Since he’s been gone, she has dodged thirty-seven calls from her sister and been forced to answer eighteen. Gloria, her astrologer friend, has called twenty-two times, been spoken to twelve. For twenty-nine meals in a row she’s eaten a lump of cottage cheese with a handful of Goldfish crackers on top. She has gone through thirty cartons of Tillamook ice cream, but only nine liters of vodka. It has been ninety-two days since he’d gone, so she considers this restraint.

On one of those days, she made it to the gym and swam four complete laps before the weight of her body sank her. She’d come home and thumbed through thirteen old copies of The New Yorker. Why were they even still here? 

She has been sleeping too much. And she isn’t proud she’s tried felting the fur from his favorite cat into a little black finger puppet, like that Japanese lady on YouTube. The puppet is a disgusting failure. 

She endures, basically, and she thinks. Are the cats as depressed as she? Will her heart ever again beat at a normal speed? Was every moment she had not paid him her full attention a moment wasted? This last is a question that haunts. 

On the ninety-third day, Gloria comes to the actual front door and will not be dodged. When Gloria enters the living room, the favored cat and the other one flee. The sofa is cleared of remotes, blankets, and the felting. Gloria is alarmed at her state but congratulates her for not downloading I Did Not Die. Gloria also implies that her resistance to IDND is the only thing she’s doing right. 

“Your aura is black,” Gloria says and tells her then about the app IDND because it is the topic du jour, after all, named for that old Depression-era poem, or threnody. Immortality!

Some call it mawkish while it brings others down to their knees. 

Do not stand by my grave and cry. I am not there…

In answer to a million desolate prayers, I Did Not Die made the link, proving at last that death isn’t final. The dead aren’t in their graves, not at all. But Gloria says those using the app aren’t sure the dead know we have tapped in and are watching. “How did we tap in?” she wonders aloud. 

“The universe is energy,” Gloria answers wisely. 

Images, only muted and grainy images, and sometimes, broken buffering feeds, can make it through the app. No words, not ever. No writing, no speech. Which is cruel. How everyone longs for words.

All these things Gloria tells her, unnecessarily, for she has looked up IDND seven times over the past ninety-three days—with trepidation and curiosity, but not yet with intent. However, she, enmired in bereavement, hadn’t known how the app has been impacting the people she knows. Because it has. Monumentally. And Gloria tells her…

…how Clare saw her deceased wife, smiling radiantly with her arms round Usma, her college girlfriend who’d also died recently, how it was agony, and...

…how Miguel’s mother, gone four years, never posted at all. Every time he logged in, which was constantly, he hoped, but nothing… 

…how Masha had taken to watching her baby sleeping. He’d been gone from crib death for decades and, cruelly, still slept, and… 

…how David viewed his son Ian’s new ecstatic, seemingly substance-induced adventures, just as in life, only now he couldn’t die from them. David, depressed to see how little had changed, had already spent thousands on therapy, and... 

…worst of all was Jeremy Perris, whose wife Amy and toddler Alice had met an untimely end while e-biking, baby trailer and all run off the road by a speeding delivery driver trying to make quota. But when Jeremy saw they were still biking on IDND, he hung himself. To join them, it was supposed.

She’s read about this, too: the suicides. How they have skyrocketed since IDND went live. Age, gender, and race make no difference. People who have big families, who have no families, who are healthy, who are sick, who have great jobs, who are broke. It does not matter. Anybody can choose to die.

And for those who continue living, there is FOMO, so much FOMO. What look to be strange, wild rituals of dance. Gardens and beaches and the lighting always perfect, sunset colored. Some users report odd pairings and meetings that, frankly, sound manufactured: Cleopatra and Curie? Pericles and Poe? Audrey Hepburn and the real Anastasia? There are rumors of giant creaturely modes of transport, iridescent dragonfly-type machines. For certain there are towering, pink, fruit-filled cakes like no one this side has ever seen. And the garments!

All in all, things just seem better where they are.

Of course it isn’t all downside for the living who watch. Otherwise, how could IDND thrive?

And they do thrive, charging $199 per month—or $1,999 for an introductory annual membership. Many subscribers smile to see formerly chair- or bed-bound loved ones walking, running, sailing through clouds, floating on light! They check in on beloved pets, still eating shoes, or brazenly clawing heavenly divans of the most delicate textures. They see pictures with all of them singing and imagine how peaceful the melodies are, because, of course, they can not hear. What sympathetic joy! 

Yes, for some, IDND brings peace.

But images and feed might come through only infrequently after you sign up. That’s the worst part. A month? More? Really, it can be any amount of time at all, waiting. Till a smudgy, remote image—or if you are lucky, a stream, a feed of images that synthesize movement—appear, leaving one relieved or bereft. Or even just bemused.

