Inbox Zero

Inbox Zero

  An Obituarist short story

  by Patrick O'Duffy

  Copyright 2012 Patrick O'Duffy

  DEMONSTRATE THAT YOU ARE STILL ALIVE.

  'I don't understand what this is,' said Abraham Jericho, looking over my shoulder. 'Is this some kind of bill or something? I said you should take care of all that rather than bother Enoch's family.'

  'Not exactly,' I said. I motioned for him to pull up a seat next to me. 'It's a Deathswitch email.'

  Jericho pawed at his sweaty face with a handkerchief. 'A what?' My spare office chair groaned slightly under his bulky frame.

  I opened the email so that he could see its ominous demand in full. 'It's a little unusual, I know. Deathswitch is a company that stores an email message and then sends it out after you pass away.'

  'You mean Enoch asked someone to send an email for him?'

  'No, it's automatic. The user sets a time period, such as once a month, and whenever that time rolls around Deathswitch sends them an email, asking them to log in to let them know they're still alive.'

  The handkerchief knotted through Jericho's damp fingers as he slowly wrung his hands, eyes flicking down the lines of the email. 'Is this something you set up? I don't... I'm still not entirely clear on what you do, Mister Barber.'

  I laughed a bit, mostly to show the kind of polite self-deprecation that my clients tended to like. Yes, my job is strange and silly and just a little creepy, sorry. 'No, this isn't my doing. Some time before your brother's unfortunate accident, he opened an account with Deathswitch. The email might go out to one person or twenty to thirty people, and it could have attachments as well. It's good preparation on his part. I imagine he signed up for it once he developed his heart condition.'

  Such a nice euphemism, 'heart condition.' So much less confronting than 'cardiomegaly' or 'chronic hypertensive heart disease', two phrases I'd found in Enoch Jericho's medical records. Similarly, 'unfortunate accident' was far nicer than saying 'your brother had a heart attack while driving and ran his car off a cliff'. Diplomacy truly was the core of my business. Diplomacy and spreadsheets.

  Jericho stared at the screen. This close I could smell the sweat rolling off him, the musky stink at odds with the expensive white suit he was wearing. 'And that's what this is – these people are asking him to answer the email?'

  'We're actually past that. The initial email was a few days ago, and now we're into a cycle of daily reminders. This is the last one; Enoch's email will go out tomorrow. I really should have spotted it before now, but I was so busy going through his online data that I didn't check his email enough.'

  Even to my ears it sounded like an excuse, but it was mostly true. Enoch Jericho and his brother were successful publishers of customised Bibles. Their customers used web tools to design the Bible they wanted, whether that meant putting a logo on the cover or excising uncomfortable mixed messages about rich men, camels and the eyes of needles. It was a big business; everyone wanted their own version of the Word of God, one that conveniently lined up with their existing prejudices and/or brand identity.

  Anyway, Abraham Jericho was their sales and production manager, and his job mostly involved finding clients and liaising with paper manufacturers. Enoch had been in charge of marketing, and had an active online presence – not just on the usual social media sites but on a large number of Christian discussion and networking forums. Ferreting out all of his accounts and shutting them down had been time-consuming, and I was learning quite a bit about both custom publishing and the flamewars that raged over interpretation of the Gospels.

  Jericho sat back a little in his chair. His lips quivered behind his thick beard, like he was chewing over his thoughts before spitting them into words. 'Enoch never... he never said anything about this.'

  'That's not very surprising, sir. This sort of service is for people who don't want to tell people that they're using it. Not until after they're dead. It's for last words. For secrets.'

  That last word slapped him upside the head. His lips stopped moving, and his eyes moved from the screen over to me. And stayed on me to the point where I started to become uncomfortable.

  At last, he said 'Show me the website. Show me what's in his email.'

