Mia thinks that her downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Auclair, is dead. 

At ninety years old, Mrs. Auclair lives by herself because her only son moved to Miami to waiter on commercial cruise ships and to benefit from low income tax. Mrs. Auclair is (was?) French enough that her diet consists only of stinky cheese and Gauloises. She hates Mia and her roommate Catherine, and files a noise complaint every time one of them sneezes. 

Mia loves to talk about death, so naturally she was the one to initially theorize that Mrs. Auclair may have died. This was two months ago. Mrs. Auclair usually wore the most aromatic L'Oréal eau de toilette, and at the time, Mia had not smelled it in the hallway for an entire week. Mia always noticed the smell because her sister used to wear the same perfume. Catherine was quite skeptical. 

I don’t know, she said to Mia. Maybe she ran out of perfume and is just like, too lazy to buy more. 

But all this time has passed and Mrs. Auclair has not made a complaint against them once. They have not seen her or heard her at all. 

Mia and Catherine now try to provoke her. They throw heavy objects on the floor while eating breakfast, like World Encyclopedias and free weight dumbbells. Mia plays Twilight Zone reruns at such a high volume that she has to put in headphones. Catherine moved her bed over the squeakiest floorboards in her room and tells the people she has sex with that she wants it loud and rough (Mia puts in headphones for this too and consoles herself by saying that it’s for a good cause). Last week, the girls clogged their shower drain with cut up pantyhose and overflowed the bathtub so that water would leak through the floor and into Mrs. Auclair’s ceiling. Still nothing. 

* 

Saturday morning, Mia is peeling an orange over her coffee and reading the opinion section of the Times, while Catherine stomps across the kitchen in a noisy, ugly pair of rainboots. “Don’t forget I’m throwing something tonight,” Catherine tells Mia. Her voice floats across the kitchen as she walks in a circle. 

“Why?” Mia asks. Her brain is groggy from some Xanax. “Is it your birthday?”

 “No.” 

“Oh good, I thought I forgot.” 

“You did. It was two weeks ago.” 

Catherine is throwing a party because she got into business school. Mia’s sister always found Catherine to be subtly self-obsessed. Mia just thinks Catherine looks for any opportunity to have a good time, which sometimes includes celebrating herself. 

“My friend Jack is gonna be at the party,” Catherine says, apropos of nothing. Catherine sits down next to her. Mia does not look up from the newspaper. “That’s nice.” No one acknowledges this, but this means that Catherine is trying to convince Mia to sleep with Jack. 

Mia is still thinking about Xanax. Mia has a legitimate emotional connection to her Xanax. Xanax is the love of her life. 

“I’ve been meaning to introduce you guys since. Well, I’ve been meaning to introduce you for a while.” 

Mia doesn’t comment on what Catherine almost said. Catherine doesn’t either.

*

Mia thinks that Catherine wants her to have sex and find love because Mia’s been a bit depressed and a bit impulsive. For a while. Her sister died two years ago, off the George Washington Bridge. The Hudson is so dirty, why would her sister go in there? Mia just read that psychologists were considering adding Prolonged Grief to the DSM. 

Sometimes, Mia feels like a baby who only knows two words. My sister, my sister, my sister. It’s still easier to say that than to say her name. 

*

Catherine loves to talk about investing in a 401k, feminist understandings of Sex and the City, and having unmedicated ADHD. These are all very real things, even if Mia sometimes feels like they are not. Catherine probably does not love to talk about death because she is still someone who fundamentally believes that young people don’t die. Maybe Mia is just jealous that Catherine has a life where death gets to be the unreal thing. 

*

So Jack and Mia are in the kitchen. They haven’t spoken yet. They each coincidentally ended up in the kitchen to catch a break from the salty smell of such a crowded, coked out party. Jack is staring out the window into the open street, presumably to get some air. Mia pretends to glance at the leftover newspaper to avoid conversation. Mia’s too drunk to understand words. She’s been staring at a political cartoon of George Bush for five minutes. She hates Catherine right now, because Catherine has made Mia feel strange about talking to Jack. Mia’s wine tastes so weird. She keeps picking up her crystal glass, sipping the wine, putting it down. What’s wrong with it? It’s like, syrup. 

“That’s Manischewitz wine.” Jack interrupts when she reaches for the glass again, as if he can read her thoughts. Maybe he can, she thinks. She’d like that, she thinks, abruptly. “It’s really bad actually. I only drink it during Passover.” 

“Are you supposed to be punishing yourself on Passover?” 

He snorts. “Are you Jewish?” 

“No.” Mia hopes this isn’t the wrong answer. “I’m Irish.” 

“You can be Jewish and Irish,” he says. 

“Oh really?” 

He walks closer to her. He moves his head strangely, like a nutcracker. It’s endearing. Mia’s been waving a hand in front of her face. Someone is playing the Talking Heads outside. Jack doesn’t answer her question and instead asks, “You’re too warm?” “A bit. I drank before the wine.” 

Jack steps close to Mia, so that his chin is hovering above her nose, and places his Heineken against her neck. The droplets of water on the bottle make her skin damp and cold. She gazes up at him, silently. 

