by Rob Rosen
My nodding picked up steam. “We just need to act before the azzhole gets the password changed back.”
I put my hand out. Max put his hand over mine. Bruce covered the two with his giant mitt, obliterating them from sight. I could feel the energy-levels rapidly rise. Being in Arby’s was like plugging into a socket, filling a spirit with joy and comfort and oomph.
I locked eyes with the two of them. We were three very different people. Death, it seemed, made strange bedfellows. Not that there were beds in Arby’s, or even the ability to lie down, but, yeah, strange just the same.
I smiled. We were back at Clark’s, back at what had once been Max’s. To every season, turn, turn, turn. Life always rolls along. Funnily enough, so does the afterlife. Who could have guessed?
Voltan was still there. Clark was still there. Voltan and Clark were making out on the couch. I cleared my throat. Suffice it to say, nothing happened. “Ahem,” I said instead.
Voltan sighed. “They’re back.”
“Already?” grumbled Clark.
“They need your help,” Voltan said.
“Again? Didn’t we just help them?” He seemed to have gotten over his shock rather quickly at being haunted.
They went back to kissing. I was glad Clark had found something other than his hand to play with. Still, time was of the essence. My essence, that is. And so, I floated in and down and poked and prodded at the medium.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Voltan said, squirming like he had ants in his pants. I poked, poked, poked. He flung his arms this way and that as if I was a fly you could swat away. Yeah, good luck with that. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll help; just stop!” I poked him one final time, so he’d know we meant business. Plus, okay, it was sort of fun to poke the living. He winced at the last poke and hopped off the couch, heading for the computer. Clark followed.
I turned to Bruce. “Feel like a little possession?”
The side of his top lip rose. “I can do that? All Linda-Blair-like?”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t try making his head turn three-sixty, but, yeah, you can do that. With Voltan, at least. Just go in and let Clark know what we need. The password is password.”
“Not exactly a safe password.”
I shrugged. “I’m living on the edge now that I’m, you know, no longer fucking living.” I pointed. “Now hurry, please. Just tell Clark to log back into the company’s computer system. The log-in name should be Chaz. We all use our first names. It makes life easier for the IT guy. Tell him to look for recently deleted files, a lot of them in a short amount of time.”
Bruce was nodding all the while, eager, it looked like, to go all Exorcist on Voltan’s ass. And then, the medium blinked. His body went rigid. His mouth moved and out came Bruce.
“Fuck,” said Clark.
Voltan/Bruce smiled. “Maybe later. For now….”
The orders were given. Clark went to work. Bruce again joined us, back to the land of the sort of dead. “Weird,” he said.
“Very,” I agreed. “And crowded.”
He nodded, touched almost transparent finger to equally almost transparent nose. “Still, that was amazing. Almost like I was alive again.”
Almost, yes. But not quite. Truth was, I missed being alive and was also glad not to be. I wondered if the former would fade in time. Then again, I also wondered if I, too, would fade in time. Death brought peace, but no answers. Then again, death had also brought me Max, so I wasn’t complaining—at least any more than usual.
In any case, all that poking had drained me. I floated back over to Voltan. “He needs to hurry! We have little time!”
Voltan stared me in the eyes. It was unnerving because I knew he couldn’t actually see me. “I sense anxiousness,” he said to Clark. “Worry. Fear.” He tapped the other man’s shoulder. “You need to work faster.”
Clark sighed, his fingers moving like wildfire across the keyboard. “Almost there,” he grunted. “Almost…” A few more clicks and, “There.” He sat back and pointed at the screen. “That’s the CEO’s deleted items. Thirty-seven of them. All from within a thirty-second span.
“But,” said Voltan, leaning his face closer to the screen, “those aren’t documents this time.”
“Emails,” said Clark. “He was deleting emails.” Clark again ran his fingers across the keyboard, copying the deleted emails before dropping them into a folder on his desktop. He turned around and stared in our general direction. “The password was just changed back, by the way.” He shot us a self-satisfied grin. “Fast enough for you?”
