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Premise of End Man: Afflicted with dromophobia, the fear of crossing streets, 26-year-old Raphael Lennon must live out his life in the one square mile that surrounds his Los Angeles home. Fortunately the area provides everything an artistically sensitive person needs, including a job at an oddball company that tracks the online remains of the deceased. One of Raphael's assignments will require him to move beyond his geographic boundaries into the realm of extreme data harvesting, psychometrics and resurrection with a high tech twist.

End Man

Chapter 1

Death was a good place to hide. Ninety-nine percent of the reported dead stayed dead, but occasionally someone played possum.

Raphy read the Jason L. Klaes obituary for the fifth time, each read more frustrating than the one before. The details that he needed just weren’t there.

The notice, published in the Pasadena Gazette, provided no indication of the cause of death, relatives to contact or burial arrangements. Why run an obituary without the essential information? Hoping to find out who had submitted the Klaes info, Raphy had left several messages for the column’s editor at the Gazette, but none had been returned, which matched the response to his other inquiries on the case. Jason Klaes was making his head throb much too early in the game.

Hissssss.

On one of the light screens protruding from the Necrology Department’s east wall, a woman ironed a sheet, vapor rising from the sleek device. The screens were for bulletins, but during downtime showed only mindfulness videos, which—though other End Men claimed the videos calmed and focused them—made him uneasy and caused him to avert his eyes.

Above the screens, contrasting oddly with the mundanity of the ironing woman, the Norval Department of Marketing Necrology’s corporate charge glowed in silver letters: “To Preserve and Protect the Online Remains of the Dead.” The silver logo mocked him. Preserve what? Protect, why? That he knew the answers was the trouble.

Preserve: Compile every social media page, message, search, photo, vote up or down, blog entry, tweet and Instagram that a deceased has left behind. Obtain the rights to the data and then create a Norval Portal to the loved one’s online remains.

Protect: Make sure that the only way anyone will ever see the stuff again is through its Norval Portal. And then gouge advertisers to reach the eyeballs that come looking. No bigger a rip-off than ancestry and genetic searches, but no less.

Outside his cubicle, fingers raced over keyboards. Someone sucked vigorously—a straw probing a drained Frappuccino? A Cri de Coeur of, “Is it lunch time yet?” A throttled yawn. On the department floor, within the prehistoric, high-walled cubicles, amid crunching, gurgling and complaint, a hundred End Men preserved and protected. Come next month, he’d have spent five years as an End Man, the last three as a Possum Specialist.

Raphy looked down at the death notice again. Why did this possum set his nerves on edge? Every undeclared he’d investigated played elaborate games to cover his or her tracks. But like the light screens that comforted others, Klaes made Raphy want to turn away.

He stretched his legs out under the desk, set his heels on his skateboard—which he always kept close—and brushed a wheel. The whirr of the spinning wheel calmed him like donning a lead blanket. His pulse slowed.

He’d spent much of Wednesday and Thursday on the case, mapping Klaes’s online activity in the months before the day of his reported death. Nothing sounded alarms: no darknet sites, no guides to disappearing from society, no underage girlfriends or boyfriends, no cryptocurrency plays or big insurance policies.

The only unusual transaction on his debit card was a truck rental on January 8, two days before his death, but even physicists liked to haul out junk once in a while. Klaes, a reputable scientist, had no obvious motives for faking his own death.

“Knock, knock.”

He turned his head. Matt Tucker stood at the entrance to the cubicle, fist in the air as if he had actually tapped wood.

“Hey, Raphy,” said Matt, putting his fist to his mouth, uncurling his fingers and then looking at them curiously.

“Hey, Matt.”

“You know Belinda, that girl I was going to take to the Arroyo Festival?”

“Yeah?”

“She can’t go.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah. Bummer. Anyway, I’ve got an extra ticket.”

For an instant Raphy allowed himself to imagine the fields of people and the scores of bands. If, but no. “Hey, that’s cool, Matt, but I’ve got . . . plans.”

Matt pulled on his stretched earlobe, which hung like a carabiner. “I guess that means you’re still . . . stuck?”

Feeling suddenly hollow, Raphy nodded.

Matt tugged again on his earlobe. “Just thought I’d ask. Well, have the best weekend you can.”

Within your square mile.

“Thanks. Later, Matt.”

Matt drifted away.

Raphy shook it off and looked down at the death notice again. “. . . passed unexpectedly January 10 . . . graduate of MIT. . . the Boltzmann Medal . . . Lieben Prize. A celebration of Jason’s life will be held on January 31 at 2 p.m. in the King George Room of the Harvey Hotel in Hollywood.”

A thigh muscle twitched. He’d read so many of the damn things that some days they all blurred together. Worse, he’d imagine a hundred possums writhing in a ball like snakes. But why did he see Klaes as a bigger snake swallowing them all?

