House of Lazarus

by T. L. Bodine

  But the truck bumps over the bridge easily, without incident, and then it’s behind me. I remember to breathe again and suck in a hungry gulp of air. I don’t know whether it actually means anything, now, or if oxygen is some new kind of placebo for the Undead. But the threatened gorge of panic abates all the same, and I finish the drive to the Lazarus House without exhaling. The sky darkens but does not storm.

  One day, maybe, I’ll cross the bridge without feeling that tightening in my body, the ache in my chest. Maybe after enough weekly trips across this stretch of desolate highway, the memory of my death will fade and loosen its hooks in me.

  I’d like to think so, anyway.

  What I know is I’ve driven so much today, I’ve brokered in so much disappointment and tension, that the morning with its empty bed and burnt eggs feels like an eternity ago.

  But at least I’m here.

  I can see the facility looming large ahead of me, set back from the highway by a long path and a pair of fences, one chain link, the other hastily threaded barbed wire.

  Fun fact: Back in the day, a leper colony used to be called a “Lazar House” or “Lazaretto.” Not named for the dead guy who came back to life, but for the other Lazarus in the Bible — the poor leper who died a beggar outside a rich man’s shop.

  I wonder if the people running this place have a taste for irony.

  This modern House of Lazarus is a collection of worn-down adobe buildings clustered around a dusty central courtyard. The structure itself is very old, Spanish Colonial in style and origin, and it’s been a lot of things over the centuries. That’s another fun fact about the old Lazarettos. At first they were for the lepers, and then the tuberculosis patients, and once the diseases were cured, people needed someone new to put in those buildings, so they started locking up their lunatics, their hysterical women, their sufferers of chronic melancholia. As long as there are asylums that need to be filled, society will always have some group of undesirables to put in them.

  I stop at the gate, and the guard approaches from his little security box.

  I roll down my window. “I’m Davin Montoya,” I say, digging out an ID. “My dad…lives here.” I stumble over the word ‘lives,’ choking on the inaccuracy, and try again. “He’s a resident — Ignacio.”

  The guard glances at my ID, then hands it back with an approving grunt and moves to open the gate, waving me through. I pull up the gravel drive and stop at the “visitor’s parking” area in front of the office, which is actually a single-wide trailer sitting awkwardly in front of the crumbling old historic building.

  The door creaks when I open it, and the receptionist looks up at me with suspicion, like she’s expecting me to rob the place. She’s a middle-aged woman with her hair tied back, gray at the temples. If you don’t look closely enough to see how thick her makeup is caked on, you might think she’s about 20 years younger than she is. I don’t recognize her, but then, I’m not usually here in the middle of the week. The whole staff is probably different than the weekends.

  “I’m here to see my dad,” I say, because she’s just staring at me. I pull out my ID again. “Ignacio Montoya?”

  “We don’t hold open visitation on weekdays. Did you make an appointment?”

  “Well, no, but —”

  “We’ll have to ask you to come back another time.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, shifting uneasily. “I’m just — I got off the phone with him a little while ago. He sounded very upset. I’m worried he might…” I trail off, start again. “Just let me see him for five minutes?”

  Her eyes narrow. “Ignacio Montoya?” she repeats.

  I nod.

  She looks down. She keys something into a computer. She’s got one of those screen protectors on it, the kind that makes it impossible to see anything from an angle, so from here it just looks like she’s peering into the an empty screen. In the silence of the office, I can hear that low, quiet plastic creak of the computer doing its thinking, the small sounds of electronics groaning with effort. The receptionist taps long acrylic nails against the desk, impatiently waiting for something to load, and then looks back at me with an expression of recognition. It’s not a happy look. “Oh, yes. Your father, you said.”

  I nod.

  “He’s caused us a lot of trouble.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” I hate that I’m apologizing. I hate that she’s making me apologize. I would have figured that apologizing for my dad’s bullshit would end when one or both of us died, but it turns out that some things are actually more certain than death and taxes. “Look. He called me about an hour ago. He sounded worked up over something. I was thinking if I came down I could talk to him before he tried something stupid.”

  Something stupid — like the time he escaped from ‘outside time’ and scaled the fence, planning to hitch a ride to the casino bar for a drink. Or like the time he bit an orderly, not because he’d gone mad from Lazarus withdrawal but just because he didn’t want to get his injection that day. Some patients have roommates or make friends in here; sometimes you see them playing chess out in the courtyard. Dad isn’t one of those patients.

  Judging from the look on the receptionist’s face, she knows these same stories, or at least just pulled them up on her computer. He’s probably got an incident report a mile long.

  “Let me phone down to the floor and see if anyone is available to check in on him,” she says, coolly, and then turns away from me to make a call, as if facing away is going to erect a soundproof wall between us.

  I wait, awkward and exposed and increasingly angry about this whole situation. The reason I even turned my dad over to this place — the whole point in locking him up — was so I could get my life back, so I didn’t have to spend my days babysitting him, keeping him penned up in the master bedroom and dealing with his insane angry rambling. Now, well, it’s a little late, isn’t it? You can come back from the dead, but you’ll never get your life back the way it was; every moment gets chewed up and discarded as soon as you pass through it.

