‘Red Light’

Shelbey Leco is a mixed media artist. Her style was heavily influenced by her grandmother growing up. As a child, when spending time with her grandmother, Leco enjoyed coloring in giant coloring books. Her grandmother soon realized that Shelbey went through art supplies rather quickly. So, her grandmother taught her the art of zentangle, by creating various patterns and shapes within negative spaces. Through time, Leco’s work developed more into mixed media, however repetition and pattern work is present in her work today.

Red Light

I traced my hand over the coffin, as if admiring the smoothness of the lacquered wood. Really it’s just because I never know what to do with my hands. But it seemed a sturdy vessel to spirit a person beyond this mortal realm, and would duly protect this vacant body from the soil and water which had given life to all things on this Earth. A bizarre death rite that I will never understand. 

He’d asked for a closed casket ceremony, as though even now he preferred the privacy of a dark room to the scornfully inquisitive light of day. I wondered if the velvet upholstery of the casket’s interior would remind him of his plushy gaming chair if he were alive to compare the two. I wondered how long it would take for his sedentary body to spend as many hours in the former as it had in the latter.

Wiping my forearm across my eyes, I turned to leave. The tears were real. They always were.

“See you tomorrow, Scott?” the undertaker asked after me as I strode across the otherwise empty funeral hall.

I didn’t turn. I just raised my hand in confirmation.

“Great, see you then. And remember.” His voice pitched up melodiously then, in an imitation of the singer from Journey. “Don’t stop, bereavin’!” 

He laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever said, even though it was at least the fifth time he’d made the joke. Everyone who works in funeral parlours has the wildest sense of humour. Almost like they give you an aptitude test for the macabre as part of the training process. It was unsettling sometimes. But I had to admit, he had a fantastic singing voice. Couple that with the fact that the acoustics are always great in the places where our dead frequent, and I found myself thinking I’d probably listen to this guy’s cover album.

A lively breeze greeted me as I stepped outside, coaxing me to zip up my coat. It was early spring, so the detritus of melted winter still littered the parking lot. A thick layer of dusty grime lay upon the pavement, making the outside world seem more a tomb than the polished interior of the funeral parlour I’d just left. On the way back to my car I idly kicked at a crumpled Red Bull can, musing at the unfortunate mind-state a person must have been in to chug an energy drink before a memorial service. I’m always preoccupied with thoughts of other people. My therapist told me that it’s a coping mechanism so I don’t have to focus on myself. She isn’t my therapist anymore.

I got behind the wheel of my old Chevy Lumina and pretended not to be bothered by the growing rust spot along the base of the driver-side door. My mind was already several blocks away, at my next job. It used to make me feel bad, forgetting the deceased so promptly after I left them, before they’d even been buried or stuffed into the incinerator. But what use was it to dwell on them? Their mark on this world was transient, all but for this last ditch effort to leave an impact on me. It wasn’t fair to myself to try to shoulder that burden, day after day, usually for the sake of some guy who wouldn’t have spared me a cup of piss if they’d come across me ablaze in the street.

So as the funeral parlour diminished in my rearview mirror, so too did the last lingering psychic remnants of that poor soul whose crowning achievement was completionist run of Skyrim that took him under one hundred hours. And I felt no guilt as I let that ghost die. Don’t take your work home with you, the wise among us often say. Though if I’m being honest with myself, that is not actually a piece of wisdom I adhere to. I take my work home with me all the time. My work is all I’ve got.

God damn. Red light. I hated getting stuck at this intersection. The liquor store is right there. There is a line-up of people spilling out of the front door, all waiting to present their ID to a security guard before being let in. It was a particularly sorry crop of folks waiting to get their “noon on a Wednesday” booze. Mostly scrubby dude-bros, but also one woman whose harried look could largely be explained by the colicky infant strapped into the baby carrier on her chest. It was a sad sight, but it didn’t make the compulsion any less. 

I had my one hundred day chip though, and I wasn’t going to give it up without a fight.

Green light. I released the breath that I didn’t realize I’d been holding. I resisted the urge to put the pedal to the metal, and drove away at what I like to think was a calm, measured pace. Much like the ghosts of the dead, the voices of the liquor store phantoms quieted with the physical space I put between us. It’s kind of wild how much beating addiction is just out of sight, out of mind. How if you keep moving forward those insidious suggestions of your own lizard brain have trouble keeping up with you. Sure, you’re bound to get stuck at a red light every once in a while. You’ll see the ghosts creeping up in the side mirror, even closer than they appear. The hardest part is waiting out the red. Sometimes you’re left wondering if green lights aren’t some Fairytale. But it will change back. It always does. You just have to remember that.