I swooped in and patted him on the back. My hand went right on through. Clark didn’t seem to notice. “Why was he deleting those emails? What was in them?” I asked.
“Why was he deleting those emails? What was in them?” echoed Voltan.
I nodded vigorously and pointed at our pint-sized friend. “Yeah, what he said! What he said!”
Clark again began to work, pulling up the same emails he’d just copied. He opened them, closed them, one after the other. Then he turned and faced his audience. I stared at him with bated, if not entirely nonexistent, breath. “The files are not related to the dearly departed.”
“Huh?” huhed I.
“What are they then?” asked Voltan.
Again, Clark turned to the computer, pulling up one of the emails for us to see. He pointed at the screen. “This guy Chaz is cheating on his wife. Best guess,” he said, “he figures that the police might request access to his computer at some point in the investigation, so he’s destroying the evidence. Little good it’ll do him.”
“Who’s he cheating with?” I asked.
Voltan again leaned in and squinted at the screen. “Some woman named Paula. Who’s Paula?”
I turned to Max.
Max turned to me.
We were back at Arby’s a moment later, all three of us.
“Well,” said Max, “that was interesting. We have three suspects and two of them are having an affair.”
My head bobbed. “Think it’s a coincidence?”
His shrug saw my bob and raised it a squint. “I don’t see how your murder and their affair could be related, especially in relation to that financial document, but, yeah, something smells fishy, just the same.”
All our heads bobbed in agreement.
“So,” said Max, “to recap, we have a financial document that has some sort of information in it that possibly got you killed, and we have three suspects: Paula, the account manager, who stole your flash-drive; the boss, one Chaz, A.K.A. the azzhole, who is having an affair with Paula. And the CFO, Glenn, who is a homophobe with, what appears, an axe to grind.” He’d been counting on his fingers; now he was again looking my way. “That about cover it?”
Bruce raised his hand. “Anybody else think that medium guy looks like Woody Harrelson, only shorter?”
“And with hair,” added Max.
I sighed. As usual, I was stymied by a lack of lungs. “Voltan,” I said. “His name is Voltan.”
Max grinned. “I wonder if his parents had a strange sense of humor or absolutely none at all.”
“Voltan,” said Bruce. “Sounds like a guy who walks around in turbans.”
I laughed. Max laughed. Bruce laughed, but only because it was contagious. Still, he was right; Voltan seemed to be born to be a guy who wore turbans, what with that being the standard headgear for mediums, soothsayers, fortunetellers, psychics, and clairvoyants. “Born to it,” I said, trying and, of course, failing to snap my fingers.
“Born to what?” asked Max.
“Voltan,” I replied. “Voltan was born to be a medium.”
Max squinted my way. “Because he wears a turban?” His standard grin returned. “Bit of a stretch, Nord.”
I shook my head. “No, I mean, he died when he was a baby. He died and came back. I bet he came here. I bet he came here and that’s why he can communicate with us. He is, or at least was, once just like us.” I turned to Bruce. “Are there babies he
re?”
Bruce’s smile momentarily faltered. “Not that I’ve ever seen. Stands to reason, if we’re all stuck here because of unfinished business back on Earth, then why would there be babies here? Babies have no unfinished business. Babies who die probably go to wherever it is we’ll go to once the poof happens.”
I nodded. I frowned. And then I smiled but didn’t try to snap my fingers. Because fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, blah, blah, blah. “Unless we’re his unfinished business.”
“Lost me,” said Max.
Bruce nodded. “I’ve been lost from the get-go.”
“Fate,” I said. “Like Voltan was fated to help us. Like Voltan was sent back to help us years and years later. He died. He came here instead of going poof. Maybe he came to Arby’s momentarily, sort of dead, just like us, but not quite, and then returned to Earth.”
“And do you believe in fate?” asked Max.