There is so much bemusement. 

It is as if they, the dead, don’t operate with regularity where they are. They can be “outdoors” night or day, sailing a cloud one moment, and the next ensconced, asleep in a brilliant bower. They are in one place, a teal-bright sea, for a moment, then transported to a forest in prehistory. Or you’ll see them involved with a thousand others in a dance, and then suddenly floating alone, arms outstretched like Christ. Time and order do not seem to matter. And still the question nags: Are the dead curating this content for the living? Is it a lure? Or are we just interlopers and spies, witnessing what was never intended for us?

Yes, she has not downloaded IDND. But she knows about it, she wants to know. I Did Not Die. How could it possibly work?

#

On the ninety-fourth day, she wakes missing him dreadfully, more than ever before.

A million little things, every one precious. How he’d look at a problem, sometimes for hours, working out the ways to fix it. How the black, favored cat would sometimes come and look at the problem by his side. How he’d hold her hand when a plane took off. How he hated to see garages converted into anything but bigger garages. The tower of books on his nightstand. His eyelashes. That time in the meadow.

How he would have hated IDND, she realizes now. He who never curated anything, who just was. She must not sign on, cannot bring herself to. But where are you? she thinks. Is it nighttime where you are?

She continues on some three, four days more, doing six laps once or twice, eating some fruit, drinking less vodka …until the day IDND reaches out. Without warning, invitation, or explanation, she finds it one night in her email box. A free week’s subscription. 

How? She wonders. And why? Was an algorithm following her? Tracking survivors?      Had she been reported as someone grieving? She is chilled. And in some strange way, thrilled.

You are a disaster, she tells herself. But she has held out so long. 

It is nothing like she expected. He sits in an old leather chair, staring straight ahead, indoors by a lamp, in wan light. None of his books, no cats, no movement, just staring. He is wearing one of those spectacular robes, billowing even as he sits. It is spring green—to match his eyes. His mother Evelyn comes in, leaves a piece of cake on a plate beside him. He does not move or react, though he had always loved cake. And he doesn’t seem peaceful, not like others she’s heard about. Just cold, fixated, and strange. Does he miss her? Is this staring his way of watching out for her?

Then the feed breaks, and it is bad, so much more than bad. Torture. She thinks of calling Gloria, but sobbing, cannot bear the shame. Her sister? Clare or Masha? No one can help her now. She thinks of Jeremy, late father of Alice, husband of Amy. 

Was his way the way?

She drinks some vodka, probably too much. She takes up the pill bottle and sits on the closed toilet lid. It is something to consider.

But even now, thinking the thoughts she does, she cannot wash down pills with vodka. No. She goes to the kitchen for a proper glass and fills it with water. She sits on the toilet lid again. She does not know how long she sits, almost fugue, but it must be a long time before she comes to. And there is the cat, the other cat, looking into her face with his own striped face. He sits on the sink ledge next to her, right by her water glass. When she calls his name, he turns away and with his striped paw reaches out searchingly, infernally, knocking her glass of water to the tile, where it shatters into many pointed shards. 

How she screeches as the cat hops off and runs away! She throws a towel down over the floor so she can exit the bathroom without slicing her bare feet. And returns with a broom, dustpan, and paper towels, taking fifteen minutes to clean up. 

Then she is angry.

At the cat, of course. But also at herself (why had she succumbed?). At him (why had he died?). At IDND (why had they picked her, and whywhywhy would they torture her this way?).

Her rage leads her, at 2:30 am, back to the internet, to all the frantic crosstalk. And it is truly the dead of night when she finds them in her research. There is a group. Because being targeted, being tricked into I Did Not Die, they are as enraged as she. 

Yes, They Did! is their battle cry. 

They are taking action, determined no more to mix with the dead. Let Us Move On, they are called. LUMO. They have converted their tears to energy. And it is easy to join!

There is so much momentum, so much fury. There is a frequency, and a place. There had always been a way to tap in, and IDND had found it. How can it be untapped? This is LUMO’s preoccupation, as well as her own. Because having seen him once, would she stop herself from looking again? And if not, could she survive it… 

It is after five am and she cannot sit still. She has to go and help. She texts her sister and hides a key, begging her to feed the cats while she is away. She fills up the water and food bowls. Packs a light bag, leaves notes for the neighbors. Then she starts her car and drives into the rising autumn sun as it glints at many pellucid points from a light rain or mist, which seems miraculous to her. And there is a bird, a lone bird, circling in flight. She begins to count. Just over seven hundred miles to the meeting place. Then 498...153…nine. 

She will join the living soon, determined and resolute. They will find the tap and transcend it. They will break the link, right there, where the veil is thinnest.