Eileen

15

Lessons on Dying: Making Sure People Attend Your Funeral, and Other Things
By Eileen Deng

“The sun rose and everything fell,” Alex said.
“Oh my Lord, he is being overly dramatic,” the angel next to him said.
Alex paused. What was this guy’s problem? Just because he has a fancy halo and a pair of white wings doesn’t mean he’s got some sort of moral high ground or anything.
“Gabriel, stop being so hateful," God boomed. A new island in Hawaii formed. "The more dramatic stories usually get more retweets." God turned to face Alex and pressed record on his phone. "Continue, my son."
"There's not, um, really much else to say, God."
God sighed. A tornado formed down on Earth.
“Gabriel, why is everyone always so unwilling to tell me all the details?"
Gabriel pressed "Post" and looked up at God to shrug.

Facebook:
Gabriel777
1 min
Feeling bored while listening to another sob story—with God and 2,483,274,194 others. #killmenow #butimalreadyinheaven #yol4ever
2,384 likes 274 comments

Ding! Alex's phone vibrated slightly in his pocket. "Oh cool, there's signal up here? Wow! I'm the first one of my friends to be tagged by an angel."
“That’s not really something to feel accomplished for…” Gabriel said, throwing his head to the side to brush away the side bangs on the left side of his face.
God tapped his fingers impatiently. Little rain drops got prematurely knocked out of the clouds. "Hush Gabriel, stop bickering. Thank God—myself. The app for memory viewing has finally downloaded."
"There's an app for that?! Are you gonna use that on me?”
“Yes it's been super helpful since Steve Jobs came up here, our technological advances have progressed a lot with the help of iPhones and myself. Now hold still Alex—"
“Wait what—"

***

“Ouch, ouch, ouch...where are we?" Alex asked as he slowly lifted himself up from the floor. He was surrounded by the aroma of coffee beans, scones, and the joy of having free wifi. Starbucks.
Next to him he found his iPhone 6, facing upside down. He quickly reached for the phone and checked the screen, making sure it didn’t crack. Suddenly, his phone started to glow and feel warm. He dropped it to the ground. (Thank God for his Otterbox case.)
“You’re very welcome, Alex, but please be gentle with me," he heard God's voice say. "Stop dropping me all over the ground."
“G-God?" Alex asked. He looked down at his phone, picked it up, and wiped the screen with his sleeve—a routine he has performed many times. "Why are you in my phone?"
“I am not in your phone, for God cannot be confined in a phone. Rather, I seemed to have turned into your phone."
"What the he—"
“Heaven's doing was this?"
“Er, sure."
"Whenever I use the app, I must take the form of whatever is most important in the person's life I am viewing.”
Alex scratched an old bug bite that reactivated after being dormant for some time. He had never felt so great of a judgmental aura from his phone, not even when he asked Siri: "Siri, what is 0 divided by 0?"

Siri:
Imagine you have 0 cookies that you split evenly among 0 friends. How many cookies does each person get? See, it doesn't make sense. And Cookie Monster is sad that there are no cookies. And you are sad that you have no friends.

