“Maybe when new life is created?” Ava said.
“Despite the requisite exclamations of Oh my God, often not even then,” Devi said. “The only time man usually comes into contact with faith or his lack thereof is when life ends.”
Julian lowered his head.
“You can conceive without God,” said Devi, “you can give birth, marry, live every Sunday, every Good Friday, every day without God, but it’s difficult to confront death without God—especially for the living. We don’t know what the dead do when the door closes, and darkness or light swallows them. But we know what we the living do when tasked with the burden of their burial, ritual, funeral, memorial. We have a hard time with it. A man dies quietly in the hospital. Sometimes his family is present, sometimes not. A priest is often absent, for the man has no priest and has never been to church, at least not willingly. After some medical to and fro, the body gets taken away. The funeral director brings it to a place most people rarely enter. There it lies for a few hours or days or weeks until the family decides whether to bury or cremate. Cremation is now the most popular option, for it allows the body to return to dust without any theological fanfare. I once knew a man who had made his own funeral arrangements, planned for his own disposal. He died alone in Dover, and by the time his sons arrived, a few days later, his body had already been cremated.”
“How do you know?”
“I went to Dover and sat with him before he died,” Devi said. “His sons didn’t know me at all. They were presented with a cardboard box filled with their father’s ashes and another cardboard box that held the last of his earthly belongings. His drugstore-bought reading glasses. His disposable cell phone. The Timex watch he had since the ’70s. His thirty-year-old wallet, in which there was a ten-pound note, a National Health card, a credit card, one nearly expired license, and an old magazine about eagles. That was all. The sons kept the ashes and threw the other box into the trash on their way out. There was no funeral, no memorial, no wake, no dinner. Perhaps they went to the pub for a drink, I don’t know. There weren’t even any secular words to remind anyone of the man’s life, why he lived, what he meant, who loved him. There was nothing.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Julian said.
“That’s how you die without God,” Devi said. “Anonymously. But that is not how Ashton lived. And it’s not how he died.”
Julian wept.
LITTLE BY LITTLE, THE APARTMENT STOPPED CONTAINING traces of the man who was gone. His clothes did not remain in the empty closets, the smell of his open cologne did not linger over his dresser, his toothbrush and razor did not lie in his unused bathroom, and the old expired coconut water, courtesy of the delicate and tormented Riley, was no longer in the fridge.
The things Ashton left behind:
His accounts and insurance policies, all to Julian.
His poster of Bob Marley, which Julian tried to give to Zakiyyah, but she refused to take it.
A photo of him and Julian high in the Sierra Madres, nineteen years old, backpacks on, baseball caps on, arms around each other, beaming for the camera.
A scribbled saying on the side of the fridge. If it hadn’t been in Ashton’s large bold hand, Julian might’ve forgotten who’d written it. It was from Don Marquis and it said, “My heart has followed all my days something I cannot name.”
Julian still walked through London looking for the Café with the Golden Awning.
When he grew tired, he would find a bench, and sometimes that spot would be by the church at Cripplegate. Unmoving he sat, looking across the canal at the preserved crumbling stretch of the London Wall. He hoped that through lack of motion, he would eventually regain his strength. It hadn’t happened yet. He wasn’t growing handsome. He was getting older, grayer, thinner, flailing his helpless arms, clenching and unclenching his mutilated hand, shuffling his feet, all splintering aching bones. The Q’an Doh Cave, once a place of hope and salvation, had become nothing but a stalagpipe organ without a church, playing out the last of its quiet dirge, not in absolution but oblivion.
Julian didn’t hear from Riley.
A few times he tried to get in touch with her but remained blocked on her phone. Indirectly—through her parents or Gwen—the path to her also remained closed, and Riley remained purposefully and utterly unreachable, in the level desert sands of Snowflake, Arizona, working on herself or hiding, which amounted to the same thing.
How is she, he would ask her parents.
Not good, they would say. How do you think she is?
No one asked how he was, not even Gwen.
And it was just as well.
Julian didn’t hear from Riley, but oh did he hear from Zakiyyah.
During some inopportune time during late London mornings she would call—when it was the dead of night in L.A. He knew it was her by the relentless mournful yawp of the neutral ring.
For hours he would sit at the island, elbows on the granite, eyes closed, phone pressed to his ear, and try not to hear the unendurable lament of a stricken woman—now married to someone else—the up and down modulation of outrage and anguish, punctuated every few minutes by a desperate, hoarse refrain. “It didn’t have to be this way.”
Zakiyyah didn’t require Julian to speak. She required of him nothing but the phone squeezed to his ear.
“It didn’t have to be this way!”
“It didn’t have to be this way …”
After weeks and months passed like this, she stopped calling.
Her silence deafening, Julian reached out to her himself.
The new husband answered her cell phone. “It’s not a good idea for you to talk to her anymore,” he said. “Especially in the middle of the night, when she should be sleeping, or doing other things. It’s just making her feel worse. We are trying to have a baby, and this is screwing up all our plans.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Julian said, feebly trying to argue, to persuade, to convince.
“Maybe,” the husband said as he hung up. “But that’s the way it is.”
Julian didn’t call her after that. His pose remained the same, even without the phone at his ear. Head bent. Eyes closed.
It didn’t have to be this way.
A line of love.
A line of hate.
It didn’t have to be this way.
A line of grief.
A line of rage.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Zakkiyah recalled the days.
The years.
The joy.
The fights.
The life.
It didn’t have to be this way.
She