now i might be getting this wrong or just that its from j so dont trust it or do with grains of salt but after he came home and i told him we were pregs and we talked it out late into morning he excited but about which i couldnt tell insisted on telling me about his presentation. he said the curator liked his text actually liked it. fact: that in the egyptian embalming process not only are all the organs and glands removed through the nose and jarred and their cavities lined with resin and replaced with linens but by now the ancient mummies have been replaced in full in that all that human flesh and bone has turned to like bitumen or like grains of natron salt. fact: whether it was a religious thing to satisfy the gods or the peoples expectations of their rulers or else just a practical consideration because a pyramid ramping up to the realm of the gods could take such effort and money and so many people and so much time regardless the first thing that all the pharaohs did upon ascending to power was to commission and break ground on their tombs.

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I left Booth 8.S42 before doing anything dicey like A a Q, give or take advice, explain. I had to get away from that mortuary, Lisabeth when she returned, myself even. Szlay Literistic will have its pick of eulogists, obituarists, and apt quotation epitaphs—though for sheer eloquence none will surpass the silent punctuation of “Reykjavík, Iceland,” that pause reassuring me that I had the same city/country combo in mind while also, condescending. “Reykjavík, Iceland”—that comma spoke—I heard that comma, I saw it on Seth’s tongue before he spoke it, or didn’t: Aar’s bemused rectitude had become just a tic.

Seth, I’d been around that type before—back when I was new to a life I was better than, I’d been that type—too resentful to deal with anyone not me.

I’m imagining an airplane, planing through the air—a jet swooping through every cloud and so through everything swirling within the Cloud—all the Canadian maps, Greenland facts, and Frequently Asked Questions about water, average temperature of the Arctic (water, land, air temps), average surge of glaciers (time of year dependent), airline routes, ticket pricing, protocol for dealing with passengers deceased en route, which plane models have onboard morgues, or whether the attendants automatically upgrade corpses to first class. Aar’s flight soaring through the omnibus nimbus, through all charts and graphs, all blogs and castings and torrential feeds, until the compressed uncompressed, the zipped unzipped, and stormed with every word, every letter, I’ve ever written, the .docs, the emails, every bit I’ve deigned to store—Aar passing through them all and though he wouldn’t have had the time or life to read them, I’d like to imagine that he noticed them, and that he noticed what was missing from them—this.

LH403 (Lufthansa), Newark—Frankfurt, 18:05—Never, passenger Szlay, Aaron, losing life with altitude, losing life with speed, breasting the meridian untimely, to be descended with as a deceased body for burial under Iceland.

A corpse borne away winged to the lowerland, the iceland, that had the ring of saga to it—not a book to be written now, but a myth if written deep hesternal.

Break a hunk of ice off the land, crack off a chunk the same proportions as Manhattan Island, then slab Aar’s emberous body on out, the winds floating a hyemal pyre melting toward the Pole. Now that’s a way to pass.

Before simile rose like a star, before the star of metaphor rose, death was north, beyond Ultima Thule. This explains why the preeminent mourners are northerners, because they’re already dead. In an unheated zone of the hall Slavs huddled together, in furs clipped with leaky pens like amulets, talismanic charms. All you can ever hope for is to expire peacefully among a people who deny Self-Help, and who refuse to countenance any genre distinctions between Religion and Spirituality. Their stalls repped books both origs and trans, appropriate for all ages, mortality being a market unto itself. On angels and demons, on thaumaturgy (thaumaturgia), eschatology (eschatologia), and Ragnarök (Рагнáрёк)—books that in this world have to toil in Polish or Ukrainian or Russian, but that in the next world will repose in print forever in that one language after this we’ll all share—yes, ja, da. A drink? Why not?

To you, Aar. Prost, prosit, l’chaim.

I was drinking all the whites and reds on offer—free—and what appeared to be the Messe staple, prosecco, uncorked to toast Cal in German, Romanian, Bulgarian, Svorsk, fits of fizzy ebullience for whichever laureate just fell off a list and won the Booker, the sensation de rigueur of the rentrée littéraire, the finalists of the Prix Goncourt and Renaudot. But then I was sampling the clear harder stuff too, accepting shots like prizes, gripping bottles like they were the 108th Annual Stockholm Oslo Helsinki Awards. Members of the Royal Academy, thank you for the vodka. My ration aquavit, appreciated. I wouldn’t be standing here with you today if it weren’t for Aaron Szlay. Wouldn’t, weren’t, barely standing. A man who loved his sister, Miriam, his niece, Achsa, and the NY Knickerbockers, even through the post-Ewing/Isaiah Thomas Era. A man who also loved women he wasn’t related to, and never engaged in oragenital stimulation without trying to make it mutual and simultaneous. He died above Iceland, which has nothing to do with Thor Balk, because I am sane. He is survived by a diner out on York Avenue, which, like him, would always refill an empty glass.

The Lapps clapped bookends stylized like sepulchral menhirs, condolence applause. I was about to lead everyone in a rousing kaddish. But the only editor who was also the only writer who was also the only reader in Greenland lit the cig in my mouth. A guard preempted with “Rauchen Verboten,” but then used his body English.

“Alright, alright, I’ll go immolate outside.”

Wettish slate the sky. The satellites were wheeling.

Faces surrounded—from Midtown, the Flatiron, faces with whom I might’ve shared rides leaving parties in Park Slope or Astoria. Or with whom I might’ve had lifechanging convos about slipped my mind subjects stumbling south down the Bowery from a launch for a handsewn letterpressed poetry chapbook of two pages in a limited edition of 12.

They said they were going back to the hotel, so I went along, but it wasn’t my hotel. It was too modern, too minimal as maximal luxe—it was this immense mercury raindrop, shaped like a tear.

Into, and through, the lobby—to throng the elevators, but I took the suspension stairs, which were mocked up into a bookcase holding coffinsized volumes.

I tried lifting the cover or lid of, I won’t record which, but it was nailed.

Up on the mezzanine was this beton empyrean of ballroom, with a party on. And who wasn’t there? I mean that literally. Who wasn’t?

We clocked each other out in the vestibule—this lady and I—sciamachy by the cloakroom hung between the doorways. We clocked each other but let it go.

I studied the wall until she went inside. They were raffling off the wall. I took a ticket. I had one chance to win the wall. At the end of the night the DJ would draw the numbers. The wall was a series of screenbanks stacked like shelves that showed new books and if I liked any title flashing past all I had to do was doubleclick it open and stand amidst the clamor and read.

This lady, she was my successor—putative, emphasis on the first two syllables, because she was Spanish, barrio Spanish, Afro-Cuban NY.

I’m not trying to say she was my replacement, I’m not trying to say I was replaceable, only that I once worked for, and that she still worked for, the Times—our careers might’ve overlapped for a weekend edition. But while I’d written criticism and then quit, she’d been hired to cover the publishing beat, rather the media beat, whose “news” about how much culture was being bought or sold for, how much it grossed, and the business behind its production, was now unequivocally established as the apotheosis of culture and criticism both: the dramas and appraisals of boardroom and backstage, in one convenient package.