by Rob Rosen
To which Anna replied, “Amen.”
My frown mirrored Clark’s. We’d all died horrible deaths, the four of us. Life hadn’t been fair to us; afterlife was still questionable.
Voltan wrapped himself up in a blanket. Naked, he was skinny and hairy. Otter-like. Meaning, cute and cuddly. Nice dick, too. Not Clark-nice but lightning rarely strikes twice so close together. “They want something,” he said.
Clark nodded. “Don’t we already know that?”
“No,” Voltan said. “Something new. I can feel it again, the need, the desperation. The energy shifts in them. The auras change.” He stood, the blanket now like a toga. He walked to within a foot of me. “You’re growing impatient, Nord.” I nodded as he sighed. He waved his hands my way in the universal sign of come in already, you’re letting all the heat out.
I looked over at Max. “If this works, wait for me. Promise you’ll wait. And take care of him.”
Max’s head again went at a tilt. “Wait? Where are you going? Better question, how? And take care of who?”
I didn’t answer. Mainly because I was letting all the heat out. Or, in other words, he invited, so in I swooped. As before, I felt him there, but I was in control of his body. As before, it was a tight fit. Maybe because Voltan was so compact to begin with.
“Sorry to intrude, Voltan!” I shouted, my voice echoing inside his head.
“You don’t have to shout; I can hear you.” His voice sounded tinny, like he was speaking over a wire attached to two soup cans. “Just tell me what you want.”
I paused. What I wanted was dangerous. For him. For me, too, possibly. And that wasn’t even taking into account the wrath of God—if He even existed. Though, seeing as I still did, odds were in His favor. For now. “You’ll never find my killer, not at this rate. You have no connection to my life, to the person who put the bullet through me. You’re a medium, not a detective. All that is to say, my unfinished business will, more than likely, forever stay that way.”
“Uh huh,” I heard. It was weird to hear him and not see him. Then again, what about any of this wasn’t weird? “And what’s your point?”
I semi-switched gears. “Do you know why you can sense us? The dead, I mean? Why I’m able to be in here with you now?”
“I died. I came back. Best guess.”
“My guess, too. In fact, you were probably in the place me and my friends are in now, a sort of holding station. You were there briefly, also a guess, but long enough for you to have a connection to both worlds, the living and the sort of dead.”
“Sort of dead?”
I shrugged. I hit a rib. “Never mind. It’s just—”
“You want to swap places. You want my body so you can conduct the investigation. You want me to go to this holding place—”
“Arby’s.”
“The holding place is in an Arby’s?”
“Again, never mind. In any case, yes. We swap. And then, once I find my murderer, once I bring this person to justice, we swap back.”
“Presumably.”
I sighed. Seriously, I sighed! I could feel Voltan’s lungs inhale and exhale. Now that was joy. In any case, yes, he was right. Presumably. If he was capable of leaving his body, would he be capable of returning to it? Would he die once he left, leaving me in a corpse? Could he go to Arby’s with my friends? And worst of all, would we piss a certain all-knowing, all-seeing deity off by doing all this? I mean, death was his gig, not ours. “Um, yeah, right. Presumably.”
“Fine.”
I coughed. Seriously, I coughed! Such rapture. Pissing was sure to be nirvana. I’d taken everything for granted. Everything. “Fine? But it’s dangerous. All of it. Probably never been done before, not for all eternity. I’m guessing there’s a reason for that.”
“Yep,” he said. “Still, we’ll be the first, though that’s not the reason I said fine. I said fine because I’m a medium. My job, my life, is to be able to connect with the dead. This is my chance to see what I’m connecting to. Man walked on the moon. That was just as risky, and look at the payoff. This is simply exploration on a whole new level, Nord. I’ll be the next Columbus. Heck, I might even meet Columbus.”
I laughed. Seriously, I laughed! Then I blinked. Then I swallowed, tapped my foot, scratched my head, and my finger didn’t travel right on through! “At the very least, you’ll meet Anna Nicole Smith.”
“Huh?”
“Again, never mind. You’ll see.” Fingers crossed. Literally. My fingers were crossed. Or his were crossed, but still. “And I’ll take great care of your body.”
