by Erika Swyler
Dr. Papas requests to immediately schedule a private video call with her mother, Betheen Papas. Please inform Betheen Papas that her daughter can’t remember the best way to pop a bubble and requires a refresher.
1986: The Dead
Marty Neuhaus was sweating something awful. It came with the suit, which was required, even for pre-planning consults. People liked to think they’d chosen a high-end establishment for their loved one. A wool suit said quality, but it could make you sweat like you’d run ten miles. Marty had a pre-plan coming in at eleven, the Alfresons, for Deenie, who was fading. A delivery blocked one of the exits, which was illegal, so here he was, lugging embalming fluid and cosmetics through the parking lot door and into the embalming room, sweating in his suit, his shirt rubbing his armpits raw.
That he had customers made it worse. He prided himself on dignity for his clients, peace and quiet after a life which was typically not restful.
He hefted and grunted. “My sincerest apologies, Mr. West. I don’t usually subject customers to this sort of display, but my assistant is fond of oversleeping.”
Mr. West said nothing, and hadn’t for the past two days, not since Mrs. West found him on the kitchen floor, having choked on the last pickle in the jar.
Marty’s assistant, Reg Peterson, hadn’t overslept but had gotten lost, which was bizarre considering he’d managed to get to work without a hitch for seventeen months. But that morning, when he went to turn off the highway for Easter, the exit wasn’t there. He’d done three U-turns but couldn’t find it going north or south. He figured he must be sick, so he turned back for home.
At his apartment in Port St. John, Reg called the funeral parlor, but the line rang and rang. He tried three more times that day. On the last try, the line cut out. Reg turned on the news, all of which was focused on the shuttle explosion. It made sense that he couldn’t get through. The lines must be overloaded.
On the third day of driving and missing the exit, Reg, who was a quiet man, spoke to a waitress at the Howard Johnson’s off the highway. Hands clenching a coffee cup, he read her nametag. Rowenna. Pretty name. Rowenna’s hands were calloused from bleach and dishwashing, and they didn’t match the rest of her, which looked like she should be picking shells off a beach somewhere.
“Rowenna, I have a weird question for you. Has anyone come in here over the past few days asking where exit 43 is? I can’t find it for the life of me.”
“Not that I know of. We had some reporters on their way to the Cape because of that horrible accident, but they’re always lost. Mostly we get truckers and folks on their way down to Ft. Lauderdale. We’re just a lunch stop on the way to somewhere else, you know?”
In that moment, as Rowenna refilled his cup, Reg heard something in her words—that she might not mean just the HoJo. That she, from her voice and the slump in her shoulders, might feel like a stop on the way to somewhere else. Reg was that way. Picking up bodies, conveying them from home to table to grave.
“It’s strange,” he said. “I’ve taken that exit every day for over a year, then two days ago, it up and disappears.”
“Well, they’re renumbering exits to match miles. Maybe a sign change has got you mixed up.”
“Could be,” he said.
“Are you all right?” Her hand touched the table, and he saw her dry, cracked cuticles. Like his.
“You know, I’m not sure.”
“Me neither, honey. Me neither.”
At the end of the third day of breakfast at the HoJo and heartburn from too much coffee, Reg asked Rowenna, “Would you like to look for the exit with me? Maybe you’ll catch something I missed.”
She tucked back a wave of permed hair. “I’ve got a break in fifteen minutes. You can take me to the Orange Julius if you’re buying.”
After two weeks of lunches with Reg, Rowenna did not return from her break. She rolled down the passenger window in his little white Ford and let her hand ride over the wind. They went down to Ft. Lauderdale. Reg stopped talking about the thing that had made him stop at the HoJo in the first place.
It was too many bodies, he decided.
He took a job selling office supplies and found that he loved it; he had a gift for matching people to serviceable paper products. He used the same calm that he had with the bereaved and sold more folders and paper than anyone else.
Rowenna finally felt like a destination. And if she noticed Reg calling a dead number once in a while, it was a small quirk, and one worth overlooking in a man who had made up the most ridiculous lie just to ask her out.
