Dying for a Living (A Jesse Sullivan Novel)

by Shrum, Kory M.

  I am not even sure Julia, turning four years old, will agree with her mother anyway. She’s done a good job of keeping her distance from me, the red-nosed wonder, always backing away slowly when I offer her a balloon.

  My floppy shoes squish against the ground saturated from six days of September rain. I rock on my heels and watch Julia twirl in her party dress, a good twenty feet away. The dress is a pretty lavender color, complete with lacey ankle socks and Mary-Janes. She looks like any other privileged upper class kid, standing in a big beautiful yard, her thick brown locks pulled up into curling pigtails that graze the tops of her shoulders, and the lacy white collar of her dress. A white painted fence establishes the boundaries around the property and along the edge of the fence stands a few large saggy trees that have seen better, dryer days.

  The pool has recently been drained, a tarp stretching from one end to the other. And I can’t help but look at it and wonder if Julia will fall through, and crack her head open on that poured cement. Or perhaps the birthday candles will ignite and catch her hair on fire.

  Occupational hazard, I’m afraid. I spend lots of time pondering death.

  A little boy, maybe a year older than the birthday girl, tugs one of her curly pigtails. She stops twirling, squeals, and takes off chasing him. It is a shame the kid will die today being as cute as she is.

  Unless I can change it, of course, and that’s what Regina is paying me to do—without her husband Gerard’s knowledge, I might add. Given my real reason for being here, I am perfectly fine with this arrangement.

  Gerard doesn’t need to know about me at all. But what she said to keep him away from Julia’s birthday, I have no idea. Or maybe he’s just that dad, the kind who puts work first.

  Gerard Lovett, religious freak, would have never allowed me—especially me—to be his daughter’s death replacement agent. The Unified Church has a particular view on people like me. It doesn’t matter that I have the ability to sense death coming, the ability to see its sneaky blue fire creep up on a person and put the kabosh on all that. Taking help from a death replacement agent would be a sign that they didn’t have faith in their God. All high-ranking Church officials like Gerald Lovett have to demonstrate the solidity of their faith at all times. I often wonder if they’d refuse blood transfusions too, having faith that God would just add a few pints when he got a chance, or if it is really because I can come back after I die that I can’t be trusted.

  I turn at the sound of a sliding glass door and see Regina appear cake in hand. My personal assistant and best friend, Ally, follows close behind. She holds open the door for them both.

  “Time for cake!” Regina exclaims, cake in hand. The smile she’d given me when entering my office with Julia’s death report two months ago had been forced, practiced, the smile of a wife married to an important man. But her smile is softer now and Julia abandons the boy she’s been chasing. She runs to her mother with renewed laughter. My glance slides, focusing on something mundane—Regina’s clothes. They are some kind of modern business casual, classy and feminine. Her mousey hair is side swept and elegant, curling at the ends naturally. She is attractive, not gorgeous like Ally, but she knows how to do herself up, glossing up her plainness enough without screaming I am trying, okay?

  I notice all of this instead of looking at her and Julia together. Sometimes it hurts to look at mothers. Specifically, it hurts to look at mothers loving their daughters. Especially when my mother is dead and she wasn’t loving me—or what I’d become—before it happened.

  Ally leaves Regina’s trail, escaping the children gathering like snakes around the pied piper, and comes to stand beside me. She pulls her red A-line coat tighter against the chilly air icing our cheeks and gathers her straight blond hair in her hands, the color of honey butter. I’d have helped her free it from the collar, but my clown gear prevents such small movements. Her nose ring looks silver in the dull overcast sky, instead of sparkling like the tiny diamond that it is. Her brown eyes are equally muted from their usual vibrant amber to an unremarkable brown. Dull light aside, she seems radiant against all this lush, landscaped green, moist with rain. And the light flush in her otherwise pale cheeks suits her.

  “Are you cold?” she asks, nodding at my colorful polka dot jumper.

  The answer is yes. Cold air has collected in my thighs and stomach, where the fabric feels thinnest.

  “I’m wearing layers,” I insist. Ally can be quite the mother hen and I know myself well enough to admit I can’t be alert and babied at the same time.

  “Are we good?” she asks.

  Do I sense Julia’s death coming? No, not yet. “For now.”