The urge to drink had mostly faded by the time I parked my car at the funeral parlour which would be my next jobsite. It’s funny. I keep telling myself that I could probably have the occasional beer if I wanted to. That it was the high stress of my old gig as a private investigator that drove me to overindulge, and that my life was at a healthier equilibrium now. I didn’t really think of myself as the kind of guy who would stay completely dry, and I felt like in recovery I’d learned pretty well how to have a better relationship with the sauce. In fact, could I ever rightly say that I was a newer and stronger me without demonstrating my control to have a drink or two without letting it get out of hand?

Yet I still recoiled at the thought of even having a single sip, as if in some deep recess of my brain, I knew better. It’s weird, isn’t it? That one part of the unconscious brain can be directing us away from the primal urges of another part of the unconscious brain. Meanwhile our conscious awareness is stuck in some fantasy of cohesion, utterly divorced from the conflicted reality of our biology.

Distracted as I was, it was hardly a surprise when I tried to step through the front door of the establishment only to crash into it with enough force that my nose smooshed against the glass. It was a pull door, not a push. I’d been here for nearly a dozen services, and I still did it every time.

Maybe spend less time thinking about brains and more time using yours.

“Right enough,” I agreed with myself aloud as I pulled the door open, resisting the urge to rub at my sore nose. Thankfully I didn’t think anyone had seen me.

Not that there were any people here to witness my moving about the world as if lobotomized. The foyer inside the entryway was entirely deserted. The thick grey carpet which allowed one to walk about silently, as if upon a cloud, carried nary a single dusty tread mark upon it. Nobody had been through here. And considering the service was set to start in just a couple minutes, it didn’t seem likely anyone would be. I could walk into all the doors I wanted. A number that was apparently legion, if my actions were an accurate barometer.

Ultimately I decided one door was enough for today and made my way into the next room. Here was the lobby, where a small reception area had been set up optimistically, on the off chance that perhaps some unexpected mourners would arrive. But not too optimistically. It only consisted of a single small table tucked off to the side, upon which an unopened bottle of apple juice sat next to an unopened sleeve of plastic cups. Oh, and a red box of soda crackers, also still uncracked. There were a few chairs, but nobody had bothered to unstack them. 

I was not unaccustomed to empty funeral parlours, but I don’t think I’ll ever shake the uneasiness they stir in me. The rooms are often designed to dampen sound, so the silence hangs thick. And in it I imagine I can almost hear voices. Not the ghosts of those dead who have passed through this place, but those of the living who aren’t here. The faint hopes of the corpse still lingering before following the rest of the spirit into the next realm, ethereal projected imaginings that just maybe somebody will come to grieve them.

If that’s what they were, then the guy in the casket in the next room was fooling himself.

I left the lobby behind and entered the predictably vacant casket viewing area. The dulcet tones of a church organ buzzed on the air, though they were of the canned variety, playing off a small Bluetooth speaker in the corner. There was only a single chair put out in the audience. For my expected attendance, I knew. The undertaker stood at a podium next to the casket, wearing a dark turtleneck and slacks like he was Steve Jobs about to unveil the next iPhone.

Or the next die Phone, I could easily imagine the undertaker at my last job quipping. But the man at the podium would never make that kind of joke. This guy was all business. Always gave it his all, as if laying to rest the Queen of England in front of the entire Commonwealth in tears. Not to say he didn’t still make the dark jokes, but they were always after the service and in hushed tones, like a creepy little secret. I never stuck around long after his services because honestly, he kind of spooked me.

“Welcome, Samuel,” the undertaker said solemnly. I’d only ever introduced myself as Sam, but he always called my Samuel during the service, like we were acting out a Bible scene. “Please find your seat. We are about to begin.”

I nodded and sat down.

“Friends,” the undertaker began. “We are gathered here today, to honour the passing of Matthew Klammer. A life cut short too soon, yet he undeniably left his mark with the time he had. He will be missed by many.”

A pile of bullshit if there ever was one. I’d done my homework on ole Mattie there, lying there with a serene looking on his blushed up face that I doubted had even known such peace in life. I always did a deep dive on all my jobs before showing up. I might have left being a private eye behind, but some habits die hard, you know? And I’ve got to say, these folks that the State pays me to mourn at their funerals, they’re some fascinating people. Their stories are always wildly different, yet always kind of the same. It’s not like being a private eye either, where digging into the life of a cheating spouse or a crooked cop can land you into a heap of trouble. No, the dead don’t really give you any of that hassle, especially the ones who die alone. So you can dig into their lives to your heart’s content.

