Postcards from a Dead Girl

by Kirk Farber

  “What can I do you for?” the bartender asks.

  I’m startled by his sudden appearance. My peripheral vision didn’t catch his approach. I spin the photo toward him. “I was wondering if you remember seeing the girl in this photo?” I realize I’m acting like a TV cliché, showing photos to bartenders, but it seems to be working.

  “You a cop?” he asks.

  “No. Does it matter?”

  He smiles and shrugs. “Not really. Just always wanted to say that.” He picks up the photo and gazes at it, his expression full of forced contemplation. He nods slowly and scratches his chin. I get the feeling he’s milking this episode for everything it’s worth. Probably not much excitement going on at the Mickey’s Laundro-Garage-Bar.

  “So, does she look familiar?”

  He bites his lip and raises his eyebrows. “Oh yeah, I remember this girl,” he says, and brushes a thumb across the scratch designs.

  I take the photo back. “You sure you’ve seen her here?”

  “Looks like that one over there,” he says, and nods across the room where a young, dark-haired woman sits. She’s fair-skinned and thin, like Zoe. I can see how this guy might make the comparison. I put the photo back in my pocket and study the bartender’s eyes. They are alive, glassy, like a woodland creature: tender, afraid. I wonder if he notices this when he looks in the mirror, if he’s at all aware of his fragile nature.

  “How long ago did you see her?” I ask.

  “Maybe a year ago sometime, I can’t remember.”

  “But not recently?”

  “No.”

  “A year is a long time,” I say. “How can you be sure?”

  “I remember those freckles,” he says, and taps his nose. “Very nice.”

  He’s right. The nose freckles are one of a kind. Splashed across her face like a constellation of stars: five large, twelve small. I know the numbers because I used to count them. When I couldn’t sleep, I would stare at her for hours while she was lost in slumber—mouth open, drooling on the pillow, like a child sleeps. I used to imagine a connect-the-dots game on her face, creating my own Zoe Star Systems. Crescent Major was the three large freckles on her left cheek, and the Tear Twins sat directly under her right eye in perfect alignment with the path her tears would follow. The other Minor Freckles I thought of as distant, mysterious suns never to be visited or understood by anyone—not even Zoe, not for several lifetimes. I used to wonder if even she understood what a marvel she was, lying so peaceful there in the dark, her eyes twitching with dreams.

  “She dead?” he asks.

  I hold my breath at this question, and wonder: is she? It’s a good question, although not one I would ask a man searching for a missing person, especially if he was in the photo with her. “Missing,” I say, and turn away so as not to catch his reaction.

  Outside, the cloud bank has broken up. Giant fingers of light reach down to touch the earth. The rain has transformed the parking lot into a steaming slab of asphalt, a fog and light show. And although I’m on the edge of New Jersey, it feels like somewhere else.

  chapter 14

  Back home, Zero is not impressed with my travels. I tell him about Corey the garage clerk and his propensity for talking about honesty, but Zero gazes sadly out the window, his eyes glassed over on the verge of tears. Total drama. Pure melancholy.

  “I did not abandon you,” I say, and point at him for emphasis.

  Zero glances over to the refrigerator calendar, then studies his empty bowl.

  “That bowl was overflowing with food when I left. You gorged yourself to make me feel guilty.”

  His tail thumps defiantly.

  I go to the answering machine, which blinks with a bright red number one. I push the button, and a robot lady voice tells me I have a message. It beeps and Natalie’s voice comes out of the box: “Hi Sidney, I got word back from X-Ray. They said they could set up a CAT scan for you tomorrow. Give me a call and we’ll make it happen. Remember, it’s nothing to worry about.”

  Zero sighs heavily. First the abandonment, now this.

  “It’s not that kind of cat,” I tell him.

  I open the fridge and grab some leftover chicken, toss him a chunk as a peace offering. He warily sniffs at it, as if I’ve just thrown him poison. But ultimately he can’t help himself and inhales the meat.

