Playlist for the Dead
Michelle Falkoff
ALL MY YEARS of watching TV made me think it was possible you could find a dead body and not know it until you turned the person over and found the bullet hole or stab wound or whatever. And I guess in some ways that was right—Hayden was lying under the covers, tangled up in a bunch of his lame-ass Star Wars sheets (how old were we, anyway?), just like he always was when I slept at his house.
Hayden had always been a hard sleeper; sometimes I had to practically roll him out of bed to get him to wake up. Which wasn’t easy—he was short and kind of round, and while I’m a lot taller, I’m more of a string bean kind of guy, and when he was out cold he was hard to move. When I saw him lying there I sighed, trying to figure out how to incorporate the apology from the night before, the apology I’d come over to give him, with the apology for dumping him out of bed onto the floor.
The sound of my sigh seemed loud to me, though, and it took me a minute to figure out why: Hayden wasn’t snoring. Hayden always snored. My mom, who’s a nurse, thought he had sleep apnea; the sound of his buzzing made it all the way down the hall to her room when he stayed at my house. She kept trying to get him to talk to his mom about getting some kind of mask that would help, but I knew that would never happen. Hayden didn’t talk to his mom unless he absolutely had to, and he was even less likely to ask his dad.
The silence in the room started to freak me out. I kept trying to convince myself it was nothing, that Hayden had just found a good position to sleep in that quieted his steady drone or something, but that would have been some kind of minor miracle, and even after five years of Hebrew school I didn’t really believe in miracles.
I gave his leg a little shove. “Hayden, come on.”
He didn’t move.
“Hayden, seriously. Wake up.”
Nothing. Not even a grunt.
I was just about to grab a stormtrooper’s head and pull down the sheets when I saw the empty vodka bottle on Hayden’s desk, standing in between his laptop and his model of the Millennium Falcon, just next to where he was sleeping.
That was weird—Hayden didn’t drink at all, not even at the few parties we’d been to. And from what I could tell he hadn’t had time to take as much as a sip from the keg last night. There was no reason for that bottle to be there. Unless he’d been even more bent out of shape than I realized; he could easily have taken it out of his dad’s liquor cabinet when he got home.
I felt my stomach churn with what I realized was guilt. That must have been why he wouldn’t wake up: he was hung over. Even through my guilt, I couldn’t help but start laughing. Hayden’s first hangover—I was going to give him so much shit for this when he finally woke up. Then I’d drag him off for a greasy breakfast and we’d make up. And everything would be fine.
Now he just had to wake up.
I moved closer to the head of the bed, sniffing cautiously in case he’d puked. The air smelled like it normally did in his house, overly disinfected, the pine scent overwhelming anything else. I swear his mom must have had cleaners come in every single day. I debated whether to roll him over or just pull the pillow out from beneath his head, but just as I went for the pillow I knocked over the empty vodka bottle with my elbow. It fell to the floor with a clang, taking down some other stuff with it.
I bent over to pick it up. No need to have Hayden wake up pissed that I’d made a mess; we had enough to talk about as it was. I grabbed the bottle, and then saw a prescription bottle next to it and grabbed that too. It was a bottle of Valium. It had Hayden’s mother’s name on it. And it was empty. I didn’t know how many pills were supposed to have been in there, but according to the date on the bottle, she’d picked it up just a couple of days before. Which meant she’d gone through a whole bottle practically overnight.
I looked at the vodka bottle.
Or Hayden had.
And then I saw one more thing I’d knocked on the floor. A thumb drive, next to a torn-off scrap of notebook paper. For Sam, it read. Listen and you’ll understand.
That’s when I called 911.
THE MORNING OF HAYDEN’S FUNERAL I couldn’t get out of bed. I don’t mean that I didn’t want to—if anything, I wanted the day to go by as quickly as possible, and if getting up was the first step, then I was in.
But I couldn’t do it.
It was a weird feeling, kind of like being stuck in a block of ice. I pictured that scene from Star Wars where Han Solo gets frozen in carbonite, hands in front of him as if he could somehow protect himself, mouth half open in silent protest. It was an image Hayden had always found haunting; he said it freaked him out every time he saw it, and he’d seen The Empire Strikes Back maybe a thousand times. I’d seen it nearly as many but for some reason I thought the whole carbonite thing was hilarious, and it was even funnier how twitchy it made Hayden. For his birthday I’d bought him an iPhone cover with the frozen Han Solo image on it, and I’d slipped frozen Han Solo ice cubes into his soda.
Remembering the look on his face made me laugh, and laughing seemed to break the spell. I could move again, though I didn’t want to anymore. Moving meant I was awake, and being awake meant Hayden was really dead, and I wasn’t quite ready to admit that yet. And laughing felt wrong, but also good, and the fact that it made me feel good also made me feel guilty, which brought me back to wrong. Really, I didn’t know how to feel. Sad? Check. Pissed off? Definitely.
What were you thinking, Hayden?
“What?” My mother cracked the door open and peered in at me. Her curly brown hair was twisted into a braid, and she was wearing a dress instead of scrubs. “Did you ask me something, Sam?”
“No, just talking to myself.” I hadn’t realized I’d said it out loud.
She opened the door wider. “Still in bed? Come on, we’ve got to get cracking here. You know I’m not going to be able to stay for the whole thing—I’m going to be late for work as it is.” She snapped her fingers a couple of times. She wasn’t exactly the warm and fuzzy type.
“I can’t get ready if you don’t get out.” It came out sharper than I meant it, but she must have understood because she closed the door without saying anything, but not before hanging something on the back of my door on her way out. A suit, the one I’d worn to my cousin’s wedding last summer. She must have ironed it for me. I felt like even more of a jerk than I already did.
I got out of bed, turned on my computer, and pulled up the playlist I’d found on Hayden’s thumb drive. He’d left it for me, knowing I would find it, probably even knowing I’d find him—I was always the one to apologize first after our fights. I couldn’t stand staying mad. He must have realized I’d come over, even after how we’d left things.
I’d been listening to it constantly over the past couple of days, trying to figure out what he meant. Listen and you’ll understand. What was I supposed to understand? He’d killed himself and left me here all alone, and left me to find him. And I was pretty sure it was my fault, though that wasn’t something I was prepared to think about at the moment. But I’d listened and listened, looking for the song that would confirm it, the song that would lay all the blame on me. So far I hadn’t found it.