On the morning of his death, Dumont is late. We don’t blame him—we like Dumont. There’s no denying he has a sweetness to him, an inviting, innocent smile that’s not worth murdering. But who is worth murdering? Certainly not Dumont. He graduated from Wagner a few years ago, was the basketball team’s starting shooting guard before he quit to focus on his senior thesis, a post-structural examination of Faulkner’s Light in August, which he clearly found to be important given he sometimes recited select topic sentences to us during afternoon breaks. We appreciate his earnestness, his excessive belief in himself.
But how can we really know who he is? We discuss this now, in the conference room, over coffee. Our managing editor, Corrin, wonders why Dumont came to work at Décès in the first place. Couldn’t he have gotten a gig at Nat Geo or the Times? Susan, our creative director, reminds us that Décès is the most prolific visual arts magazines in the country. It is an honor to work here. No publication captures death’s specificity and subtly and subtext like Décès. Other magazines have tried to copy our model, but they inevitably fizzle into horror porn. Décès makes death a thing to celebrate rather than fear. Or at least that’s what the mission statement says. If you work here, you come to terms with it in your own way.
Besides, as Maria, our photography lead, points out, the risk of death at Décès is marginal. She points at Kevin, then Samuel, then me, and says, “You’ve all made careers here. You’re sooner to get hit by a car than die at Décès.” We nod in agreement. She flattens her bangs with the wedge of her thumb and smiles a weak smile.
Even still, we wonder why Dumont has to die. He is handsome and charming and has a promising future. He told Lambert that his girlfriend is “the one,” that he wanted to get married in British Columbia, under the shadow of mountains. Dumont’s probably late because he’s making love to his girlfriend, a passionate feat filled with sobbing and long kisses. She’s probably begging him to leave the country and he’s probably explaining to her that that’s not how Décès works. He either dies for the magazine or gets federally prosecuted for violating a killing contract. Besides, he says, the magazine does important work. It makes people feel at least marginally better about entering the unknown space beyond. Isn’t that a good thing? A transcendent thing? A thing worth dying for?
Or maybe Dumont says none of this. Maybe he and his girlfriend sit silent at their kitchen table, drinking lukewarm coffee, unable to say anything worth saying. Maybe they can’t even look at each other. Maybe they can’t even breathe.
Brady Brickner-Wood is a writer based in Maine. His essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere, and his fiction has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, and Quarterly West.