Chasing the dead

by Joe Schreiber

  "Ah." He sounds pleased. "Youare beginning to understand. Just when I was ready to throw you to the wolves."

  "Is his statue in all the towns along the route?"

  "Do you want to see your little girl in the morning, Susan?"

  "Yes."

  "Babe's, Susan. I'll see you there."

  He hangs up before she can say anything else.

  She puts the phone down, still cruising along at seventy, seventy-five. She doesn't know what else to do except follow the map. She thinks about Isaac Hamilton. The name has an enchantment on it. It has a kind of power, like a key dangling from a chain, a key that might open a box-or a cage.

  Sure enough, six miles later, she sees the sign coming up:

  STONEVIEW-ESTABLISHED1802

  12:48A.M.

  The town is a husk.

  Empty buildings with no glass in the windows, a dead gas station, vacant houses, and great dinosaur spines of snow drifted up in the streets. It's like a hurricane came through, or a virus, and took everyone with it. She wouldn't have thought such towns even existed in Massachusetts. And apparently they don't, at least on any map but this one.

  Sue drives through it, her sinuses expanding, the enormous, cabbage-size pain at the base of her skull beginning to pound again. She feels a twinge of nausea, and her skin is moist to the touch. Her ribs squeeze her chest like a pair of skeletal hands. The lines and edges of the Expedition are running together-the bloodstains and bodies that she shouldn't be able to see are trickling into her peripheral vision, occluding her eyes.

  Up ahead the road bends to the right, around an island of snow-buried land that she assumes was once Stoneview's town common. There is a bench, two or three bare trees, and in the middle, there is another statue. She says his name aloud.

  "Isaac Hamilton."

  As her headlights reach out to touch it Sue can see the statue plainly. And it's different again. This time it's just a head, body, and legs. Both arms are missing.

  Now she slows down, magnetized. There's a small amount of snow on it but she can still tell right away, the arms were never there. It's not like a bunch of kids came along and cut them off as a prank or ran their car into it and knocked the arms off. The sculptor deliberately left them off, fashioning smooth stumps at either shoulder. Beneath the statue, the pedestal has the same plaque as the others, and Sue thinks of the lines inscribed upon it, lines that she never bothered to read though, somehow, she'd always thought they were poetry, by virtue of the way they were laid out.

  She thinks of the poem that Jeff quoted. She squints at the old copperplate type-difficult enough to read already, abraded further by the passing decades. Though it's impossible to tell without getting out of her car (she's not getting out of her car, not here, not now, no sir), she thinks it looks long enough to be the poem.

  So what? So they wrote some poem about Hamilton, so what is that supposed to mean?

  Her eyes shift away. Behind the statue the road rises and falls again. Instead of a cemetery, the hill behind the statue gives way to an unexpected surge of red neon, a glowing cigarette tip aimed at the flat, windowless structure cowering beneath it like a blind dog.

  Babe's is a roadhouse surrounded with crookedly parked vehicles. Travelers like herself, Sue thinks, caught in the storm. She pulls in and cuts the engine. Already she can hear the music playing inside, a machinelike thud of pure distortion, skinned of all melody. Bending forward to climb out triggers something in her stomach and she almost gets sick, managing to hold it back at the last second.

  The cell rings.

  "I'm here," she says.

  "I see that."

  Sue stops and turns around, her eyes searching the lot until she sees what she's looking for. The van sits shivering in a handicapped spot with a rag of exhaust dangling from its tailpipe. She can see nothing inside.

  "What am I doing here?"

  "I'll let you know when the time comes," the voice says. "Go around to the back. Go through the kitchen. Inside you'll find another door, marked Employees Only. Go through it. And keep that phone handy."

  She starts walking. There's a freshly shoveled pathway leading around the side of the building and Sue follows it until she hears voices murmuring quietly in Spanish or perhaps Portuguese, she can't tell. There's a light mounted on the roof, aimed down, and a giant fan blasts the smell of fried onions mixed with garbage and cooking grease. Two men in aprons and bandannas are passing a joint back and forth behind the Dumpster. They flick their eyes up at her for the briefest of appraisals and then resume their conversation.

