by Daniel Parme
"I don't know," I said. "That night I was here, Little Travis just suddenly--"
"Wait." She let out one laughing breath. "You call him Little Travis? That's retarded. If you're going to name him, you might as well actually name him. You're more creative than that, aren't you? Than 'Little Travis'?"
It took everything in me not to get defensive. "I don't know. You got any better ideas?"
"I do, actually. I was watching Bull Durham the other day. That night you first came to my place, Little Travis there, he announced his presence with authority. Maybe you should call him Nuke." She winked, which, since I’d come to know her a little better, seemed out of character. She was no winker. She was, however, amazing. I mean, what woman is going to say you should name your pecker after a character from the greatest baseball movie ever?
"Anyway," I continued, "I got here that night, and Nuke just sort of woke up. Out of nowhere. I guess I was just too excited about it to give it any thought."
The phone rang, and rang again.
"Well, you should think about it. Maybe it's something you can do again." She answered the phone, told whoever it was to hold on, and went back into the office.
I rested my head on my hands and started to think about what could have possibly charged my sexual appetite that night.
Then, as so often was the case, Adam showed up, smiling and bumping my thoughts right off the track. "What's going on, brother? Haven't seen you in a while."
Virginia reemerged from the office and got back on the phone to tell whoever was on the other end "Wednesday." Then she noticed Adam. "Adam, how do you always show up out of nowhere like that?" She brought him a beer.
"I'm one quarter ninja," he told her. "You didn't know that?"
I lit a cigarette for him and asked what he'd been up to.
"Nothing much, man. You know, working and sleeping." As long as I'd known Adam, I don't think I'd ever once known him to be up to anything much. I think that might be why he was always in such a good mood. "What about you? Go to any more of those secret meetings?"
Virginia's ears went up with that one. "Secret meetings? What? Are you part of the Illuminati or something? Scheming for world domination?"
"Well, I've always been scheming for world domination, but I prefer to work alone. Those Illuminati bastards, they always manage to fuck everything up." It was a feeble attempt to avoid any more questions.
And yes, it failed.
"So what are these secret meetings, then?"
I looked at Adam and wished I could sock him a good one for spilling my beans like that, but he didn't know he had a hold of my beans, so I couldn't really be all that angry with him.
"I've only been to one meeting, and I'm not really sure what it was all about, actually. Best I can guess is they have something to do with surviving accidents. They asked me to speak for them a couple weeks ago."
"What night was that?"
"The night we had to call a cab for drunkie-boy, here."
Adam shrugged. "I don't remember that night too well."
"Oh. That night." Virginia blushed, and I couldn't believe it. "I remember that night."
"Yeah. That night. Anyway, they were really strange people. And they were all loaded. Rich, I mean, not drunk. I didn't know what they were about when I agreed to speak for them, and I didn’t really learn much." I knew it sounded ridiculous. How could I not know anything?
Virginia knew it, too. "You don't know anything? That's ridiculous. Do you at least know what they're called?"
"Yeah, I think. PEP, but I don't know what it stands for." I took a sip from my refreshed beverage and turned to Adam. “The main guy, he said he'd get in touch with me to tell me when the next one is."
"You gonna go?" I couldn't tell which of them said it first.
"I don't know. Maybe."
And then, we drank.
Chapter 17
I got to work and told Eli he could leave and that I would sign him out at his normal time, like always. He told me about our over-nighters: two simply got too old, and the other was an overdose. He left the paperwork out for me. Then he left.
I should have slept another hour. This was a waste of my time. The old people with their pale raisin wrinkled skin and brittle bones and the drug addict with his pale bruised skin and near-atrophied muscles did not interest me. I wanted my dead bodies the way I wanted my women: meaty. It could be muscle or fat, so long as it was substantial. Substantial, but not obese. The very fat and very skinny seemed equally weak to me. It was strength I was after.
Just the same, I gave the corpses a look. I would have given them a physical exam, too, if it wasn't like looking at three skeletons, either exhumed or discovered frozen in an iceberg. Nothing to prod. Nothing to poke.
So I put them away in much the same way I would also put their files into their respective drawers.
I managed to get the bodies put away without dropping any of them to the floor, but I can't say the same about their files. I dropped them all. On their way down, they opened, and their innards spilled all over the floor and under the desk.
I scraped the mess that was out in the open into a quick pile and stuck the upper half of my body in the space made for your knees. I got my right hand on the last few sheets and used my left to steady myself against the bottom of the drawer above me, where I found a key stuck to the desk with a magnet.
We're curious, people. We can't help ourselves. Look at Adam and Eve. Look at Socrates. We all want to know. Sometimes you better your life and the lives of others, and sometimes you fuck it up for everyone. It can go either way. But whichever way it does go, at least now you know.
I knew this key unlocked Dick's office. I knew I had almost an hour before anyone else came in. I knew I was bored.
Other than a box of cigarettes and a bird clock, I didn't know what Dick kept in his office. I didn't know much about Dick.
