The Afterlife Is a Limited-Liability Corporation

Everyone has a picture of what happens after you die. Pearly gates, a tunnel of light, a man with a ledger, fire if you were the kind of person who left the shopping cart in the middle of the lot. I’ve come to believe it’s none of that. I think the afterlife is a limited-liability corporation, I think it has a quarterly review, and I think you would not survive the onboarding.

That’s more or less the premise of my new novel, The Returnables, though I didn’t set out to write it. I set out to write about a man on a porch who has stopped expecting anything from the day. His name is Gary Plotz. He’s unemployed, he lives in Buffalo, his lawn is dying in patches, and there’s a thing that happened that he does not think about, which sits behind everything else like a radio playing in another room. I liked Gary immediately, the way you like anyone who has clearly given up but is still, technically, standing on the porch.

Then a man showed up at his door in a suit the color of a bruise, shot through with sequins, holding a manila folder thick as a phone book, and everything I’d planned went out the window.

The man is Terrence Midge. He represents Providence Freight and Salvage, a limited-liability corporation operating in what he calls the recall sector. Their business is the recalled dead, specifically the high-value ones, the celebrities, who apparently don’t so much die as get reassigned, the way a defective product gets pulled from shelves and sent back up the supply chain. Gary, through no fault or ambition of his own, has been selected as a handler. Nobody applies. Providence selects. The selection criteria are, and I’m quoting Terrence here, frankly none of your business, but the actuarial tables are very robust.

I fell in love with writing the corporate parts. There’s a document in the book called the CONFIDENTIAL HANDLER AGREEMENT, REVISED Q3. There’s a chapter I named “Quarterly Review of Dread” and did not have to strain to earn. It turns out the funniest thing you can do to death is give it an HR department. Make the infinite fill out a form. Have the beyond issue a compliance update. Every terrifying thing gets funnier the second somebody bureaucratizes it, and every bureaucratic thing gets sadder the second you remember it’s standing in for something you loved and lost.

Because that’s the other half. Under all the paperwork, Gary is carrying something. There’s a carpetbag by his door that stays empty and somehow keeps getting heavier. There’s the incident he won’t name. There’s the whole architecture of a man who has spent years getting very good at not hearing the radio in the other room. The recall sector, the handler agreement, the King of Rock and Roll turning up where a King has no business being, it’s all machinery I built so that Gary would eventually have to open the bag and look at what’s inside. I’m not going to tell you what’s inside. That’s the book.

I’ll tell you it’s a comedy. I stand behind the jokes, there are a lot of them, and Stan Krupka (garage archaeologist, discoverer of the Rat Balls of Eden) is personally responsible for a fair share. But I wrote it because of the bag. Everything else is the delivery mechanism: the sequined man at the door with the folder, the return you never asked to process.

The Returnables is out now in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle. Come for the corporate afterlife. Stay because you, too, have a bag by the door.

Buy it here

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Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

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