by Daniel Parme
"Woodford Reserve on the rocks, please."
"I'm sorry, but we don't carry the Reserve." She wasn't sorry. You could tell.
"Knob Creek, then?"
She nodded and walked away, and I was certain she'd be returning with a glass of Jim Beam, or, if I was lucky, Maker’s Mark.
Synchek sat down with a big old grin on his face. I couldn't tell if it was genuine or if he was selling me something. "So good to meet you, Mr. Eliot."
I was already annoyed with myself for coming to meet this man. One should be wary of any man who says your name more than twice in two minutes. Of course, I didn't have that rule in place when I met him; he's the reason for its inception.
"So, what's this about?" I suppose I should have been a little more polite, but I was so angry with myself that I just didn't have it in me.
He paused. I don't think he wanted the conversation to go this way. What was supposed to happen was, he was going to bullshit a little while, break the ice, establish a good rapport, sucker me in the way a telemarketer would. Or maybe a good cult leader.
"Well, Travis – do you mind if I call you Travis? Well, Travis, as I said in my letter, I would like to invite you to be a guest speaker at the next meeting of an organization of which I am the acting president."
I wondered if he always spoke this way, with grammar that was uncertain at best, and forced. I wondered if anyone in the world could speak to him for more than five minutes without wanting to smack him square in the mouth and scream, "God dammit! Speak like a human being!" I gathered not.
I asked him what, exactly, this group was.
He straightened up. "We are an organization of folks who have had experiences similar to your own. We've been following your story with great interest and feel that you may have a lot to offer to our ranks."
"Excuse me?"
He looked puzzled, like he didn't understand what I couldn't grasp. "We feel that we could take quite a bit from your tale, that you have a lot to offer to those who have been in similar circumstances, and that we may have a good bit to offer you in return."
This was a painful conversation. "What, like a support group? Thanks, but I'm finished with therapy."
"No, no, Travis. Not at all like therapy. We're not a support group. We're merely a small group of people who have this one relatively odd thing in common. I was involved in an accident, too, you see." He rolled his left shoulder, his stump in tiny circles. "So have many of the others."
"So this is like a club? What, like survivors of ungodly accidents?"
"Exactly like a club." He nodded to the waitress as she placed our drinks on the table.
I took a large swallow of my bourbon and was pleased to find that it was, indeed, what I'd ordered. "So, what? You guys have ice cream socials and everything? You get group rates on Kennywood and Pirate tickets?"
"Nothing like that, Travis. We just get together and talk about our experiences. Well, sometimes we have events that somewhat resemble ice cream socials. We're just a group of people with similar interests. It just so happens that our interests are a little more unique than those of most people."
"So, you just want me to come and talk about what happened, huh?"
"That's what we want, Travis. And, while you're there, perhaps you'll meet a few people and think about becoming a member. We don't like to pressure anyone into joining; most discover for themselves that they enjoy our meetings and events, and they become members with very little encouragement." He sipped his martini as punctuation.
I sipped my Knob Creek and thought about it. "I don't know..."
He smiled. "We can pay you five-thousand dollars."
Chapter 8
The night I was at Adam and Dave's apartment, I'd mentioned that I needed to find a job, and Dave said that his uncle may have been looking for some help. In the morgue. With dead people.
I was a little hesitant. I mean, it's the morgue, for Christ's sake.
"Think about it," Dave had said, "they're all dead, you know? You said you don't want a job where you have to deal with customer relations or anything. You know, no more waiting tables or calling people while they're eating dinner."
"Come on, Dave. The morgue? Don't you think that's a little creepy? When people ask me what I do for a living, I'm going to have to tell them I work at the morgue."
"Just think about it. I mean, it should be full-time. Benefits. And you could be as much of an asshole as you wanted. It's not like dead people are going to complain to your manager, right?"
