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“So, I’ve been thinking, and I believe I should go first.”
Phillip looked up from where he’d been happily leafing through a copy of It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections of Horror. He had his glasses on, which made Phillip look like the helpful librarian in a children’s book, and always made Blanc want to kiss him so he gave into that urge and did so.
“First?” Phillip said, after Blanc had pulled back. “Are you ready to check out?”
“No! No, of course not,” Blanc said, waving away the idea. “Hopefully not for years, but when the time comes, I think I should be first.”
Phillip tucked the book under his arm. “You’re doing that thing where you’ve had an entire conversation in your head without me. What are you talking about?”
“Death of course!” Blanc said. “The last great adventure!”
Phillip pulled another book off the shelves (Wild Heart: A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris) paused for a moment, and then grabbed another (Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life). He stacked them neatly atop one another, largest to smallest, and then headed for the front of the store.
“I’m not having this conversation without a muffin,” Phillip said over his shoulder. “Meet me in the café, will you?”
Two coffees, three baked goods and the highway robbery of it all costing $20 later they were settled at a table in the bookstore café.
“The thing is,” Blanc said. “On the drive back from my last case I gave the entire matter a good long ponder, and I reached the conclusion that of the two of us I should be the one to die first.” He took a sip of his cappuccino. “Is that okay with you?”
There were muffin crumbs at the corner of Phillip’s mouth, and it just further added to the local librarian who had helpful mice organizing the card catalog image. Blanc decided to not tell him about it until he’d looked his fill.
“Blanc,” Phillip said slowly. “Love of my life, source of my joy, cause of my stomach ulcer I don’t know what you think I do all day, but it does not involve mastery over the rhythms of life and death. I can’t approve this because I do not possess that kind of insane power.”
Philip brushed the crumbs away, and Blanc immediately missed them.
“I worried this would happen to you eventually. Love, you are an excellent detective, and you’ve seen a lot of death as a result. But that doesn’t mean you and death are on speaking terms. In fact, I hear he’s rather difficult to get a hold of.”
Blanc leaned back in his chair, cinnamon scone left untouched on his plate. “Can you take this seriously?”
“No,” Phillip said sharply. “I refuse to take this seriously. Taking death seriously is us having our affairs and paperwork in order so that my family can’t swan across the pond to claim our flat is their flat now, and to keep your sister from approving a biography where you were some kind of nightmare heterosexual with a distant acquaintance named Phillip. You know they’d try it, and you also know that I have locked every imaginable legal door standing between our families and our lives to make sure they wouldn’t succeed.”
Phillip had started shredding the muffin wrapper, and the little bits of remaining blueberry were staining the pads of his fingers.
“What you’re talking about right now is ridiculous! So, no. I will not take your request seriously.”
When he was done with the wrapper, he moved onto a napkin which had a caricature print of Emily Dickinson stamped across the middle. Pieces of white paper drifted across the table, and Blanc glanced down to see a piece with only the fair Emily’s eyes looked up at him unblinking.
Because I coud not stop for Death-
I waved him down like a lunatic, and then sat on him until he did what I wanted.
“This isn’t something else is it?” Phillip asked. “Some kind of…cry for help I’m supposed to be hearing?”
Blanc reached across to take Phillip’s hand, and trapped the disembodied shreds of napkin Emily between their palms.
“No. Nothing like that. It’s only that if you die first, I’ll be inconsolable.”
“Well, this is embarrassing because I was planning on taking a casual la di da approach to your death,” Phillips said dryly. “Period of mourning? No, thank you. I’ll be back at the office the very next day. ‘Making sure we hit the quarterly profit margin is what my husband would have wanted!’ I’ll say.”
Blanc huffed. “It just makes sense that I should die first! You know where all our tax documentation is.”
“You also know where all our tax documentation is!” Phillip said. “It’s in a big folder, in the closet, in a fire-proof safe, with a yellow piece of paper taped on it that says Tax Stuff! If we get robbed, we’re in trouble. If I get pushed off a subway platform you’re set!”
