First-Person Fiction

When reading this story, one has to be prepared for a non-linear timeline. In the beginning, the other person (referred to only as ‘she’) requests that the narrator tell her trivia, things she ‘won’t mind forgetting.’ By the second page, the narrator is revealed to be the Best Friend, and they are in a hospital (a supposedly glamorous one in California). The narrator’s friend asks her about the different stages of grief (asking what comes after Denial), which foreshadows impending death. This foreshadowing is further cemented when the friend (who seems to have a morbid sense of humor) makes a sort of play-noose with a phone cord. The narrator has stayed with her friend long enough to discern some of the hospital staff, such as the Good Doctor versus the Bad Doctor.

The narrator often goes off on tangents that initially seem to have no connection to what she is going through with her friend in the hospital. Talking about a chimp who knew sign language, things that seem dangerous turning out not to be and vice versa. The narrator is a nervous person, afraid of flying and earthquakes, while the friend in the hospital is fearless. When an earthquake happened while they were together in college, the friend merely served mimosas and joked about living in Kansas while the narrator’s pulse was still ‘jabbering.’ However, while they are in the hospital while the narrator is telling the story, the narrator sees fear in her friend when an earthquake strikes. 

When the narrator finally tells her friend that she has to go back to her true home, she feels guilty for having to leave her despite being the ‘Best Friend.’ The narrator’s friend wordlessly leaves her room, despite her earlier mention that she couldn’t even get out of bed, and as she leaves, she is clearly short on breath. The nurses go after her. When the narrator finds them, they are in a closet, on the floor with her friend, soothing her while also providing an oxygen mask. The friend passes away at an unspecified time and she is moved to the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried. Strangely (or perhaps not) the narrator enrolls in a ‘fear of flying’ class on the morning of the funeral. By the end, she circles back around to her story of the chimp who knew sign language, and how that chimp had so simply yet powerfully expressed her grief when her baby died. By the end, the narrator’s fixation on morbidity, on dangerous versus not dangerous things, on aspects of fear and life in California, makes sense.