From outside Raphy’s cubicle, supervisor Mike Dreemont’s voice boomed in bright infomercial style. “Seven thousand a day, and every day the number rises.”

“Wow, that’s a lot of people dying,” said a higher-pitched male voice.

Raphy glanced out his doorway to the floor’s main aisle. Dreemont, a thickset man with a heavy jaw and wide mouth, was standing with a new intern, a fresh-faced young grad in a blue skinny suit. Orientation. Dreemont droned on for a moment.

“Instagram, really? Can’t you erase those posts?” asked the intern.

“Ha,” said Dreemont dismissively. “Nothing really gets erased. Since dense-cloud quantum storage, once on the net, always on the net.”

Dreemont turned toward Raphy and as if he were animal in a zoo proceeded to describe his place in the necrology department. Raphy twisted inside at the attention. “Raphy’s what we call a possum tracker. One of the best we ever had. Raphy’s got the instincts of a Kentucky deer hunter. Just give him tracks, scat and a bent twig. Pretty damn good for a city boy.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” said the intern.

Dreemont laughed. “Possums or undeclareds are what we call people trying to pass themselves off as dead. We can’t permit any living in the database, so Raphy makes sure the possums are really dead or alive, if that’s the case. If they’re alive, they’re no good to us.”

“I see, I guess . . .” said the intern as the two strolled away.

Unfortunately, the city boy’s reputation had taken a couple of hits lately. Six months ago, he had declared a possum officially offline and sent the verification to the contracts department on the first floor. Contracts had no sooner gotten online remains rights from the next of kin, than the offline showed up at a Las Vegas casino. That was a shitstorm. The possum screwed the company for six figures to drop a lawsuit, the feds were getting on CEO Geo Maglio’s tail, and the press was raking up old scandals. “No more fucking possums,” Maglio had declared to Raphy. “One live possum in the database is one dead End Man.”

Raphy still wondered why it was so damn important to get the undeclared into the database at all. Norval had enough dead, and it would seem just ignoring questionable candidates would be the best policy. But Maglio didn’t see it that way. “Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.”

Raphy swallowed hard. Even thinking about Maglio left a bad taste in his mouth.

He once more scanned the scant obituary, stood up and tacked the notice to the bulletin board above his desk. It fit nicely between his Picasso and Seurat prints, which were bordered by skateboard decals. He appreciated the prints for a moment and then lowered his eyes to a photograph that showed him and his mother. Her slender arms accentuated by her sleeveless print dress, she hugged Raphy, his head nestled against her neck. Their gray eyes and delicate lips were identical. She was smiling, as she would even when her disease had turned her limbs to stone and she looked to him to assure her that his were still flesh. His eyes welled up. Yeah, mom, I know possum hunter wasn’t exactly what you had in mind for me. It won’t be forever. My painting is—

Leave it alone, Raphy. Get back to your possum. Raphy turned from the darkening glass of memory to his quarry.

Dropping back to his chair, he considered aspects that had marked Klaes as suspicious. The first was the obituary’s phrase “passed unexpectedly.” Generally, when people “passed unexpectedly” the cause of death was suicide. Suicides were reported. Raphy had obtained the coroner’s record of Klaes’s death, but there had been no proof-of-death letter. A POD was always filed with a possible suicide and would verify the coroner was investigating the case. Although Norval had solid contacts with the coroner’s office, no additional information on Jason Klaes was available, as if someone was pulling strings.

That could be chalked up to bureaucratic error. The email discrepancies were more alarming. First, there were signs of outward activity on several of Klaes’s online accounts after January 10. Of course, someone could have Klaes’s password or the account could have been hacked. People hacked the dead’s online remains all the time. The hackers were like mailbox thieves, sticking their hands inside and pulling out whatever was left, hoping to get lucky. But in Klaes’s case, nothing was taken. Something was added; an outgoing email appeared to be threatening someone, which is where things started to get interesting. The email was sent January 14, at which time Klaes was four days dead. Four other postmortem emails, one sent on January 11, two on the fifteenth, and one on the sixteenth also pointed to an undeclared..

But what undeclared would use his own email for trolling?

Having analyzed Klaes’s online searches, Raphy next visited the chat rooms, Q & A websites and forums the physicist had frequented. Whether social or professional, such sites were rich veins of valuable information.

A search using the terms “Jason Klaes” and “professional associations” turned up several hundred results, but the one that showed the most activity was the Physicists’ Locker Room, a forum where physicists exchanged questions and answers. It appeared Klaes had asked and answered numerous questions over the years, but for most of the links, clicking through only produced a 404 Not Found error. The few that actually worked led to a handful of older and perfunctory questions. Had Klaes himself deleted the material?