  Sue passes them on the way to the door, a featureless steel plate propped open by a plastic yellow mop bucket. She slips inside without touching it and finds herself in a filthy kitchen. The music that she heard outside is louder back here, bouncing off the dirty tiles and pans dangling over the stove, and she can hear men's voices shouting and whistling on the far side of a pair of swinging doors. A roach scuttles across the sink and disappears under a bag of frozen chicken wings.

  She puts her shoulder to the doors but they won't budge. There is another door off to her left, markedEMPLOYEES ONLY, a strange sign to post inside the kitchen. Sue turns the handle and steps into a dark dressing room that smells like perfume and sweat. It's shaped like a railroad car with a long counter covered in Kleenex wads and jars of cotton balls and makeup kits. There's just one light, a dim lamp without a shade burning in the corner, the wattage so low that it hardly casts a shadow.

  On the far side of the room a red curtain hangs and the roar coming from the other side is somehow bestial and benign at the same time, like a crowd at a ballgame. Suddenly she understands that the place isn't called Babe's but Babes, and what the voice on the phone expects her to do here at one in the morning.

  "Where are you now?" the voice asks.

  "I'm in the room."

  "Take off your clothes."

  "What?"

  "You heard me."

  I want to look at you. I want you to look at yourself.

  Sue doesn't move.

  "Take off your clothes and I'll let you see Veda. She's right on the other side of that curtain." It's not clear whether the voice is teasing her or not. "You do believe me, don't you, Susan?"

  In the end it doesn't really matter. Laying the cell phone faceup on the counter next to a jar of nail polish, Sue takes off her bloody coat and drops it on the back of a chair. Then she unbuttons her blouse. There's a lot of blood on it too and more on her skirt, making the fabric stiff and tacky as it slithers off her hips-funny how she only notices that as she's taking it off. She unhooks her bra and peels off her underwear, letting it drop to the dirty floor where it lies like a dead jellyfish among the footprints and cigarette butts.

  Naked, she's neither hot nor cold, the thermostat in the room being perfectly adjusted for nakedness, but that's not the first thing she thinks. The first thing she thinks is how infrequently she's taken off her clothes without a mirror, as if for some reason she needs one to get undressed, the way you need a mirror to put on makeup or fix your hair. She's always watched herself undress, she realizes. Whether it's in the bedroom or bathroom or a dressing room at Bloomingdale's, her stare has always inevitably found its way to the glassy rectangle reflecting the white cave-drawing of scars that crisscrosses her stomach and slashes over her breast to puncture and divide her right nipple.

  But there aren't any mirrors in this changing room, an odd thing to leave out. But then, why would a stripper need a mirror when it's only skin she's presenting?

  She picks the phone back up, holds it to her ear. "All right."

  "Now step through the curtain."

  Sue does. The curtain slides off her arm and her bare thigh and she's standing out on a stage with a white spotlight blasting her in the face. She can hear a zoo of men whistling and cheering at her. Sue squints into the light and it's like staring right at the sun. She can only make out the vague shapes of tables with men at them, and the music, tribal and deep, po
uring out of speakers that surround her head. Her eyeballs vibrate in their sockets. The music somehow seems to be making it harder to see.

  Looking behind her Sue sees another woman standing next to her, arms hanging at her sides. The stripper looks pale and awkward, with wild eyes and a drugged-out whorish expression, a zombie fucked back to life. But she's so raunchily gorgeous standing there, so exotically out of her mind that despite everything Sue finds herself staring at her until she realizes it's her own reflection.

  The back of the stage is a giant mirror.

  Only the woman in the mirror doesn't have any scars on her belly or her breast.

  She looks down. Sue doesn't have those scars anymore either.

  She doesn't have her scars anymore either.

  Slowly she runs her fingertips down over the smooth terrain of her stomach, then back up over her newly restored nipple. The crowd, taking it for showmanship, screams gleefully back in encouragement.