When their little girl, Veronica, turned sixteen and started dating, Rowenna told her, “Wait for the right one. Wait for someone so in love with you that they don’t care that they look like a fool, someone who’ll imagine up a whole town just to have something to talk to you about.”
Reg never said otherwise. Time painted with watercolors, and after enough years, he believed Rowenna was right.
Marty reached into a cabinet, searching for his wax. Reg had rearranged things, and it was impossible to find anything. What was convenient for Reg, at six foot one, was out of sight for Marty, at five foot seven.
“Sorry, Mrs. Lattimer. Oh, I know. That coroner does a number on people. But I’ll have you fresh as a daisy. That shower we gave you did wonders.” A sundress would cover the Y-shaped incision, but wax was the only solution for a craniotomy.
He was ill prepared for what he saw when he turned around, wax in hand. Mrs. Lattimer, whose repose looked particularly hard-earned, was moving. More precisely, her skin was moving; the edges of the Y incision shortened and the threads he’d sewn popped and pulled from their stitches. There was a grinding clunk, the knock of bone on bone.
A cranium locking into place.
The bruising along her back from the hours she’d been on the bathroom floor, blood pooling below the skin as rigor mortis set in, softened and faded away.
“Miriam?” He was a fool to say her name, but what were you supposed to do when a body started sewing itself up on your table? When a body became less a body and more a Miriam Lattimer?
When her knuckles straightened he ran out the side door onto Latchee Street, right into the middle of the road. Miriam’s heart was inside her. Vivisected, yes, but what if it sewed up? Her chest, her skin.
No. That wasn’t right. He needed a drink. He needed something. The sky was swimming. People. He needed people, living ones. And a drink.
Marty shuffled down to the Bird’s Eye, where there were people, and there was rum. Ellery Rees kept a hidden stash of good Cuban stuff he picked up when he went down to the Keys. It was the town’s worst-kept secret, along with Mayor Macon’s affairs.
Ellery was working the cash register, his sunburned scalp showing through what most people considered a wiseguy haircut. His Hawaiian shirt had a good amount of someone’s coffee on it. As much as Ellery was out for a buck, he genuinely liked Easter and could feel when someone was about to walk in, before the bell on the door jingled, before they passed the window and the chipped red lettering on the glass.
“Marty. It’s early for you. God, you look like death warmed over. Pun intended, pal, I assure you. Pun absolutely intended.”
“Ellery,” Marty said. “I need a beach vacation.”
“Bit early for that, don’t you think? Feels criminal to pour on a weekday before noon.”
“Put it in a coffee mug or do what you’ve got to do. I’ll pay whatever you want.”
Marty Neuhaus had done Ellery’s dad up right and made sure that nobody could tell that half his nose was gone. Marty hadn’t charged extra for Senior’s casket, even though he’d gotten too fat for the regular width. Marty just pulled Ellery to the side and asked him to pick out a different model. The charge never showed up on the bill. The Rees family didn’t forget things like that. He splashed coffee on a heavy pour of contraband and slid that chipped mug right under Marty Neuhaus’s nose.
Marty drained the cup and asked for another.
“I … I’m not well, Ellery. Miriam Lattimer just stitched herself up on my table.”
“No shit?”
Ellery had seen a good number of people go off the deep end, enough to know that everybody went about it differently. His uncle had climbed up a tree and thrown nuts at people when his wife left. When Ted Buller got the shakes, he would go on about commies in the bushes. Some people didn’t say anything at all, which was the only way to spot them. Marty was a shocker. Ellery had figured that after all the stuff he’d seen, he must piss ice. Maybe that’s what did it, though. Best to let him ride it out, calm down, and get it out of his system.
Ellery gently topped Marty off, then wiped the counter around him. Marty didn’t look at Ellery but appeared to lose himself in the slow circular motions of the rag on the Formica.
“Her skin, where the …” He drew a Y in the air. “Right on my table, it closed up. I’d washed her off, because the coroner always leaves them such a mess. I was set to start on her, when her chest—all the stitches, they zipped right up. They shouldn’t have done that. They didn’t do that, did they?”