“I work a very dangerous job,” Blanc pushed. “Money’s on me getting knocked on the head, and left to drown in some rich so-and-so’s private waterfall.”
Phillip stilled, and his eyes went very wide, and worrying bright behind his glasses. Then they narrowed.
“Oh I see! You think you can just leave me here! An abandoned foreigner. An ocean away from home, the BBC, and a genuine chip shop?”
“You have been in New York City since you were thirty-three years old. You know it better than me!”
“I could get hit by a drunk driver. I could get bone cancer. I could trip and fall into the 9/11 Memorial Pool and do a little drowning of my own! But no matter what, you won’t get any say in how I go, and you should be aware of that!”
He pulled out of Blanc’s grip, and ran a hand over his face. The move left behind a blueberry colored fingerprint on Phillip's cheek.
“What do you imagine I do in this magic world where you control death? After you get your brains beaten in by a desperate pineapple heiress of course.”
Blanc felt his face heat, and he shifted in discomfort.
“Come on. I know you’ve picture it,” Phillip said. “What’s Phillip the widower up to?”
“Well, if you must know, I believe you’d do an appropriate amount of mourning-”
“Do I wear black for the full year,” Phillip asked. “Is there veil in this scenario? I’m trying to take it seriously, but I’ll need a long black veil to take it seriously.”
Phillip’s knee started to bounce, and Blanc was suddenly very worried about his ability to navigate this strange territory he’d pushed them into. He just hadn’t thought Phillip would become this emotional this quickly over such a simple request.
“Then eventually you fall back in love and have a man that looks suspiciously like Cary Grant live with you for the rest of your days.”
The knee bouncing stopped, and Phillip graced him with an expression he usually reserved for people who insisted that the reason he must not have enjoyed The Notebook was because he hadn’t understood the twist at the end. “You get that in this fantasy death universe I just fall back in love with a dark-haired version of you right?”
That got a full braying laugh out of Blanc. “Phillip I am not someone who fell right off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, but I am also not in any way comparable to Cary Grant.”
“Your wardrobe does not communicate that.”
Blanc glanced down. He was in a grey flannel suit jacket over a white dress shirt, a tan pair of double pleated pants, and had a polka dotted navy blue ascot tie around his neck.
“Is it a crime to want you to move on with someone who makes timeless sartorial choices?” Blanc asked. “It doesn’t matter. I still think it just makes sense, universal sense, that I am the first to shuffle off this mortal coil.”
Phillip suddenly stood, and the tabled rocked dangerously “I will buy another muffin and choke on it just to prove to you that you have no control over when I die.”
He stormed off, leaving behind his coat and his stack of still to be purchased books. When he came back, he put another two atop the pile (The Best Bad Things by Katrina Carrasco and Ice Blues by Richard Stevenson), fell into his chair, and slammed his palms on the table with a smack.
“Were they out of muffins?” Blanc asked.
“I am not a fool,” Phillip said. “I have gone through the scenarios in my head where I get a call or a police officer is at the door, and I’m told it’s time for me to identify your corpse. I try not to do it since it really brings down the mood of my day. I know you’ve promised me that you won’t do anything stupid, but sometimes it can’t be helped. It’s a terrible possibility, but you know what I have an even harder time with? The idea that it might not be me who gets that call.”
“Phillip-,” Blanc started, not enjoying how worked up he’d managed to get Phillip over the course of a morning.
“I've tried to picture me dying first,” Phillip continued. “Because if I could picture it then I’d know how to plan for it, but it was terrible! I don’t like that I truly believe you’ll be inconsolable, and I won’t be around to do any consoling, and I especially don’t like that our only practical solution is to make sure you go in the ground first.”
Phillip reached to give the bridge of his nose a hard rub, and Blanc felt his stomach sink. It was one of Phillip’s easiest tells. Something he did when he was trying not to cry, but he always lost that battle and sure enough his mouth twisted, and then one tear and then another slipped down his face. Blanc suddenly felt like the world’s biggest jackass.
