Seth Eisen died on Friday, January 18, 2018. Or he did not. There were several possibilities of what occurred that evening. Here is the first.

It was Julie’s fault and his own as well. He hadn’t cleared the evening with her first, so when she, a bestselling novelist with an almost unhealthy love of animals (she had provided hospice services to not one, but two pets in the last year and hired a pet psychic to find her lost cat), was busy, Seth was alone. His high hopes for a relationship to Julie had been dashed earlier anyhow; the long string of solipsistic text messages about her new agent; her belief that her religious sister-in-law’s prayers had caused her Netflix TV deal and a contract writing for Archie; the realization that the chaos surrounding her was not a bug but a feature. So, when she promised to return a text but didn’t, Seth realized he was on his own. His other plans: visiting Dovid and his old friends in Teaneck had failed as well. Every so often, Seth wanted a Shabbat, where he could turn off his phone and just be content with those around him. When the incessant buzzing of new messages and updates and Tinder matches wouldn’t reach into the quiet of a sealed and Sabbath-observing household. But Dovid’s father was in surgery. The old man’s kidneys had failed and Dovid’s older brother, the rabbi with the popularity of a rock star had donated a kidney. Visiting his old friends was out. He could have stayed by Danielle and her husband, but her kids were terrifyingly bizarre and irritating. Last he heard, her son had taken a shit and smeared it on the walls. When he texted his on-and-off friend Aaron, Aaron invited him to a party on the Lower East Side, which he declined.

Seth had read somewhere that people underestimate how much they enjoy activities done alone. He must do something, even alone, on this cold Friday night. It was either a dinner at a nearby restaurant or a movie by himself at the local theater/arts center/ mingling house/cultural landmark that he felt obligated to get a membership too though he never actually visited, because, of course, he thought he was an artist at heart. The movie began at nine-thirty and was the latest dramedy by an auteur actor and director—all her films the same troubling coming-of-age story of hauntingly lithe girls and women. But he was tired of everything on the restaurant delivery services; in fact, all he ate had begun to taste the same. Seth delayed ordering anything until eight-thirty when it became impractical to order any food and the choice was made for him. Seth had considered ordering from the nearby Cuban place, but after his last order, two years back, when he gave the woman twenty and she promised to return him the change on his next order, he never ordered again, fearing awkwardness if he faced her. Seth decided to visit the nearby critically acclaimed ramen house. Over the phone, the hostess assured him the wait for one person would only be a few minutes. (“Who eats alone on Friday night,” the hostess had wondered to herself, mentally imagining an individual slightly sadder than Seth was in reality. Though a second later, she realized that just last week she had eaten alone, what was strange was someone making a reservation for one.)

His order was simple: veggie miso ramen with a soft-boiled egg and roasted pork. The waitress asked if he wanted appetizers: kale salad, fried brussel sprouts, gyoza, or tots. Frivolous things, Seth thought to himself, remembering all those days in yeshiva. He declined. He would have a simple meal, just ramen with some trimmings. He would enjoy it to show that he was enjoying his life. This was just another evening in the life of the waitress, who was a student at the design school nearby. The ramen was as good as he remembered it. A copy of the New York Review of Books was open before him and he read about what destruction President Big Head wrecked upon civil society. Next to him, two women and a male friend celebrated something being published. The ramen proved tricky, maneuvering the soft noodles into his mouth and the soft pork belly with the chopsticks or using the mini soup ladle to shove some of the hot broth down his throat. It seemed to take more planning than he had set aside for the meal. Still, the ramen was good, and he was doing something with his life, or so he thought to himself. He noticed a piece of flaky pork skin in the broth and, thinking nothing of it, let it drift into the mini-ladle and then into his mouth. Outside, a couple had tied up their three dogs to a pole near the restaurant and every time someone left the restaurant, the dogs yelped in the hope their owners returned.

Inside the flaky bit of skin was a staple that had slipped out of the bag holding their pork stomach. The staple, laying on the grill had been bathed in fat, flattened and crisped by the grill. The cook, not noticing, shoved the flake into Seth’s order, along with the two pieces of roasted pork.

