Seeing Dead People
by Richard Froude

Jack Haley, June 6th

Previously, I have attempted to romanticize my predicament. And I fear that in these appropriations I have misrepresented the situation. I am, to all intents and purposes, an escort to the deceased. Yet, the deceased that utilize my services are only echoes of the personas they represented in life, dealing with death in their own individual fashion.

Our interactions are confined to a place that in many respects resembles Los Angeles’ Union Station. That is to say, the consistent location, in which I sit as I write this to you, physically appears to be Union Station. The same tiles are missing from the ceiling mosaics. The same imperfections in the sculpted walls. But it is not Union Station.

Consider it in terms of weight: if one, theoretically, were to take the entire contents of the ‘real’ Union Station—trains, travelers, luggage, the vaults, the seating, the lavatories, the stone etc.—and if one were to weigh these contents, the combined mass would be huge. However, the weight of everything that makes up the Union Station I currently occupy is exactly zero, bound by something more peculiar than gravity.

Do not let the name Los Angeles mislead you. We are not angels. It has been simplest for me to understand this location as distinct from the traditional poles of heaven and hell, as something that exists beneath the surface of the world in which you read this. And for the sake of managing my interactions with my clients, it has been simplest for me to understand their afterlife (for want of a better term) as a placid form of retirement. While some flourish—free to embrace the personalities their ‘earthly’ lives disallowed—others are unable to conceive of themselves outside the life they previously embodied, sinking into loneliness and inertia.

This has affected my previous accounts. Loneliness is often romantic. If not in itself, then as a platform for romantic tendencies. It occurred to me shortly before I arrived in this place that what I had often confused for love was a sense of longing derived from these same platforms of loneliness. Many of the memories I have retained from times before my arrival occur in such sentimental waves. As if my life before Union Station were a dream, realized only in sentiment or the occasional, vivid pocket of nostalgia.

What I know is that each day, at three o’clock on the station clock there appears in locker 327 a brown envelope. Inside the envelope is a slip of paper that bears a name, year, cause of death, and age written in impeccable script. I am holding today’s in my hand: Jack Haley, 1979, heart attack, 80. Through certain enthusiasms before my arrival in this place, I know that Jack Haley was an actor who portrayed, most notably, the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz.” Things like this I can remember while the shape of my own life remains elusive.

Haley steps onto the platform and makes for me immediately. This is strange as we have never met before. I have many clients that I could refer to as regulars, but it’s not unusual for me to meet with someone only once. What is even stranger is that he is dressed as the Tin Man. He grasps my hand firmly and tells me what a pleasure it is. I am surprised by his warmth, expecting cold metal. Would I like a drink? It would be unprofessional to refuse.

We walk side by side toward the brasserie. Haley carries a small, plaid suitcase which I offer to take off his hands. Beaming, he refuses, and asks if I’m an ‘amber gambler.’ “Do you drink whiskey,” he explains, “we don’t have much time.”

“Yes,” I reply. It would be impolite for me to decline. My job is to make those around me as comfortable as possible, understand what they want me to do, then do it. For Tin Man Haley, I will be a whiskey drinker, a far easier role to play than some.

He orders four measures of bourbon. Slides two across the table. We drink the first in one. Haley winces. He reiterates his pleasure at our meeting but reminds me that he cannot stay long. Quite what engagement he might have is unclear. It is not my business to pry.

He opens his suitcase and lays a blue leather album on the table. “Open it,” he tells me. “Open it,” still beaming, glancing up to the station clock. He nudges it toward me.

On the first page are photographs of a baby. A boy in a patterned high-chair, smiling into the camera. “Keep going,” Haley encourages. And I do.

The next page is very similar. The same child, slightly older, in a garden swing, or making sandcastles. “What is this?” I ask him. But he says nothing, only turns the page, and the boy is older, standing proudly on a beach beside where he had carved ‘RICHARD’ into the sand.

“Where did you get this?”
“That’s not important. Keep going, please keep going.”
“Who—“
“Yes, that’s your father ... and your mother.”
“But—“
“All that’s important is that you see this. But please, quickly, I have to go.”

Together, we drain the last glasses of bourbon. Haley reaches a silver hand to close the album.

“I have to take this.”
“No.”
“It must leave with me.”
“Where are you going?”
“Will you move your hand, please. I have to go.”

Haley grabs the album off the table. From under his funnel shaped hat, he extracts a single photograph.

“This. Take this.”

Beaming again, he buckles his suitcase with the album inside. I hold the photograph. It is a boy, dark haired, eight or nine years old. The same boy, standing between my mother and father. And I am looking away, at something the camera cannot see.

In this phantom Los Angeles, Haley has left. We were together for less than ten minutes. And I am fingering a photograph. A scene of which I have no recollection. Only this sense of total anonymity. Divorced from my own life, clinging to a consolation prize dispensed by the Tin Man.

(To be continued...)