting himself. To support his habit. And apparently he crossed the wrong people. They beat him to death.”

Musgrave’s head falls to the table and she waters it like a flowerbed. But Bill keeps hold of both her hands and lets the warmth and the empathy seep through his palms until it buttresses her upright.

“I don’t want people to remember Eric like that,” she chokes between sobs.

“You want them to remember a young man with a bright future.”

“Yes.”

“You want them to remember a young man of character and dignity. A young man who made others smile and brought love with him everywhere.”

Musgrave nods.

“I can do that for you, Mrs. Musgrave, but only if you tell me the truth.”

Bill feels that familiar frisson in her hands, the one the guilty man feels when he knows he’s caught but isn’t ready to give it up. He’s felt it in countless clients before.

Musgrave’s terror drapes itself in indignant finery as she pulls her hands away. “What do you mean?”

“How’s your marriage, Mrs. Musgrave?”

“W-what exactly does…”

“What’s the state of your relationship with Mr. Musgrave?”

“Where do you get the nerve?”

“My job.”

“My marriage is none of your business, Mr. Canarsie.”

“I’m afraid it is. In order for me to compose an obituary that will have the desired effect, I need to know what effect is desired.”

“I just told you.”

“No. You told me a lie, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“Do not come into my home and call me a liar.”

“Mrs. Musgrave, if I come across as presumptuous or arrogant, it only seems that way because I’m very good at what I do. You were not lying about your son’s life or the circumstances of his death. I’d have known if you were. I also know you’re not worried about what your friends and acquaintances will say or think about your son. But you are genuinely concerned about the repercussions of Eric’s legacy being one of dying violently as a disgraced drug-addicted prostitute.”

“Don’t you say his—”

“So, again, Mrs. Musgrave, how is your marriage?”

Bill keeps his stare bullseyed. It never leaves her, and she has to look away before she crumbles under the scrutiny of a shark. Even with her head turned, the weight is insurmountable.

“He can’t look at me,” she says. “Last night he said he wasn’t going to the funeral if I was there.”

Bill leans back in his chair, folds his hands in his lap, and keeps his eyes on the woman.

She says, “I don’t care if he sees the checkbook.”

Bill nods, and exposes the one unconscious chink in his professionalism. He adjusts The Ear. That’s all, just a small shift one half-inch in the direction of his client. It’s so minor a breach, any boss in his right mind would let it slide.

He says, “I can help you, Mrs. Musgrave. I can write an obituary that will leave everyone, including your husband, remembering Eric as a forthright and loving son.”

“Thank you! Thank you, Mr. Canarsie. When will you have it done by?”

“It will be in every local paper tomorrow morning.”

“And how will I know… when, I mean, if…”

“It will take effect at midnight tonight.”

“Thank you.”

Bill smiles.

“How much do I owe you?” she asks.

“Your husband.”

“Excuse me?”

“Mr. Musgrave will now work for my employers.”

He lets the woman take the time to process, ignoring the sputtered false starts of disbelief and denial.

Finally she gets out, “Is this what you normally do? Make some insane joke at the end?”

“No, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“It’s because of the price, right? It’s so obscene, you start by saying it’s something impossibly crazy?”

“No, Mrs. Musgrave.”

She can’t help but chuckle. “Wait. First of all, my husband’s a chemical engineer.”

“My employers will find use for a chemical engineer.”

“What’ll he be doing?”

“That’s not your concern, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“What’ll he be making?”

“Not your concern, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“Stop calling me ‘Mrs. Musgrave.’ This is absurd. You can’t make someone come work for you. He’s not an indentured servant.”

“We don’t use that term.”

This is the point at which the client is blown away by the audacity, the sheer audacity of it all. Musgrave follows suit, and her laugh grows manic as she grasps at whatever straws of rationalization lay within reach. Bill, consummate, doesn’t let on how much he enjoys his job.

“This is fucking ridiculous,” the woman says. “I should’ve figured this was some sort of con.”

“It’s not, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“Shut up! Then it’s some kind of prank or weird therapy thing. It has to be, because if it was real, my husband would have to agree, and there is no way my husband would agree to this.”

“He already has.”

“Enough. All right? Enough! What is the matter with you? Do you do this with every person you go to see? Do you really get off on—”

She’s left her phone on the kitchen counter, so the alarum sounds as heavy plastic on buffed marble mixed with the compressed tin wave of “Lips Like Sugar.” Musgrave chases after it with a trickle of Pavlovian drool. She looks at the number and answers. “Tom?… Tom, you have no idea what’s happening right now. There’s a… What?… Tom, what are you talking about?… What do you mean you’re not coming home?”

If Bill’s job required him to listen to the Musgraves’ marriage come to an end, he would, but the who-says-what-and-when is irrelevant. Too bad. On any other day Bill’s mind would be turning to his next appointment. It would be dry-running through potential turns in the conversation, ghost-steering the client toward a sale. But today a rarity transpires: work weaves an accidental spell and triggers thoughts about Bill Canarsie’s personal life. I hope it’s not the start of a bad trend.

Bill uses his own cell phone to call his son. At first he can’t complete the call as dialed, then he remembers to enable interdimensional roaming. He gets through on the second try, but it goes to voicemail. “Hello, Rhesus. It’s your father. I haven’t heard from you since you got there. I had a minute, and I wanted to see how the new post was treating you, find out how you’re acclimating, all that. I shouldn’t have to be the one to call though. Listen, don’t be an ignorant American in a foreign dimension, all right? It’s not like you’re a diplomat to some banana republic. It’s a serious thing. Call me tonight.”

Bill hangs up as Mrs. Musgrave’s hysteria crescendos. “What is happening? Why are you doing this? Tom? Tom!?!”

Bill waits for the tear-wracked wound to drift into his field of vision, but Musgrave can’t collect enough of herself to move beyond turning in his general direction.

“What are you?” she asks.

Bill doesn’t turn to face her. “I promise you I’m simply a man, Mrs. Musgrave. Like your husband and your friends’ husband I have a professional responsibility. I’m seeing to it right now.”

“I don’t want this.”

“It’s done, Mrs. Musgrave.”

“I DON’T WANT THIS!!!”

Bill returns The Ear to his briefcase and closes it. He stands and faces her, never forgetting the necessity of quality customer service. “Please calm yourself, ma’am. Screaming will not change anything.”

“You’re a monster.”

“I’m a businessman, Mrs. Musgrave. I charge what the market will bear.”

Her eyes are off him, searching somewhere for something she can’t even consider. “You can’t do this.”

“You can dispute the charge,” Bill says. “You can find people who will fight on your behalf, but I wouldn’t advise it. If my price is too steep, you do not want to pay theirs. Good day, ma’am.”

Bill heads for the door, his footsteps lightened with the satisfaction of a job well done.