Seth was wondering which side of the pork belly was the meat: the white part or the dark part. It was clearly not the web of flesh holding them together. That was what Seth was thinking about in the second that the flaky skin deteriorated in the back of his mouth and throat and the staple lodged itself horizontally in his throat. Immediately, Seth knew that something had gone wrong. He gasped as his airflow constricted. He hit his chest, trying to clear it. Dimly, he recalled being prepared for something like this (always worrying that his predilection for eating alone would lead to his untimely death) and looked for some object to fall on to self-perform the Heimlich maneuver. Turning, his face white, he grabbed the shoulder of the woman next to him. The woman’s name was Maggie and she was soon to be a best-seller with the publication of her first book, A Widow’s Peak, by Penguin Press (2018). Maggie, a former world-class gymnast who had been sexually abused by her team’s doctor, pulled away. The forced hand on her shoulder, reminding her of the hand of her doctor after she finished a successful floor routine. The hand on her shoulder and Seth’s white face caused her to scream. Seth convulsed and hit his chest again uselessly. Maggie wrapped her arms around Seth’s chest and squeezed. The wire, almost evolving sentience, stuck itself deeper into the red folds of Seth’s windpipe. Maggie’s male friend pushed her out of the way and attempted the maneuver himself. By then, the restaurant was in chaos; the waitress had called 911; ramen was spilled everywhere. At Maggie’s male friend’s second squeeze, the wire shifted, and Seth’s air pipe opened slightly, allowing him a brief breath of air. The wire shifted back, rupturing one of the trachea’s walls and blocking the airflow again.

The paramedics arrived surprisingly quickly, five minutes after the call. By then, Seth’s brain cells had already begun dying. While he didn’t immediately lose functions, memories began to dissolve. Ninth grade class with Rabbi Bachrach, whom he hated, was the first to go. Next was what immediately happened after his first kiss on a bus ride back from an NCSY Shabbaton. His father picked him up, bemused when his son told him about his first kiss. Seth gave his father his luggage and then walked across the street to see his best friend. Though they hadn’t been close for some time, Seth felt that Shimmy should know about this remarkable incident. The conversation was a glimmer of the once close friendship they had and led them both to becoming friends again. Seth remembered all that but lost the memory of walking from the bus to his friend’s house under a large white moon and then the walk back home afterwards. He also forgot the album he was listening to at the time: Daises of the Galaxy by the Eels. The paramedics attempted a tracheotomy, but due to the diagonal placement of the wire, the first attempt failed. The second attempt was a the seven-minute mark and succeeded. Seth was taken to Maimonides Hospital, a hospital that ironically shared the name of his hated high school. He failed to recover consciousness and died at two a.m. the following morning. It would have been an irony he appreciated; high school which he believed had stained him so, taught him that he was a delinquent, unlikeable and a failure, had actually killed him. Though the initial steps of his death had been painful, the final ones had been easy. The last conscious part of Seth’s brain thought about the death of Moses at the end of Deuteronomy. Chazal, the rabbis, said it was painless, a kiss from God.

Seth’s mother received a phone call at three and though Sabbath-observant, picked up the phone on the second call. His funeral was held in Woodmere Chapels. Shimmy, who hadn’t seen Seth in years, attended along with Seth’s family and members of the local Jewish community. It was hard to find a rabbi to speak at the funeral, but the shul rabbi, a towering figure who spoke terribly, spoke vaguely about Seth and what he remembered about him. Despite Seth’s ambivalence about it, his body was flown to Israel and buried in one of the plots that his mother and father had bought while they were still together. Since there were too many bodies to bury in Israel; his body was placed on an elevated floor of concrete with hundreds of other graves. One had to take an elevator to reach it. His nephews and nieces were crestfallen at his death, though his young nieces played with other children during the speeches at the funeral. Maggie, the debut author, also attended the funeral and her experience at it, “Mourning a Stranger,” published in the July issue of The New Yorker, led her to her second book, Forgetting What You Know, to become more of a literary darling than anything else. “She should stop trying to be Zadie Smith,” one irate commenter on Goodreads wrote. Critics complimented her range, but sales slumped and her third book, where she revisited the characters of her first book, did far better and was made into a movie starring a British actor at the height of his career, playing a detective at the end of his. 

Maggie’s male friend Mike was considerably younger than her, in his early twenties. Everyone knew he was gay, except Mike refused to admit it, until this night. He was about to make the announcement but was interrupted by Seth’s coughing fit. Seeing Seth’s death as a kind of punishment for his sexuality (though he had left his strict Christian upbringing far behind, it still stayed with him), he never officially came out and instead had a series of clandestine affairs throughout his marriage. All his friends agreed that it was weird, in this age and time, that he could never admit it to himself.

