House of Lazarus

by T. L. Bodine

  Never mind it’s my body that’s malfunctioning. He’s the one hurt by it.

  “Let me,” I say, leaning across the seat now, grimacing as my back creaks and my knee jams into the dash. “Let me make you feel good, at least.”

  He slaps my hand away with sudden violence, like an angry cat. “Don’t fucking touch me!”

  I realize that he’s trembling. Beads of sweat, blood-pink, well up at his pale brow. The purple-black strangulation mark stands out starkly against his throat. The scar, that eternal reminder of his death, the hours he spent hanging from the rafters, resurrected but helpless, before the maid finally cut him down.

  I’m shaking, too, but I don’t know if it’s for the same reason. If you could just pry someone’s head open, I wonder, could you see their thoughts racing through it, blue tendrils of electricity coursing over the wrinkled gray surface? I don’t know what’s going on in his head, but his expression is closed-off, his dark eyes distant and glazed. He’s not here, not in this moment, and I don’t know how to bring him back to it.

  I expect him to be breathing heavily, but of course he’s not breathing at all. He’s too distracted to remember.

  “I’m sorry.” I don’t say: You asked me to do this. You begged me. You begged because you wanted to feel dirty, you wanted me to make you feel like shit, so don’t blame me for giving you what you asked for. How dare you turn this back on me. How dare you push me away.

  “S’okay,” he mutters, thickly, but his dark eyes still have that faraway look, and I know it’s serious because he’s not making any wisecracks, he hasn’t recovered with some witty retort. But he’s not apologizing back, either.

  But slowly, the trembling stops, and he starts to loosen the tight ball of his body. He turns the key in the ignition, and we drive home in silence.

  ***

  The house is dark by the time I get home. Randy is back in control of himself, his face rearranged to its usual sardonic mask. His hair is mussed, fluffy in all the places where my fingers had ruined the gel. My hand feels greasy, unclean, no matter how many times I wipe it on my pants.

  “You can stay,” I offer, when he pulls up to the curb.

  “It’s better if I don’t.” Maybe he senses some reluctance in my voice, or maybe he wouldn’t have no matter what I said.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  He shrugs. His lip curls in to a wry smile. “What do you think I’m going to do? Kill myself?”

  He laughs, as though this were funny, but catches the look on my face and quiets.

  “I mean, I tried that already. Didn’t like it much. Not giving that old bastard the satisfaction of doing the job right a second time.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “Sure. Or whatever. It’s no big deal.” He offers me a smile. “See you.”

  He doesn’t lean in for a kiss. I don’t, either, and I don’t reach for his hand. There’s something between us now, some awkward, uncomfortable thing, like a plastic barrier, sticky and clinging and impenetrable. Something unspoken, and unspeakable.

  I climb awkwardly from my seat, and he’s pulled out and away before I reach the front door.

  ***

  At first I think that Zoe’s gone to bed, and I creep through the house in the dark so I don’t disturb her. But as I pass her door in the hall, I hear the whispered sounds of mouse-clicks and staccato keyboard strokes, and pause to linger outside. The light over her door, the one she turns on while she’s recording, is cold and dark. But there’s no sliver of light spilling out from below the door, either. Do I want to know what she’s doing there in the dark?

  “Hey,” she calls from the other side of the door. “Is it just you?”

  “Yeah. Randy went home.”

  “He okay?”

  I shrug, realize she can’t see it, and then say, “I think so.”

  Fortunately, she doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to press for details. I open the door and she spins in her computer chair to look, her face illuminated by the brightness of the dual monitors set up, casting their strange glow over the otherwise dark room. She’s tied her hair back and changed into pajamas, but judging from the number of tabs I can see open on her screens, I don’t think she’s planning on sleeping any time soon.

  “So I looked into Randy’s dad, and he’s a real piece of work,” Zoe says, the computer screen shining white off her glasses in the semi-dark. “Like. Whoa. These crime policies he advocated, the cases he prosecuted. It’s like he’s been waging a war on Undead down there. Did you know anything about this?”

