You park your car in back. No one is here. No one is here because according to your phone it’s only 12:20 p.m.

The funeral won’t begin for over an hour.

At the front door, there is no sign mentioning anything about a service today, there are no flowers that have been delivered, there’s no guest book to sign, and through the building’s windows, which are decorated with these truly pall-looking purple faux-velvet drapes, the inside looks dark and all this must be, you deduce, because you are early, which is why you’re surprised, when you push the front door, that it opens.

The smell hits you first—it’s a perfume you can’t locate, floral or herbal or something—and the brown wall-to-wall, which is everywhere, just absorbs it. You cross the carpet and walk silently through an atrium, wondering how in the hell Greg Tampico ended up in a place like this when you thought he had money, and if not money then, like, at least, taste, and it occurs to you that you actually know next to nothing about Greg Tampico’s friends or his family, nor even his coworkers from the Happiness Foundation, and maybe you don’t know any of them because you never asked, maybe it was never important, or maybe too dangerous, or maybe because what you’ve known about Tampico, up to now, has always been enough for you:

Omnivore. He’ll eat anything.

Laugh, when genuine, is embarrassingly high-pitched.

Underarms, when wet, develop meat-scent.

Smokes cigarettes on his back, with legs crossed.

His voice-lull in bed, like a radio on low.

You are inside for only a few minutes, wandering the parlor’s gloomy, scented interior, before you appear in front of a shop of some kind, and you have never conceived that there would be an opportunity to sell things at a funeral home, but this is America. There’s a counter, a register. They sell coffins.

You have never seen a real coffin before. Not one up close and in person, and there are four options for coffins ranging in price from $895 to $3995, which to you sounds pretty cheap. Each of the coffins on display is lined with shiny white silk that is not silk, it’s sateen, padded with cotton, and some have frills, and all have lace or bows, enormous white pillows, and though they are made with hardwoods like cherry, walnut or mahogany, and are covered in so much polyurethane that they shine like new cars, and though you have never before thought seriously of your own death in your life, you make the decision, here and now, that when you die you will not go the burial route, you will go the cremation route, and you’re apparently not alone in your thinking, for across from the coffins, a much more diverse selection of urns ranging from $95 to $495 are displayed, and it’s clear that here’s Murphy & Milliken’s real business: selling urns.

The urns display nameplates like Trinity Sunset, Everlasting Symphony, Majestic Star—all but the smallest and cheapest urn, the one that looks made of aluminum and resembles an old-fashioned milk pail and is named, in an exercise of zero imagination, “Infinity.” You pick it up, and the Infinity urn is lightweight, somehow weirdly appealing, and you glance around and consider stealing it when, from somewhere outside the store, a vacuum goes on.