House of Lazarus

by T. L. Bodine

  When I brought Dad here, I was still alive and the tour was jarring. That’s when I met Chuy, who took me on a grand tour and told me so gently what a great place this would be for the corpse I’d left sleeping in the car. Things might have worked out differently for all three of us if I’d gotten a different first impression, if I’d decided that maybe this place wasn’t so great after all. Maybe I wouldn’t have died, and Chuy wouldn’t have gotten attacked, and Dad would still be holed up like an angry, suspicious feral creature in the master bedroom, and maybe that would have been better.

  Then again, I don’t know that we would have ended up like this if I’d ever really felt like there was another choice. Going back, not knowing any of what I know now, I think I probably would still have made those same decisions. That’s the thing about choice: it always feels inevitable once you see how it all works out.

  They’ve tried to make the office space cozy, magazines and pamphlets strewn over a coffee table, a fake potted plant with a film of dust on the waxy leaves. I glance at my phone to check the time, and to see if Zoe’s sent any texts about burning the house down or something, and then go back to my usual routine of fidgeting.

  I have to see Dad this time. No excuses. After everything — the phone calls and the voice mails and that weird, cryptic warning from Julian — I just need to look him in the eye and ask directly what’s going on.

  An orderly comes for me after what feels like hours but, my phone assures me, has been less than fifteen minutes. He’s a scrawny older guy with a few days of salt-and-pepper stubble. He greets me with a wide, genuine smile, like he loves working here and can’t imagine anything better than talking to me now. I wonder if the Lazarus House makes a point of hiring outgoing people, if they’ve got some kind of personality assessment to go through. What are the criteria for working here, anyway? Do you actually need any kind of medical training to deal with people who are already dead? It had never occurred to me before to ask. When I came here the first time, I was just eager to get rid of my dad.

  I imagine a paper sign taped up in the window: Now hiring friendly, dependable staff to keep your dead relatives happy while they rot!

  If it’s good enough for the tire shop, I guess it’s good enough for this.

  “These rules are stupid,” the orderly says, by way of an icebreaker as he claps a hand over my shoulder to steer me out of the lobby and onto the grounds. “I’m sorry if they hassled you at the front desk. It’s been getting harder and harder to schedule visits lately, I feel like.”

  I make a small, noncommittal noise of agreement.

  “I get why we have to run things this way, though,” he adds. “With all the security measures and rules, I mean. We’re under-funded as it is, and we’re constantly fighting against bad PR. I mean, we can’t win. Either the human rights groups are saying such-and-such is mistreatment and abuse, or else the media is saying we’re putting the state at risk by letting dangerous people run roughshod all over the place. It’s a mess.”

  He heaves a sigh and leads me outside and across the courtyard to the old adobe building, toward the rooms they’ve got partitioned off for…residents? Inmates? Patients? No term seems to really make sense. Curious eyes peer out at me from doorways. Out in the courtyard, there are a few Undead sitting at a picnic table, talking among themselves, but mostly the sudden cold snap has driven people back inside.

  An old woman stares out at me from behind the small square window of her room. Her skin sags from her cheekbones, dragging down her lower eyelids, giving grotesque illustration to the term “hangdog face.” Her skin is the color of an onion, and semi-translucent like one as well. I can make out the spray of blue-gray veins spiderwebbing across her cheeks and forehead. Her lips are curled back, revealing yellowed teeth riddled with cavities.

  I hurry past and stop before the door to my dad’s room. The guard moves out of the way so I can approach the door. I move to knock, but the orderly just shakes his head.

  “No point. Just go in. He won’t answer if he thinks it’s me.” He hesitates. “I’ll just wait out here.”

  I give him an uncertain look, like I’m expecting this to be some kind of trap or test, but turn the knob and step inside anyway.

  Dad’s room was hastily converted from old living quarters for Spanish missionaries. A barely renovated antique space, looking ancient and dilapidated. There’s nothing inside but a bed. He used to have some other things in here, a chair and a plant and a few books and such, but everything has been taken from him over time since he can’t seem to stop “acting out” – a nice way of saying “turning objects into weapons for attacking the staff.”

  Just now, the room is dark, illuminated only by light spilling in from the hall. I squint into the gloom, looking at dad’s sleeping form lumped up on the mattress.

  “Dad?”

  He was awake and perky when I called him to say I was coming, but that was a couple hours ago, and his moods can change like capricious winds. Sometimes he’s clear and lucid; sometimes he’s utterly incoherent, as if his corpse has remembered he’s supposed to be blind stinking drunk.

  “Dad,” I repeat. A pause; he doesn’t answer. “Dad! Get up.”

  The anger in my voice almost surprises me. But it shouldn’t. The situation stinks of déjà vu. When he died, I was the one who found his body — slumped in the couch, head twisted back at an odd angle, mouth hanging open and vomit crusting his lips. It wasn’t the first time I found him passed out, but it was the worst.

  Now, in his room in this modern House of Lazarus, his eyes blink open. They retain that inebriated glassiness; his skin is still ashy and bloodless. But his eyes roll in their sockets, brown and bloodshot, and they meet mine in an uncomprehending stare.