“And Clark?”
“What about Clark?”
“I like him.”
I nodded. “Yes, is saw. And I like him, too.”
“No,” he said. “Like I really like him.”
My laugh returned. Or his laugh, but close enough. “Got it. No sex with the computer geek.”
“And don’t get the computer geek killed either.”
Deal. I shook his hand. With his other hand. And then I pushed. Inside, I pushed, filled his body with my being, pushed as he relented. And then, I was alone. I could feel it. That is to say, I couldn’t feel him, couldn’t hear the echo of him inside my head.
“Voltan?” It was Clark. Clark’s willie had gone soft. Even then, it was quite a sight to behold. “What happened? You seemed…off?”
“Um, yeah, about that…”
He blinked. He blinked again. “You’re not Voltan.”
“How can you tell?”
He touched his chest. I sensed he meant to touch deeper in. “The inflection is off. The way you hold your head is off. The way you look at me is off. Where is Voltan?”
I looked behind me. I couldn’t see any of them, but I could feel all of them. Four of them. Meaning, Voltan was at least, uh, alive. “Off,” I said, to quote him. “But he’ll be back.” I could feel him poke me. Poke, poke, poke, he went. “Promise! Promise, he’ll be back! And fucking ouch, dude!”
“That’s unnerving,” said Clark.
“Tell me about it.” And then I told him about it. All of it.
His eyes went wide. “Anna Nicole Smith is here? In my home?”
I sighed. It never got old. “That was the take-away message?”
He shrugged. “I’ve never had a celebrity in my home before.” He waved sheepishly her way, though I think she was off a little bit to the left. “Your daughter is doing fine, Miss Smith.”
I could sense her. I could sense she liked hearing that. It was an odd feeling. Like a light switch had suddenly been flicked on inside me. I’d always had five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell; now I had six. I could also sense where Max was. I missed him already, missed his grin, his hand over mine, the kiss that blocked out the multitudes that surrounded us. “Take him to Arby’s,” I said. “I’ll be fine here.”
Clark again blinked my way as the four spirits blinked out of this realm and back to theirs, to mine. “So, now what?” he asked.
I pointed to his state of undress. “Clothes might be nice.”
A faint blush of red spread across his cheeks. “Oh yeah, um, right. Clothes.” He hopped up. I turned away to allow him his modesty, even though I’d already seen his dick in all sorts of positions and forms of arousal. “Okay,” he eventually said, now in sweats and a T-shirt. He stared at me. “This is strange, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“Which part?” Then again, what part wasn’t strange?
“You. You’re dead. You’re dead and you’re here with me. I’m talking to a dead guy.”
I held my hand up. “Got it. Dead. You can stop saying it. Trust me, I already know.” All too well, in fact. Voltan’s body felt like a space suit, like I was wearing it. I could control it, make my hands move, my lips snarl, but it felt like I was simply directing it, not inhabiting it. Meaning, it felt great to be alive again, but it didn’t feel natural. To be fair, though, I really was dead, and so natural had flown out the window right along with my sort of dead posse. �
�We have three suspects,” I told him, cutting to the chase. “We need to infiltrate my previous employer and spy on those three.”
He grinned. He had a nice grin. “Uh huh. That all? Need I remind you, you are no longer Nord. No one will know you there. No one will know me. Plus, where will you live? And you need money, clothes, food. And you don’t know Voltan, so how will you act like him when you run into people he knows?” He crossed his arms over his narrow chest. “Also, where is your old office? Is it even near here? If not, how will we get from here to there?”
“Oh.” Suffice it to say, I hadn’t fleshed out my plan all that well. Then again, I was busy trying to flesh me out, so points for me for at least getting that done.
His grin faded. “Yeah, oh.”
And then we compared notes, where we were, where my office was. Turned out, Max lived barely ten miles from me. Bruce lived barely ten miles from me, too. It was easy to think that when you died, maybe you just went straight up, that you landed close to the people who died near you. The again, it was just as easy to imagine fate had something to do with all this, too. Maybe everything. Though how sad was it that I could have met Max, that I could have met Bruce, when I was alive? We could have all been friends, possibly so much more. How sad was all of it? And how sad would it be to lose them all again?