Ellery couldn’t parse the distasteful things Marty said. Marty stared at dead bodies, most of them old, most of them people he knew. Ellery hadn’t thought about what that entailed, like Miriam Lattimer’s naked old-lady breasts sagging like used pantyhose. Marty had seen Ellery’s dad’s shriveled old-man dick. A job like that could make someone crack. How could you keep looking at bodies and not see people? Or look at people and not think about them dead on your table?
“Hey,” Ellery said. “Don’t take this wrong, but when I put in too many hours the forks start talking to me. You had a break in a while? I don’t mean anything by that, I’m just saying. Take a few days off and let that kid you got handle stuff.”
“Reg isn’t in. Do you mind if I sit for a while, Ellery? I can’t go back there yet.”
“Do you want me to see if I can get a hold of Shelly?”
“Yes. Yes, please. I’d call her myself, but …”
“But you’re shaking like a cold Chihuahua. Gotcha. She’s still working at the bank, yeah?”
“Yes.”
Ellery started dialing on the phone by the register, only to realize there was no dial tone. “Sorry, Lurch. Lines are out again. Look, just stay. It’s a slow day. My soda guy hasn’t showed up, and it looks like a storm anyway. Sit until your head gets together, okay?”
Marty nodded and whispered, “Sure. Yes, all right. You’re right.”
Eddie Ingram slid onto a stool next to Marty.
“Hey, Ellery, can I get some of that stuff? There was an accident on Satsuma. Some guy got damn near decapitated and his car’s stuck in the canal, which is frozen. The roads out of here, I don’t know, man. There’s no getting out. The highway— It’s like the woods just— I don’t know what the hell’s going on.” Ed shuddered.
“Lot of that going around.” Ellery slid a cup down the counter. He poured another for himself.
1986: Pete McIntyre
Pete was sure about a few things. He knew that if there was a fire or freeze, or if another hurricane flattened Easter, he’d be just fine. He’d find something new, start over. He was sure Rita would never get over him, and that’s why she was on husband number three. And he was sure what happened to Denny Prater wasn’t natural and no kid, not ever, deserved to die like that.
He liked Denny, which surprised him, because the kid’s father was the gapingest asshole in the state. Pete McIntyre knew Desmond Prater when he was just a greasy little sonofabitch whose father had somehow managed not to kill the family business. That didn’t seem like it took too much skill; the more difficult thing was starting over, which is what every McIntyre man did at least five times in his life.
Pete’s father, Red, had run fan boat tours, wrestled gators, run numbers and done time for it, and driven trucks. His mother, Gina Lee, had been the same way. Pete had picked fruit under Jim Prater, scraped roadkill off highways, put out fires for Brevard County, been a janitor at Covey, done maintenance work at Kennedy, and fixed cars. When his back wasn’t killing him, he counted himself one lucky bastard.
It’d been bad enough knowing Challenger was gone. All those people dead in a second. Nothing set you up for a shock like that, but that was just the deal; part of what made the sky beautiful was the risk that came with touching it. But that kid— In what had already been a bad week, Denny was the worst thing Pete had ever seen. His chest hurt. His heart took bad news before the rest of him, like it meant to crawl out from under his ribs.
Nothing like that should happen to a kid, not anyone’s kid.
He and Rita had had a daughter in their early twenties, when they were working at a bar in Mims. Della was like him, but she had the travel bug. At eighteen she’d left to drive to California, where she waited tables. He guessed tables were better there. That was five years back. Della called her mom, and Rita called him, so that was all right. But if something happened to her, he’d know. He’d feel it. That shitbag Prater should know about his kid.
Copper. Theo Papas said he needed copper to fix it. Fuck it; he’d get some. He picked through his stuff, homing in on where he might have stashed any copper.