  “It’s really not what you think,” I assure him, and wonder what the hell it is exactly, in my head, that’s so messed up it needs to be scanned.

  chapter 15

  They keep telling me it’s almost over.

  I’m lying face-up on an ice-cold gurney, entombed inside a massive humming machine. An electric eye slowly spirals around my head, pausing for contemplation and an occasional blip or whir.

  “It’s almost over,” they say again, muted voices from outside the tomb. “Don’t move your head, just another minute.”

  The truth is, if I could buy tickets to this ride, I would. The only thing missing is the pink foam. I feel strangely calm here, with the electric eye blinking its meditative trance signal. I breathe in and out and the eye blinks in unison, and we come to an understanding, the eye and I. If it weren’t so damn cold, I could lie here all day.

  “Twenty seconds,” someone says.

  Good-bye electric eye, I think. It blinks back at me.

  After the test, I sit in my green gown and wait for Dr. Singh’s arrival. I study the black-framed diplomas on his wall: a bachelor’s degree, a master’s, an MD. Others describe specialties and boards, procedures and licensing. They’re all ornately written in unreadable calligraphy, but they look impressive. One is perched unusually high on the wall but I can’t read it. I’m about to stand on my chair to check it out, but Dr. Singh makes his entrance.

  He sketches mad notes on my chart, short, dark hieroglyphs that are illegible maybe even to him. He doesn’t look up. I sigh and drum my fingers on my knees. He mumbles some words to himself, flips a page back and forth, then looks up at me as if I’d asked him something. “You can get dressed. We’ll have someone call you.”

  “Any chance you know when the results will be in?” I ask.

  “We’ll let you know when you get weak, probably right before you die,” he says, and tucks his chart under his arm.

  “Okay,” I say, and hop off the ice-cold steel table onto the ice-cold tile floor. He leaves the room and I change back into my civilian attire. A giant calendar hangs on the door, decorated with illustrations of myriad microscopic diseases. I wonder how many of those four-inch-by-four-inch days it will be until I’m consumed by the little dots that clump together, or sunk into a coma by the long stringy things that interweave. The doctor walks by, and I wave him down. “Doctor?”

  He stops and looks up from another patient’s chart, this one full of jagged penmanship. “Yes?”

  “Could you say that again?”

  “About your results?”

  “Yeah.”

  “As long as a week, probably closer to a day?”

  “Thanks.”

  The doctor searches my eyes back and forth, back and forth, like the manic expressions of soap opera actors on Univision just before they shed tears. He talks softly then, but forcefully. “Let’s not worry about anything until we see what we’ve got, okay? It might be nothing at all.” His face changes then, possibly into what he feels is a compassionate smile, but it comes off as slight dental discomfort. He looks back at his chart and continues his purposeful walk down the hall.

  I want to tell him that I’m sure it’s really nothing too, and that I’m not worried about it. I want to assure him that the wild lilac bush in my head randomly blooms because of something unrelated to the medical field, and that whoever has a chart with extra dots on the i’s is probably in more dire need of his help. But I keep my mouth shut.

  Outside the weather is gray and cold, much less pleasant than inside the giant humming machine. I walk to my car, and inside is the bag of postcards. I pick one at random. London Bridges, it says.
It’s as good as the rest of them, I think, and immediately know that a Wanderlust #15 will do the trick. I congratulate myself on selling one more vacation package. It’s time to cash in on my flex-time privileges, and make use of that employee discount. I’ll tell Steve I’m doing some guerrilla-style vacation research; he should be thrilled.

  chapter 16

  “You forgot all about me,” a voice cries.

  I sit up in bed. My alarm clock rests innocently on its night stand, quiet as can be, so the voice probably woke me again. It’s dawn, or near it, as evidenced by the slats of orange light penetrating the window blinds. I shade my eyes. I’ve got to get some curtains.

  “All of you forgot about me,” the voice says. It’s my mother, whimpering in an uncharacteristically desperate tone. A whine is more like it, but laden with true grief, real suffering. It’s coming from the wine bottle under the stairs. A whine from the wine.

  I get out of bed and make my way to the basement, down the carpeted stairs, following the voice. The lilacs that sometimes bloom in my head often accompany her voice, and I guess that makes sense, given how much she loved those flowers, although I’d never tell that to Dr. Singh or Natalie. And while the scent can be disconcerting, her voice is less of a threat, due to its predictability and sheer repetition.

  “How could you all forget me?” she asks.

  “Nobody forgot about you,” I say. “We could never forget you.”

  Her voice changes to a finger-shaking tone. “I don’t remember telling anyone that this was okay with me,” she says, “but people do what they want.”

  I believe it’s better not to respond, so I keep quiet and listen. I’m concerned about committing too much energy arguing with alcoholic beverages.

  The bottle is a ’67 Bordeaux, plainly labeled with blue print on white paper. My mother’s spirit is trapped inside. I know this because I moved the bottle from the bottom rung of my wine rack to another location entirely—under the staircase and behind the box of green army blankets. The voice followed. I heard her muffled crying a second time and was hoping it might be something more acceptable, like a lost kitten or stray squirrel baby, but it was Mom, cooing and whining under the stairs, alone in the dark. I guess she stuck close to this particular bottle because she and my father had kept it as an anniversary gift, never really intending to open it.

  I like to think her soul lives inside the bottle, like a genie who might get drunk on occasion, and this would explain her crying spells in the afterlife. She was never much of a complainer. But I wonder if all this afterlife drama is making up for her lackluster departure. She died so suddenly and silently, without warning or fanfare. No last words, no calling out to Jesus.

  When I was in middle school, one of the kids in my class died by drowning. I always thought this was a dull way to go, silent and futile, probably with nobody nearby for rescue, hence the drowning part. It sounded so lonely and anticlimactic. So I made a list of exciting ways to die. It went like this:

  Avalanche

  Massive Explosion

  Lightning Strike

  Plane Crash

  Gang Warfare / Hand-to-Hand Combat

  Shark Attack

  Roller-Coaster Malfunction

  Industrial Turbine Accident

  Spontaneous Combustion

  Death by Fear

  All of these involve lots of screaming and violence and terror, which seemed to be the best way to go at the time. But when Mom died, it was quick and quiet, like a lightbulb turned off. A flick of the switch. Personally, I would take the switch in a heartbeat now. But Mom was a mover. So maybe she’s getting out all her guilty pleasures now, and she’s going to cry and moan to me every morning at 6:15 a.m. until she gets it out of her cosmic system. I like the company, but it’s hard to explain to others.

  “She told me if we saw the sun set enough times,” I tell Zero, “we would eventually forget about her and she would disappear forever.”

  Zero sits, staring up at me, seeming to accept and understand.

  “She’s really worried about this, and she won’t be consoled,” I say. “You want some coffee?”

  Zero wags his tail. I pour us each a cup of black and sugar. He holds his nose over the coffee and drools through a smile. He’s clearly not worried about my ghost story.

  “You knew about her before I did, didn’t you?” I ask.

  Zero lifts his eyebrows, then flattens them out, a little embarrassed.

  “So why didn’t you tell me?”

  He laps up his coffee and sits back on his haunches.

  “Didn’t want to worry me, eh?” I nod. “Good ol’ Zero. Things are worse than they seem, though.”

  He’s not impressed with my dramatic statement. He walks in circles a few times and lies down, wrapping his tail around himself. He looks up at me with sad eyes and his whole body moves as he sighs.

  “I know worry doesn’t help anyone, and I also know that I shouldn’t be having conversations with you beyond asking you for a walk.”

  Zero’s tail betrays him with a sudden thumping.

  “Cut it out,” I say. “I’m going to have to go away for a little while, do some research. So that means a short stay at Sunnyland Kennel for you.”