  We watch Regina arrange the cake table, and launch the birthday song with exaggerated glee. It isn’t until I start singing that Ally nudges me.

  “Quit that,” she says.

  “What?” I play coy.

  “I hear what you’re saying,” she accuses. “You’re replacing birthday with deathday.”

  “It is her death day.”

  “You are so morbid,” she murmurs, but she is smiling. Happy Death Day, Little Julia. Happy Death Day to you.

  “What does morbid mean?” a kid asks. This kid is pudgy, as tall as he is round, and apparently uninterested in singing to the birthday girl. Also, his face is an unnatural green color from eating something made mostly of food color.

  “Weird,” Ally says. I am not sure if she is defining morbid or if she is as surprised by the ninja appearance of this kid as I am.

  “Clowns are weird,” the kid says, sucking on his sticky fingers.

  “You’re weird,” I say. Ally nudges me with an elbow, but it is unneeded. This kid is too young to recognize an insult or he is just impervious beneath all that fat.

  “I want a balloon,” he demands.

  I offer the big black trash bag to him, filled with animal balloons of every shape and color. When I took this job, I knew better than to improvise a skill I didn’t have. So voila—a big bag of premade balloon animals.

  “I want to see you make one,” the kid groans.

  “I want to see you leave,” I say and stick the bag in his face.

  Ally intervenes. “She can’t make them because she has a bad wrist.”

  “Really?” the kid asks. He warms to her the way everyone warms to Ally.

  I tell the kid, my cover story. “Yeah carpel tunnel from all that juggling, camel riding, and whatever the hell clowns do.”

  “You said a bad word.”

  “I’m going to call you a bad word if you don’t go away.” I jiggle the trash bag. “Take your damn balloon.”

  Ally is doing a decent job of keeping a straight face. She is also doing a great job of being pretty and convinces the little fatty to take a yellow “lion” and go get some cake. The words before it’s all gone seem to work.

  “You promised not to make the children cry,” Ally says. She is not kidding.

  “Sorry,” I grumble. “I’m in a piss poor mood today.”

  “It’s the first kid since Nessa.”

  And that is why Ally is my best friend. She knows what bothers me before I do. I let out a big exhale and the breathing hole in my red nose whistles, dramatizing my despair.

  Nessa.

  I’ve thought a lot about Nessa this past year, especially in the past month leading up to Julia’s replacement. It was this time last year that I’d failed to save her. Granted, I hadn’t been her death replacement agent, so technically my perfect record is still intact. But she had also just been a little girl and I had promised her mother I would save her from some bad people. And when you have this ability to save people, a perfect track record of doing so—when you fuck up—

  Yeah, I’m a sore loser.

  “Nessa Hildebrand. Our first casualty of war,” I whisper. An ache fills my chest and I look away from the kid.

  “Are we calling it war now?” she asks. Then she let her own breath out slow, weary.

  “Two sides. Good versus evil. Onl
y one can win. That’s war, isn’t it?”

  “Evil hasn’t made a move in over a year,” Ally whispers.

  “Oh they’ve made moves, I’m sure,” I say. “Just not that we can see.”

  “That’s a good sign though, right?”

  Oh Ally, my ever optimistic companion. Just because someone hasn’t stabbed her in a year, she thinks we are safe. But I know better. I can feel the bad guys slithering through the dark around us, large and scaly, looking for the right moment to spit acid venom in our eyes.

  “Sure. That’s a great sign,” I say. But she knows I don’t believe it even though I’m trying to not be sarcastic for once. Sometimes you say things to be kind to the people you love. It wouldn’t comfort her to hear We’re all going to fucking die, Ally. They came for us once and they’ll come again. Harder and harder until they win and God help us, I can’t imagine anything worse than what we’ve already been through, with your guts, blood, and shit all over my hands and—No.

  Some things you don’t say to people you love.

  Besides, the word war suggests a fighting chance. War means a prolonged battle where either side could come out on top. This isn’t war. This is a death sentence.

  Ally gives my hand a quick squeeze, bringing me back to the present moment, to a moment when I am just a clown at a little girl’s birthday party.

  “Go on,” she says. “Get what you came for.”

  I cast a last look at Regina, Julia, and the others, then hand Ally the balloon bag.