I couldn't help myself. I went to his office and stood in the middle of the room, looking around for what I wanted to molest first. Filing cabinets, bookshelves, end-table drawers, a closet. So many choices. I settled on the desk. People are always hiding things in their desks – liquor or little black books, pistols or records of dirty deeds.
Everyone who has a desk has something to hide in that desk. Everyone except for Richard Pearson. The most exciting thing I found in any of the four drawers was a novelty pen. When you turned it upside down, the upside down woman in her underwear turned right side up, and her underwear fell to her feet. I got the sense that this would not be a productive exploration.
Disappointed, I leafed through the stack of papers sitting neatly on the polished oak. (It was quite a desk to have in a coroner's office. It could have belonged to the CEO of some huge, money-grubbing corporation.) Nothing interesting there, either. Just the autopsy reports of all the unclaimed bodies we'd had in the last two weeks.
I grabbed a pencil from the golf bag, held by a six-inch caddy, on the desk. I started doodling on a pad of blue post-it notes and noticed indentations on the paper. I shaded lightly over the entire square, like they do in detective movies, and found a note now written in the dead space.
Six for Saturday the tenth. Call W tomorrow.
This wasn’t much more interesting than the nudie pen. I peeled the note from the pad, folded it in half so the glue was inside, stuck it in my wallet, locked the door on my way out, and put the key back.
I wondered if Dave knew his uncle was the most boring man in the world.
Chapter 18
It was hot outside, and because I had time now, since my regression back into the world of the perpetually flaccid, I spent most of that time in my air-conditioned apartment, reading books and watching documentaries. I had all the time in the world to read the pixilated words of people who were really obsessed with this cannibalism stuff. I was merely taking a tour of the grotesque mansion in which these people lived, this house decorated with bloody gruesome paintings an
d severed parts preserved in yellowish liquid in jars on the mantles.
There were rooms I couldn't get into without a password and a credit card (turns out you truly cannot go anywhere without your American Express card), and rooms I wouldn't dare enter. Sometimes you just have to know when to leave a door shut, you know?
Just the same, too much of my time was given to exploring this house. When I did manage to force myself to go out, I’d find myself sitting at the bar, sizing everyone up. Which of these would Fish have picked? Or Dahmer? If I were stranded again, who would I want to be there with me? Which of these boozing, smoking twenty-somethings would be of greatest nutritional value?
These games were moderately effective substitutes for what was once known as my sexual desire. I still checked out all the women, but not because I wanted to fuck. I eyed their legs and breasts and bellies and asses, all the same parts I used to, not because I wanted to touch them but because I wanted to eat them.
Before this gets out of hand, I have to tell you something. I was afraid. I knew I was getting too far off the path. I knew it was somewhere nearby, but I was beginning to lose track of which direction I had to go to find it again. I felt like a child in the woods at night, with an enormous amount of fear and a little sense of adventure. I was scared because each step meant one of two things: either I was closer to where I should have been, or I was farther away. I found myself praying on more than one occasion that it was the former, but every now and again I’d have been ok with the latter. I didn't want to get too deep into these woods. I didn't want to do the things you’d have to do to survive in these woods.
To make matters worse, I couldn't stop thinking about Synchek and his pseudo-cult. And about Pearson's note, which had since been moved from my wallet to the fridge, right beside Synchek’s letter. Something was up. If Pearson had nothing to do with it, it was of no matter. Those PEP people, something wasn't right about them, and I felt a strange attraction to whatever it was. A connection. I couldn't figure it out, but for some reason, I was drawn to them.
I was curious. I wanted to know.
I hadn't heard from Synchek, so I didn't know when the next meeting was. I needed to know when the next meeting was.
Conveniently enough, this was a Thursday, and Thursdays were One-Armed-Man Day at the James Street Tavern.
"Mr. Eliot! So good to see you!" Synchek stood as though he was being pulled towards the ceiling by tiny wires at the corners of his smile, like some puppeteer was up in the ceiling, controlling everything. "Please, have a seat. Let me get you a drink."
I sat across from the blue suit with its arm folded and pinned to the shoulder. "When's the next PEP meeting?"
He laughed. "So, we made an impression on you then? I trust it was a good one." He sat and looked pleased with himself for a moment, then continued. "What won you over?"
I didn't dare tell him anything about my newfound love of research, or about how I felt connected to his group of, uh, followers. I searched my head for a reasonable response. "The food. It was unbelievable."
Ah, truths that are lies. And lies that are truths. God bless the subtleties of the English language.
"I told you, John Gregory is quite the chef, is he not?" He knocked back the rest of his martini and looked for the waitress, who was taking an order a few tables away. He lit a cigar. "Well, Travis, the next meeting is scheduled for next Saturday. The eleventh. If you're serious about coming back, you'll need to know the password."
I thought about a clubhouse with a crayon-scrawled no girls allowed sign on the door, kids inside stockpiling porno mags and fireworks. "Really? A password?"
"It's more of a pass-phrase, I suppose. 'I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.' T.S. Eliot. Hmm. Eliot. Isn't that a coincidence?" He thought it was clever. I thought it was retarded and didn't crack a smile.
