Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
The Day He Died
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
On a backstreet in Oaxaca, Mexico, over a studded wooden door crackled with dark green paint, a beige awning in faded block letters reads Posada de Jorge. The interrobangs explode like firecrackers in my head. I am yanked backward to a time before George, my very best friend, vanished.
George and I took some great ‘guy trips’ together. We were each other’s best man. We talked all the time, told jokes, worried about our kids or just bitched to bitch. I think about him every day.
Strolling on the stony streets, buildings press in on me. The cobbles are like thousands of little tombstones crammed together. Brightness ricochets off the facades. Under the clear skies and hot sun, my neck is wet with sweat. More than anything, I want a shady sanctuary for my overheated mind, the flushed feeling coursing through me.
I’m in town for Día de los Muertos—a day when the barrier between the temporal world and the spiritual world crumbles. A day to reconnect with deceased relatives, departed loved ones and—in my case—a dead friendship. A day of remembrance and, sometimes, trying to forget.
Restaurants, hotels, homes, laundromats, libraries are adorned with ofrendas. The golden fragrance of marigolds fills the air. Sugar skulls with dead eyes stare at me. Colorful paper banners, tissue-thin and cut into patterns, drape across entryways and hang from rafters. Las Catrinas—female skeletons with over-sized, floral hats—are sentried everywhere.
In the cemeteries, grave sites are tricked out with candles, food, flowers, music and picnickers. Life and death are celebrated, honored, respected.
Everyone dies. Not everyone is dead in the way that George is dead. Not everyone is dead while still alive.
George and I don’t talk anymore. Never an email. Never a birthday card. I don’t visit him. He’s in federal prison convicted on charges of commercial espionage.
I first found out about George’s double life in the S.F. Chronicle. The news article read, “Federal agents have arrested George Miller, 36, for spying for the Chinese government.” It added that, according to anonymous sources, the FBI found technical schematics from Apple, Intel and other Silicon Valley companies behind a workbench in his garage.
George dressed himself in a cloak of innocence and normality. He used his family, his friendship circle, his work colleagues and his best friend to mask himself. Of course he did. That’s what spies do.
When he no longer needed his cover story, overnight he stopped returning my calls. Wielding his silence like a weapon, he shot down my need to stand by him. It’s as if he buried our friendship in an unmarked Day of the Dead grave. The ghost of what was haunts me, a burning in my throat.
Before his arrest, the most important thing about my best friend was the one thing I didn’t know. As George showed me, friendship doesn’t require that we know the fine print of each other’s lives.
It does require that we let our friends be our friends. It requires that we let them celebrate us, help us, mourn us, remember us in the cemeteries of our minds.
Damn you, George. Damn you.