  Not knowing what ‘this’ might be referring to, specifically, I’m left reeling a little. I don’t know if I can handle any more revelations this week, not at the rate they’re going. I shift my weight to lean against the door frame and try to decide what I want to tell her. It’s petty, but I don’t want her thinking that she knows more of Randy’s secrets than I do, even though that’s probably true. “I knew his dad was…some rich asshole, important somehow. I knew Randy killed himself and they covered it up by sending him out here. He’s been getting hush money or whatever. The lawyer who set it all up is friends with Ash, introduced them.”

  “That’s wild,” she butts in. “I wouldn’t have thought Randy was the suicide type.”

  I blink. Surely she had seen the scar on his neck, that livid purple bruise he half-heartedly tries to hide with high collars. “What did you think happened to him?”

  She shrugs, and she sounds almost exasperated, but it’s hard to read her expression in the dim light. “I don’t know. I figured he was, like…lynched or something. He’s southern, he’s gay, it’s still a thing that happens.”

  “Oh.” I don’t know what to say to that. It hadn’t occurred to me, and I don’t know what to do with the idea now that she’s put it in my head. Then, reflex, I say the thing that he told to me the day we met: “Nobody asks you how you died. But everyone always finds out eventually.”

  She nods, frowning. Doubles down. “Yeah. I just…I didn’t think he was the type.”

  “What type is that?”

  She grimaces, shifting uneasily in her chair the way that someone squirms when they realize their beliefs are being challenged and that there’s nothing behind them — that they’re all just smoke and feelings and a lifetime of training. When she finally does speak, I know exactly what she’s going to say because it’s something Dad would say. “Cowards, I guess. People who won’t fight or take responsibility for their lives. I didn’t think…Randy’s just really strong, you know?”

  “I don’t think suicide is weakness,” I say, softly, but something is tugging at the back of my mind, some memory that takes a moment to slide into place.

  Remember in the beginning, when we all thought it was just suicides?

  That’s what that orderly had said at the Lazarus House. Suicides. Patient zero — that teenager with a shotgun blast to his chest. Randy. Dad, too, maybe, in his way, suicide by self-neglect.

  “Hey, Zoe?”

  “Hmm?”

  “The Undead Registration Act. That means there’s, like…there’s an Undead registry, right? Like somewhere there’s a document with all of the known Undead on it?”

  She nods, rolling her eyes at me like I’m an idiot for not knowing, and I guess that’s fair. “Yeah, obviously. It’s like the sex offender registry. It’s public record. You can just pull it up. Here…” a new tab, a few clicks, and then there it is, a boring-looking government website that looks like it was designed sometime in 1995, which is ridiculous since the Undead have only even been an issue for a few years. “Why?”

  “Just…” I hesitate, not sure if there’s anything to this hunch, not sure if it’s worth pulling her into it if there is. “Does it happen to list cause of death on the list?”

  She shakes her head. “No. You’d have to cross-reference it yourself if you wanted something like that. It’d be kind of a pain.”

  “Oh.”

  She turns all the way
around, spinning the chair on its axle to do so, and seeks out my gaze. “Why? What are you looking for?”

  “Just…something I heard at the Lazarus House,” I say, and instantly regret it because she looks so eager, so suddenly hungry for information. “About how at first everybody thought it was just suicides who came back from the dead.”

  She cups her chin in her hand, tapping the pad of her thumb against her lower lip. She frowns, thinking hard. “You know, there might be something to that.” She spins back around and makes a few keystrokes, pulling open a window with some kind of bare-bones web forum in it. There’s a logo in the corner, a retro-style black-and-white clipart skull. When did everybody start leaning so hard into 90s-era Internet nostalgia? What kind of ironic aesthetic have I missed in the last generational shift?

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “I’m enlisting some help. No way I can trawl through all of these results myself. So I’m gonna crowdsource that shit. Don’t worry, people do stuff like this all the time on these forums…”

  “Okay.” I don’t know what I’m expecting her to find, or hoping for her to find. It’s probably a dead end. But I don’t say that. I am suddenly unbearably tired, and I want nothing more than to crawl down into my bedroom and sleep my dead, dreamless sleep.