The garage suited him. But he missed touching all those things at NASA. People thought it was trash. Casts of hands, feet, and tire treads; stuff that hadn’t gone to space, but was right next to it. He hadn’t meant to collect this much, but good stuff kept getting tossed. He couldn’t—not if he wanted to think of himself as a man—let a goddamn impressive piece of machinery like a crawler transporter piston rust in a dump.
Space junk wasn’t a bad way to make a buck either. People who drove over wanting a break from the Mouse, the “I want to see the real Florida” types, were happy to dump two dollars to see food tubes, the locker bank, the rover tires, even busted phones from Mission Control. As far as he saw it, there wasn’t much difference between taking space junk and keeping cars running; they were both salvage. Some years were shit for fishing, but there’d always be a need for somebody who understood salvage, someone who could fix things. The Prater kid got it; that was part of why Pete liked him.
By the side of the house was a commercial AC unit he’d scored on the cheap from Ellery at the Bird’s Eye. He’d been meaning to fix it up. A crowbar peeled away the back like tinfoil, exposing guts and twisted copper tubing. Shit. He didn’t know if it needed to be straightened, bent, or what. The professor hadn’t said. What would take the least amount of time? No boy should have to stay like that.
When the kids had first started tooling around Pete’s yard, he thought about running them off, until he recognized Denny as Desmond Prater’s son. He had the same face as his prick dad, but it had turned out skinny this go. Denny liked to stick his fingers in carburetors and engines, which would have been a problem if he broke them, but he didn’t; the kid was fascinated by them, almost worshipful. Pete didn’t want to kick him out, especially not when he saw the other kid with him was a girl. He’d never had a girl nosing around the yard, not even his daughter. Della had liked the hi-fi in the den, but that was about it. The little blonde girl was different. She poked at all his good stuff: a busted solar panel for a satellite, the control table he’d grabbed when cleaning out a media room. It was fried and he’d never get it working, but it was good stuff. History was made on it.
It took a couple of days before he placed her: the Papas girl. The professor was an ex-NASA guy, cut loose when they scaled back. He was all right and good for a few bucks for some salvage every now and again. Her mother was a beautiful woman, but cold. She baked like a goddess, but butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
Nedda was a talker. He’d heard her yak Denny Prater’s ear off about everything from dinosaurs to sunburn. It was rough she didn’t get her mother’s good looks, but wors
e that she couldn’t seem to shut up. But Pete recognized himself in her, save for the talking. Junk rats recognized junk rats. She was careful with things and looked at stuff with an eye to figuring out how it worked. And Denny Prater looked at her like she hung the moon. Desmond Prater didn’t have that kind of look for anybody but himself. Pete might be a sentimental idiot for letting two kids work out that they liked each other, but it made him a better guy than Desmond Prater.
Car in, car out. Take a few bucks out of some tourists around a launch. Wake up when his back yelled, go to bed after three beers. Go to Mims on the weekend, see if Rita had another man yet. Keep an eye on the kids. That was what was supposed to happen. Then he’d seen a guy get his head nearly taken off in a wreck. Betheen Papas should probably be dead too, but she’d walked away like nothing had happened. Wouldn’t even take a ride. Then her husband had dragged him out to the grove.
He was supposed to be working on her Cadillac, not pulling copper out of his stuff.
None of what he’d seen in that equipment shed should happen.
Denny was a good kid, even if his dad was a shitstain, and good kids didn’t deserve what he’d seen. He spotted a refrigerator he’d forgotten he’d picked up. Crowbar in hand he went for it. Hell. He’d rip every inch of copper out of his house if he had to.
Aboard Chawla
They’d set up a routine where Marcanta did Nedda’s spinal taps while she was under; now headaches plagued Nedda’s artificial sleep, but the drugs kept her from waking. She dreamed of Easter, of bodies plumping in their graves. Their cells were her own, half-alive, waiting to wake up.
Marcanta said during sleep cycles she dreamed of athletic sex romps in exotic locations with the pop star Jasper Soo. They’d done it in a floating waterfall over the heads of thousands of his screaming fans. “You know, you can dream a week-long orgasm,” Marcanta said.
Nedda couldn’t.
