We're All Excited, We're All Gonna Die

Scotland’s sister had died sixteen times between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-seven. She had a habit of faking her own death only to reappear like Huckleberry Finn a few months later. The explanation was always art. Her art. The first time she did it, Scotland screamed at her. He had grieved. He had mourned. It had been two hundred agonizing days. She was his only family. He thought he would spend the rest of his life alone.

“But don’t you see,” she said, “You are alone. We all are. I was just trying to remind you of that.”

She told him this while laying on the lumpy mattress in his college dorm room. His sister was four years older than him, and she semi-raised him after their parents were killed in a helicopter crash somewhere in Reykjavik. Like Ireland, his sister, they were artists. They were in Iceland to investigate whether or not they could get a bear to attack them as part of a commission for the Cleveland Modern Art Museum. The plan was to have an Icelandic bear attack one of them while the other filmed it. When Scotland, only fourteen at the time, mentioned that people don’t usually survive bear attacks, his mother told him that it was impossible to kill a real artist.

“If that’s true,” he replied, “Why are so many artists dead?”

His mother didn’t have an answer for that so she kissed him on the top of his head and went back to making minestrone for dinner. They mainly ate soups. His father was on the roof of their apartment building in downtown Cleveland at the time trying to move stars using telepathy. His sister was eighteen and off at some boyfriend’s house. That was the year she decided that, rather than go to college, she would simply bed college professors for the next four years. After their dalliances, she would ask them questions and try to learn as much as she could, and it would cost her nothing. Her parents approved of this plan, provided she stayed on the pill and didn’t sleep with any psychology professors.

“They’ll try and manipulate you,” her mother said, “They can’t help it. It’s like how if you scream at a bear, it’ll attack you. It’s in their nature.”

“At least we hope so,” said Scotland’s father, “You’d hate to go all the way to Iceland and not get attacked by a bear.”

His parents were always in the middle of several conversations at once. There was no point in asking them any questions about anything they were discussing, because half the time, they’d assume you were asking about something else entirely, and they’d begin to sound like a Lewis Carroll character.

Any fears about the bear attack were moot when a phone call came in around 4am (8am Iceland time), and a man with a thick accent and very poor English informed Scotland that his parents had been killed. Presumably they were taking a helicopter to some remote part of the country to find the bears they were looking for, but they never made it that far. The teenager never bothered to get more details than that, because talking about the death of his parents often gave him panic attacks. When his sister returned home later that morning after having spent the night with an Applied Mathematics professor, she found her brother seated at the kitchen table with a glass full of egg yolks and a plate covered in milk-soaked ham.

Ireland was thrilled. She thought this was her younger brother’s first foray into the art world. She sat across from him and waited patiently for him to describe what he was going for with his breakfast presentation. Instead his head tilted, and he told her that they were both orphans.

Four years later, she died for the first time.

Scotland knew that if he went anywhere near the arts, a curse would befall him. The way some people could carry a gene that would make them susceptible to alcoholism or drug addiction, he knew that inside him was the potential for utter ruin if he even so much as thought about modern art.

His sister did not share his concern. She felt they owed it to their parents to take up the mantle. Ireland even suggested they go to Ireland and complete the bear attack film their parents never finished. Scotland couldn’t go, nor did he want anything to do with carrying on a legacy that meant never having money for rent or food or clothes that weren’t purchased from the sales bin at Goodwill. His sister called him a traitor to the culture. She said that if he refused to accept his destiny as a great artist, then he was no brother of hers.

The two continued to share the apartment where they grew up, but conversations were few and far between. Ireland was working on a sculpture of a helicopter being consumed by flames as part of a commission from the Cleveland Trauma and Healing Through the Arts fund, and Scotland had found something that could possibly set him up for a halfway decent life.

Football.

It never occurred to him that he could be adept at any sport, let alone the sport. The one that people seemed to get the most excited about every time there was a Friday night game at the Wes Craven Stadium next to his school. It wasn’t until his gym teacher pulled him aside to ask if he’d ever considered playing that Scotland realized he did, in fact, have the build of a football player. He was a larger boy with broad shoulders, and one of those muscular frames that most people had to work very hard to attain. His parents may have given him a predisposition to recklessness and poverty, but they also provided him with an attractive set of genes.

