Free Dead is Better by Jo Perry

people dot the beige walls. A secretary in a pants suit sits at a triangular desk at the end of one long hall and speaks on a telephone. Behind her is a closed oak door upon which are shiny raised letters that spell out Frederick R. Nilsson, Chief Financial Officer, and through which appears the hazy figure of a dog.

41.
    Death: The end of life. The cessation of life. (These common definitions of death ultimately depend upon the definition of life, upon which there is no consensus.)

    ***

    My reunion with Rose is deeply moving and perplexing. Once we return together to our little corner of the otherworld, she leaps upon me and I embrace her—two flickering gray flames becoming one. The way she licks my pallid face with her dry tongue, you’d think I was the lost soul, not she.
    Which leaves me where, exactly?
    The doctor who pronounced me dead—I haven’t found him yet.
    The geezer was a dead-end. He had no real connection to me or to AndyCo.
    The CFO’s office at the hospital, why did Rose park herself there? I’ve never seen his name before.
    Why would Rose run away like that, then return to the hospital?
    Why wasn’t she looking for me?
    What am I missing? What is it that I can’t see?
    Rose assumes her patient pose again, her wise eyes wide. She reminds me of those small statues of Anubis, dog or jackal, in the British Museum that I liked to visit the summer I was twelve. My father was doing a summer variety show for an English television company. Every morning a car picked him up under the silver pergola of the Savoy Hotel and took him to the Pinewood Studios outside the city. My shit brother and I spent our days wandering London with our mother—and spent time fighting over our stamp collections in our suite overlooking the Thames and Cleopatra’s needle.
    We returned to the museum often to see the Egyptian art and mummies—not just the humans, but cat and dog mummies too, their painted faces on the mummy cases animated and individual. I still remember a papyrus depicting Anubis with his dog head weighing a dead human heart during a ritual designed to test its purity: The heart, if it proved lighter than a feather, was the soul’s ticket into the afterlife. If the heart failed the test, Anubis fed it to Ammit the Devourer.
    My own fat, twisted heart should make a nice snack for the Devourer. I look into Rose’s sweet and worried face and see in it the expression of a heart purer than Anubis’s lightest feather.
    What’s troubling her?
    Rose nudges my hand gently with her nose, as if to urge me to get going, to do something. I have no idea what she wants and, before I can stop myself, I pull my hand away, unable to suppress my irritation, my frustration at myself and the absurdity of my situation.
    As Rose drops her head and almost cowers, I feel the weight of my own crass self-centeredness.
    For most of my life and certainly since my death, I haven’t considered anyone except myself.
    I pat Rose on the head until her body relaxes.
    Stupid, arrogant fuck that I am, the possibility that Rose might have her own concerns—her own unfinished and important business—never occurred to me—not even once.
    Because I died or was pronounced dead in the Memorial Medical E.R., I assumed Rose was nudging me toward my own truth.
    Well maybe there’s truth to be had—but it doesn’t belong to me.
    And if there’s meaning to be sought—it’s not located in my own death.
    Maybe it’s Rose’s death that counts.
    I look into Rose’s expectant and forgiving eyes. As she looks back at me with an expression of love and hope, I could kick myself.
    I had everything ass-backwards, I see that now. I was completely mistaken all along.
    The dog’s not here for me.
    I’m here for the dog.

42.
    “Death is when the monsters get you.”
    —Stephen King

    ***

    Rose and I circulate inside the spacious office of Frederick R. Nilsson, Chief Financial Officer, Memorial Medical Center, a Medical Corporation. I’ve spent