Life According to the Dead

Jim

Tuesday. Pizza night.

My place was a ratty apartment located on the corner of Washington and Cedar Street. I'd had a few close scrapes with potential eviction in the past couple of years, but as my landlord, Tony, was also my best friend, he had always seemed to let the rent slide just long enough for me to find myself a new job. I've never been the best with jobs, period. I've always found it hard to come up with any options that aren't mind-bogglingly boring and also pay reasonably well. Besides, by that point, I had managed to get myself fired from just about every occupation that came my way. I guess you could say I'm not really a people person.

I met Tony and Anna-Claire in my apartment at seven, just like I did every week. The three of us have known each other since grade school, and they've always been the only ones to really, truly believe the whole communicating-with-the-dead thing. Most other people just naturally assume I'm crazy, including my parents. As a kid, I usually managed to scare the psychiatrists away by casually mentioning how I'd been chatting with some dead relative of theirs recently.

Hi, I'm Jimmy Halliday. Nice to meet you, too. Yes, I talk to people after they die. Speaking of which, Nell says she knows you were having an affair with Beatrice before she died.

It worked like magic.

It was hard at first, of course. How could it not be? When I was little they called me "troubled," but I quickly learned not to be too freaked out. It's not like I was communicating with blood-soaked poltergeists or the kind of ghosts who play the organ at night just to piss off everyone living in their old house. I never thought of the people I met as spirits. Before long I just came to think of them as people – regular people, the kind of people I might pass in the street without a second thought if they were alive. The only difference was that for a few days after they kicked the bucket, I'd start noticing them – and they'd notice me, too. They would find me, and we would talk for a while, and then they'd leave. No haunting, nothing too scary or hard. Plain and simple as that.

The only hard parts came when the dead person wasn't a complete stranger. Like Tony's grandmother. Or my auntie Diana. Or Todd Anderson from my class in fifth grade. I never talked to Todd much during his life because he was a nerdy kid who wouldn't know a football if it hit him in the face (proven theory), but then one day he had a fatal asthma attack and suddenly I was trying to make the guy feel better after dying. The whole thing made me pretty sick to my stomach myself, even without having Todd follow me around afterward.

Sometimes I tell Tony and Anna-Claire about the dead people, and sometimes I don't. Mostly I don't – I guess you could say it's out of respect for people's privacy. But they did know about Peter. I'd told them partly because of the fact that he kept showing up, that he just wouldn't leave like the rest of them usually did, and partly because he had actually been murdered.

The latter was also the reason why I decided to tell them about Amanda.

Tony was already there when I got back. Tony lets himself into my place as if it's his own. He's welcome, of course, but it does get a little annoying when he starts stealing too much of my food – though technically I shouldn't complain, since I probably help myself to about the same amount of his.

"You got fired?" he asked, as soon as I walked through the door.

"Don't act so surprised. It's not the first time," I said, hanging up my coat and collapsing on the sofa. "How'd you know?"

"Checked your web history. You were searching online for how to apply for a job as an Argonaut." He looked at me from where he sat on the kitchen counter, auburn eyes glinting with amusement. "You realize that's a kind of octopus, right?"