He couldn't eat another cookie for a whole 30 minutes after that.
“Usually,” God continued, “I take the form of a mother, a father, maybe an older sibling, a wise teacher, a last lover, or a faithful friend.”
Alex scratched even harder, a rash red color formed on his forearm.
“His phone’s probably the last three things,” Gabriel snarked, throwing his side bangs back with the head jerk maneuver.
What’s this guy’s problem? Alex thought.
“I don’t have any problems.”
Okay, so he’s in my head. Great. Just what I—
“So,” God’s voice boomed, “Why do you think we were transported here out of all your memories?”
A wave of images of AP textbooks and classroom handouts layered on a small table while Alex and his girlfriend sat with their laptops and shared notes appeared. He felt the same urge to massage his forehead as he did the night before the AP tests and he was running on 2 hours of sleep and 4 bottles of 5 hour energy. Was he getting a headache?
Alex shrugged. “‘Cause of the free wifi? That’d probably make you stronger since you’re a phone now…”
“No. No, no,” God said. “This place is special to you because…”
Another wave came. This time it brought memories of him grabbing hot chocolate as a child with his dad. His dad wasn’t there to order him his first coffee. He had to do it himself. Another pulsing feeling in his head, as if a fetus formed inside the cavity of his skull. Would there be Advil in Heaven?
“‘Cause I always came here to only buy one drink and sit there for hours mooching off of the free wifi?”
“Forget about the wifi for a second, Alex. This is where you had your last date with your girlfriend.”
Alex scrunched his face and itched his bug bite. The skin hole where the bug had bitten him started bleeding.
“Your girlfriend? Sia? And not the singer of IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII'm gonna swiiiiiiing frooom the—"
“Okay, okay. I know what her name is. I was just trying to think of what our last date was like."
Welp, Alex thought, I guess I can now tell Sia that she has the singing voice of a god, he chuckled. He remembered her singing karaoke on their first date. Well, it wasn’t really a date since they were not a couple yet and they went with a huge group of friends. Still, that was the moment when he noticed her, singing the Giving Tree. He also loved the Plain White T’s.

Sia:
If all you wanted was love, why would you use me up, cut me down, build a boat, and sail away. When all I wanted to be was your giving tree. Settle down, build a home and make you happy? Settle down, build a home, and make you happy?

“I think the Lord's singing voice is amazing,” Gabriel puffed. “You should feel honored to have heard it.”
“You don't need to remember it. We’re gonna see it play out right now.”
As the iPhone, or rather God, said this, Alex was walking in with a naked Sia.
“What the fu—dge?” Alex said. “I know for a fact that she was not naked during our date. I would have noticed.”
“I’m sure you would have,” snickered Gabriel. Alex couldn’t see him but somehow he knew that Gabriel did the little head jerk again.
Shut up, Alex thought. Why don’t you just get a bobby pin for your bangs or something?
“Are you sure?” God asked. “The only reason she’s, ahem, not wearing any clothes, is because you didn’t notice what she was wearing.”
“What?”
“Have you noticed how no one is really here? We can only see them as much as you paid attention to them during that moment. Look, people materialize a little bit when you try sidestepping them and look up from your phone, but they immediately disappear afterwards.”
Alex watched himself and his girlfriend head to grab the tall seats near the window. She seemed cold by the seats, how come he didn’t notice? In the past, when either of them were stuck taking a table under a vent, they would go outside to the little kiddy park and sit on a bench by the small playground where little kids would sit in the sandbox and dig. They were too young to build castles or houses, but they did what they could, and all the digged up sand created small mountains next to them. Then one kid would accidentally let sand fly into another kid’s eyes and the other kid would cry and the moms would stop talking and come take their kids away. Memory Alex walked over to join the long line that materialized. Suddenly, the memory world shifted.

***

Alex’s vision cleared and he found himself contained in a small square. Inside the square he had an arm around Sia’s shoulder as they stood in front of the Chicago Bean. The small square was in a bigger rectangle that said, “What’s on your mind?”. Above, there was a bar that said ‘Status’, ‘Photo’, and ‘Check In’. Above that was a blue bar with a search bubble.
“Ah, Facebook. I approve,” Gabrielle said as he brushed his hair away with his hand.
The posts started moving up, all different posts from Humans of New York, The Best of Tumblr, Lunarbaboon...Memory Alex stopped at Amy Simon’s post:

Facebook:
Amy Simon added 32 new photos to the album: Summer2k15.
22 hours
Had so much fuun today! Miss you guys <3 #squad with Sia LeBlanc and 8 others.