* 

In their first week of knowing each other, Mia and Jack talk about death three times.

*

“Catherine told me about your Mrs. Auclair conspiracy,” Jack tells Mia. 

Jack left his wallet at the party, so he comes over the next day. Mia invites him to stay for lunch. She thinks he forgot his wallet on purpose and she lets him do this. They are eating bread and butter pickles and hard boiled eggs. Everyone at the party raided their fridge. “Do you believe it?” Mia asks. 

“I think she would have smelled by now.” 

“Lots of experience with dead bodies?” 

“Sort of.” 

* 

Joshua’s undergraduate thesis compared different religions and their treatment of bodies post-mortem. After death, Jewish bodies must be whole, naked, and buried immediately. Christians can be embalmed or cremated. 

Mia is the most interested by his description of corpse meditation. It’s a type of meditation in Theravada Buddhism, and was primarily practiced by monks in ancient times, Joshua thinks. He doesn’t remember all the details anymore. As he remembers it, monks would meditate in the presence of corpses and to confront the truth that this live body and this dead one are of the same nature. Renderings of corpse meditation can be found in murals and manuscripts. Cadavers with worms nestled into their rotting crevices. Crows picking at open eyelids. Deadmen sliced in two, their bodies bloated and pink. 

* 

On Wednesday, they are sitting on the grass in Bryant Park. They have seen each other every day since the party. Jack tells Mia a story. This is the first time he saw something dead. Jack was six years old when his tabby cat fell off the ledge of his fourth-floor bedroom window. At the time, Jack lived in Washington Heights, next to the Stella D’oro factory. His apartment always tasted like confectioner’s sugar and, in his memories, everything in the Heights was gray. This story happened in the wintertime. 

When the cat fell, Jack was too scared to look out the window. Even at his age, he could tell that it might be in pieces. Instead he got an old department store shoebox and begged his dad to clean it up. The box was to give the cat a proper burial. 

Weeks later, when it was spring and Jack’s mother started to leave the house again to take Jack to baseball, the snow that had been all over the earth melted off, like a molting snake. And in the rivers of slush Jack found it: a mushy cardboard shoebox, with a decomposed cat inside. Joshua still remembers the collar rolling around inside the chest of the skeleton, its metallic bell dinging against the still muscled-bones. 

* 

“I didn’t realize that because of winter, the ground was basically frozen solid and impossible to dig into. So my dad had just climbed the hill near my house and left it at the top under some snow. That’s how it melted all the way down.” 

Jack finishes telling Mia about his dead cat. 

His story makes Mia sad, but not really because of the cat. It just makes Mia sad to think of Jack as a little boy. Who he is now but smaller and defenseless and less emotionally regulated. When Mia’s sister was little, she barely cried. She was like an overstuffed Cabbage Patch doll. 

“Were you upset with your dad?” Mia asks. Mia and Jack haven’t kissed yet, or done anything explicitly romantic, but suddenly she is feeling so attracted to him. She wants to suck his finger into her mouth. 

“What else could he have done?” 

She shouldn’t bring it up, she shouldn’t bring it up, she shouldn’t— 

“My sister didn’t really care what we did with her body.” 

Jack pauses. Mia appreciates the thoughtfulness. 

He clears his throat. “Was she religious?” he asks. 

Mia laughs, loudly. The other people on the lawn, two small girls and their father, turn their heads at the noise. 

* 

Growing up, Jack’s mom had bipolar disorder when it was still manic depression. Jack does not tell Mia much about it, he just mentions that there was a two year period of time where his mom used to keep him in the house with her after school. For two years, he didn’t really leave much. He watched cartoons. He learned to cook pasta. He did his homework. He took care of her. 

* 

Mia doesn’t know if Jack has many friends. 

Who is she to talk? 

* 

Mia hates coming to see her sister, but at least she is not alone this time. They’re standing next to the gravestone. It’s early morning, and there is a sparse burial procession ten feet away. It's windy in the cemetery, so every time Jack exhales she gets a whiff of cigarettes and burnt coffee. 

Mia shuffles in front of Jack and stares at her sister's name. She is standing on flat earth. If she were on a sidewalk, the fact that the ground extends beyond its surface would only feel theoretical. What’s below her would register as empty and unimportant and like one homogeneous mass. But now Mia is standing on flat earth, and she is standing above her sister. There is not much to say here. 

Mia rubs her sneaker against the granite. Then she turns around to look at Jack. Jack’s watching the funeral. His eyes are scanning, assessing the small scattering of people. Maybe, assessing all the negative space. 

Mia goes, “I want to sit with her. And see if it feels better. Like corpse meditation.” He looks back at her. She loves eye contact. 

“I don’t think that’s how that works. At all.” 

“I want to try.” 

He’s silent. 

Then he says, “So let’s sit.” 

They sit on the dirt, which feels like mud. 

“I’m not close enough to her,” Mia complains. 

Jack takes her hand and presses it to the ground. He begins to shovel grainy and wet dirt over it with his own hand, like they are kids at a beach burying themselves in sand. The dirt is slimy. Mia never would have thought to do that to herself. She already needs him, she thinks. “How does it feel now?” 

“Good,” she tells him. “It feels good.”