He'd made a strong enough argument that the following Monday I found myself on the bus, headed downtown to my interview with the head of the city morgue. I wish I could say I took the bus for some honorable reason such as reducing air pollution or doing my own part to ease our dependence on foreign oil, but in reality I just didn't feel like paying a quarter to a meter that only gave me seven-and-a-half minutes in return. It's not that I'm cheap. It's just that I happen to have strong beliefs about certain things, and one of those things is that nobody should ever have to pay that much for parking.
Besides, there's something to be said for the morning commute, with the other morning commuters and their morning commuter faces. It's always an interesting mix of briefcases and backpacks, suit coats and leather coats, sneaks and dress shoes, novels and newspapers, CD players and mp3 players, coffee and Red Bull. It's like a little cosmopolitan casserole. The guy next to me (backpack, leather coat, sneaks, coffee, and walkman) even smelled like those crunchy onion things on top.
It was a nice ride. Reminded me that, even though my world had been a little fucked up over the last year, the rest of the world just went right on doing what it does. I felt like I could just slide right back into that little niche I'd created before my accident.
I got off the bus and made it to the morgue. The reception area, if you could really call it that, was this small, square, grey room. Grey. They'd actually painted it grey. Who does that? There were four chairs side by side along the wall to my right, also grey except for the chrome legs, and nothing else. No posters. No pamphlets. No magazines or newspapers. Nothing.
At the far end of the room (and I only mean far as in the other side; it was only about fifteen feet away) was a counter with a sliding glass window separating the "waiting room" from the filing cabinets and computer and incredibly pale and skinny guy who was at work. At work in the morgue.
"Can I help you?" He looked exactly the way a guy who worked at the morgue looked when he was just a figment of my imagination. So pale. So skinny. His eyes were, not big, but wide. Open. And he didn't blink as much as a person should. His hair was black and thin, and thinning, from what I could tell. He even had those thick-rimmed glasses and that little nervous twitch that comes along with creepy jobs.
Just looking at him was enough to convince me that this would be among the most interesting of all my employment debacles. And I'm not going to lie about it: I was a little excited, even if I was pretty creeped out.
"Yeah. I'm supposed to be meeting Richard Pearson." I glanced around that horrible, boring room, that valium/thirty-years-to-life themed room, and hoped I wouldn't have to wait. "Is he in?"
"Do you have an appointment?" No blinking. Just staring. "Or are you just dropping in for tea?"
"For tea? No." Weirdo. "I don't really have an appointment, though. I was just supposed to come in sometime this morning."
He folded his hands on the counter. "Come in for what?" Still no blinking.
"An interview, if you really have to know."
BLINK. But just one. "He's busy. You can have a seat, and I'll go tell him you're here. Name?"
"Travis Eliot."
The creepy little bastard nodded, slid the glass shut, and disappeared through a door to his right. I sighed and took one last look around the room before resigning myself to taking a seat and fidgeting with a quarter I'd found in my pocket. I tried doing that thing where you flip the coin from knuckle to knuckle, across your
hand, and then back again. I tried it, with no success, for a long time. Ten minutes, twenty, forty-five, who knows? I didn't own a watch, had left my cell phone at home, and there was no clock on the wall. I imagined what it must be like to be in prison, and then figured it must be a lot like waiting to see the head of the city morgue, in a tiny room with nothing to do and no way of knowing exactly how long this doing nothing was taking.
After a while, I fell asleep. I know how bad it is to fall asleep at a job interview, but I couldn't help myself. Those walls were like that machine in The Princess Bride that just sucked the life right out of you. That thing made Westley mostly dead, and he's at least twice the man I am.
I jumped out of my seat when I felt a hand shake my right shoulder, and the owner of that hand nearly fell over when I jumped out of the chair and out of his grasp.
"You must be Travis." He offered his hand. "I'm Dick."
It took a second, but I remembered what was going on here. Job interview. Right. "Oh. Shit. I was asleep, huh?"
He laughed as I shook his hand. "Yeah. You were. Don't worry about it, though. People fall asleep in here all the time. Especially when Eli doesn't let me know there's someone to see me. He's not the best with customer service."
