Page 25 - Vol. VII #7

terics? The intervening days had brought with them the struggle to understand the girl’s overwhelm-
ing grief for a man she had known for a matter of weeks. Eric suggested in jest that they had been sleeping together, and we all shot him nasty looks so that anybody watching would know that we knew that such crass remarks were in poor taste. Tomás, who we all agreed was impossibly handsome and charming, swoon-worthy really, made the same suggestion later, and we shrugged and considered it. Whatever the truth was, they were quite a pair—the
“Whatever the truth was, they
were quite a pair—the dead man and the live girl. The consummate over- sharer and the enigma.”
of the screen cast her skin in shifting tones. For each Warren, there was an Emily. One for every possible explanation. Fragility. Empathy. Lust. Narcissism. She was, every second, made new, no trace of the previ- ous Emily, or the one before that. She was everything. Or she was nothing. But if you were to reach in, peel her back layer by layer, you would find, we were con- fident, something altogether strange and marvelous and kaleidoscopically alive.
The sympathy card had been circulating for a while. At the time of the funeral, when it was supposed to be sealed in its envelope ready to be sent, its where- abouts were unknown, forgotten under a stack of neglected papers in the corner of some cubicle. It resurfaced after the in-house memorial and con- tinued to make the rounds. One morning we would arrive at the office to find the card perched ever so carefully upon our keyboard. We would read what our fellows had already written, both for inspiration and to ensure our own message avoided the pitfalls of cliché. We would Google “condolences” and rage at the internet’s banal offerings, none of them quite right. We would labor over our wording, inevitably coming off as stilted and awkward in our doomed attempts to be the opposite. We would deem our mediocre line or two good enough and pass the card on to another, satisfied that we’d made our best effort and relieved to have it at last out of our hands, out of our minds.
As we bunched together in the kitchenette to pass around the card, it seemed impossible that the twelve words didn’t contain a clue to a mystery we’d very nearly given up on solving. Emily, at the memo- rial, had been still, unmoved. She neither cried nor wailed nor beat her chest in mourning. We couldn’t put our finger on why exactly, but we had felt let down. We’d seen her grief once, that unexpected burst of emotion, but it might as well have been within a dream. Reality, since then, had given us nothing, and we were angry. We’d been given a taste and, understandably, we wanted more, enough at least to subsist on. And here it was, our mana from heaven. A new expression of feeling, nearly identi- cal to those which we each labored over in private18
dead man and the live girl. The consummate over- sharer and the enigma.
One afternoon Felicia returned from her lunch hour to find the card and, within it, a new note, one of special interest: “With greatest sympathy to you and your family during this difficult time.” Signed simply with an “Emily” formed in elegant cursive loops that stood apart from the scribblings around it.
Gathered, we took our seats. Doreen, from her perch in the back of the room, restarted the montage, the projected image of her laptop’s cursor stirring to life on the wall. This time the procession of still images was accompanied by music—a quivering instrumen- tal piece, bow screeching mournfully across violin strings, incongruous with the ever-smiling Warren who advanced back and forth through his life in a gentle fade. One Warren wore a suit and stood next to a woman in a white dress with a veil set atop a wild poof of eighties hair. Another Warren was a chubby seven-year-old learning to ride a bike down a sepia- toned neighborhood street. We accepted the lack of discernible chronology in silence.
Besides, our attention was directed instead at Emily.
In the dimmed light, we could at first make out only the amorphous shape of her hair, today worn down, and the silhouetted curve her nose, her chin. Our pu- pils adjusted to better take in the specimen, widening to engulf her and therefore understand. The soft glow
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