Chairs

On the subway, a man sat next to me and opened a newspaper.
"Strange," he said, sort of to himself, after reading for a minute or two. "So many familiar faces in the obituaries."
I smiled at him and didn't respond. What do you say to that anyway?
He kept reading.
"This guy here is younger than me."
I wasn't sure if he wanted to start a conversation or just liked to hear himself talk. There was little I could contribute. Twenty-eight year olds don't have much to say about death or obituaries. I took a good look at the man while he was busy reading; he looked like he was in his late fifties, maybe sixties. Not exactly on the verge of croaking either.
"I cut out the ones of people I know," he said, pointing to the paper. "I started about ten years ago and now I've got a whole folder's worth."
How depressing, I thought. A yearbook of dead friends.
I saw a play once called The Chairs, written by Eugene Ionesco. An old man and woman live on an island and entertain a bunch of guests who aren't there. Their audience is a roomful of empty chairs.
"Does it help," I asked, "to preserve them?"
He laughed at me. The next stop came and he got off the train.

Two weeks later I saw the same man on the front page of the Post. "HITMAN TURNS HIMSELF IN," read the headline. The photograph showed the man inside an NYPD station, his hands handcuffed behind his back, shoulders propped up by police officers on both sides. He stared straight at the camera, at me, at the wives of the men he'd so delicately dispatched, having preferred to snipe his victims, the paper said, after learning their daily routines and vices.
I wonder if he brought in his folder. I wonder what he told the cops was his reason for coming clean, no, not just coming clean but willingly walking into prison for the rest of his life.
I wonder if what I said made him do it.