  But Zoe looks excited, and she grins at me as I start back out of the door frame. “Thanks for the lead. I’ll let you know what we dig up. You might be onto something, who knows.”

  “Yeah. That’s great.”

  “Everything is okay with Randy, though? Like aside from the obvious?”

  “Yeah, I think it’ll be fine,” I lie, backing into the hall.

  “Cool. Well, goodnight.”

  “Yeah. Don’t stay up too late.” I close the door behind me and pad down to my room, barely managing to kick off my shoes before I face-plant into the bed, fully-clothed, puddling my body up on top of the blankets. I wake up twice in the night, disoriented in the darkness. When the light comes in gray and cool around the edges of my black-out curtains, I realize that my pillow case is stained russet from blood-tinged tears.

  Chapter 13

  I used to be someone who could hit “snooze” a half-dozen times before rolling out of bed. I used to have multiple different alarms set at different times, a multi-hour lead-up to the moment when waking up became a matter of dire need. Two-hours out, for the ambition of waking up early and getting something done before work. An hour out, for a workout and a shower. Half-hour out for breakfast. Fifteen-minutes to get dressed. Five minutes for pleading. The last one, the final straw: sleep past this and you won’t be able to get to work on time.

  Another, five minutes after, in case you didn’t listen. Call that one the depression alarm.

  Now, I don’t bother with the alarms. For one, because since I died, sleep has been a binary state: on or off, sleeping or waking, dead-not-dreaming. A sound or a light or a touch in the night and if it’s enough to rouse me then I’m up, brain switched on whether I’m ready or not. Also, now that I’m Undead and unemployed, I have no need of alarms because I have nowhere to go and nowhere I need to be.

  So this morning, I’m more than a little disoriented when the sound jolts me awake, and it takes a few minutes of fumbling with my phone to realize it’s a call, not an alarm. I squint at the name on the screen, second-guessing my alertness. It’s early, barely 8 a.m. So why is Ash calling me?

  “Hello?”

  “Davin. Hey. Sorry if it’s still early, I didn’t know when you usually get up.”

  “It’s fine.” I blink a few times, trying to clear the crust from my eyes. Reddish-black flakes of blood-tinged tears, dried and goopy, drop onto the sheets. “What’s up?”

  “Were you with Randy last night?”

  My gut twists. Apprehensively, not knowing where he’s going with this or why he’s asking, “For a little bit. Why? What’s going on?”

  “I think you’d better just come over.”

  “Ash —”

  “It’s not urgent, you can take a shower and get some breakfast for your sister and whatever else you need to do,” he says, and now I can hear the weariness in his voice, some twinge of exhausted not-angry-just-disappointed paternalism. “But it’s better you come on over sooner rather than later.”

  He disconnects.

  I stare at my phone, disturbed to feel stillness where my heart should be hammering. My fingertips feel hollow and cold. I fumble with the touch screen and pull up Randy’s number.

  It goes to voice mail, twice.

  I send him a quick text and then force myself upright, past the creaking resistance of my joints, past the rotten wood ache of my bones, and let momentum carry me to the door. I hesitate in the hall, hear the soft snores from Zoe’s room, and debate whether to wake her. I decide against it. I don’t know what I’m walking into, and 8 a.m. is early for her, too, especially if she was up late looking into the Undead Registry, which I can almost certainly guarantee.

  I decide against the shower, after all, and just scrawl her a quick, vague note instead. I figure she’ll call when she gets up if I’m not home by then. I wonder what could be happening that would keep me out late, and wonder what could be happening that Ash wouldn’t just tell me over the phone. It has to be Undead business, I figure. Something he wouldn’t want to say even on a burner phone. Something about Randy’s dad?

  Or, a more unpleasant thought: Something so bad it requires a face-to-face talk. Something you can’t say over the phone because you need to look a person in the eye.

  I drive to Ash’s as fast as the speed traps will allow.