The coach asked him if he would try out for the team, but signaled to him that were he to try out, it would be a given that he’d secure a spot somewhere on the bench. Not much play his first year, but after that, he could see a lot of action. Maybe even get himself a scholarship. Scotland didn’t bother to tell him that he had no idea how to play football. He knew a few terms, and he knew that concussions were prevalent, but other than that, he was in the dark. At the tryout, he mimicked what the other boys on the field were doing, and when nobody laughed at him, he assumed that he hadn’t made a total fool of himself. After managing to tackle one of the seniors, he heard the coach whoop over on the sidelines, and he began to develop a sense of optimism that had evaded him his entire life.

His position on the team infuriated his sister. She went from giving him the silent treatment to haranguing him everyday while making him a breakfast of a deformed set of pancakes and two cigarettes. He’d take two puffs of each cigarette and then put it out in the maple syrup. His sister was too busy lecturing him to notice.

“You are participating in the downfall of American taste,” Ireland said, already on her third cigarette, “Mom and Dad would be appalled. They would disown you.”

“Yeah,” he said, “If only they hadn’t cared more about getting footage of a bear eating Dad than they did about you or me.”

“The bear was never going to eat Dad,” Ireland replied, not willing to lose the argument, thereby changing the subject, “I think it was just supposed to give him a few scratches and then they would have scared it off by doing that thing where you raise your arms and yell.”

In spite of the arguing, Scotland found that he couldn’t help but grow close to his sister. They understood each other in a way that nobody else could. Each had traits of their parents that served as a comforting connection to the two lost souls that used to occupy the apartment with loud music and weed and overdue library books and Post-It notes with ideas that would never come to fruition and red envelopes indicating the water or the electricity was about to get shut off and random pets that would appear and then disappear like a one-eyed cockatoo or a bulldog that looked like Paul Newman.

Their closeness was the reason Scotland couldn’t believe it when Ireland faked her own death and didn’t tell him. He knew she was eager to establish the kind of career their parents had, but neither of them had ever done anything so hurtful to the people they loved, unless you counted getting themselves killed in a foreign country. For a day or two, Scotland wondered if their deaths had been staged as well. Ireland promised him that a death hoax would have been too complicated for their parents to pull off. She told him that she was now operating on a level far beyond anything they were capable of when they were alive.

Scotland was not someone who could be fooled twice. When Ireland died the second time, he didn’t even arrange a funeral. His college football career was taking off, and he couldn’t allow himself to be distracted--not because he cared about winning games, but because football was the vehicle meant to take him to other places. What those places would be, he couldn’t say, but he knew they were better than a rundown life shared with a performance artist who insisted on convincing people she was a corpse. Ireland was resurrected the night after his team advanced to the finals. He smelled her cigarette before he even walked through the door to the apartment he was sharing with two of the guys on his team. When he walked into the living room, he saw Ireland on the couch with both of his roommates kneeling at her feet. She was smoking and feeding them olives from a small bowl by her side.

“Your roommates need more discipline,” she said, “I can probably tame one of them, but both might be a challenge. Why didn’t you throw me a funeral?”

“Because I knew you weren’t dead.”

“I sent you a letter telling you I was dead.”

“And I knew you were lying.”

“It hurts me that you didn’t respect my preferred method of living.”

“You said you weren’t living,” Scotland said, setting down his backpack and picking an olive out of the bowl as the roommate to Ireland’s right growled at him, “You said you were dead.”

“Death is a form of living,” Ireland said, tugging on the leash she’d put on the growling roommate to quiet him down, “It’s non-living, but that’s still a form of living. Just like how the absence of color is still a color.”

“I’m not arguing with you about being dead means you’re not alive,” said Scotland, “Just please stop killing yourself. It’s extremely annoying.”

Ireland immediately began to shake. Something he’d said had set her off.

“I would never KMS, Scotland,” she said, “Don’t ever say that. What I am doing is demonstrating what my death could look like, but however it looks, it will not be the result of me pulling a KMS. I would never do that. I am an admirer of life. I adore life.”