  “Davin?”

  “Hey. I’m here.”

  He stares. He blinks, slow and labored, like he’s trying to clear a hallucination from his field of vision.

  “Dad. I talked to you on the phone, remember?”

  He blinks again. His expression is suddenly slack, dumbfounded.

  “You’ve been leaving me a ton of messages. You begged me to come and see you. You said I had to come down right away.” My voice is low and cold and insistent, even though I don’t mean it to be. I feel the orderly’s eyes on the back of my neck and wish desperately that he would leave, or at least close the door. This is hard enough – humiliating enough – without a witness.

  “It’s late,” Dad says, slurring. “Does your mother know where you are?”

  “No, Dad. Mom’s dead.”

  “Right….” He trails off, and I think he’s done, before he asks in bafflement, “Aren’t I dead?”

  “…It’s complicated.” I heave a sigh. I can tell already, this is going nowhere. Of course. “Can you remember what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  Sometimes it’s like he’s not even there, like his brain has checked out and left a glassy-eyed corpse in its wake. It’s just my luck that he’d be like that now, that I would have hung my hopes on this visit only to be met with a drooling, barely-coherent joke. Anger burns in my chest, a match held to lighter fluid. How dare he. How dare he make me worry — how dare he make me care — only to fail so completely at even the simplest of things. It’s not even that he’s never been able to meet me halfway; it’s that every time I try to go where he is, every time I cross over that center line and come to his side with my accommodations, with my understanding, it’s like he backpedals even further.

  He lets loose a stream-of-consciousness babble, punctuated by moments of silence as he starts to drift back to sleep. I shake him awake. His head lolls on his neck, boneless like a doll, but his eye is wide and staring. It rolls up in its socket to fix me with a bloodshot stare.

  “They take them down the hall and they come back all wrong.”

  “Who, Dad? What are you talking about?”

  “The rats.”

  I draw a hand over my face, taking a long, steady breath in an attempt to keep
myself from screaming. What I want to do is give him a good, hard slap. What I want to do is raise my voice and tell him exactly what I think of him, and how I feel about this waste of time.

  But I don’t, because there are eyes on the back of my head.

  And I don’t, because a part of me is the same scared little kid who never stood up to him, who learned to stay out from underfoot and pick up messes and soothe hurt feelings. The little kid who learned how to de-escalate and find distracting games for his little sister to play so she wouldn’t notice, because only one kid in a family should have to bear a burden that oversized.

  Dad refuses to say anything else. He curls in on himself like a snail, a defensive ball huddled in the center of his bed. I can’t bear to keep pushing. I came here with all these ambitions, thinking I would blow some mystery wide open — thinking I would interrogate my dad, figure out what Julian meant, lay to rest a half-dozen fresh anxieties that have swirled and eddied to the surface of my life in the past few weeks. But I can’t even get my dad to string together more than two coherent sentences.

  Back in the hall, the orderly makes a small noise, a quiet little cough. I glance back and he meets my eyes with a sad little half-smile.

  “Sorry,” I say, burning with humiliation. Shame rises like bile from my gut, hot and burning.

  But he doesn’t mention it. He kindly glances away, standing aside to let me take the lead back to the front lobby. I hear the jangle at his belt as he withdraws a key and twists it in the lock on Dad’s door, sealing him in for the night. He does the same to each other inmate’s door as we pass their rooms.

  Just in case.

  “When it all started,” the guard says, without preamble. “Everyone thought it was only suicides. Remember?”

  I’m taken off-guard by the question, but as the words settle in, I nod. I do remember. It was the running theory at the time: Only suicides came back from the dead. For a few weeks – maybe a month or two – that’s how it seemed. Everyone believed it, planned for it even.

  Somehow, that made it less frightening. If it was something you had control over – a thing you could prevent from happening to yourself – it seemed like less of a threat. You’re never going to accidentally commit suicide. If you can stop your loved ones from doing it, if you can focus on that one single thing, you can prevent the Reanimation Virus from ever affecting you.

  Well, they were wrong.

  “I think a lot of us have lost someone this way,” the orderly is saying, and I hear him hesitate over the word ‘lost,’ aware that it’s not quite the right word. I know what he means. “For me, it was my brother. Not a suicide. Everyone in the family was shocked.”

  I hesitate, slowing my steps. I’m not sure why he’s telling me this.

  “He’s here, in another ward. I’d already been working here, thought I knew everything I needed to know about the Undead, and then comes my brother and it’s like I don’t know anything at all. Life’s funny that way, huh?”

  Hilarious. Like a goddamn toothache.

  “Anyway. It’s probably a good thing you came when you did, to be honest.” We’re coming up toward the lobby now, and he slows, as if hanging back to talk. I match his pace. “They haven’t made this public yet, but we’ll be closing the ward soon – putting everything down on quarantine.”

  “What? Why?”