But I was alive now. Now was all that counted. And so I pushed all those dreary thoughts away and hopped off the bed. Voltan’s jeans were on the floor. I fiddled inside the front pocket and removed a cell phone, keys, a wallet. “Car, house, money.” I retrieved his driver’s license. “I know where he lives, his birthday.” My grin widened. In fact, it downright hurt. “And his real name.”
Clark also jumped. We were now standing there, me still naked. He looked at me. I looked at him. “Weird. Him and yet not him. You and yet not you.” He reached down and grabbed my dick. “Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t get a chance to before…”
I sighed. My dick grew. Only, it wasn’t my dick. We both stared at it in wonder. “Nice dick,” I made note. “Girthy.”
Clark let go. He realized what he was doing and who he was doing it to, namely, not Voltan. His dick had also grown in watching the one attached to me grow, the lump in the sweats very much evident. His dick grew and grew and grew some more. He stared down at it. I stared down at it. Now we had two men with two raging boners. “It’s an albatross, you know,” he said.
I tilted Voltan’s head. “Um, I’ve been dead a little while now, but I’m pretty sure it’s a dick. Dick-plus, but still.”
He swayed it to and fro, the fabric shuffling in its wake. Took a while to go from one side to the other. “I was tall and lanky in middle-school, in high school. Kids made fun of me. Even the big dick they made fun of. Called me a freak. Said my mom must’ve been fucked by a horse.”
“Kids can be cruel.” I knew of that, too. You don’t need a huge dick to be made fun of. Nice as that would’ve been. To have a huge dick, I mean. Neat consolation prize. In any case, that also explained a lot, why he was, according to Max, always alone, by himself, socially awkward. Poor guy. Poor horse-dicked guy. I pointed down at my still-hard girthiness. “But, hey, things are looking, um, up.”
His grin at last returned. “A guy in a turban shows up at my front door and suddenly I’m standing here naked with a dead guy.”
I nodded energetically. “See, up.”
He shrugged. He laughed. His dick bounced and returned to the fro position. “Fine. Up. Just don’t get him maimed. Or marred. Or worse.” He again grabbed my dick. I again sighed. “I like this guy; don’t fuck it up.”
Talk about pressure. That was a lot for an almost dead guy to have on his plate: find a killer, finish the unfinished, go poof, and don’t maim, mar, or otherwise kill the host body in the process. “Lewis,” I said.
“Huh?” He let go of my/not-my dick.
“Voltan’s real name. Lewis.” I suddenly laughed. Howled, really. Fate again. Fate was once more playing its little games. “Lewis and Clark.”
His laughter joined mine. “Has a nice ring to it.” He pointed at the clothes scattered on the floor. “Can you please get dressed now, though? Small talk with the erect undead is making me a little uneasy.”
I reached for Voltan’s underwear. Boxer-briefs. Orange with blue stripes. I slid them on. “The erect undead. Sounds like a horror movie. Or a porn movie.” Sounded, oddly, life my afterlife.
“I’m more of a sci-fi guy,” he said, then pulled on the elastic of my undies and peeked inside. “Sorry, last time.”
I grinned and mirrored the gesture with his. “I don’t think anyone would make fun of you anymore.” Worship maybe, but make fun of, not so much.
“Yeah, but I don’t want them to like me just for that either.”
“So you gave up trying?”
He frowned. Jeans replaced his sweats, socks got slid on. I did the same with what remained on the floor. “Did our horror/porn movie suddenly turn psychological drama?”
I’d overstepped. I’d seen him hard, naked, jacking. I knew him intimately and yet not at all. I wanted to help him. I needed to help myself more. I nodded, dropped the subject. “Come on.” I dangled the car keys off my index finger. I was feeling more in control now, as if Voltan’s body was suddenly mine. The body stains the soul, but it also seemed to work in reverse.
He paused, locked eyes with me. “Where are we going?”
It was my turn to pause. “Um…” More pause. “You see…” More pause. “Well…”
“You need to be here, at my place, when the others, your friends, Voltan, returns, right?”
I nodded. “It’s a lot to ask.”
