Is that enough about me, for the present? As I wait in my apartment, observing my wife, who has no awareness of how near I am, I am amazed to see her go to a locked drawer in her desk, take out a package of cigarettes and light one. She smokes near a window, and carefully blows the smoke outside. She must be more shaken than she admits, or she would never revert to an old habit. She used to be a two-package-a-day woman, in the time when smoking was part of her persona as a woman of the world, and an angel of public compassion.
(6)
The police come. They are commendably prompt in answer to her call. No need, surely, to describe the scene that follows. A doctor examines me, and measures, and makes careful notes. Detectives measure, and examine, and make careful notes. A constable with a stenographic machine takes down my wife’s statement. She is a little uncertain about the time of my murder; she loses a few minutes somewhere and who is to know but I? Understandably she cannot be too explicit, for she now permits them to see that she is shaken and distressed — more so than I have observed since my sudden taking-off. They remove my body, and I discover that I am in no way tied to it; indeed, I feel no impulse to follow them, for I know what nasty things they are going to do with it, and where they are going to store it until they have found out all they can from it. I prefer to stay with Esme, because I want to see what she will do in this unusual situation.
To my astonishment, I have begun to feel hungry, but this familiar sensation abates as soon as the police have wrapped my body in a winding-sheet of coarse cotton and carried it away. I recall having been told by a biologist that the digestive process continues for something like forty-five minutes after death, and clearly the carcass that is lugged to the waiting truck is still busy at its work.
(How do medical people know this particular piece of post mortem information? My friend told me that it had been established as long ago as 1887, when two curious French physiologists, Regnard and Loye, examined the bodies of two decapitated French criminals in the cart in which they were lugged away from the guillotine. One thinks of Regnard and Loye, hacking and peeping in the jolting cart, as the horses dragged them toward the murderers’ graveyard. What devotion to science!)
When my body is taken away, my hunger goes with it. My gut and I have bid farewell forever. But my powers of observation are at a peak.
My wife’s performance for the police filled me with admiration. What an actress was lost to the stage when she chose journalism. Perhaps if her television career develops as she wishes, that brilliance may not be wholly lost.
She displayed a refined dramatic sense, not sobbing or giving way to hysteria, but like a woman of strong character who finds herself in a trying position and is determined to meet it with courage. She would not embarrass the young constable who took her statement, but from time to time she hesitated, and I could see how deeply he felt for her.
She told her story briefly and well, for she had been rehearsing it before the police came. Lying in bed, with some of her work as a crusading journalist spread about her, she had heard sounds from the little balcony outside the bedroom window. Before she could investigate a man pushed aside the long, sliding window which was also the door to the balcony. He was surprised to find her in bed. He menaced her with a weapon he held — a cudgel of some sort — and warned her not to cry out. No, he had no identifiable accent. At that instant I had come into the room from the adjacent sitting-room and rushed at the man, who struck me a forcible blow and then escaped through the window as I fell to the floor. No, she could not describe him except as a man of perhaps thirty years of age, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. He was dark and was either unshaven or had a scrubby beard. (A man, I thought, like ten thousand other men.) She had rushed to my aid, but I was dead. Yes, she had felt for a heartbeat, a pulse, but there was none. She had then called the police.
The other policemen were trying to discover how a man had reached a balcony seventeen storeys above the ground; he must have come from a nearby apartment, climbing from one balcony to another, dangerous though that was, but he had left no marks.
As a man who had, for a few years, served his time as a theatre and film critic, I was delighted with Esme’s performance and her subtle management of the scene. One or two of the cops, I sensed, found her irresistible, and hated to leave. Was this the woman I thought I knew as my wife? How fully does one ever know anybody?
When the police have gone, I watch as Esme helps herself to a stiff drink, returns to bed and, as she is not yet sleepy, reads some reports on the frequency of wife-beating in the city of Toronto, but I do not think she takes in much of what she reads. After an hour or so she falls asleep, and in time a film of bee’s wing coloration forms on her full lower lip.
(7)
Just what of Randal Allard Going? To my delight it was easy to remove myself to his apartment. I did not fly, or float; I simply wished to be with my murderer, and behold! I was. I found him in what I suppose I may call a pretty pickle. He had tried to steady his nerves with a lot of whisky, but had only made himself sick, and had vomited with extraordinary force until he could vomit no more, and now lay in his bed, weeping. Not presentable, dramatic weeping. No: racking sobs, as though he could not get enough oxygen.
I was not touched by his distress. This fellow had killed me, and I saw no reason to forgive him. No, indeed. I decided that, in so far as my unaccustomed condition would permit, I would hound him down, and revenge myself upon him in any way I found possible. What that way would be I had still to find out, but my determination was total.
(8)
My funereal rites were a comedy beyond even my expectation. Newspapers are very good to their own, and my murder was a front-page story. A smudge, said to be a picture of me, was well displayed. I was popular, I found to my astonishment. My colleagues regarded me as a first-rate journalist. (Well, that was true.) A fine career had been brutally interrupted. (Would my subsequent career have been fine? And what might the word fine imply, in the circumstances? But obituaries do not quibble about such things.) I was married to Esme Baron, the well-known and widely admired columnist on feminist affairs, a friend of the poor and afflicted, a writer of moderate but firm opinions. We had no children. (It was not said that Esme had refused to have any, though the obituarist, who was obviously my friend McWearie, knew it.) All of this was sober and pretty well factual. It was the funeral which moved into the realm of comedy and even of fantasy.
It was a church affair. Esme and McWearie had a fine row about that, for Esme had no use for churches, but McWearie had insisted that I was a Believer — a word he loved and used somewhat immoderately — and must be buried like one. So, to a small Anglican church adjacent to the crematorium my carcass was conveyed and there I drew a full house of my newspaper associates who showed themselves, like most journalists, men of strong emotions. Newspaper people like to be thought of by the public as tough, hardened creatures, made cynical by the procession of crime, political duplicity and public shenanigans that passes continually under their gaze. My experience is that, apart from policemen, they are the most sentimental people you will meet anywhere. And so at my funeral they sat in rows of weeping men and grim-faced women (for in our day there has been a reversal which makes it perfectly all right for a man to give way to feeling, whereas women must show no such weakness) as the parson read the ancient burial service and read it, I thought as a former theatre critic, pretty well, though I could have given him a few pointers about emphasis and the value of pauses.
I suppose it is not astonishing that one should be moved by one’s own funeral, but I had not expected one tribute Hugh McWearie had prepared for me. He had been put in charge of the funeral, on behalf of the paper. Who else, as a special friend of mine, and the Religion Man of the Advocate? Esme had been satisfied to leave the details of the affair to him, though he consulted her, as a matter of form, about everything. The paper had not been mean. There was a handsomely printed Order of Service and I was stirred to find that the only hymn was a favourite of mine, and of Hugh’s. It was Bunyan’s hymn, from Pilgrim’s Progress, and Hugh had insisted on Bunyan’s own words and not the watered-down modern version. My colleagues were not great singers, but they did their best, and I rejoiced to hear the final verse: