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white and full color, and they put them all across the back. No tiny
little picture on the back flap, not anymore, I had my whole face,
grinning out like a loon at whoever bought a copy of anything of
mine. The autobiography had the picture on the front cover, and there
was one biography that had a collection of all my portraits as a
mosaic. It covered the whole book.
Maybe ifI hadn't put all those pictures on there I wouldn't be
like this now. But that's stupid. If you're going to spend eternity
being punished for something, why that, of all things? Maybe it's not
supposed to be punishment. Maybe it's just one of those things that
happen for no reason. That's easier to swallow than the alternative,
I guess.
I don't know if it's punishment or not. I don't know what it is.
But my eyes look out the backs of those covers, and I see everything
those covers see. I don't know how. I read once that your eyes don't
even really see that well, that it's your brain that has to take the
images and refine them into what you really see. Like mental
Photoshop. I don't know where my brain is anymore. Rotting in the
ground, probably, but I still see 20120.
It's a good thing some copies (hell, most of them) sit on shelves
or in boxes or in attics or lie forgotten under sofas, where it's
dark and I can't see. It's better that way, although I didn't like to
think about that stuff when I was alive, about my books in boxes
shoved in the bottom of the pile in the basement or left to rot in
the rain. It's a good thing, though, really. I'd go into sensory
overload otherwise.
Sometimes people will take one of my books out, then flip it over
~nd just stare at me. It happened after I died a lot, less often
nowadays. My wife did it, and my son. They just stared.
It makes you tired, being dead.
I learned to read lips the first thing. I can't hear anything
anymore, or feel, or anything like that. I can only see. It's not
really enough. Sometimes my son gets a copy of one of my books down
and talks to it, and the silence is ... strange. I can hear the
movements of the books, of every page, like when you lie your head
back in a bathtub and you can hear the water rushing through the
pipes.
Lately, I've been doing experiments.
Sometimes, when a book is shut on the shelf, I think maybe I can

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