1: a complimentary item provided at no charge.
2: a funeral full of free lies, and not a single truth worth keeping.
The cathedral is full of strangers.
I can feel them all around me. Bodies packed into pews and the rustle of programs. Sniffles. Throats clearing. Yasmin sits pressed against my left side, her hand wrapped around mine so tight my fingers have gone numb.
We’re in the back, as planned. Anonymous mourners lost in an ocean of them. Yas insists that no one has given us so much as a second glance, thank God. The huge hats and N95 masks she bought for us are functioning as intended.
Up front, someone is talking. Whoever he is, he’s very good at it. His voice is a butter-drenched purr, so rich and dulcet that it almost makes me forget that everything he’s saying is complete bullshit. “Bastian Hale was a visionary,” he proclaims.“A pioneer who forever reshaped Chicago’s culinary landscape and proved that fine dining could be both accessible and transcendent.”
I dig my fingernails into my palm. Yasmin’s thumb strokes the back of my hand to soothe me.
The speaker continues. A buffet of what Bastian achieved in this lifetime. Project Olympus. The Michelin stars. The James Beard nominations. Each achievement gets its own paragraph, polished and perfect and utterly meaningless.
It’s more of a press release than a eulogy. I feel sick.
He finishes with an uncomfortable crackle of microphone static. Another speaker takes over. A woman this time, her voice trembling with what I assume is supposed to be sadness. It comes across more like indigestion, though.
“I had the privilege of working with Bastian on several occasions,” she warbles. “His attention to detail was legendary. He demanded excellence from everyone around him, but most of all from himself.”
Wrong. He demandedcontrol, I think bitterly.And if he didn’t get it right away, he’d slice you open until you fell to your knees and gave him what he asked for.
Sometimes, the slicing was literal.
But she doesn’t say that. None of them do. They don’t know what I know, or if they do, they pretend they don’t.
A third speaker goes. A fourth. Each one builds another layer of the myth, constructing a Bastian Hale who existed only in carefully staged photo ops. The brilliant entrepreneur. The culinary genius. The man who put Chicago on the map.
None of those things are real.
If nothing else, they’re incomplete.
Because the man they’re describing isn’t the same as the one who sang me Russian lullabies in the shower. That man kept my bucket list tucked in his pocket, and when he looked at me, his eyes wereblue,not black. The blue-eyed Bastian looked at me like I was the only thing in the world worth seeing, even as we were both drowning in darkness we couldn’t escape.
As for the black-eyed Bastian…
Well, safe to say no one’s eulogy mentions anything about alley corpses or severed fingers.
So yes, this is a kind of burial, but onlykindof. These people are shoveling dirt on thefakeBastian. It’s nice dirt, perfumed dirt, dirt that’s been run through a machine of PR double-speak and the niceties that people only remember to say about you afteryou die.
But it’s still dirt. It’s still a lie. It’s still bullshit.
And it’s still forgetting to putallof Bastian Hale to rest.
If anyone asked me, I could give my own remarks about him. I wouldn’t lie and I wouldn’t omit. I’d tell them he loved me more than anyone has ever loved me before—and also that he hurt me worse than anyone has ever hurt me before. I’d say he showed me kindness and oysters, bloodied hands and sunrises over the lake.
And then I’d lay him to rest. For good.
But since I can’t say that stuff, it all sticks in my throat until I feel like I’m choking on it. “Yas,” I mutter, “I need to get out of here. Let’s go.”
“Wait just a?—”
But I’m already moving, shuffling sideways past knees and purses and mumbling apologies as I go. Someone up front is still talking, but I’m no longer listening.
The cathedral doors are heavy, but I push through them into the open air. Chicago has a smell, I’m realizing. I almost kind of missed it. I thought coming here would give me something. Closure, maybe. Or at least the chance to say what I needed to say, even if Bastian couldn’t hear it.
I hated what you became. I loved you anyway.