  He looks over his shoulder, as if searching to see if someone is watching, and then shrugs. “Things are about to get…interesting. You didn’t hear this from me, but that whole Lazarus thing is hitting us hard. It’s looking like there’s not going to be a replacement drug on the market for a good long while. And now that they keep sending folks to us…” His lips twist up, that wry smile freezing into place, but I notice that the humor has long since drained from his eyes. “The higher ups don’t want a PR hassle, you know how it goes. So for a while, anyway, the doors will be closed. No new patients, no visitors – just the staff and folks already here, until we figure out what’s going to happen longterm.”

  He pauses, and I reel, trying to take a moment to let that sink in. I’m trying to make sense of it. How would they even enforce the Undead-out-of-containment problem if no new patients are going to be admitted to the Lazarus House?

  “So be happy you’ve gotten to see your dad, even if it wasn’t much of a visit,” he says, and there is definitely something in his eyes now, something hiding behind that unhappy smile. “You never know when you might get the chance again.”

  They used to say that about dying. They used to warn you: Tell your loved ones what they mean to you while you can, because you never know when you might lose them forever.

  When someone was dying, it used to be a big deal to spend time with them, to try and squeeze those quality moments out of them at the end. Tie up loose ends, make some final memories – like photographs of those last days or weeks or years that you could store in your mind or heart.

  These days, it’s never a sure thing that someone might stay dead, and those final moments are cast in a different light when you know it won’t be the end. It’s that awkwardness of bumping into someone at the grocery store again and again, ratcheted up to a horrible eleven.

  I thank the orderly for his help, and I make my way back to the car, feeling bone-weary and exhausted.

  But just outside the outbuilding, I see something that sets my blood to freezing.

  It’s a huge frame, taller than me and easily twice as broad. A guy dressed in scrubs, built like a football player and with a no-frills buzzcut. There’s no missing that silhouette.

  I recognize him immediately, but it’s impossible. It’s like seeing a ghost.

  “…Chuy?”

  ***

  He turns to look at me, his expression temporarily caught in a configuration of surprise, then a grin spreads across his features. “Órale! Davin. I didn’t know you were here!”

  I gape at him. I can’t find the words to make sense of this. Not the part where he’s standing here, and certainly not the part where he looks happy to see me. What the hell?

  “Last time I saw you,” I start, but he shakes his head quickly, shooting me a meaningful look.

  The last time I saw him he was being eaten alive from the belly up by a zombie. It’s not the kind of thing you easily forget, and it’s not something your brain can just make up. I know what I saw, and it does not reconcile with the image of him standing here now, whole and smiling.

  He tugs up the hem of his scrub top. He’s wearing a form-fitting shirt below, under armor or some kind of girdle — hard to say. It takes me a second, but recognition snaps my brain to attention. The form-fitting fabric isn’t just covering the place where his guts were torn open. It’s holding it all together.

  “Holy shit,” I breathe, little more than a whisper.

  “Nothing’s ever as final as you’d think these days,” he says, and grins.

  “Are you…are you still working here?”

  “It’s a good job. It pays well, and my sister just moved back in with her kids, and…” He shrugs.

  I look around, searching for prying eyes and ears, but we seem for the moment to be alone.

  “Didn’t know if I’d see you again,” he’s saying, and I’m starting to realize the kind of danger I could be in now. Is that a threat? Is he going to tell someone about me, about Randy, our drug deal, the way it all went wrong? Has he already told someone? Is he in a position to blackmail me?

  But then, if he did that, he’d be blowing his own cover, too.

  “I’m sorry…”

  “It’s not your fault. Shit happens.”

  Shit happens. Right. Like having your body torn apart by teeth. Just a normal everyday occurrence, really.

  “You didn’t text me or anything,” I say, still not really able to get over the shock. It’s kind of weird to be shocked by people not staying dead these days, but the thought had never occurred to me that Chuy would have walked away from that. I don’t know what I imagined. That h
e was eaten up like a kid in a fairytale. Ripped into pieces like something in a video game. What we saw happen was so horrific that I never once stopped to think about what might have happened afterward.

  “You never texted either, man.”

  “Can I…do you want to meet up somewhere? Grab a cup of coffee or something?”

  He lowers his voice. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. I think…it’s probably best…if you stay away from here. For everyone’s safety.”

  But I think I see something else in his eyes, some kind of silent communication or message. But it’s gone before I have a chance to try to guess what he was communicating with a glance.

  “My number’s the same if you want to meet up,” I say.

  He hesitates, glancing over his shoulder at the building rising up behind us. Instead of answering, he says, “I’m sorry about your dad.”

  I don’t think he’s talking about the general status of being Undead. His words are pregnant with meaning that I can’t parse, and before I can get any closer to understanding, the orderly who took me around back is passing by, eyeing us curiously.

  “Okay,” I say, the words empty, just something to say. “Well. Take care of yourself, all right?”

  “I do the best I can.”

  He gives me a sad smile and shuffles away, leaving me alone and reeling in the parking lot.

  Chapter 8

  The drive home feels longer than usual, more lonely. A half dozen different trains of thought run brokenly through my head, swirling and eddying together so I can’t see where one thought ends and the next one picks up — just one long chain of confusing ideas. Chuy’s Undead now. The Lazarus House is going to stop taking visitors. And Dad’s the same dead end as before, maybe even worse. All of the questions I came here with are every bit as unsolved.