In the second possibility, most of what happened occurred again. Juliet cancelled dinner; Seth ate alone, sitting next to Maggie and her friends. When Seth began choking, Maggie and then her friend performed the Heimlich maneuver. An ambulance was called, but in this version of reality, Daphne, a half-Haitian, half-German OBGYN whose parents had always doubted her capabilities, had opted to accept an invitation from her friends to eat at the restaurant. Though she was exhausted after her shift, she felt, in some ways, obligated to go out, to make the most of her free time despite her rather wanting to curl up into bed and sleep the weekend away with a thriller, the latest one she had bought randomly, A Widow’s Peak. Jeremy, the friend who had invited her was also not-so-secretly in love with her and he had brought two of his friends along for cover. As the ambulance was being called and Seth lay on the floor struggling for breath, she put down her chopsticks, announced she was a doctor and the crowd parted quickly. Grabbing a nearby knife, she placed an index finger between Seth’s pronounced Adam’s Apple and his cricoid cartilage and in one quick motion, sliced it open. She held the cut open with her finger and inserted a straw brought to her by the trembling waitress who had once taken an extensive CPR class in high school. Seth began breathing after three-and-a-half-minutes. His eyes flicked open. The restaurant applauded. Daphne looked back at her table and her eyes met not Jeremy’s, but his friend’s, and it was one of those deep instantaneous connections that lead to romance and marriage, caused by a mistaken rush of adrenaline.   

Maggie’s second novel, another mystery-thriller-ghost story, began at a restaurant like the ramen place. The book begins as the narrator, a well-to-do sports writer thinks about his day while eating. He feels something lodge in his throat and dies at the end of the first chapter. The rest of the book is told through a series of narrators, including the ghost of the sports writer as he tries to understand who poisoned him. The answer, given the time period in which it was written, was something vaguely Russian. Maggie would bury the memory of Seth’s choking and only recall the novel’s genesis when she spoke to Leonard Lopate in the month after the book hit first place on the New York Times Bestseller chart. (In this reality, the #MeToo movement either did not happen or it happened, but NPR commentator Leonard Lopate was somehow spared. In all realities President Bighead was elected in November 2016. The event was a singularity, like the event horizon of a black hole, in which it occurred in all realities).

No one in the restaurant had realized that by the time the tracheotomy had begun, Seth had already sustained massive brain damage, the hospital’s doctor explained to Seth’s parents. It could have been worse though, he said, not believing it entirely. The patient might regain some functions.

Seth never did and lived the rest of his life as a vegetable in a nursing home, occasionally ferried to either his father’s house or his mother’s, with only his oldest nephews periodically visiting. Despite the brain damage, Seth recovered all his memories. In his mind, he lived in an everlasting present composed of his past. It was a palace he walked through. Every few months, he realized where and who he was.  His father’s new wife, who had been a nurse in Nepal, was the only one who could adequately care for him. She had never particularly liked Seth and viewed him as much as she viewed any other patient. Seth died ten years later, his body atrophying to a skinny, smelling husk. It was a mercy. 

After the dinner resumed, Mike came out to celebration and laughter. He was received happily by his friends; their effusiveness only matched by their rushing endorphins caused by the near-death scene they witnessed. They ordered more drinks, all got shit-faced and woke up the next morning in the beds of others.

Daphne and Jeremy’s friend divorced after three children, fourteen years of marriage. Daphne kept the shitzu. The most lasting effect of Seth’s choking for Daphne was a renewed interest in working in the ER. She left her gynecology residency mid-year and instead took a less competitive residency in an ER. Twenty-two years after the incident, Maggie’s daughter June had a sudden cramping in her lower abdomen. An emergency room PA diagnosed it correctly as a ruptured appendix and Daphne performed the surgery without complication.

In the third possibility, Seth swallowed the elongated staple, but instead of the soup going down his trachea, which would have normally caused a bout of coughing and not much else (and in this case, his death), the staple slipped in with the rest of the food and somehow travelled down to Seth’s stomach where the staple, skinned of its flesh accoutrement, inserted itself into his stomach’s lining. For the next few days, Seth suffered from bouts of constipation and diarrhea, observed blood in his stool twice, never saw a doctor and then ignominiously shat out the staple without realizing it. 

In the fourth possibility, Seth put the skin in his mouth, flipped it up against his teeth and thinking it was a bone, pulled it out. He wiped off the wire with a paper towel and called the waitress over. She was apologetic and offered a replacement. Seth demurred; the manager eventually brought over an expensive beer and the meal was comped with a profuse apology. Seth, who was high at the time, though about the incident as he walked back to his apartment. 

Seth imagined the staple getting caught in his throat. The gasp and the terror. Like everyone else, he had flirted with killing himself and even had a single half-hearted attempt that didn’t get very far. He had seen the yawning dark and swerved. Death now scared him.

The next day he awoke with newfound satisfaction at being alive. It lasted for a few hours.

– Michael Orbach