A few days ago I asked Stephen what the suicide was like. He told me about a Leni Riefenstahl film documenting the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

In the film, special attention is given to the divers. Shot lovingly in slow motion, they leap from their diving boards and as they swerve down into the pool twenty feet below, they go through an incredible serious of flips, turns, spins and whirls, their bodies tight and controlled. When they reach the pool, they are totally vertical, hands at a perfect point in front, legs stretched out in the back, bodies taut between the two like vibrating piano wire.

He said it was a little like that, but instead of a twenty-foot drop into water, it was a twenty-eight-story drop onto concrete, and the slow whirls and twists the Mr. Graham did on the way down weren’t on purpose; they were the fault of his plants.

He had raised hundreds of plants in his apartment, and he had had to wade through them to get to the window. They had grabbed and tangled all over his legs and chest as he struggled through them, and when he had leapt, they had stayed on his body, so that as he fell it was almost like he was digging his way out of them, like he was being rolled out of a huge green carpet that grew thinner and thinner as more and more of the vines snapped off.

When I first saw the body, there was still a matted noose of vines clinging to his feet, suspending them in the air. They swayed in the light breeze, back and forth.

There was a little fan of bone fragments on the pavement before his face, and his chin and neck had gotten kind of rammed up into his torso, like the end of a telescope. It looked like the hot asphalt of the street was a sheet of water that he was submerged in, and only the plants were keeping him from dropping below the surface.

Only one of his eyes was intact – the other one was smeared onto the pavement like an egg white – and it was stretched and swollen so much that it didn’t close, just bulged out of his head, barely above the steaming pavement. The blood had pooled in his face – his legs, suspended by the plants above his black silk bathrobe, were the color of papier-maché, pasty and thin and ridged with the first suggestions of blue hypoxia, but his torso and head were huge and swollen with blood, and his eye was almost the size of my fist, its capillaries burst, little red lines leaking out from under the bottom of his clamshell-sized eyelid.

When they cut the noose of plants from around his ankles, his legs flopped pathetically down onto the sidewalk, and the whole carpet of plants reverberated, shuddering all twenty-eight stories up to the lip of his window. A few leaves snapped off and fluttered gracefully down onto his heels.

I stood by him for a while, amid the noise of the hoses of the street cleaners as they massaged the blood and skull out of the street. He smelled like his plants, like a botanical garden – green and wet and heavy, like steam and creeping ivy, emanating a sense of life so primal and powerful that it was hard to believe he was just a corpse.

I had to brush past the curtain of plants as I walked in the door. They were waxy and wet, tense globes of moisture beading all over their surfaces. The elevator ride to his floor felt very long, and I could still smell him – the smell of damp leaves and heavy, warm steam.

The plants on his door were the same. Little vines covered in dark leaves hung down from the top of the door, swaying a little in the breath of the hallway fan, and tentative shoots of green peered out near my feet.

I knocked on the door. A low female murmur of assent eased out of the wood, and I turned the knob.

Sheets of moist green leaves slid past my arms as I walked in, my feet making little squishing noises on the vines that had crawled off the walls and settled on the floor. In the center of the living room, an old television had been crushed and colonized by the teeming vegetation, shards of jagged screen squeezed and constricted by stalks and stems. His wall-mounted landline phone had tiny green tendrils growing out of its grilles, and the spiral of the cord was gnarled and bent by the vines. Here and there, little piles of ceramics and nutrient-enriched dirt marked the spot where a pot had been smashed to feed the plants’ hunger. By the window-sill, ferns flowed out of their planters like ground fog, their leaves skittering blindly along the floor. An enormous skylight in the ceiling shone rich amber light on the plant-encrusted dining-room table, illuminating an atmosphere full of tiny seeds and dead leaves that twirled and caught the light like wisps of snakeskin.

The nearest comparison I can think of is Where the Wild Things Are, when the forest grows in Max’s bedroom. It was a reversion to nature on that level.

Seated on the vegetated sofa was a young woman, expectant and draped in a black dress, her thin fingers lightly grasping a cigarette like a blade of grass. She had high cheekbones, and when she sucked the smoke into her mouth in long, languid gasps, her pale cheeks sunk in and fluttered as if they were being drawn into a vacuum. When she exhaled, the smoke floated up into the gold glow of the skylight and dissipated slowly. She flicked her eyes up at me as I walked in.

“Oh, good. You’re here,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m here.”

Usually they get up to shake my hand, but she didn’t. She turned her eyes away disinterestedly and took another unhurried drag on her cigarette, then murmured, “Can we try get this over with fast, please?”

I thought that over. She examined me felinely while I considered, washes of smoke escaping her mouth.

“Well, Miss Graham,” I replied, “It will probably take a few months at the least, but if you’d like to meet more intensively I can try to fit more appointments into my schedule.”

“You haven’t read his note, have you?” she asked.

I hadn’t.

“No, Miss Graham. I didn’t know he had left a note.”

“You should read his note. I think it could apply some context.”

“I’m not sure what you mean, Miss Graham,” I replied.

She leaned over the back of the sofa and her long, thin fingers spider-walked over the mass of vines to the crumpled paper on the table. I picked it up.

The note said:

Dear Candace,

I’m sorry about all the plants. I’m really sorry.