His office phone rang. Pasadena. He recognized the number and accepted the call.

“Verena. Gazette Obituaries. How can I help you?” asked his caller.

Identifying himself, he posed his question.

Verena cleared her throat. “Sorry. Damn flu. What was the date of the notice?”

“January 12,” answered Raphy.

“Let me bring that info up.” Raphy rolled his eyes at the caller’s long, loud drag on what was likely a vape, followed by pounded keys. “Okay, let’s see. Got it. Anonymous.”

“Anonymous? How can that be?”

“Came in the mail with a cash payment.”

Raphy pushed his chair back. “You accepted that? What if it was a prank?”

“Obits ain’t cheap. Excuse me.” Verena cleared her throat again. “Even the hundred word ones.”

“Did anonymous request a receipt? A copy of the article?”

“Two-fifty in cash and a thank you note. Nothing else.”

Raphy stretched out his leg, tapped a wheel on the skateboard and rolled it back and forth. “Did you verify—”

A hand fell on Raphy’s shoulder. He followed Dreemont’s gaze toward the mindfulness screens, whose images had turned hideous. On each screen, sheets of flame and coils of smoke engulfed a high-rise studded by the remains of a plane’s wings and fuselage.

The department’s speakers blared, “Big D. I Repeat, Big D. Override status. All End Men return to their desks.”

He pressed his hand to his belly. “Verena, I’ll have to get back to you,” said Raphy softly. “Something has come up.”

His potential possum would have to wait.



It was 7:00 p.m. before the intense labor demanded of a Big D subsided. Dreemont told the exhausted End Men they could call it a night.

The floor slowly emptied until it was just Dreemont and Raphy.

“Nice work,” said Dreemont.

“Thanks.”

“Take off. Go have a beer. I’ll shut down.”

“Ah, that possum’s bugging me. I want to dig a little deeper.”

“You sure?” asked Dreemont.

“Yeah. I got it.”

“Don’t kill yourself, Boy Scout.”

“For sure.”

Dreemont turned and stepped away. Keeping his supervisor in the corner of his eye, Raphy shrugged, tapped his mouse and watched the monitor brighten. Dreemont strode a few feet from the cubicle entrance, pivoted and looked back at Raphy, who pretended to suddenly notice him.

“Don’t mess this one up,” said Dreemont.

“Oh. Oh. Yeah.” Raphy tried to nod, but his spine seemed an iron rod.

Waiting until the door had closed and locked, Raphy returned to the Physicists’ Locker Room.

He wanted to take a second look at Klaes’s bio on the website, which he had read the day before.

The bio offered little more information than his obituary—his anonymously-submitted obituary—and he wondered again if information had been deleted by Klaes. Was the information in Klaes’s bio typical of the website? He surfed through a dozen biographies of physicists from Berlin to Tokyo. Although the bios were of various lengths, all were longer and more detailed than Klaes’s.

One, Lily Faraday’s, held his attention through the entire entry, which finished with an odd declaration:

I refuse to ask or answer any more questions on this site. Some users don’t comprehend a scientific answer, so they continually downvote, rather than ask the poster for further explanation. This occurs on a regular basis and the community refuses to address it. If the poster objects, they become persona non grata. I see no effort to rectify this situation. My knowledge is being distorted and wasted on this site. Before I am forcibly removed, which seems to be the common fate of those who don’t march to the drum of grand poohbah Maisie Sparod, I will no longer participate.

So, like every other forum, there were dissenters, feuds no doubt. With that in mind, he spent the remainder of the evening ferreting out the points of contention and rivalries on the site. Maisie Sparod seemed to figure in most of them.

Raphy glanced at the time on his monitor: 9:00 p.m. He was the last End Man among the sleeping computers. As a yawn crept up on him, he shook his head. The Klaes enigma would not be resolved tonight. He needed a few hours of sleep to clear his brain and restore his energy. If he were lucky, he might get an hour of work in on his painting.

Raphy shut down his computer, grabbed his skateboard and stood up. He looked once more at the obituary notice. A celebration of Jason’s life at the Harvey Hotel. Someone had to be making those arrangements. On Monday, he’d talk to the Harvey.

He turned off the lights. Below the wall screens, the cumulative flashed as all the numbers changed. The thousands digit was now an eight. Another old song played: “Round, round, get around. I get around, yeah . . .”

“Yeah, I get around,” said Raphy to the dark department.

As was his habit at night, he walked over to the floor’s plate glass window and gazed down at the lights of Wilshire Boulevard. On the far side of the street a couple of hooded blanks—Digital Luddites—defaced a cell phone store with large spray paint letters. Damage done, the pair raced off, leaving the sidewalk to the homeless. Raphy considered the great boulevard and tried to imagine crossing it. But even imagining made him jittery.