Seeing Dead People
by Richard Froude

George Peppard, May 8th

Richard Froude is an escort to the deceased. To his clients, he has been variously a conversationalist, a lover and a friend. He exists in a limbo where all forms of intercourse are possible, some probable. Donations are negotiable.

Here’s a funny story. A boy grows up beside railway tracks, a small house overlooking a cemetery. At school, his teacher explains that it was Dickens who first understood. What happens as a child influences the adult you become. But rather than read Dickens, the boy climbs his shed roof to wave at dining cars over rows of grey headstones. Now, the man that the boy has become waits in Los Angeles’ Union Station to greet the deceased. I mean, it could be funny, how Dickens was right. Funny, if you like that sort of thing.

George has read Dickens. He doesn’t like to talk about it. He rolls up with a patent leather briefcase and a black umbrella. I miss him on the platform, pace after him toward the departure lounge. This is where George feels most comfortable, he says. In departures.

He has taken up swimming. It uses all of his major muscle groups, he says. If he varies his strokes. He demonstrates the butterfly from his seat.

I spent much of my childhood underwater. George offers an idea about the womb. I tell him I was maybe a strange kid, a solitary boy in goggles, privy to the lower halves of bodies. Interested, much more, in these lower halves. Once, I tugged at the back of my mother’s bikini.

I tell this to George. He considers it for a moment then opens his briefcase. Tells me I should have used a nose clip. He grabs one from the case, shows me how to apply it most efficiently to the bridge. I can have this one. Thanks, George. It will only go so far though, he says. I should, as he has done, dispense with body hair.

He is planning a diving trip. He takes a leather notebook from his briefcase. He will travel to the Caymans, on to Bermuda, then recuperate in Antigua for a fortnight. When all is said and done he will have developed the capacity of both his heart and lungs to a near superhuman extent. His conditioning is already remarkable, he says. He will also have gathered enough pearls to launch his own jewelry concern in Los Angeles.

I have dived before, I tell him. In the chlorinated pools of European campsites. Coins of various currency: fifty centimes, the occasional pfennig, never a pearl. Once, a dark stone of human turd, offered unknowingly to my father as something perhaps semi-precious. The wheat from the chaff, says George. I would be useless on his expedition.

This is his typical assessment. He has scratched me from dozens of schemes: ivory hunting—poor aim; shark fishing—flat feet. All this meticulous preparation, only to jump on the first tenuous reason to abandon the project—always a shortcoming of mine. It makes me suspicious that all his planning is only to ensure we have something to talk about. That’s funny I suppose. Something like that.

He worries about it, I think. That we’ll just stare at each other attempting small talk, though it is never that way. Nor would it be, even without his briefcase full of papers, maps, and newspaper clippings. We’ve never talked about the movies.

We’ve never talked about Dickens. How I was always too preoccupied to read. Isn’t that ironic, George? Or is it just funny? Are we being funny now, George? We never laugh at each other. Don’t you think it’s funny that you make these plans but never do anything? You insist that we sit in departures but we never go anywhere. Isn’t it funny how everything has shrunk to preparation?

But this is George. And he is packing up his briefcase, shaking a black umbrella that will see no rain. And this is me, waving goodbye, wearing a nose clip in the departure lounge of Union Station.