The face, thank god, has been covered. The eyes have been wrapped tightly in a tear of white cloth that resembles a bandage, and you wager the funeral parlor has done this for reasons you don’t want to think about but helplessly do: like maybe the rims of the eyelids have been glued shut, are still glistening wetly, it’s the reason for the delay, and by three o’clock the lids will have dried, the bandage may be removed—so you’re relieved that the eyes are covered, wrapped up, because you definitely do not need to see them, those two blue globes which always seemed to grow wide, bulbous, whenever Greg Tampico saw you climbing the stairs of his walk-up, you know them already, every nuance of their color, their glassy sheen, you have stared into them for hours, countless hours, you realize, and staring into them always made you feel as though you actually belonged to something big, bigger than you, and you know that Greg Tampico, he felt the same way because one night you were both resting in each other’s arms, smoking cigarettes in his bed, admiring the stuffed aardvark, when he looked at you and said, all solemn, “Weird, I’ve got déjà vu,” and you recall how dumb he sounded at the time, how you poked his guts with a sharp finger and snorted, dork or something, and he said, “No really, I swear to god, we’ve been here before,” which is exactly what you’re thinking while standing next to this body.

How lazy is the embalmer at Murphy & Milliken’s who must not be paid a penny more than the minimum wage. Who clearly spent not, like, a second more than the minimum of time washing the body in some kind of cheap disinfectant before shaving the face, securing the jaw with some kind of wire before draining all blood from the veins and replacing it with some kind of crazy formaldehyde; how the hair was washed and pulled all to one side with a comb (precisely the manner in which it was never worn); how the ashen skin has been masked with a tan-colored paste sloppily wiped over the hands, neck and face, covering the pores of this cold meat that you once knew as “Greg Tampico,” but the color is wrong, it’s much too pale for the man who always sported a wrinkled tan from the Namibian sun; how the body’s whole angle in repose, it looks forced, there is just something, like, off about it, and while you can guess that the embalmer does this with all bodies to try and make them look restful or peaceful—it’s what the pillows are for—nothing about Greg Tampico’s body looks right.

Although the body wears a full-dress tuxedo, the one he wore when you met, the way the broad shoulders have been tucked into silk cushions, the way the hands are folded, left over right as though their owner were religious and not apostate, the way the head has been tilted, ever so slightly to the right, as though to welcome Viewers for the Viewing, is flat-out nothing like the way the actual Greg Tampico gazed at you from his bed pillows, and though you do not know—and will never know—the word “jiva,” it’s the word you are searching for: whatever the taxidermist captured so well in the aardvark has not nearly been captured in the body of Greg Tampico, and so you experience the peculiar feeling while you are looking at the body of Greg Tampico that this, at the same time, is not Greg Tampico at all. It’s a nightmare.