Can you read this? I hope the plants haven’t soaked through it. They do, sometimes. I guess they collect dew or something. Reading the newspaper is impossible after a day.

I’m sorry. Please call a grief counselor.

And at the bottom, crossed out shakily, it said,

these fucking plants, these fucking god damn plants

I lifted up my eyes and she exhaled a heavy stream of smoke.

“I still don’t follow, Miss Graham. Good communication is very important to this sort of thing.”

“Well,” she said, “I called you because he wrote that I should. I’m respecting his wishes. It’s something you usually do for dead people.”

“So you were estranged,” I said.

You start to pick up on things like that after a few years. Usually people who can still be smug right after a death haven’t seen the deceased for a long time. Her eyebrows rose briefly.

“I guess, in a word,” she said. “It wasn’t so much that we were estranged, it was just that neither of us ever initiated anything after he moved out.”

“How long has it been since you spoke to him?”

“About five years.”

“So it’s not too hard to adjust to his being gone?”

“Not at all, no,” she said.

“Good,” I replied. “Let’s begin.”

The burial was normal. The sun glinted off the glossy black casket. There was a small cluster of people, including Miss Graham, and a preacher. A few black-clad onlookers swayed uneasily, their immaculate dress shoes crunching the frost on the grass. The sermon came in puffs of steam.

Every death is different, but every burial is basically the same.

Later, I sat in the back of a coffee shop with Miss Graham, who had taken off her veil and some of her makeup. She had her cigarette out. Swirls of aromatic smoke whirled in the fluorescent light above our heads, thrummed by the beat of the ceiling fans. We had stopped talking.

“So why did you call me?” I asked, to break the silence.

“What do you mean?” she asked. The fans stirred wisps of her thin black hair into her eyes, and she brushed them away with her free hand. A little absentminded smile rested on her face.

“I mean, if you’re not experiencing trauma, why call me?”

She paused for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “It seems like the wrong decision now. I was a little dazed that morning.”

“You weren’t trying to honor his memory?”

“That was part of it.”

More silence.

“What were the plants about?” I asked, finally. It wasn’t a therapy question.

She looked away, still smiling a little.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what the plants were about. I don’t really know anything about him after he left the house – I guess I knew he’d moved into the apartment, gotten a job as some kind of writer, and started leaving only to buy food and plants. But that’s all.”

“But he didn’t seem to like them, did he?” I asked.

She raised her eyebrows and exhaled.

“What do you mean? No, he loved them,” she said.

“But the bottom of the note-”

“What?” she asked. She was genuinely perplexed, I could tell.

“The bottom of the note said, ‘these fucking plants, these fucking god damn plants,'” I replied. “It was crossed out, but you could read it.”

“Oh,” she said, and her smile curled up and died.

I raised my eyebrows. Her cigarette holder had stopped moving.

“You didn’t read that part?”

She was staring past me, into space. “No,” she said. “No, I guess not.” She slowly put out her cigarette in the table ashtray, twisting it into the cinders. I was puzzled now.

“I guess they must have gotten to him,” I said.

“I guess,” she echoed.

I stopped trying. We were still for a moment, and then she stood up and slowly walked out, the thrumming fan throwing her hair around. I wanted to stop her, but I didn’t.

I walked by her apartment on the way home. I knew somewhere that I was doing it on purpose. There was no real reason for the detour. The wind blew, cold and dry, down the corridor of buildings, and the sky was a bare shade of ice blue, the sun fading from the clouds in gold patches. The smell of acrid frost stung my throat when I breathed too deep.

I heard the first crash, echoed a dozen times around the street, when I was about a block away. I knew it was her without really knowing, and I sped up until I was in front of her door.

Against the golden blotches of fading sun, she leaned out of her window, her makeup a little smeared. As I got up to her door I saw the pot.

It lay like a corpse on the ground, a pile of dust and jagged ceramic shards. A small green fern lay on the crown of the pile with its roots splayed desperately all over the sidewalk.

She didn’t see me. She threw another pot down. It cracked like a water balloon hitting a wall – sort of folding up, its broken sound echoing like glass around the block. The dirt hissed out of it.

Another pot hit the block next to me. I backed up into the street. There were no cars coming.

She hurled out another pot, and then another, and then I guess that wasn’t good enough, because she started cracking them on the windowsill herself, like she was cracking eggs on a pan. They shattered and their dirt and roots and leaves snowed down, drifting all over the block like fallout.

Her wispy black hair had been whipped into a halo around her head and she was biting her lip, the rest of her face totally pale. She smashed the plants faster and faster, sprinting into the house for more, until the door to her building was dusted with clinging dirt, and her whole block was spotted with the corpses of cacti and ferns, and a small armada of green leaves was drifting down onto the street. I heard her rasp out, “These fucking god damn plants.”

When the last plant hit the windowsill, she stood panting for a moment in the door, her slim shoulders rising up and slumping down. She closed her eyes and leaned against the edge of the window, and her smile slowly accumulated back onto her face. Then, finally, she looked down and saw me. Her fingers curled up in a wave, and we stood like that for a moment, through the haze of drifting dirt and leaves. Me with my face buried in my scarf and her still in her funeral dress, her face finally flushing a little.

Then, she pulled the curtains closed, and as I walked a little closer to her house, I heard the metallic flick of her lighter.