My smile returned in full. “I didn’t, Max. But I didn’t believe in any of this, and look where we are now.” I held his hand in mine. “You found me, Max. Out of the multitudes of spirits around here, it was you who found me. What are the odds? And what are the odds that Clark found Voltan online, and that Voltan was legit?”
Bruce again covered his hand over ours. “And me,” he said. “You found me, too.”
I nodded. My smile was stretched to its limit. “Fate,” I repeated.
“Fine,” said Max. “Let’s say all of that is correct; so what? What good does it do us now?”
I wondered if it was smart to reply to him. I had a feeling what I was thinking, what I’d been thinking since I first inhabited Voltan’s body, was a no-no. I mean, if there were rules in Arby’s, it was probably not a swell idea to break them. But were there rules? Was there some sort of divine governance over all of this? There were no angels in Arby’s that I could see. Sure, Max and Bruce were angelic, but that didn’t exactly count, did it? Maybe we were all angels then. And if there were angels, if we were in fact angels, there was a God, right? If there was fate, there was a God who set the wheels in motion, right? And if all that were true, was it smart to possibly do what I’d been thinking of doing? I mean, if God existed, wouldn’t he be pissed at my idea?
And so, I asked a question with a question. “Do you guys believe in God?”
Max laughed. “Interesting segue.”
“Humor me,” I said.
He shrugged. “I did when I was a kid, in Sunday school, in church. Then I grew up, saw all the crap, the crap on top of crap, everything wrong with the world, and my belief faltered. Then I got here, life after sort of death. I felt the joy, the absence of crap. Hard not to believe in God now.”
I looked at Bruce. “And you?”
He looked left, then right. “Can I plead the fifth in Arby’s?”
I grinned. “Afraid that what you say might be held against you?”
He nodded vigorously. “Best not to piss Him off.” He was still looking around. I winced, half expecting a visitation at any minute, but I was no Moses and there wasn’t a bush in sight, or at least not a burning one.
And yet, what Bruce had said was exactly the thought I’d been having. I wanted to act, needed to act, but that act might do some major pissing-off. Or, of course, not. Who knew? God seemed to give us free will. This was me simply exercising said will. And possibly cancelling out another one in the process. Though, in that regard, I had a feeling fate was still on our side.
“I have a plan,” I said.
Max put his hand on my shoulder. “To find your murderer,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing since you arrived?”
I shook my head. I stared him in the eyes. I’d been feeling joy. It was almost impossible not to in that place, but staring him in the eyes gave me something else. I’d like to say an erection the size of my arm but, yeah, good luck with that. No burning bushes, no boners, not there, no sir. No, what he gave me was the proof I’d been asking for.
God. Fate. Love. Maybe they were all the same thing.
“It’ll never work,” I said. “Not the way we’ve been doing it. Bouncing in and out, minutes at a time. Plus, we can only go so far, a house or two, a business. Relying on a couple of strangers with no connections to my life, or at least what was my life.” My eyes again locked with Max’s. The feeling returned. Even as I felt it, I knew I risked losing it. “But there might be another way.”
Chapter 4
“Come on,” I said as I started to walk. Or hover. Or, um, whatever it was I was doing to propel myself through Arby’s.
My friends fell in behind me. “Where we headed, Nord?” Max asked.
“It’s all the same,” Bruce said. “No matter which way you walk, it’s all just…people.”
I stopped and smiled. “Exactly.” I turned around. “Just ask them, ask them if they’ve ever seen a baby here. If they have, if it’s possible for a baby to be here, even for a moment, then Voltan might’ve been here. That might explain why he can communicate with us, to a degree, why he can feel us when we poke him.”
Bruce’s face tilted to the right. He was beautiful if not a tad but crooked. “Still lost.”
I nodded. “If we can go to earth and come back here, if he was here and went back to earth, maybe, just maybe, he can come back here again.”
Max’s head also tilted. “When he dies, you mean?”
“No,” I replied. “Not exactly.” I held up my hand. For now, it was all conjecture anyway. “Just ask. Ask them if they’ve seen a baby. Ever. Even once.”