  I scratched my chin. 'That's not really a good idea. If we log into the site – and that's assuming I can figure out his password – it'll reset the countdown, which means the email won't go out. I can understand your curiosity, but this will disrupt your brother's final wishes. And I'm sure you don't want to do that.'

  Jericho stood up slowly, a tiny squeak of relief rising from my chair. He put his hands down on the desk next to me and closed into massive fists. He didn't make a big deal about it, but I was nonetheless acutely aware that a very large, very agitated man was looming over me. 'Show me the fucking website, Barber,' he said.

  I showed him the fucking website.

  The Deathswitch site opened up with a trill and a beep, like something from a TV show set in the future. I clicked over to the login screen and started by saying that I'd forgotten my password – sometimes that nets you a replacement by email right away. Not this time, though – there was a security question, which was just 'April 2004?' and I had no idea what that meant.

  I started working my way through some variations on Enoch’s usual passwords. Jericho stood close behind me, bodyheat beating against the back of my neck. I could see his reflection in the monitor, dark patches of sweat slowly growing under his arms. My office had been grossly vandalised a couple of months ago, and I'd had the air-conditioning overhauled as part of the repairs, so it was pretty cool in the room; this was flop-sweat, not heat-sweat. This was panic and adrenaline oozing through the armpits.

  I knew where he was coming from. I was feeling a bit of that myself.

  At last I hit on the password – the same one he used for iTunes, but with 'DW' tacked onto the end – and got to his account. 'Here we go,' I said, and Jericho nudged forward to get a better view, his body odour in my nostrils, his fists cocked at his sides. I clicked through to the account page and pulled up the details. There was a long email, scheduled to be sent to a large list of people, along with... 'There's an attachment.'

  'Open it,' said Jericho, his voice hoarse.

  I clicked the link, a media player window opened, a video started playing and we both watched.

  I don't think it was what either of us had really expected.

  When it ended, I sat back in my chair, or tried to, but Abraham Jericho was still too close for comfort. He stood there for long moments, chewing his words again, before finally saying 'I don't understand.'

  'It's not that complicated,' I said. 'Your brother wrote an email and recorded a video message – a very moving one, to be honest – to tell you and the rest of these people that he was gay.'

  'That's nonsense,' Jericho said flatly. 'My brother's not gay. Wasn't gay.'

  'Well, that's not what he said in the video. Or the email. He seemed very clear about it.'

  He glared down at me. 'Just shut up! 'This doesn't make any sense. This is, this, it's some kind of sick joke! Enoch has a wife and two sons, for God's sake!'

  'No sir, it's the truth. I'm sure that you'd find other signs if you cared to look. I mean, I knew it as soon as I found Growlr in his iPhone apps.'

  'Growler?'

  'It's like Grindr but for bears, and okay, I can see that neither of those words mean anything to you. Never mind. Look, your brother was gay. He was gay, even if he couldn't admit it to his family, even if maybe he couldn't admit it to himself at first. And it meant so much to him to finally tell you about it that he recorded this video and wrote this message. You need to respect that. And him.'

  Mentioning the message seemed to rouse Jericho from his whisker-chewing
reverie. He bent over to look at the screen, fists still clenched. 'Are there any other attachments to the email? Is there anything else other than, than this?'

  I checked the account, the attachment and the email. 'No,' I said, 'that's all there is.'

  His shoulders lost some tension and his fists finally uncurled. I wheeled my chair back towards the window to get a little distance from him.

  'Now, if you're looking for the evidence that you murdered him,' I said, 'that was on Google Docs.'

  That got his attention. Jericho lurched upright and the funk of his flop-sweat burst out anew like a mighty tide of stink. 'What?' he half-shrieked-half-growled.

  'Oh come on, I'm sure you've heard of Google Docs, even if you don't use it yourself. Your brother was pretty conversant with it; he had a pile of things on there. Some of which were very, um, personal. But there were also a lot of records, invoices, spreadsheets. So many spreadsheets.'

  He didn’t advance towards