Old Dead Gods

“Mr. Sanders!” you shout, banging on the door. “Mr. Sanders I’ve got lunch!”

You hold up the bag to face height in front of the door as if the door itself is going to pass on the message that yes, you do in fact have lunch. A plastic bag with some cheap Chinese from around the corner. You bang on the door some more. Usually Tuesday night is Chinese, you watch Jeopardy with the old man and eat on his 1950’s style TV dinner trays. Not last night though, you had a date.

You bang on the door some more.

“C’mon, open up ya grumpy bastard! I gotta tell you about my date!” You put your ear to the door, but you can’t really hear anything. “She was really hot! I know how you like an attractive lady!”

You’re starting to get worried, naturally. Most of us have already figured it out already. You try the door and it’s locked, so you set the bag down in the hallway and head to your own apartment for the spare key.

It had been your first date since the pandemic started. Not so coincidentally it was the first Chinese night you’d missed with Mr. Sanders, too. You didn’t get out a whole lot before COVID, but you at least took yourself out to dinner and went out with your one or two friends. Since the first lockdown it’s been you and Mr. Sanders most nights. Most days, too, if you’re being honest. You work in medical billing and coding, not difficult to do from home.

You make it back with your key. You only ever needed it once before, when Mr. Sanders had fallen in his bathroom and couldn’t get himself up. Though, that time, he was yelling and cussing and you heard him through the wall like he was in the room with you. He might have become frail, but not gentle. He had yelled for you, specifically. A detail that makes us that much more heartbroken for what you’re about to find.

You creak the door open and reach down picking up the bag of Chinese, though, somewhere deep in your chest, you know it’s not going to get eaten. You carry it with you anyway, into the stillness and the dark. It’s an old apartment building and the only thing cutting the silence is the creak of the hardwood flooring.

The old man is laying back in his chair with the feet up and his head back, open mouth pointing to the ceiling. You have seen him nap before, except this is different. It’s too still. He’s too still.

“Mr. Sanders?”

No answer.

You are alone in this room.

The people on the ambulance were very nice, but they didn’t do anything. They said he had been gone for too long. After rushing in and checking a few things on him and hearing your story, they just set their bags down and spoke into their radios a couple times.

“The coroner will be here in a little bit,” one of them said. “Do you know if he had any arrangements?”

You’re staring at him. Mr. Sanders, not the ambulance guy. They don’t cover dead bodies in real life like they do in the movies. Not unless its particularly gruesome and there’s a lot of people around. If it’s a family member and they’re in their house, they just leave them there staring at the ceiling or the TV, or eating the carpet if they had a heart attack and fell on their face.

“What?” you say, still staring.

“Do you know if he had arrangements

with a funeral home?”

“No…I mean…I don’t think so.” Is that something a neighbor is supposed to know?

“Well, the coroner can figure that out when she gets here.” The paramedic said. Then he looked back down at his computer typing at something. “You said you were a neighbor, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Does he have any family nearby?”

That’s right…you are not his family. All year you’ve taken care of him, waited on him. Your own parents haven’t been around in years. Phone calls every once in a while, a birthday card twice a year (your dad still thinks it’s the wrong day). Instead of fighting over you in the divorce they tried to let each other win. The hollowing feeling in your chest right now, after the reminder that you aren’t Mr. Sanders’ family, says more about you than it does him.

“Umm…no…” you don’t really know if there’s any family nearby. “I don’t think so…maybe a daughter up north.” He had said something about a daughter that lived somewhere too cold for him to visit. You couldn’t remember him mentioning any family other than that one time. The sadness inside you deepened. You hadn’t asked about his family. He hadn’t told you about his family. You thought you’d bonded with this man, but maybe you had just been someone who took care of him, brought him dinner, checked his mail.

As if a distraction from your deepening loneliness, you remembered his little black book. A self preservation your mind preformed for you.

“He’s got a little black book,” you said moving toward him, broken from a trance.

The ambulance guys looked at each other as you moved toward him, as if asking each other if they should stop you. They didn’t.

You tell yourself he’s just sleeping so you can get close enough. The book is in his breast pocket, where it always is. You use your index and middle fingers to pull it out. His chest isn’t moving. You don’t notice people’s chests moving until they don’t. It feels like grave robbing. But as you pull the little black book out of its home, he doesn’t grab your hand as he surely would have if still alive. It’s both relieving and hopelessly saddening.

“What do you keep in that book?” you had asked.

“Secrets about old dead gods and ancient magics…” he said the first time.