  ***

  Ash’s house has come to be like a second home, as much as Ash has come to be some new kind of father figure. It’s a trailer, sun-faded and stained with the hard-water drip of the swamp cooler’s exhaust, but the fenced-in yard of the trailer park space is always tidy, and Lilith keeps the worn-out interior immaculately clean. When I pull up, I catch some kind of warm, yeasty smell coming from an open window. Fresh bread or cinnamon rolls or something. It opens an ache way deep down in my core, some mix of nostalgia and longing and the kind of hunger that I can’t sate anymore.

  Randy’s car is in the drive, so I have to park on the curb. Ash is outside, leaning on the low fence and smoking a cigarette. I wait for him to say something, to set some kind of tone for what I should be expecting.

  “Sorry to call you over so early,” he says. He steps aside so I can open the gate, and waits for me to fidget with the latch before he continues.

  “Randy’s car is here,” I say, stupidly pointing out the obvious. I get the feeling like Ash thinks I know more about what’s happening than I do.

  “He’s inside.” He frowns, brows knitting. “He came over late last night, and Lilith is still real upset. I don’t mind helping where we can, but you need to make him understand that we can’t keep doing this.”

  I blink.

  Ash continues, either not noticing my confusion or just not caring. “We were plenty happy to take you in when you needed help. We were grateful for the work you and Randy would do. But things aren’t the way they were, and we can’t carry on like this.”

  I’m frozen halfway between him at the fence and the rickety steps up to the trailer’s front door, torn with indecision whether I should ask him what the hell he’s talking about or just go inside and see for myself. I give Ash a long, questioning look, realizing as I do just how old he’s looking now, how withered. His cheeks are sunken, sucking in so far with each inhale of his cigarette that the bones jut out like points. There are deep hollows under each eye.

  I turn and let myself into the trailer.

  It creaks and settles under me as I step inside, and I’m immediately hit by that fresh-baked smell, its intensity enough to freeze me in place. It smells like a bakery in here. Lilith is in the middle of the kitchen, fussing over something on the stove, and every inch of the trailer’s minimal counter space is covered with flour and sugar and mixing bow
ls, pies cooling on racks, a tray of cinnamon rolls.

  “Lilith?”

  “Oh!” She stands up too quickly, wheeling around as if startled. There are big oven mitts on either hand, making her hands seem cartoonishly oversized. A wisp of gray hair falls over into her face. I try to remember if her hair has always been this gray. “Davin. Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in. He’s in the back room.”

  It it wasn’t so long ago — barely a season — that Randy brought me here, freshly dead and delirious. I dead-slept on their couch for a day and night, a pitiful orphan. “What’s all the baking for?”

  “Just keeping busy,” she says. “Once you get started it’s easiest to just keep going.”

  I don’t ask her what exactly she — the only living person in this house — is going to do with two pies and a pan of cinnamon rolls. It seems cruel. Maybe she has friends to share them with. Church ladies or a book club or something. Maybe The Underground needs its own support group, I think, a space carved out for the survivors who have to straddle our world and the land of the living.

  “I told Randy this last night, but you tell him again to be sure it sticks,” Lilith says, and catches my eye. There is no maternal warmth in her gaze, just a kind of low smoldering anger, feelings kept in check by years of practice in self-control. “Let him know this is his freebie. He pulls a stunt like that again and I’m not opening the door. This isn’t our life anymore. It can’t be.”

  I wish they’d just tell me what I’m walking into, but I figure I might as well rip off the bandage myself if no one’s going to say it out loud. I make some noncommittal grunt in Lilith’s direction and head down the hall to the back room, the singlewide trailer built like a funnel that leads back there. On the way, a stench catches my nose from the bathroom, and I linger there, nudging open the door to peer inside.

  It’s been cleaned, but there are still obvious traces of a tremendous mess. There’s a brown stain like old, rancid blood smeared deep into the peeling linoleum of the floor, caught in the crevices of the baseboards. There’s part of a handprint in the shower, smudged fingerprints, and a trash bag in the middle of the floor is bulging with stained towels. It smells like death and vomit and liquor, sick-sweet and sharp.