  Zero’s tail stops; he promptly stands on all fours, his body stiff with this unfortunate and unexpected turn of events.

  “Unless you want to go to Europe.”

  I spread the postcards out before him, picture-side down so he can see all the messages from Zoe. He gazes at them for a few moments, looks up at me, then circles himself again to lay down by the fire, and stares into the flames.

  I read once that the reason dogs circle around before they lie down is to trample all the snakes in their grass bed so they can sleep in peace. Zero doesn’t look particularly peaceful. I decide to have Natalie take care of him while I’m gone and spare him the tortures of the Sunnyland Kennel.

  chapter 17

  I cup my hand over the phone and hope Nat can’t hear the wailing. But it’s too late, she’s already asking me what all the noise is about. It’s more difficult than you think to disguise the distinct rise-and-fall cry of an English police car.

  “Just watching the telly,” I say.

  “The telly?” she asks with a hard edge of sarcasm.

  Nothing gets by Natalie. It’s amazing how quickly I’ve assimilated into London culture, all the way down to their manner of speaking. I wonder if my own sister even knows it’s me. It’s possible she thinks this is an elaborate prank brought on by someone other than myself—a villain or criminal, a mastermind postal offender.

  “Sid?” she asks. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh I’m just calling to tell you I’m feeling much better. I mean, the smells stopped and all.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “Yeah.” I clap my hand over the phone again. The police car must be going through a roundabout because it’s headed back my way, bawling like a baby toward the hotel. Eeeh Aaah Eeeh Aaah. Natalie notices the gap in our conversation.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Oh, right. Yes. Brilliant.”

  “Uh-huh. And why are you using a phone card?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The phone card number. It came up on my caller ID.”

  I think about this. I can’t tell her I’m in the London Hyatt that processed Zoe’s first postcards because she will either not believe me or, worse, she will believe me, and as I’ve said before, she would have me committed in a heartbeat. It’s best to keep things simple.

  “Oh, the phone card thing,” I say breezily. “I just thought it might be cheaper to use one instead of paying all those long-distance bills.”

  “You live two miles away.”

  “Right.” So much for simplicity. “I’m actually in the UK on a secret mission to uncover a mail-fraud criminal, and I thought a phone card would be cheaper.”

  “Good one. I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better,” she says. �
��What’s up?”

  “Can you take care of Zero for a couple of days? I’m visiting some friends, and don’t want him to panic.”

  “Of course. Why didn’t you just bring him over? Zero loves it here.”

  The truth is, Zero can’t stand it at Natalie’s house. Her husband, Jake, spends most of his time on the Internet and they have a Siamese cat that sits on the most comfortable furniture and stares at Zero with savage contempt for hours on end. Zero was shocked to be victim to such drawn-out hostilities. He thought cats slept sixteen hours a day. Not this one.

  “If you could just stop by and make sure he has food and water, that’d be great. The key is inside the fake rock.”

  We wrap up our conversation and I stare out the tall windows of my hotel. The city of London allows itself to be gazed upon like a beautiful woman posing naked for a portrait: full of mystery, hungry for adulation, waiting for something magical to happen.

  chapter 18

  First, it’s the yelling. The man behind the double-thick glass walls shouts something at me, but I swear it’s not English. I am in London though, and what else would they be speaking here? I’m at a currency exchange booth, so isn’t he required to speak several languages? He yells again and then he starts the pointing. Yelling and pointing. He never looks at me, only down at the sliding glass tray. Next he talks loud and slow, like I’m a dumb foreigner, and I realize he is speaking English, but with a strong accent. The people behind me in line don’t verbally complain, but a few shuffle their feet and cough. The man opens the sliding tray again, takes my money, and exchanges it for bills and heavy coins, then waves me out of the way. I’m not sure what just happened, but I’m glad I have money. I’m also glad that Zoe didn’t send any postcards from Tokyo or Dubai or Rio because I would really be screwed in a place like that.