You – seen from here – are a deeply flawed person; you know this, and so do your friends; in fact, they frequently discuss your flaws behind your back.

When you die, they will not discuss these flaws, which will have been transmuted into virtues (“Vlad, you know, was so passionate, so … resourceful”).

Your enemy knew you best; were he allowed to deliver your eulogy, he’d speak without the stutters of the newly bereaved; he’d speak you well, float you along in your coffin on a fast stream of articulate bile. Your coffin would wear away. Your body would topple out. Your suit would rip on jagged rocks.

You’d be done more justice by this enemy than by any of your self-censorious friends or family.

By enemy, of course, I’m referring to that schizoid particle that speaks to you incessantly after parties, to the mirror that tells you how ridiculous you look in that suit, and to the ear that hears your voice on tape.

-

A nobody asks the narrator to turn him into a character*; the narrator and his friend, Dr de Los Rios, tell nobody he must first fake his suicide by leaving his coat with all means of identification by a bridge. After having done so, the nobody’s wallet, with ID, is picked up by a stranger from where it was left, and the stranger uses the nobody’s identity to become a rich media mogul. The nobody returns to the café where the narrator sits with Dr de Los Rios, and tells them of his misfortune – he is now even less than a nobody. There is only one thing you can do, Dr de Los Rios says – you must commit suicide. The narrator nods in agreement. The nobody walks back to the bridge and jumps from it, plunging to his death. The narrator ends his story hoping that he has done the nobody some justice in the telling of it. And indeed he has.

-

The shame of a life capped with piss-poor prose (or worse: a gravestone typo). In the necessary absence of the truthful, hateful You, perhaps a storyteller would better serve as eulogiser? Hermeneutic modesty is also popular (“Vlad, for me, …”), but that tells us more about the living than the dead. Religion used to provide the fiction to die by, but there are now almost as many afterlives as there are people – personal gods in personal heavens, with personal rules of admittance (“Well now, of course I wouldn’t exclude the homosexuals”).

I’d much prefer a simple, flagrant fiction, charting my undercover career as a spy for MI5, for example, or about the monumental book I’d been working on at the time of my death (Éloge pour Narcisse: How to Die Beautifully), in which a near-scientific syncretism of aesthetics and thanatology would have been established; or perhaps the elected fictionist could apishly parody the usual makings of a eulogy, smearing on his palette a tacky mix of cliché and sobbing inarticulacy, boohoohooing his way through stuttering anguish toward a gushy crescendo of pure bathetic sublimity – causing real pain, rage, and hysterics among the mourners.

By storyteller I suppose I just mean anyone generous enough to relieve a friend or family member of the burden of making a holy show of themselves.

*This is a synopsis of a story to be found in Felipe Alfau’s collection of interweaved tales, Locos (published by Dalkey Archive).

Ciaran Lawless lives in Dublin