“The longitudes and latitudes of all my buried treasures…” he said another time.

“All my regrets and apologies to those I’ve wronged…”

“I count. It starts at 1, and I left off at 86,201 last night…”

“Nothing. It’s blank…”

“Grocery lists and my kids’ birthdays, addresses and phone numbers…”

It was the last one that reminded you of the book. He was always taking it out and jotting something in it. He’d calmly pull it out mid-conversation and write something with a tiny pencil that seemed always ready and nearby, and then he’d fold it back up, pull the band back around to keep it closed, and put it back in his pocket.

You undo the band and start to open it, but something seems wrong. You didn’t know this man at all, really. You sat next to him most nights talking about the weather, your love life, the answers on Jeopardy, but what does that mean? You can just open his life now? Read his secrets? You open that book now and you’ll know more than the man ever told you when he was alive.

“Find anything?” the paramedic asks. Neither of the guys from the ambulance are looking at you. One is by the open door of the apartment, apparently ready to bolt as soon as the coroner turns the corner. The other is staring at his computer, tapping away at whatever he has to tap at to document this sadness.

“No...nothing.” You don’t know why you’ve said it. You didn’t even open the book.

You just stand there holding your breath, expecting to lie to be obvious.

“Ah, its alright,” the one with the computer says, “the coroner can sort it all out.”

You want them to care more. You want them to care about his old man’s death enough to get to the bottom of who he was and who he left behind.

“How often do guys have to do this?” you ask.

“Do what?” he responds without looking up from his tapping.

“Stand watch over a dead man,” you say.

He smirks, not rude, but rather something he can’t control.

“Third time this week,” he says.

“It’s Tuesday,” you say.

“Yeah,” he says, but it comes out like a sigh and his smirk dies in the process.

You slide the book into your back pocket, still feeling weird about it, but you’re not leaving it here.

Some time passes and the paramedic has stopped asking you questions.

“You don’t have to stay here,” he says. You haven’t moved in a while, or said anything. “I’d say the coroner would have some questions for you, but probably not. This doesn’t seem that complicated and if you don’t know any of the family…” he trails off and shrugs his shoulders.

“Okay,” is all you can muster. You want to tell the guy how much you did for Mr. Sanders this year, that he was important to you, that you’re sad that you didn’t know more about him. It seems pointless, though. Staying seems equally as meaningless, now.

You turn to leave and walk out the door of the apartment for the last time.

“Hey,” the other ambulance guy says when you’ve made it to the hallway.

You freeze. Your hand instinctively reaches to your pocket where you put the little black book.

“You forgot your food,” the guy says. He walks in and picks up the tied up grocery bag of Chinese food you had brought for you and Mr. Sanders.

“Thanks,” you say when he hands it to you.

Inside your own apartment you collapse into your chair. It’s a beat up old recliner you’ve had since you were in college sitting in front of a very large nice TV. If there’s nothing else for you to do, why spend any money on anything but a good entertainment center?

You drop the Chinese next to the chair and pull the little black book out of your pocket.

You unbind the book again, but don’t open at first.

Would the old man want you to open this? Would he be mad? It’s hard to tell at this point.

You resign yourself to open it. If there’s something embarrassing in it, it would be your secret. The price he pays for your servitude for the last year, you think to yourself. It’s all justification. You knew you were going to open it as soon as you put it in your pocket to take it out of his apartment.

You crack open the book and see little meaningless notes on the first few pages. Titles of songs and TV shows. But then…

Josh Bday

1/18/1985

That’s your name. That’s your birthday.

Josh

Likes

Brunettes

The Walking Dead

Asian Food

Zelda

The list goes on for pages.

Josh

Important

Parents Divorced Seems lonely Smart Kid

Drinks too much Lost Good at Chess

Cares about me

This list kept going too.

You look further. There’s nothing else. Just a lot of notes about you. There’s a page with tic marks counting the number of times you’ve mentioned one of your parents. On one page there’s a sketch of you eating. Of course, there’s plenty of pages filled with passwords and logins for anything from Facebook to his email. Customer service contact information, payment confirmation numbers, things no one your age keeps, but everyone his age does.

It’s not all you, but the ratio is making you think differently about your relationship with this old man for the second time in as many hours. Then you flip to the back.

In the back of the book there’s a pocket. It folds out from the back cover. Inside there’s two slips of paper. Checks. One written to you for $20,000.00. One is blank, with For Funeral, written in the memo. Neither is dated. On the flap of the pocket is written the words…

Josh, I don’t have any children.