Not that I usually have to do too much digging. Most of the time these guys practically leave a detailed daily diary on their social media, wide open for anyone who cares to come looking. Take Matthew up there in the casket for example. Or Mattie, as he was known to his little circle of Bitcoin buddies on Facebook.

I wasn’t sure if anybody in real life referred to him as such. Near as I could tell he didn’t have much in the way of personal relations IRL, as the kids say. His wife had stopped talking to him after he’d “invested” their life savings into a novelty cryptocurrency which had crashed faster than a Tesla on autopilot mode. His daughter had stopped talking to him shortly after she’d come out as transgender. Mattie had taken this revelation about his daughter as an opportunity to regale her with his grade-school knowledge of biology, his passion on the topic belying the fact that he didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

Not that this was how he spoke of these events in his own postings. In his own words, he was the victim of a vindictive wife who didn’t understand how markets fluctuate, and a daughter who had been brainwashed by the postmodern Marxists teaching at her university. And his self-pitying posts about it always received tons of support and confirmation from people who he would never know more intimately than their tiny thumbnail profile pictures next to little blocks of text.

But going through the trash outside his rundown apartment, I’d seen the credit card statements and how he’d been living entirely off cheap frozen dinners. The market was not going to fluctuate him out of this hole. And I’d seen his daughter’s tearful Tiktok videos telling her side of the story. Her words chilled me as I recalled them, looking up at the empty vessel which had once been her father.

“Maybe the worst part is,” she sniffed as she wiped away a mascara-laced tear. “I would forgive him if I could just have my old Dad back. But it’s like he cares about what those losers on Reddit think of him more than me. I don’t even know if my old Dad is in there anymore.”

She certainly right now, but she’d probably been right back then too. He’d gone on posting his angry screeds to the same little audience of cheerleaders right up until the day he hung himself. Six days he’d dangled there in his apartment until finally he’d stunk enough that the building’s caretaker had come in and found him. My contact at the police station told me that his poor cat had already eaten some of the meat off his legs and had to be put down. Nobody at his work at the auto plant had even noticed him missing. I’d gone down there to ask around about him, and the best I got was a couple coworkers who recognized my description of him well enough to say they were on a “hey buddy” basis.

“—never shied away from an honest day’s work,” the undertaker was saying when I tuned back in. “And tragically, perhaps nobly, in the end he gave more to this world than he got out of it.”

The undertaker’s heavy make-up job didn’t entirely conceal the rot in Mattie’s face, but at least his flowery words covered the rot that had present in Mattie’s soul long before. I looked around at the empty room. I knew from my research this morning that nobody on his social media had questioned Mattie’s absence with any more alarm than an offhand “haven’t seen Mattie in a while.” It was nearly two weeks since he’d last posted.

After the undertaker finished, I wiped a forearm across my moistened eyes and turned for the exit. I offered a mumbled “bye” as I fled. My battery for the day was completely drained, and the last thing I wanted to do was get stuck in a conversation with this guy. I knew he would assume I’d just been deeply moved by his puff piece of a eulogy.

“See you soon,” the undertaker called after me. “Real soon.”

The bastard didn’t even offer a chuckle to show he was joking. I didn’t turn back, because I feared seeing the sinister smile I imagined must be stretched across his face as he watched me depart. Joke or not, I decided I wasn’t going to accept any more jobs at this parlour unless money got real tight.

After a couple more jobs and running some errands, I settled down at home that night with a big glass of iced tea to watch the nightly news. I never touched the video games, and the only time I went on social media was to do research for work. I’d just seen too many lives destroyed by those poisons. It baffled me how anyone could lose themselves to digital toxins so fully.

I clicked the on the TV and started scrolling through the news channels.

“…the doomsday clock gets two minutes closer as nuclear war looms…” 

“…another massive Arctic ice shelf collapsed yesterday, and global warming continues to…”

“For just $699.99 this designer blender will solve all your problems!” 

“…growing income inequality blamed as violent protests erupt all over the…” 

“…the stock market reached another record high today, leaving economists baffled as to…” 

I clicked the TV off and rubbed at the budding migraine behind my eyes. Red lights flashed inside my head. Red lights without end, demanding a stop to the forward motion of time itself. What was left to do but obey the traffic laws? But waiting on the world to change…well, it’s thirsty work.

Alex Passey is the author of the novel's Mirror's Edge and Shadow of the Desert Sun. His short fiction, poetry and journalism have been featured in many publications, most recently in the graphic novel Twilight of Echelon, the Apocalypse anthology from Dragon Soul Press, and the Winnipeg Free Press.