"Yeah. I noticed."
He looked at his watch. "How long have you been waiting?"
I told him I had no idea and that he really ought to think about getting a clock, maybe something to read, and a few gallons of paint. Bright paint of any color at all.
"We've thought about it," he said. "But we find that all this dull grey, well, it has sort of a calming effect on people, as you've already noticed. It's strange. It's sort of like the lack of color..." He stopped, searching.
"It doesn't seem real."
"Exactly." He seemed pleased that I was able to finish his sentence. "A lot of the people who come in here are here to identify bodies, so they're usually pretty, well, distraught. The grey sort of takes them out of the reality of the moment, so there's a lot less breakdowns when they realize that this dead kid is really their son, you know?"
I just raised my eyebrows and nodded. What was I supposed to say to that?
"It doesn't always work, but most of the time." He looked at his watch again. "At any rate, I hope you weren't waiting too long. It's about eleven o'clock right now."
"Eleven? Hmm. It's been about an hour, then."
He opened the door next to the sliding glass window and gestured me inside. It was polite, to be sure, but also pointless, as I had no idea where to go and he would just have to maneuver himself around me to lead the way. "What did Eli say when you told him why you were here?"
"He said you were busy."
"Well, I was in the middle of something, but I had plenty of time. It's not like the dead have anywhere to be, so they tend to be fairly patient." He laughed at his own joke. I gave it a little chuckle, too. It was funny, considering.
We got to his office, and he sat behind his desk and held his hand out in the direction of the sofa against the wall. The red sofa against the white wall. The first bit of color, maybe the only real sign of life, I'd yet seen in this place. I heard a bird chirp and looked up to see one of those clocks with a different bird where each of the numbers should have been. I guessed the song was different every hour, too. Eleven AM appears to be the hour of the lark, no matter what Shakespeare says.
Pearson put his feet up on his desk. "So, David tells me you're a bit of a celebrity."
"I guess you could say that." Don't ask why. Don't ask why.
"He said there was an accident or something. I remember hearing something about it on the news, too. Must have been a pretty bad one if it made you famous."
"Yeah. It was pretty bad."
He took a cigarette out of a box on his desk, lit it, took out another and offered it to me. "If you're famous, why do you need a job?"
I suppose this is a common misconception, that fame equals money. "Well, I only got half of that whole rich and famous thing."
"Hmm. That's interesting." He tossed his lighter to me. "Did David tell you anything about this job?"
"Well, no. Not really."
"It's nothing too difficult, really. I won't be asking you to do much with the bodies. Just to help move them every once in a while. And even then, they'll usually be in body bags, so you won't really have to touch them."
"Well, that's good, I guess." I figured I'd already touched all the dead bodies I'd ever need to.
"I'll mostly just need you to do a lot of paperwork for me. Filing and whatnot. You'll mostly be in the front, where you met Eli."
"Wait. Aren't you going to ask me any questions? Like, what my qualifications are or anything like that?"
"Well, David said you're a smart, hardworking, trustworthy guy. I figure that's good enough for me. Just as long as you can show up on time."
"Actually, I'm sort of an early person."
"Good." He smashed out his half-smoked cigarette. "The only thing about this job is it gets to people sometimes. You know, seeing all these corpses all the time. The last guy, well, it sort of ate him up, if you know what I mean. But I figure if you've gone through what you've gone through, and you're still fine, you should be able to handle it."
Chapter 9
I walked out of the morgue and into a cool breeze blowing trash down the street and messing the thin white hair of the old woman in front on me. A cool breeze on a hot, bright, summer day can stir one to do something completely mad. Something like walking all the way home instead of taking the bus.
I crossed all the necessary crosswalks, adjusting my steps so not to become entangled with the lunch hour traffic and dragged back to work after a bagel sandwich and a cup of coffee.