He laughed. I liked it when he laughed. I also liked it when he shook his dick my way, but the laugh was nice, too. “Horse is so far out of the barn on that one that it’s now hauling the barn behind him.”
“Still, I need to ask. We dragged you into all this. It could be dangerous.”
He walked to the door, turned the knob, smiled my way. “Drama queen much?”
I nodded. In life and death. Much. “Doesn’t change the facts.”
He sighed as he walked outside and shielded his eyes from the sun. Me, I breathed in, smelled the grass, the fresh air. Arby’s was great, but there were no scents, no colors, just joy, endless joy. But joy without depth. “Voltan seems to trust you, gave up his body for you.”
My nod continued. “Yeah, but we sweetened the pot with Anna Nicole Smith.”
“I suppose.” He kept walking. We were at Voltan’s car. A black Prius. Very unimaginative for a guy who wore a friggin turban.
“Never mind.” I got the keys out, opened the door, his and mine. We got in, Britney instantly blaring out at us. Also unimaginative, but it’d do.
“What’s it like?” he asked, turning my way as I in turn turned the key in the ignition.
“Which part?”
He smiled. “You know, death.”
I grinned. I had the answer to everyone’s question. Me. Then again, what good did it do me? “Wouldn’t know.”
“Again, huh?”
I turned my face back to the road, pulled out onto said road. Me. The dead guy. Driving. Would wonders never cease? “Technically, I’m not dead. Technically, Voltan never really speaks to people on the other side. I’m sure he’s mighty pissed about that right about now, too.”
“So, you haven’t seen God?”
“Willies and bushes,” I said. “Lots and lots of willies and bushes.” Voltan didn’t live too far away. I knew which way to go. “Plus Max. You met Voltan; I met Max. We all met you. You met us. Death is more like the Dating Game, thus far. Or a soap opera. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the gays of our afterlife. That about answer your question?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t really explain Anna Nicole Smith though.”
We pulled into a driveway. Voltan lived in a small ranch-style house. The grass needed trimming. I hoped he’d get the chance to trim it. I didn’t pray
for it in case you-know-who didn’t know what I was up to yet. “Clark?” I said.
“Yes, Nord?”
“To tell you the truth, I have way more questions than answers. Maybe a few less would be helpful.”
He grinned as he again looked my way. He gazed at me like I gazed at Max. Only, he wasn’t gazing at me, was he? “I want to help you, Nord. I want to do something else besides what I’ve been doing. You had unfinished business. Maybe it’s time for me to not have so much of that.”
I nodded with vigor and quite a bit of vim. “Smart.” I hadn’t learned from my mistakes soon enough; I would be happy if he could learn from them instead.
We walked up to the house, strode inside, silently, like thieves in the night. “Weird,” Clark said, repeating the obvious. “Neither of us really knows him, and yet here we are.”
I closed the door behind me. “Yep. Weird.” Made all the weirder by the fact that the house looked like it was lived in by a man who had a penchant for turbans. That is to say, Voltan’s career extended to his decorating skills. Or lack thereof. Unless crystals and skulls and beaded curtains were the in-thing these days, which I highly doubted. “The good thing is, now you know what kind of present to get him, should the occasion arise.”
He nodded. “You think Target sells crystal skulls?”
I found the bedroom, the bathroom, a suitcase. I packed, quickly. It felt like stealing. It felt like breaking and entering. Weird, like we’d continue to say. Then again, I’d sort of died and sort of came back, so weird was nothing in comparison. A drop in the fucking weird bucket, in the grand scheme of things. But was there a grand scheme?
“I think he has enough crystal skulls,” I said, heading for the door. “Maybe a counseling session instead? Yes?”
It was getting late. The sun had just about dipped beneath the horizon as the sky turned a brilliant gay pink. Tomorrow would be a busy day. I was tired, or at least the body I inhabited was, or so it felt like. FYI, still weird. Very, very fucking weird.
We drove back to Clark’s, back to what once was Max’s. We ate dinner. We watched TV. We brushed our teeth side by side. Clark wore pajamas to bed. Clark had a guest room but shared his bed with me instead. “In case Voltan or Max comes to visit,” he explained. “You’re sort of the antenna here, the USB port, the connection.”