They both shrugged in sync. It was nice to have friends in high places. Literally.
And so we split up, to a degree. I went straight—first time for everything—and Max went slightly to the left, Bruce slightly to the right, none of us losing sight of the other two. Everyone was friendly. Everyone. When you peel away class and gender and race and all the other bullshit dividers, people are just people. In Arby’s, you could be you and not be judged, not worry about what others thought of you. Maybe that’s where that all-encompassing joy came from.
In any case, I asked everyone I met if they’d ever seen a baby there. Most all of them looked at me funny. A baby, after all, didn’t have unfinished business. A baby was pure. Babies, they figured, either went straight to the poof or were maybe reincarnated. That was the general consensus. As always, it was mere speculation. No one had been given a guidebook. No one had met an angel when they arrived. They’d all figured everything out as they went along, and some of them had been going along for decades now. But a baby, no, no one had seen one. Someone had run into Donna Summer but love to love you, baby ain’t the same thing.
And then, after what seemed like hours, and after I was about to give up, Bruce came hollering my way, a woman in tow, boobies bouncing merrily along, brown locks swaying from side to side. “I found her!” he shouted. “I found her!”
My eyes went wide. He had Anna Nicole Smith by the hand. “I think you misunderstood the assignment,” I said. “Baby, not celebrity.” I nodded her way. “Big fan, ma’am.” She was a brunette now, her boobs smaller in death than in life, and yet she was still radiant. FYI, like money, you can’t take silicone or dye with you when you kick the old bucket. Anna was a case in point. That is to say, something had finally come between her and her Guess Jeans, namely death.
She grinned. “There’s been a baby here,” she said in her telltale Texas drawl. “Came and went like—”
“Poof,” I said.
She nodded. “Yep, like poof. Or least that’s what I was told, but it was from a reliable source. This guy I used to know. Worked at coffee shop in West Hollywood.”
Max had seen the commotion and joined us. I looked his way. “She knows someone who once saw a baby.”
He nodded. “I heard. Congrats. And?”
I put my hand out. His hand covered it. Bruce’s covered that. Anna shrugged and placed her more dainty hand over that. Which is how we all wound up in Max’s old apartment together. In
death, I seemed to be travelling in strange circles.
“And,” I said, “if that’s possible, then my plan might also be possible.”
Anna floated around. “I had an apartment like this once. Small place. Cozy. Before…” She let it go. Her smile quivered. I didn’t have to ask her how she died; I remembered the news, the overdose. It was a big life. It was a sad life. She probably had more unfinished business than the three of us combined. She turned my way. “Plan? Why would you need a plan now?” She meant, I was dead; what was the point? But she killed herself, to a degree; me, I was murdered. Me, I needed a plan. Fortunately, I had one. But would it work? Could it work?
We floated into the bedroom. When last we’d seen Clark and Voltan, they were making out. Things, ahem, had progressed.
“Whoa,” said Bruce. “You said it was big, but…”
I nodded. Clark’s dick was being sucked. By Clark. “Nice trick.”
Voltan had been licking Clark’s asshole while Clark sucked himself off. He stopped, mid-lick. “They’re back,” he said, sounding less than thrilled. “Four of them now.”
Clark’s dick came out of Clark’s mouth in an audible pop. He tried covering himself up, but that was about like using a Kleenex for a blanket. Meaning, modesty wasn’t in his cards. He sighed and simply let it stand there, an entity unto itself.
“You could’ve knocked first,” he said.
Were it that easy. And speaking of easy…“You two move fast,” I said. Though I was happy for Clark. That trick of his was probably learned out of loneliness. At least now he had an admirer. Or five, counting us.
“A woman,” said Voltan. “They’ve brought a woman.”
Clark rolled his eyes and frowned. “Figures. Maybe we should charge admission.” He stared in our general floating direction. “Do the dead tip?”
Bruce nodded. “Here’s a tip: don’t do drugs.”