“I just...imagine you wandering around our apartment looking for our extra keys, and this pit opens in my stomach,” Phillip said. “And I don’t know how to make sure you have all our important paperwork because you’re not good at remembering it no matter how many times I tell you where it is! And what if my mother hires some terribly shark of lawyer who gets you in front of a homophobic judge, and makes you homeless! What then!?”
“Well darling, I guess you and I will both just have to live forever.”
It was a gamble, but sometimes a joke was the best move to make when Phillip got himself twisted up. This time, it failed rather spectacularly.
“Please tell me you know that’s not an option!” Phillip sobbed.
Blanc scooted his chair around the table until he was close enough that their knees knocked together.
“Sugar, I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about this.”
“Of course, we have to talk about this!” Phillip said. “You think you have mastery over death, and I’m crying over muffins!”
Over Phillip’s shoulder, Blanc caught the eye of the baby-faced barista manning the cash register. He blew a lock of blue hair out of his face and motioned to the tray of muffins on the counter with an overexaggerated questioning face. Blanc shook his head and got back to the matter at hand.
“What if,” Blanc said, and idea starting to form. “What if you made me a map?”
“I-a…a what?”
“A map,” Blanc said, quickly warming to the idea. “You put all the stuff you think I should know about in one place-”
“Like in our closet with a big yellow sign?”
“Yes! Exactly! See you’ve already done part one. Then you leave a map on, let’s say your laptop, for me to find. If you die first, your laptop is the first thing I’d be poking through for information.”
“My personal computer?” Phillip said. “Are you planning on reading my diary too?”
Blanc paused, honest puzzlement disrupting the flow of his new idea. “Should…should I not do that?”
“I actually hadn’t thought about it,” Phillip said, lifting his glasses so he could scrub one of the Emily Dickinson napkins across at his face. It caused the blueberry stain to streak. “I guess you can? They won’t be very interesting, but sure. Yes. If you want to read all my journals when I’m dead go for it. Start a book club for all I care.”
“Well, that’s just another layer of security," Blanc said. "You leave a note in the front of your diary that just says, Remember the laptop, my love! and if I forget what that means it won’t matter because that would be a mystery, and if there is one thing my brain can’t resist it’s a mystery.”
Phillip had an odd way of crying. It was like there was a specific amount of saltwater put aside for tears, and even if his mood was changing once the tap had been turned on they couldn’t be turned off until the ducts were empty. Which meant that even as his expression shifted into something less distraught his face stayed wet.
“You’ll be okay to solve a mystery on the heels of my untimely death?”
“That’s the brilliant part,” Blanc said, grabbing Phillip's hand in his own. His other was moving through the air with a passion usually only found in mid-concert orchestra conductors. “Whether I’m up for it or not my brain won’t care! I’ll have to solve it. It’s my great curse!”
“But you’re bad at stupid games. You say that all the time.”
Blanc leaned forward and kissed his wet cheek. “Phillip, anything involving you and me is never stupid and never game.”
Phillip let his forehead fall against Blanc’s.
“How will you get into the laptop?”
“I’m a detective. I will figure your password out.”
Phillip nodded slowly. “I-this is insane, but it might work?”
“There we go!” Blanc said. “And it involves a map! You love a map!”
“Don’t patronize me,” Phillip said. “But yes, I do love a map.” He looked off into the distance. “I bet I could color code it. Maybe involve an Excel spreadsheet.”
“Now that is the spirit!” Blanc grabbed his scone and took a triumphant bite “But just so we’re clear, I’m still planning on dying first.”
A shadow fell on the table, and the nervous baby-faced barista with the blue hair placed a muffin on Phillip’s previously empty plate.
“Um, on the house,” he said, and then scuffled away.
Phillip glanced at the muffin, and then looked Blanc dead in the eye, the last of his tears running down his face.
“Want to bet?”