  The spotlight leaves her and sweeps through them, picking out clusters of wide-eyed, openmouthed faces like a sniper from a tree. One by one the faces fall away from the light. They scream and vanish, scream and vanish.

  The light keeps sweeping.

  Sue stares at it, following it with her eyes.

  Then in the front row Sue glimpses Veda.

  1:24A.M.

  Sitting in the yellow-and-blue stroller that Marilyn keeps in the Jeep, Sue's daughter is pale and motionless, her eyes closed, mouth slightly ajar. The stroller is parked between two tables of people. And the girl is still, so still.

  Without thinking Sue jumps off the stage. It's farther down than it looks and she lands hard on her heels, twisting a tendon in her right ankle with a twang that she can feel. She ignores it.

  She reaches for Veda and starts to pull her up, but her daughter is fastened into the stroller. Veda's warm body struggles fitfully and Sue realizes that she'smoving, thank you, God, she was only asleep but now she's moving as Sue fumbles with the first of two plastic latches that hold the canvas restraints in place. Sue's hands are trembling, her heart hammering spastically against her sternum the way that it never did on the job, because this isn't like saving someone else's life, this is like saving her own life-she's a rookie at this.

  The spotlight swoops away, burying them in darkness, and then circles back again, only now it's pulsing across the entire room, making everything happen in a broken, jumpy necklace of images. Sue continues groping for the second latch, feeling her daughter's body stiffen and stretch as Veda opens her eyes, looking drowsily up at Sue with a moment of dawning recognition and relief, and Sue can see her daughter's lips drawing together to form the wordMama. Somebody shoves Sue sideways, something sharp catching her in the ribs, an elbow, and she's sprawling naked, her bare ass skidding on the floor, legs and arms knocking over chairs and a table as she tries to scramble back to her feet. The crowd screams louder. Through the tables she sees a group of three or four people drawing together around the stroller, closing it off from her, the small white oval of Veda's outstretched palm reaching out between their bodies before it disappears in a forest of legs.

  Sue screams her daughter's name and throws herself among them like she's digging a grave with her bare hands. She clutches skin and fabric and hair, yanking out clots and patches and chunks. It all comes to a halt with a fist flying into her face, a white flashbulb between her eyes that sends her crashing backward again. Sue spills like a bucket of water and somebody catches her under the arms, now she's being dragged away, her bare heels squeaking along the sticky floor, until she feels a gust of cold air across her belly and they're spinning her, throwing her out.

  She feels wet pavement against her lips, smells garbage, beer, onions, tobacco, grease.

  Rolls on her back. Opens her eyes.

  Next to the Dumpster, the two dishwashers she saw earlier are gazing down at her, the orange firefly of the joint's tip floating back and forth to illuminate first one face and then the other. At last one of them leans down to offer her his hand. They continue to stare as she rises to her feet.

  "You okay?"

  "My daughter," Sue hears herself say. Her lips feel two syllables behind the words they're emitting. "Her name is Veda Young. She's been kidnapped by some people in there."

  They blink at her, so stoned. "Ki'nap?"

  "They're in a van. It's parked out front. They've been following me all night to make sure I do what they want. They've got my little girl and they told me if I…"

  One of the men unclips a cell phone from his apron string and holds it out to her. "You call police?" His dark eyes watch her closely.

  Sue takes the cell phone. She looks at the man's face. His eyes are black and reflect no light. There is nothing there that she can see, either way. "Is there a pay phone anywhere around here?"

  "Pay phone?"

  Then behind them in the parking lot something slides into view, moving steadily across the snow. Her eyes fly to it, already knowing what it is. The van. For the first time she realizes that it's gray, the color of brain and ash, as if by default.

  It stops forty feet away, turns away from her, and sits, waiting. Thirty-eight feet closer the two men continue to stare at her body. They've given up offering their assistance and have gone on to simply ogle her bare breasts and the glossy blue shadow of her pubic hair. Over their shoulders Sue sees the back of the van open. She steps around them, toward it. There's a long pause and then something falls out of the van with a clank.