"Why Eliot?"
He stared into the lit end of his cigar. "Oh, I don't know, exactly. I've just always enjoyed that line. And a password has to be something, does it not?"
"I guess so."
So that was that. Saturday, August eleventh, I would go back to that warehouse and learn what was what.
Chapter 19
Smoking cigarettes is bad for me. I know it. And my parents knew it, and some of my friends know it, and my dead grandparents all know it first-hand. Smoking is bad for me, and by this point in my life I'd been doing it for almost a decade. There was an eighteen month period when I'd quit, not had one cigarette, even if I was drinking, even after sex, but I'd since started up again. I knew I had to quit then because the stairs were beginning to look more like Everest every time I approached them, and the balls of phlegm that I coughed up in the morning were growing larger, a little more discolored. I knew I had to quit because eventually you realize that things are getting worse, and someday they'll be irreparable. You know that someday a doctor will tell you that you have cancer, emphysema, whatever. He'll tell you you're going to die, and you should have stopped before it got to this point.
And the bitch of it is, he'll be right.
Surgeon General's Warning: Cannibalism can lead to such horrifying diseases as Kuuru (or the laughing death, as it's referred to by tribes in New Guinea, which is sort of like the Mad Cow Disease of humans). It can also lead to jail-time or, more likely, a death sentence.
It says so right there on the box.
There are many ways to quit smoking. There's the gum, the patch, the rubber-band around the wrist, the hypnotherapy, the acupuncture therapy, the twelve step programs. They call them aides, helpers, crutches.
I call them crap.
The only way to quit doing anything is to quit fucking doing it. Just stop. No aides. No crutches. If you think you have to stop eating so much, then don't put all that food in your mouth. If you have to stop drinking and driving, don't drink, or don't drive. If you have to stop smoking, stop lighting things on fire and sticking them in your mouth. You get the idea.
If you have to stop wondering what it would be like to have people as your main source of food, as a preference rather that out of necessity, then you have to stop reading about it. You have to stop watching your documentaries. Stop sitting around your apartment with all that access to cannibalism web-sites. It would help if you could stop going to work at the morgue, too, but a man has to work, and the benefits are a major plus.
But the thing is, you have to stop doing all these things NOW, before the doctor tells you your nervous system is completely shot and soon you'll collapse, trembling onto the floor and losing your ability to speak, before you start breaking all those rules you made for yourself only a couple chapters ago. Before the police catch you with body parts in your freezer, you have to stop all of it.
They call it cold turkey.
I call it way more effective than all that other crap.
I woke up one morning, a couple days after meeting Synchek at James Street, and the first thing in my head was, I wish I had to work today. I want to feel-up another dead person. If I'd become this addicted to the idea, just imagine what the actual practice would do to me. Finally, my conscience recognized this as a very bad thing. I was killing myself, just like with the cigarettes. And one form of slow suicide is plenty, thank you. At least the cigarettes don't hurt anyone else. At least the cigarettes don't mean you've completely lost your senses of humanity and of right and wrong.
So I decided to quit. Cold turkey. No crutches. If I could survive months of being alone and starving and broken in the mountains, in the snow, in the tragedy and death of that fucking accident, I had to be strong enough to stop myself from getting deeper into this addiction.
I disconnected my computer, threw my books into the incinerator in the basement, returned the documentaries to the library, and I quit. Just like that.
The thing about working at the morgue is it's much more difficult to quit your addiction to dead people – eating them, thinking about eating t
hem, or otherwise, if you swing that way – when you have to be around them all day. It's like an alcoholic carrying a full flask in his jacket pocket, like a gambling addict moving to Vegas.
I should have quit my job.
But I didn't. I decided I would just have to deal with it. Piece of cake. I spent most of the time at the front desk anyway, an entire hallway separating me from my vice. I could bury myself in paperwork, reorganizing files, cleaning.
And I did. Come August ninth, I hadn't even looked at a dead body. I kept busy answering the phone, ordering chemicals and new tools, scrubbing the waiting room floor. I kept busy by whatever means necessary, and it was working. And it certainly didn't hurt that nobody seemed to be dying. At least not in the city.
August ninth, and Pearson came out from the back. "So much for the undertaker always having work, huh?"
I was busying myself, putting new labels on the file folders. "Yeah. I guess so."
He sat on the corner of the counter, picked up a couple of paperclips, and started bending them up, sculpting. "You feeling all right, Travis? You seem like you're getting a little too involved with all this cleaning up out here."
I pulled a faded yellow label from its plastic holder at the top of the folder. I-J, it said. "Yeah, I'm fine."
"I noticed you've been coming in early. That's good. It shows you care about your work." He looked down at the paperclip figure in his hand, curled his lip, and went back at it. "Seems like you're settling in nicely. That's good, too. Sometimes this place makes people a little weird."
"I guess I'm doing all right. I like it well enough." I stuck a nice, new, bright orange I-J label on the folder and slid it back into its drawer.
"Are you interested in any overtime work? There's something I need to do tomorrow night, and I think I'll need a hand."
