Ted was a sober man. Ted was a serious man. Ted did what he was told. His job demanded nothing less. Did a funeral home want a mortician who giggled his way through his shift? Would it like it if he styled a corpse’s hair into spikes because ‘he felt inspired’?
No. No no and no. No such shrift would be taken; it would be shorted. Ted woke up on time arrived five minutes early did his job went home ate and went to bed. Without smiling. He had not carried on a conversation for sixteen years and counting and was probably happy about that as far as anyone (including himself) could tell.
So when a man started on his way through an intersection Ted was crossing without seeing him and had to break to avoid running him over for no reason, it was the most exciting thing to happen to him in years. Slush sprayed him from the car and the man’s eyes were wide and his fist shook and as he drove away his window rolled down and instructions were screamed out of it.
Well. Ted was on his way home already. He could afford the detour.
So he walked down to the lakefront, surely and smartly, where he undressed in the cold, numb air of March. He selected two large rocks as ballast and put them in his shoes. And then he walked down the boardwalk onto the docks and off the end of them onto the lakebed, where he trudged for a good two miles.
It wasn’t easy. He kept having to come up for air, and his limbs grew tired. Halfway through the return trip he was rudely plucked from the surface by a concerned band of paramedics.
“What the HELL was that for?” asked a polite young woman who was applying first aid with one hand and cursing him with the other.
“I was told to take a long walk off a short pier,” said Ted. “It was good exercise but cold. I don’t recommend it.”
***
The frostbite went away. The hand tremors took longer. Ted didn’t mind them because he didn’t mind anything. He didn’t mind when the supermarket ran out of bologna slices. He didn’t mind when the slush was replaced with freezing rain. He didn’t mind when his umbrella broke. He didn’t mind when on his way out of work he was mistaken for the secretary by a distraught member of the recently bereaved who was upset about something one of his fellow employees had said.
“I am not a secretary,” he informed her.
She informed him of something else. It was not something he’d ever heard before, but it was spoken with conviction and power and authority and even if he had no idea why she wanted it she wanted it very much and so he decided to get it done.
The thrift shop provided some alphabet blocks, two action figures from the 1980s and a half-eaten Barbie, and some scratched-up Legos. It was sufficient. Ted took them on his hands and himself to the highway and stepped gently and carefully into the lanes.
Horns blared. People screamed. Tires dodged around him as he sat down – careful to keep his coat out of the mud and salt and dirt – and, with impossible precision, made the Barbie punch GI Joe in the face. Then he made a little hill out of the alphabet blocks and built a lego tower on it. He’d just about decided that GI Joe was going to live in it when the sirens showed up and he was taken away.
“What the Christ were you thinking, doing that?” demanded someone made entirely of beef as they cuffed him.
“I was instructed to go play in traffic,” said Ted. “It was alright, but a bit messy”
***
The time before big holidays was always slow business – all those old and sick bodies, hanging on to see their families one last time. Ted was encouraged to use his time off. He spent much of it at home, since that was the easiest place to sit and wait, but he also took daily walks to encourage appetite and maintain his body’s muscle mass. Since vehicles had been cruel to him recently, he stayed away from the roads and walked on bike trails and footpaths, where strangers cycled and led dogs. One particularly small dog saw Ted and began barking, then ran up to him – pulling its leash loose – and attempted to chew up his shoe. He offered his hand to it in peace and it repaid him with violence and small, blunt teeth that failed to make an impression on his skin, let alone tear it.
“Your dog’s teeth aren’t very good,” he observed to its owner, who gave him his most peculiar directions yet.
“I will try this,” he said, and after purchasing some small screwdrivers and other tools and a few bouillon cubes, he did so. It was a lot of work disassembling the old revolver his uncle had left him – the bigger pieces he had to use the hacksaw on – but even that was nothing as compared to the effort of choking it down, and THAT compared even more grimly to the toilet that evening. It went so poorly he had to go to the hospital, where an impossibly annoyed and confused doctor asked him what on earth it was this time.
“Someone said I should eat my gun,” he told her. “It was a terrible idea.”
***
Three months later Ted removed some food from the fridge with a coworker’s name on it, as it was comppany policy that such things not be left overnight.
“That’s mine,” the night shift guard said.
“It’s going in the garbage,” Ted told him.
“I’m here overnight; that’s my breakfast!”
“It’s against policy.”
“That’s not how the policy works, can’t you use just a little common sense for once? Chrissakes, get that stick out of your ass!”
“It’s against policy.”
“Oh, drop dead!”
Ted considered this.
“Okay,” he said.
And dropped.
***
The funeral wasn’t very well-attended, but it was tidy and straightforward. He’d have appreciated that.