  It's the stroller. It lands on its front tires, teeters briefly, and then tilts forward and collapses so that the bundled shape inside, a soft pellet refusing geometry, vanishes underneath it.

  Still naked, she breaks into a run.

  Closing in, the van starts moving again, Sue tasting carbon monoxide in its wake. Her feet, numb as beef, smear crosswise over a patch of packed ice and disappear beneath her. Just before she starts to fall, she grabs the stroller, which flips over sideways with the force of her tackle so the handle hits her in the face. What spills out is a bundle, a canvas-wrapped package, and as Sue pulls it out she realizes it holds a coat. There's something soft buried in its folds.

  Not a child.

  Clothes.

  They spill like entrails across the snow. Not the ones she left behind but clean, unfamiliar ones, a pair of sweatpants, underwear, a T-shirt and turtleneck sweater, socks, gloves, and a bra. Nondescript wool coat with a hood. Two boots. Something slides out of them.

  A cell phone.

  It begins to ring.

  1:51A.M.

  "So now you see," the voice says. "You seeyourself. "

  It's a few minutes later. Sue has climbed back inside the Expedition, wrestling the newfound sweatpants up around her hips. This is difficult enough, holding her hips off the seat by pressing both feet to the floorboard between the gas and the brake, but at the same time she has to keep the cell phone clenched between her shoulder and her jaw. The clothes are too large for her, the sleeves of the sweater flopping over her hands, the sweatpants bagging slightly around the ankles-nothing fits, and the footwear he left for her is a pair of men's snowmobile boots. But at least they're warm. She's got the engine running and the heat on, combating a chill seeping in from the broken window.

  Outside, cars are pulling away from Babes, leaving the parking lot, shuffling home through the blizzard. Closing time.

  "My scars," Sue says. "What happened to them?"

  "What?" he asks.

  "The scars from my accident." Once again she runs her fingers over herself and once again she finds the scar tissue missing, supposedly permanent geography erased by an unexpected reversal of time's current. How easily things enter and exit a map. "They're gone."

  "You're a smart lady, Susan, you figure it out. Think hard."

  "It's like they've been healed."

  "Healed?" He sounds disappointed. "That's a meaningless term in this context. You were an EMT for enough years. You know you can't heal something that's al
ready dead."

  Meaning her scars, she thinks, dead tissue.

  "What about the lobsters?" she says. "I had lobsters in the car. They were boiled, completely dead. But while I was driving, they…" Feeling him waiting, she makes herself say it. "They came back to life."

  "Ah."

  "But that's not possible."

  "There are two kinds of people in the world, Susan. Pragmatists like yourself, who believe what they see, and the rest of the world who, when they see something they don't believe or can't understand, pretend that it isn't there. You've seen these things, and felt them for yourself. So why are you fighting it?"

  "It can't be real."

  "Oh, but it is real. It's as real as the knife I'm holding to your daughter's throat. And believe me when I say, the longer you wrestle with this, the closer the knife gets."

  That punctures the moment for her. She doesn't have to think about it for long before it hits her that this was one of the reasons he chose her. Besides digging up the thing underneath the bridge, she was also, as the voice on the phone said, a pragmatist, one who could be counted on to believe what's in front of her no matter how impossible it seems. So she says exactly what he wants to hear.

  "This route," she says, "and these seven towns. When you drive through them in the right order, it brings the dead back to life."

  "Bravo."

  "But why-"

  "Now do you understand the significance of what I'm asking you to do?"

  Automatically: "Yes."

  "No," he says, "you don't, not yet. But you will."

  No, she thinks. All she really understands is that she saw Veda again, touched her and almost got her back. Then she failed. Also she understands that her night is not over-there are hours left until daybreak-and after what she's just done she has no idea what else to expect between now and then.

  "Don't worry, Susan. Veda's still safe and sound for the next five hours. She's sleeping. She never saw her mommy standing naked onstage in front of strangers."