“Hi, what would you like to order?”
“One venti iced skinny hazelnut macchiato sugar-free syrup extra shot light ice no whip. One lemonade.”
The lemonade was for Sia. She had a weird obsession with lemons that he found out the first time she cooked something for him for a picnic. That’s probably what she would say was their first date. She had little boxes of different dishes prepared, and Alex brought some kabobs to grill. She brought a bag of lemons from ShopRite.
He clicked on Amy Simon, on About, on More about Amy, and scrolled down to the relationship status. It’s complicated.
More time elapsed in the phone background. Somewhere through the liking, commenting, and stalking, Memory Alex had managed to finish half of his drink.
“So…” Sia said. Memory Alex glanced up. “How was your trip to Chicago?”
He looked back down at his phone. “Hm? Yeah, Chicago, yeah it was great. Got to see the bean. What ‘bout you? Last week?”
“Idiot I was with you on that trip!”
Alex looked up and swat at a fly. “Huh?”
“Why would I ask you? I was with you! Look! Look at your profile picture! Who is that standing right next to you and holding a peace sign?”
“Oh yeah...sorry Sia, just a little distracted.”
“You, you’re always distracted. You’re always staring at your phone and giggling like a first grader at some cat meme. You want a meme? I’ll give you a meme.” She made her bag do a high kick and hang onto her shoulder and stood up so that the chair made a loud friction sound against the floor. “Caption it: when girlfriend leaves me because I’m being a douchebag.”
“Wait Sia! Urgh, darn it.” Alex tried slapping the fly on his arm. “Darn it!”
Memory Alex ran out of the Starbucks and the others got transported to inside his car.
Alex returned to his bug bite. The blood had dried into a small dot scab.
Memory Alex started driving down Eisenhower Parkway at 78 mph. He did the small crowd weaving movements that he learned from having to reach from one end of the hallway to the other to reach the cafeteria line. Little images of him and Sia racing each other down the hallway from their third period science class appeared. They’d inch toward the door slowly even though their teacher always said, “I’m the one who lets you go, not the bell.”
He held the home button on his phone.
“Siri, where is the nearest flower shop?”
“Here is what I have found: Big Lemon Tire 0.7 mi…”
“No!” He pressed the button again.
“Siri, where is the nearest flaaa-wer shop?”
“Here is what I found: Funeral Flower Shop 0.2 mi…”
He sighed. He clicked on the name and ‘Directions to Here’. ‘Route’. ‘Start’.

iMessage
Today at 3:54 PM
Sia
You still there
Wait
Im comin back
...

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP

***

“Well,” God said, “We’re almost at the ending.”
Alex buried his head in his hands. “Do we have to continue? We can just end here. I get it. I screwed up and I died.”
“We can’t, my son. We have to read the whole memory...to till you reach me.”
Alex stared at his body resting on the white sheets, with wires connected to him and monitors surrounding him. His eyes roamed to the phone placed on the small tray next to the head of the bed. The body’s hand reached out for the phone and grabbed. Memory Alex slid open the home screen and opened Facebook.
A few seconds later, a small vibration appeared in Alex’s phone, which was in his pocket.

Notification
5:50 AM
Sia LeBlanc and 50 other people are going to your event: Alex’s Funeral.

Outside, the sun started rising. Memory Alex’s belly stopped moving up and down. Alex threw his own phone down, and the memory shattered. The sun rose and everything fell.

***

“So,” God said, “We’re back.”
Alex stared at his sad bug bite. It had started bleeding again.
“That story was definitely a lot more thorough that your ‘I got into a car accident and died’ one. Gabriel, give him a small tour.”
“Let’s make this quick,” Gabriel said, leading Alex down a path lined with golden doors. “I know there’s probably only one section you really want to see: this door leads to the technology section.” Gabriel smirked and flipped his side bangs to the side.
Alex frowned in disgust. Why would I want to use my phone after how I died? he thought.
“And just in case you’re trying to be an idiot, I’m not inside your head anymore,” Gabriel said as he left Alex there at the door.
He could strangely imagine Gabriel with a group of head jerking side bang flippers, laughing at his story. Alex sighed and stared at his phone, which had broken when he threw it to the ground. There was no one to talk to and he was bored.
Who else RSVP’d to my funeral? he thought. Steve better not be coming. That jerk was always ogling Sia. Bet he’ll take this as his lucky chance, the weird voodoo dolls he’s been carrying around finally worked. If only I had my phone and I could check...
Alex stared at the door handle and slowly turned the knob.