  The receptionist sets down the phone, and I realize I’ve zoned out most of the conversation, her half of the exchange mostly just a dull buzzing drone in my head — my name, my dad’s name, something about a status, something about a visitation. But she’s looking at me now, wary and tight-lipped, the way a dog looks at you when you’ve got it cornered and it’s thinking about biting. I think she’s going to tell me something she knows I won’t want to hear.

  “Mr. Montoya, your father is sleeping now.”

  “So go wake him up.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t advise that.” Her jaw clenches, teeth gritting behind that tight lipsticked smile, and I can see the ball-joint of her cheek pulsing under the skin. Her eyes are cold. “We ask that you come back during your appointed visiting hours.”

  “I drove all the way out here,” I say, trying hard to keep my voice level, trying hard to keep my nails from digging crescents that won’t heal into my palms as my fists tighten. “I just want to see him for a minute. Just to be sure he’s okay.”

  “Your father is fine, Mr. Montoya, and if you had called ahead we would have saved you the trip. Now I must kindly ask you to leave, and refrain from any unexpected, unscheduled visits in the future. It will save all of us some time and trouble.”

  Would I have fought this, in a previous life? Was there a time when the stakes were lower — when I did not have a terrible secret of my own to keep hidden — when I would have raged at her, when I would have waited for guards to appear and usher me from the premises? I might tell myself that, but in my heart I know I wouldn’t. I’m not a guy who sends food back at a restaurant; I’m not a guy who starts fights over what I want. If I were that guy, a lot of things in my life would have gone differently.

  And right now, with a foot in the grave and staring down the specter of my future in mandatory lock-up if they catch on about my Undeath, well, now isn’t the time to indulge in ill-timed courage.

  I mut
ter something scathingly polite and back away from the front desk, trudging back out to the pickup, seething with an anger that crawls up through my body like some living thing. I’m done with his shit. I can’t get my old life back, but I can keep him from screwing up this one any worse than it already is.

  I fish my phone out of my pocket as I start up the truck, pulling up Dad’s recent calls, and block the number.

  Chapter 3

  You’d think that even just waking up each morning after your death would feel like a miracle, but the reality is that just about anything becomes routine once you’ve gotten used to it.

  There’s this theory I heard about once in a psychology class, before I pulled out mid-semester to come tend to my dying mom, called the hedonic treadmill. The basic idea is that happiness and misery are fixed states of being, more internal than external. Some scientist studied it by looking at people who had undergone a life-altering tragedy, like a death in the family or becoming disabled, and then people who had won the lottery.

  What he figured out is, in both cases, the subjects returned to their baseline levels of happiness within just a few months. It doesn’t really matter, it turns out, what happens in your life: however happy you are is just how you’re going to be. Misery is a thing that soaks deep into the fabric of our lives. It’s unavoidable and inescapable. When you grow up with unhappiness, when that unhappiness is all that you’ve ever known, you’ll find the misery wherever you look because you don’t know how to be happy. That’s the hedonic treadmill.

  Then again, maybe the scientist was full of shit. I feel like if I won the lottery right now, it’d solve a whole lot of problems. I’d still be dead, but at least I wouldn’t be dead and broke. Whoever said money can’t buy happiness probably never had his electricity cut off.

  September is swiftly giving way to October, days getting eaten up in job searches and hassling Zoe about her homework, and the bills slowly accumulating on the kitchen table are the most reliable way of marking the passage of time. I’ve opened all the envelopes and laid them all out on the table like pieces of a very boring jigsaw puzzle, staring at them as if maybe if I can see them all at once I’ll have some kind of epiphany about how they can get paid.

  I catch Zoe out of the corner of my eye, approaching with a kind of cat-like slyness that makes me immediately suspicious. She’s carrying a sheet of printer paper, held carefully so I can only see the blank side.

  “What’s that?”

  Zoe’s pushes a paper at me, looking somehow both sheepish and utterly pleased with herself.

  I take it, having to read it a couple times to make sense of it.

  There’s her name up at the top — Zoe Montoya — and right below that, UNDEAD LIVES. Then, in table form, a list of names, aliases, and usernames with numbers out beside them. Most of them small dollar amounts, some of them bigger, the final balance tipping out at just under a thousand bucks. I stare.

  “Is this…?”

  “My donor’s page!”

  “Your…what?”

  “My donation page. I’ve got subscribers who get to see my videos before I post them, and they get some extras like footage I didn’t use or stray research or whatever — don’t worry, it’s not like real behind the scenes stuff, it’s all still really anonymous and under this persona I’ve got.”

  Partly for theatrics and partly to satisfy my paranoia, Zoe has always taken pains to dissociate her journalistic activities from her identity — voice-changers and VPNs and a green screen and dramatic lighting and all sorts of other tricks. But I can’t see how any of that is going to do her any good if her name is printed right here at the top of the page, and that’s not even touching on the insanity of the amount tallied at the bottom.

