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Lindy Conners Has a Quarter Death Crisis

2024; Duke University Press; Volume: 2024; Issue: 102 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00265667-1104697

2157-4189

Katelyn Pike,

Lindy Conners woke up dead on the day she would have turned twenty-five. For a single blissful moment, she remained oblivious to her new state. She stretched her arms and legs out across the mattress, reveling in the luxury, the cocoon of the warm sheets. As she continued to lie there, however, and the five more minutes she had promised herself in bed ticked away, awareness of her own death filled her slowly, like light filling a room. It did seem strange to her that this transformation from living to dead had taken place without leaving her a memory of panic or pain, yet she could not deny its consequence. For she felt a stillness in her body that went beyond mere sleepiness. Her bloodstream itself stood still. Her systems and cellular processes and her inner electricity had all slowed to silence. No heartbeat contracted in her chest, just as no pulse tapped a panicked rhythm in her neck, wrist, or fingertips. She sat up, somewhat perturbed, and chanced a look at her reflection in the mirror above the bureau. No blush anointed her cheeks, not even when she pinched them. Her lips possessed a faintly bluish hue. Moreover, the cold tension in her muscles never abated, even as she stretched her arms a second time and swung her feet out of the bed. If anything, she felt heavier, leaden. The blood pooled and mottled her legs.Although Lindy had no choice but to acknowledge that she had died, she was not altogether certain what to do with this information, so she did as routine dictated. She brushed her teeth and dressed, and she pinned up her long hair. As she was pulling on her jacket, she considered the possibility that this was simply what the act of dying was. Perhaps all people experienced natural deaths this way and did not know it, and Lindy herself only felt more keenly aware of her own demise for that intimate way in which she remained acutely aware of what it was to inhabit her body at all times, sucking in her stomach, self-correcting her posture, and finger-combing her flyaway hairs when strangers looked her way in store aisles.Now Lindy headed downstairs to tip food into the cat's dish and give it a scratch behind its clipped left ear. The cat shied away from her fingertips at first, put off by the faint odor of decomposition under her nails. Only out of greed did it dare to sally near again, even nipping at Lindy's finger in an effort to steal a treat. The cat followed Lindy around, tail switching, as she called work to let them know she'd be taking a sick day. When the phone began to ring, however, Lindy realized that the word sick did not sound right to her, and so she settled on bereavement instead. Her ability to still use logic at this crucial junction put her at ease, at least until the phone call ended, at which point she admitted she now had no idea what to do with the day. The people she cared most for were all at work at this hour, and while she knew she ought to explain her situation to someone, the nature of it being her birthday meant no one would take her assertion that she was dead seriously. They'd call her a dramatic and a hysteric and say they'd see her Friday, when they all went out for drinks.Lindy's cat lurked in front of the bookshelf, licking its black lips. Lindy shooed it away and pondered the spines of the volumes there. What book did one read—what movie did one watch—what meal did one eat after they had died already? She felt no pleasure at all at the promise of any of it, and every book she picked up and flipped to the last page of, she'd slam shut again. Dissatisfied, and not a little ashamed to know the end.Finally, she fished her car keys from the bowl, grabbed a stack of envelopes from a kitchen drawer, and drove to a park south of town. There, two retired women played tennis on the courts. The leaf-dotted grass needed a trim. For a long while, Lindy merely sat on a bench and studied the wind through that grass, allowing the thwump of the tennis ball to mimic the sound of her missing pulse. This self-deception could not last, of course, and after some time Lindy returned to the car. She did not leave right away. Instead, she wrote letters to her loved ones against the steering wheel. She had to scrawl them on the envelopes themselves, since she'd forgotten other paper. More unfortunately, every word she wrote in an attempt to explain her passing smacked of suicide, as the letters would make it look to everyone else she'd known of her death before the fact. With every draft, and with every discarded envelope, Lindy found the truth more and more impossible to convey. She did not want anyone to think that she had killed herself—not because she would never have done so, but because she would have done so once, and had not gone through with it in the end.By the time she gave up the letters completely, her fingers had stiffened, and a faint smell emanated from her pores, that scent of decay aggravated by the sunlight trapped by the closed car windows. Outside, beyond the glare, trees swayed back and forth. Their autumn leaves rustled like golden monarchs and brown moths, insects all flurrying together like a cacophony of wings. Above, the sky's emptiness—its perfect clarity, its hue of crisp blue—made Lindy think she ought to feel something more profound by now. Where was her grief, her loss, her anguish, that she had died so young? Those feelings seemed strange to her and even sealed off inside her now, like the inside of a seed. Shouldn't she weep at the prospect that, by nightfall, she'd be too noticeably dead to continue as she was, and, in consequence, might never meet a lovely sky or a summer day ever again? She tried in vain to summon up the appropriate despair. Even thoughts of her coffin shut around her stirred in her only slight distaste. At last, she turned the key in the ignition so she would not have to think at all, and she left the park behind her.She drove from the cardboard storefronts and graffitied lots of the city to some suburb, bound for nowhere in particular except, perhaps, the unremarkable landmarks of strangers' childhoods: plastic pools strewn with leaves, merry-go-rounds revolving slowly, creakily, covered with rust that flaked away when one removed one's hands. She listened to the radio as she drove, which was out of the ordinary for her. She half-expected the news to break in with some story about a dead woman drifting down the streets, or with a flash that some asteroid had struck earth and destroyed all life on the planet at once.No such luck. It was late afternoon by the time Lindy pulled over again, this time in her mother's driveway, though the mother in question was still at work and not at home. The young woman waited there, listening to radio commercials at first and then to the hits from a half a century ago. She wondered at how many of the voices on those airwaves were dead too, and what it meant that she could hear them still, when they'd never lived a year of overlap. At some point, she blinked her heavy eyelids with some difficulty—a certain gumminess lined them now—and realized once she wrenched them open once more that a rose-colored dusk had settled like dust over the car.She forced herself out of the vehicle and stood in the driveway under the sunset. She admired the pink flush that light cast over her arm, like blood still worked within her. Had she wasted it? she asked herself. And if so, what had it been? The hour, the day, the year, the life, the damned quietness of it, its contentness, its solitude, all of it without a truly worthy misery, all of it without a star."Honey?"Her mother switched the headlights off and got out of the car behind Lindy's. The lines on the hand that rested on the door, the simple blue cardigan she wore, at last wrenched the feeling free from Lindy. She knew a grown-up woman was too old to lie down in her mother's lap, or to cry on birthdays, but—and it happened between the moment when her mother began to cross the yard and when that same mother hugged her, held her, and did not know, did not suspect for even a second, that her daughter was dead—Lindy felt the incredible and spiraling loss of this person, as closest she could come to feeling the loss of herself. All at once, the girl felt like weeping, and she searched for how she could possibly articulate what had happened to her, searched for how she could say goodbye."Oh, Lindy, what's the matter?""Nothing," she hiccupped, "nothing!"And to this, her mother said soothingly, "Why don't you stay here tonight?"But this only made Lindy weep harder, a choked mantra of, "I can't, I can't," for she knew there would be no use or good in that, that she was gone already.