With that, she got up and went to the growling roommate’s bedroom. Both roommates went with her, and Scotland heard the door slam and Pretty on the Inside began to play. Ireland always kept the album downloaded on her phone. That and Ace Frehley’s self-titled debut.

The next couple of deaths were uneventful. Scotland treated them as episodes. As though they were health scares from a disturbed relative. Ireland would post obits online from burner accounts, and every so often, people would approach Scotland after class to offer condolences or send him messages asking if his sister was really dead this time.

“Probably not,” he’d reply, “I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

After college, Scotland worked on patenting an idea he had for a new kind of vacuum. The invention was inspired by a sculpture his mother had made once that she quickly lost interest in when Scotland’s father pointed out that it looked like a Dyson. For some reason, Scotland took an interest in the piece. Something about it made him think that, were it to actually be a vacuum, it would be a unique one. Perhaps even a more effective one. Most of the classes he took at school were in business and marketing. By the time he graduated, he was ready to put together a product that could revolutionize  home cleaning.

Meanwhile, Ireland focused on dying the same way Scotland concentrated on his invention. She had become an expert at faking death. No matter how many times she did it, she still managed to trick people. Everyone but her brother. She had been back for a week after Death #14, and she had moved in with Scotland in a studio apartment in Avon Lake. He slept on the couch while she sat up in bed filling up notebooks with eulogies she wanted people to give at all her upcoming services. Ireland had given up on her brother planning anything for her, but she’d gotten an especially large commission from the Cleveland Death, Dying, and Reinvention Initiative, which allowed her to pre-arrange her own funeral arrangements.

“I can’t believe you’re building a vacuum,” she said to him one night, as they watched Kill Bill Vol: 1 for the thousandth time, “You’re a disgrace to the family name.”

She handed him the remainder of her cigarette, but he waved it away. He was used to enduring her insults, but that didn’t mean they didn’t register with him. He wasn’t necessarily ecstatic that his life was now dedicated to suction devices, but he saw it as a trade-off. An exciting life would mean a life that could end at any moment. He’d rather have something more consistent. Vacuums were consistent. They were a decidedly good invention. Not like fraudulent deaths. You couldn’t get a warranty on a fake death. You couldn’t even get a receipt.

“Sometimes I wish I had a sister,” Ireland said, watching Uma Thurman decapitate Lucy Liu, “A sister would never show an interest in carpet cleaning.”

Scotland received his patent for the vacuum. He created a prototype. He went on a very popular television show where he pitched the product to a group of investors. Two of them thought it was a great idea, and a bidding war began right there on the show. Suddenly, Scotland was rich. Richer than his parents had ever wanted to be. Richer than everyone he played football with in college since none of them managed to go pro. He could buy a house now. He could get married. Have children. He could travel to places where there were no bears or helicopters or any opportunities for artistic expression. He could have sugary cocktails on a beach served to him by colonized people who would secretly resent him. He was no longer an orphaned football player.

Now, he was a star.

The sixteenth time his phone rang with a message from some newly acquired friend of Ireland informing him that she was dead, Scotland was in the middle of a meeting about a new attachment that could be sold alongside his vacuum. It would net him another eight or nine million dollars. He had assistants. He had an office in Cleveland and one in New York. Two in Tokyo.

“Scotland, I’m so sorry,” the voice on the phone said, clearly holding back a bombastic sob, “She’s gone. She’s gone, Scotland.”

Scotland looked at the group of executives gathered around him. Seated at a table at which he was the head. Thin-framed glasses and suits made from fabric outsourced from Europe. They were all waiting for him to finish his phone call. They were all prepared to wait as long as he wanted them to wait.

“Did you hear me,” the voice said, it sounded like a man’s voice, but possibly not, “Your sister is dead. Are you listening to what I’m saying?”

Scotland realized he was biting his lip. He was biting his lip in front of all these people who were important, but not as important as him.

“Tell her I’ll see her after the funeral,” he said, hoping he hadn’t left a mark on his lip, “Tell her I hope this is her last one.”

The voice on the other end started to say something, but Scotland hung up on them. He placed the phone on the floor by his feet in case it started to vibrate again.

“So,” he said, staring down the table at his next great success and the people who could help bring it about, “Where were we?”

The phone didn’t vibrate again.

It just sat quietly by his feet.