Mahjong in the afterlife, and pot roast today

I started rereading Kevin Brockmeier’s A History of the Dead last night, focusing on the odd numbered chapters, the ones offer a glimpse of the lives of those who have passed on, but who are still tethered by the memories of the living: these people are starting new businesses, renewing affairs, reading books they never got around to in their earthly lives, and tucking into ham and egg sandwiches in a city that has its own monuments, jewelry vendors, and a newspaper run off of a mimeograph machine by a guy who used to teach journalism at Columbia.

After a mysterious “great leaving” catalyzed by a plague that has swept over the earth, everyone left in the city is lodged in the memory of a young woman who is isolated in Antarctica, as part of a research expedition funded by Coca-Cola. So the city houses her parents and grandmother, several Coke executives, her best friend from third grade and her first lover as well as a guy to whom she once gave a pack of matches, an aggressive panhandler who used to be stationed outside her office, and a quartet of elderly Korean women who played mahjong in her favorite park.

One quibble with a scene set in a diner: we are told that a character can hear the tiles clicking from the booth where these women are playing….but who plays mahjong in a booth? You need to be at a square table so that your neighbor doesn’t see your tiles! Should pass this information along to Penelope, the mother of Brockmeier’s editor posthaste.

The book raises the question of what memories make up our lives, what encounters leave an impression that we carry for days, weeks, or months, what the web of the world would look like if we were the connecting thread. One of my favorite characters is one of the Coke executives who is, on the one hand, a complete asshole who is spending much of his time in this station of the beyond trying to figure out how to erase all signs of the corporation’s culpability in the spread of the deadly virus. On the other hand, Brockmeier gives you a sense of the guy’s full humanity – perhaps most acutely at a moment at which the character is cursing out the young woman left on earth since she never knew his wife, his girlfriend, or his mother, leaving him without his family in this other realm; thus a reader is left empathizing with his lyin’, cheatin’ self.

Regarding the moments that make up the days of our lives (cue the soap opera announcer’s voice here): I have been dipping back into Julie Doucet’s 365 Days, a sketchbook/journal published by Drawn and Quarterly in which she documents those experiences that usually seem to effervesce into the atmosphere: the trouble she has converting a computer file for a grant proposal, the day’s horoscope reading, making the perfect pot roast for a dinner with friends.