  “All of these people are giving you money for your ‘Undead Lives’ channel? The one where you post videos about Undead rights and conspiracies and stuff?”

  “Well they’re not getting nudes, if that’s what you’re asking,” she huffs.

  I can tell I’m not reacting to this the way she expected; this conversation isn’t going the way either of us probably want. Also the idea of her selling nudes hadn’t even entered my mind, but now that she’s suggested it that’s adding a whole extra layer of things to worry about.

  “I’m not trying to imply anything! I’m just. Surprised. I didn’t realize you were doing this.”

  “Are you mad?” Sulky, defensive. She snatches the paper back and holds it close to her chest, like she thinks I’m going to do something to it.

  “I’m not mad. I would have liked you to tell me before you did it, though. I’m a little concerned —”

  “Davin, the literal title of your autobiography would be ‘I’m a little concerned.’”

  She’s not wrong, but it kind of pisses me off to hear it. “And for good reason! That’s your real name, tied right there to this content —”

  “It’s only stored on the donor site! And it’s not even like, a big-name site, it’s set up specifically for people who are doing stuff discreetly…” She blushes, suddenly averting her eyes.

  “Zoe…”

  “I told you, I’m not selling nudes or anything! There are people there who do sex work, okay, that’s kind of what the platform caters to. But there’s people doing all kinds of stuff! Real grass-roots stuff and advocacy work and all kinds. I’m not an idiot, I vetted it and made sure it would be totally safe! But people love my videos. And I can make money at it, real money! Which we need, last I checked.”

  My temple starts to throb, a phantom pain of a body helpfully remembering only the worst details of how it feels to be alive. I lay a hand over my eyes and massage my temples. Nobody ever gave me any kind of rule book for raising little sisters. And if they had, I strongly doubt that this specific scenario would have been included in it. How to talk to your sister about her anti-government advocacy work on a sexworker website when it threatens your identity as an extra-legal zombie.

  But I can also practically hear her heart breaking with disappointment, so I have to say something.

  “I’m really proud of the work you do,” I say carefully. “And it’s really impressive that you’ve got so many passionate fans. I’m just worried —”

  “The reason I came out here to show you this is because I want to help. And also, I can’t set up a bank account or cash out any of this money without a guardian’s legal approval.” She mumbles this last part pretty fast, like she’s hoping I won’t notice. “I know we’re hurting for money.”

  “We’re not…” okay, that’s a lie, and I can’t even finish saying it without feeling like an asshole. I squeeze my temples harder. I wonder if being dead has softened my bones. What if I squeeze too hard? What if my fingers break right through my skull and plunge into my brains like jello? It would, at least, save me from needing to finish this conversation. “I don’t want to take your money, Zoe. You worked for that. It should at least go into a college fund or…something.”

  That gets her attention. “So you’ll sign off on it? You’ll let me open an account and everything? I can show you the tax forms…”

  I don’t think that’s what I actually said, but now I’m going to be double the asshole if I turn her down. “Is there, like. A time limit to this? Is this something I can think about and get back to you?”

  Instantly deflated. “No…I guess. The money just sits there until I cash it out. In escrow or whatever.”

  As surreal as everything in my life is, the fact that I’m dangerously close to needing my 17-year-old sister to explain what the fuck an ‘escrow’ is just about pushes me over the edge. “Let me think on it, okay? Just a couple days. Can you give me that?”

  Big sigh. “Fiiiiine.”

  “I am really proud of you though.”

  “Whatever.”

  God damn it. There’s no coming back from ‘whatever’ town. I’m claiming this as a victory while I can.

  ***

  I give up on the bills, carefully piling them
up into two little stacks: empty envelopes on one side, bills on the other. This doesn’t really accomplish anything, but it almost feels like it does. Anyway, it looks better. Zoe’s relocated to the couch and is clicking through the recordings on the DVR, looking for something. Apparently she finds it, because she makes a little triumphant noise and clicks it on.

  “On tonight’s special report — the Reanimation Virus. It’s been two years since the dead began to return. What do we know, and what’s still a mystery?”

  The news program plays its little opening jingle, and the camera pans over a carefully staged studio before settling on a table set in the middle of a dark room, the background blotted out to really amplify the ‘talking heads’ motif. The newscaster is a woman with gray hair carefully cut into a mid-length bob, her pantsuit aggressively neutral. Across from her is a dark-haired woman with olive skin and high cheekbones. She’s wearing a pair of dark-rimmed cats-eye glasses, her hair twisted up into a bun like she’s getting her fashion advice from Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

  A name plate hovers on the screen, introducing her as Olivia Nez, Disease Researcher.

  “Dr. Nez —”

  “Olivia is fine,” she cuts in, as smoothly as if they’d rehearsed this a dozen times, which I’m sure they have.

  “Olivia. Right. Tell our viewers how you came to be involved in this research.”

  “Well, Suzie, it’s really an honor to even get the chance. Those of us who study infectious diseases can spend a lifetime without ever seeing some of the things we learn about in theory really come through in practice — but here, we have something truly special. I don’t think anyone has ever seen anything quite like what we’ve seen with the Undead, as they’re being called.”