At Forbes and Grant, I lost control. There was a sandaled foot involved, and its owner was suddenly lying on my back, her breath heavy on my ear, reminding me of the last time a woman's mouth had been so close to any part of my head. It had been quite a while, I'm afraid.
"Oh my god. I'm sorry. I should have – Oh. Hi, Travis."
I rolled over onto my back, there on the pavement, to find Virginia's hand coming down to meet my own. "Hey. Fancy running into you down here." Sometimes they just sneak out like that. They have a mind of their own, you know?
"Did you really just say that? I had no idea you were such a fucking dork." She raised her eyebrows and sort of smirked at me. It was insulting, but not really. It was more fun than mean.
"I am, indeed, such a fucking dork. I have my membership card in my wallet, if you'd like to see it. It's been, oh, seventeen years. They give you the Star Wars trilogy after your first five, an autographed picture of the guy who played Bones after ten, and in another three I'll get my bronzed pair of Buddy Holly glasses. They look a lot like yours, actually."
"Aren't you funny. I hope that's working out for you." She was damned cute, this one. "What are you doing down here?"
Hmm. "Leaving a job interview. At the morgue."
She moved her hands to her hips. "Bullshit."
"No. Really. I start Friday." I was right. It was strange, telling someone I had a job at the morgue. It just didn't sound right.
She scrunched up her face. "That's kind of gross."
"Yeah, I guess." I glanced at her chest, her belly, her long hippie skirt, her ballerina feet. They weren't bad feet, as far as feet go, and I've always hated feet. "And what are you doing down here?"
"I was playing chess at Market Square. Just on my way home."
"Chess? Really?"
"Yeah. Chess. That ok with you?"
"It's fine. Sorry. I just --"
"Didn't expect a girl to play chess?" She tilted her head to one side and went to move her hands to her hips, but was exasperated to find them already there. I knew they were there. I kept looking down at them and thinking that the last hips I'd had my hands on belonged to Erica, and they weren't good hips like Virginia's. Nor were they very good eating.
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The meat around Virginia's hips could have lasted me at least two days, if I needed to stretch it.
"Hey. Take it easy. I just don't know any girls who play, all right? At least, not any who'd be playing at Market Square on a Monday morning. I'm sure you're great." I decided to push my luck. "I mean, chess is all about scheming and deception. You women are pretty good at both."
"Fuck you. Not all women are like that, you know. I fucking hate –"
"Relax, dear. Relax. It was just a joke. I know most women aren't like that." I couldn't help but smile. She was downright hot when she was fired up.
"Asshole."
We walked past the county jail, which gave me an excellent opportunity to tell her an amusing story about the only time I'd ever spent the night in a holding cell, with twenty-some other guys, three of them coming down off of heroin, taking turns on the one toilet. The full version of that story also involves doing coke off one of the benches in the cell, but since there's really only one way for someone to sneak cocaine past the guards who search you when you're brought in, I left that part out. I figured a story about doing butt-coke was not the best way to impress a lady, no matter how crass that lady might be.
"So, what's the point of that story?"
"Um. I guess it's just to be really polite to your arresting officer. Maybe he'll let the fog of pot smoke in your car slide, and you won't get charged with driving under the influence, or with possession."
"So, you got arrested for switching the plates on your cars, huh? Are you retarded or something?"
"Maybe a little."
She looked at me. "You love telling that story, don't you? You get all animated when you tell it."
I did, in fact, like to tell that story. I was sort of proud of that night, although I couldn't tell you exactly why. "I don't know. Not really. I mean, just as much as any story, I guess. It's not like –"
She grabbed the back of my arm. "No. It's cute, you getting all excited like that. Do you have any more of those stories?"
We'd stopped walking and were now across the Tenth St. Bridge, on Carson, between Tenth and Eleventh. She was facing me, smiling, with her head down just enough that she had to look up to see me. They all know that look. I don't know where they learn it, but they all know it, and they all use it, and it works every fucking time. It made me nervous.
