Page 13 of Earthly Ties

The maintenance man does not seem to care what she’s doing in my office; he leaves without a goodbye.

I barely notice their conversation, floating over to the dusty bookshelves, greeting the fake raven pinned to the heavy velvet curtains with a stroke of my finger over feathers I cannot feel.

Esther flicks the lamp on. “Sorry, Lucy.”

“Why?” I ask automatically, before I realize she isn’t actually talking to me. She’s talking to the Dr. Monae who is missing, whose desk she is opening without my permission. “It’s okay. Take whatever you want, if you need my consent.”

There’s no point in telling her that; she won’t hear me. But it’s hard to break the habit of saying everything out loud. By midmorning, I’ll get quiet again. It’s impressive I already remember that about myself this early in the morning. How much have I lost since dying? How many voice notes have I announced to myself, only to forget them?

I hover over the chairs in front of the desk, feeling a bit odd to see my office from the other side. I haven’t sat here since Cash was alive, when I visited him after my interview for the adjunct position, which Esther ended up getting last fall. Strange how it feels like a lifetime ago I started this job, when I was only here a semester, and Esther a semester before that. Only a year ago, Cash was alive. He sat at this desk every day, no hint yet of the rash that would bloom on his neck and seal his fate.

Esther digs through the mostly empty drawers. I never bothered unpacking my stuff; this was Cash’s office. I decorated the bare minimum required to have a personality outside of Cash’s friend, and kept everything else in boxes at home. She pauses, “Oh.”

I lean forward to see what she found. In her hand is a framed picture of Cash and me at my defense. One of the rare pictures where I’m smiling. He’d said something goofy to make my composure break as his wife took our picture. The photo is a little blurry; his wife had cracked up too.

“Why are you in a drawer?” Esther sets it on the shelf next to the photo of Cash’s family, in a row with the other photos I hadn’t had the heart to return to his wife yet, of Cash and his many friends.

She puts it right where Cash had kept it, next to the book he coauthored with me when I was still in grad school, with absolutely no academic credibility on my own and an advisor who barely remembered my existence. Among the many pictures lining the bookshelf with other lives he changed, there’s a photo of him and Gilda drinking wine together, and one of him and his wife at their hooding ceremony when they got their Ph.D.s together a decade ago. “There, back where you belong!” Esther pats it fondly.

I edge closer to Esther than is probably safe, desperate to look at them all, but especially the one of us. Had I really hidden the picture of us away? Had it been that painful to look at? The heaviness of my grief aches at seeing it again, but there’s happiness with it too.

Giving up on the desk, Esther scans the bookshelves. “Course notes, course notes, where might you be?” she sings.

Guilt digs a little deeper. “They’re in my apartment,” I reply, despite the futility. She can’t hear me. “Sorry, I never kept much here.”

Esther keeps looking for a little while longer, until her alarm goes off. “Well, I tried.” She silences her phone. “Time for class. At least it’s all my own intro classes today. One more day to figure out what the fuck I’m doing with your seminar, Lucy.”

After a heavy sigh and another muttered, “I can do this,” Esther closes the desk drawers. She taps the photo of Cash and I again with a sad smile, and shuts the door firmly behind her. I linger as long as I can, to look at the photo of Cash and I laughing together, to remember all the ways he helped me when he had no good reason to bother, other than being a kind person.

But that achy tug pulls me out of the room, and I’m forced to leave my office behind.

Following Esther as she heads upstairs to the classroom, I glide up the handrail ahead of her. For the first time, I speak to her. Not out of desperation or despair or instinct, but by choice.

“If it helps, the first few weeks of Phil of Death are mostly just history lessons about early twentieth century esoterists. You can teach from the slide decks and readings.” I pause, running through the syllabus in my head, still as clear as the day I wrote it. “It gets a little more complicated later in the semester, because that’s when the independent research gets harder to connect for discussions, but we’ll get you through it, okay?”

Esther doesn’t answer. She simply hums to herself as she marches up the winding stairs to the lecture hall in the Castle tower.

I may not be much help, but I can try. I owe it to her, to Cash, to myself. Because Lucy Monae has never been content with just knowing things. What is the point of everything I’ve worked for, if I won’t even attempt to share my expertise? I can continue to observe, to record, to memorize, and I can try to help. I can try to pay forward the kindness Cash showed me. Right now, Esther doesn’t need to know what it’s like to be dead, or that she’s being haunted, but she does need to know what death means. And there’s no one—living or dead—better than me to help her.

Seven

Esther’s not doing a terrible job.

The lie, even to myself, makes me wince.

She…is doing better than I expected her to do, but the bar is set very low.

Esther’s a perfectly capable professor. She is very competent at teaching intro classes, incredibly passionate about queer and feminist theory. But this poor woman has no idea where to begin with teaching the Philosophy of Death. Not that I blame her. Not many professors could pick up and teach another professor’s seminar in their specialty with virtually no notice. Especially two weeks into the semester. And without all of the course notes which are still locked in my apartment, presumably along with my rotting corpse.

Esther clears her throat, fiddling with her pen as she launches a presentation, using it to gesture at the screen. “I’ve compiled the notes from our forum into a slide deck. Thank you to those who responded to each other’s posts. I won’t read every response since you can see it on the slide deck, but I wanted to call out some common themes. The question posed was, ‘Why do people care about death or the afterlife?’”

Tugging down the hem of her wool jacket that rode up on her hips when she raised her arm, Esther clicks through the next slide. “An interesting theme that emerged was the motivation for wanting to know what’s next. Curiosity, fear, love, and hope were all brought up several times. What other connections do you see with these themes? What connections could be made with the reading assignment for today? Does anyone want to take a stab at summarizing Plato’s Phaedo?”

I hover over the desk next to her, pretending to actually sit on it, as if we’re leading the class together. “Give them a chance to answer. Pro tip I learned from Cash: Count to ten after each question. Gives the introverts like me enough time to work up the courage to raise their hand.”

Considering Esther panic-read all of the course materials last weekend, she seems more prepared than I would be in her shoes. If I suddenly had six intro classes to teach, my Phil of Death seminar, and her Beyond Duality seminar, I would have cried a lot more than she has.

Being able to teach the Philosophy of Death is the whole reason I applied for Cash’s unexpectedly vacant job—professors at this tiny private college get to teach a seminar on whatever they want, as long as at least ten students register for it. Far cry from the state school I was an adjunct at before this, where I churned out intro class after intro class on classic philosophers, graded endless papers on rudimentary logic, and never taught anything interesting.