  “If they ask, I went to pee.”

  She gives a small salute and I slip away. I take my huge floppy shoes off by the backdoor and creep inside, careful to slide the door closed behind me.

  The kitchen welcomes me, a large island off to the left with granite counter tops. Above the counters are mahogany cabinets, connecting to a stainless steel fridge. The place looks like an ad in Better Homes, with only a few stray coats from guests and the occasional toy forgotten in a corner. Otherwise—pristine.

  Straight ahead is a living room with couches and a large TV. To the right, just past the kitchen table and breakfast nook, are the stairs. I take them two at a time and find the bathroom at the top, first door on the left. It is baby blue with white trim and reeks of some kind of potpourri—cinnamon or baked apple. My stomach tightens at the thought of pie as I turn on the light and shut the door, hoping to give the occupado impression should someone come looking for me. You know, don’t look for the clown elsewhere, she’s right here.

  Cover story secure, I creep down the hallway toward the closed door at the end. My ears strain for any people noises—voices, footsteps, maniacal whistling, for anyone who might wonder why a girl wearing a rainbow wig is creeping around up here.

  But I hear nothing. See no one.

  I place my hand on the door handle of Mr. Lovett’s office and find it locked. Then I do what I’ve been taught to do. I pull two pins from my thick rainbow wig and slip them into the lock.

  I push against the bearing—turn, and pop.

  It sounds easy, sure, but I’ve practiced a million times on a variety of locks purchased from hardware stores. A box of locks in the corner of a living room is a great conversation starter, by the way, and a lovely way to spend a Friday night alone.

  Gerard Lovett’s office is large. The desk lay in the middle of the room, directly opposite the door. The desk itself is immaculate, nothing like mine, which has piles of paperwork, junk mail, and bills that need attention. Behind his neat desk is a regal black chair, with a high back and wheels. The desk and chair itself are perched on top of a red and gold rug that matches the red and gold drapes on either side of the fireplace behind the desk. One side of the room has a massive bookcase. The spines look unbroken, unread and I’m not surprised to find of Mr. Lovett a man who likes the appearance of being erudite rather than actually being an avid reader. The remaining side of the room has a wooden chess set on a table between two more regal chairs, this time made of red leather.

  Before entering the room completely I look around—something else that has been drilled into my head. Look first.

  I’m glad I do. Because up above me, sitting on a ledge above the chess set, is a camera. It isn’t trained on the whole room, just the desk and the wall behind it, so if I am lucky, I am still invisible.

  I admit I am pretty freaked about the camera. I’m staring at its little black eye, trying to determine my next move, how to keep it from seeing me when—

  POP.

  I jump. My heart explodes in my chest, taking off like a rabbit fleeing a fox and I am about to run like hell back down the stairs and out the door. Then I hear a child crying. I swear, steady myself against the door frame, breath-caught in my throat like an expanding cotton ball and cross to the window to see what made the sound.

  A balloon, just a balloon. And a child, devastated, is crying against Ally’s leg while she searches the bag for one in a similar shape and color. She finds one and the girl brings her weeping to a raggedy shuddering stop. Her face brightens. The smile still tight, turns into a half-hearted, lopsided grin and the sobs become this kind of gleeful hiccup.

  “Gee-zus,” I mutter.

  When I turn back to the room I realize something is wrong. Not just that I’d run into the room without thinking and was surely caught on camera. But the room is suspiciously quiet. The hum and click of electronics that I’d noted upon first entering the room is gone. The clocks have stopped ticking. Latent electricity in lamp wires, phone outlets, an answering machine and internet modem have all stopped. The camera too, of course. Everything still, everything quiet—like a house during a power outage.

  “Shit.”

  This time last year, when my life started to get out of control, and homicidal maniacs tried to kill me and whatnot, I started to develop this new—habit. Not just my weird death-replacement thing, but something that could not be explained scientifically by my NRD—my Necronitic Regenerative Disorder, a neurological disorder that allows me to die but not stay dead.

  No, this is something else entirely.

  And it would seem I have some strange connection to electricity. It’s not like I can control it. What first started out last year, it was a shocky thing—a static sort of electricity that managed to blow light bulbs at the flip of a switch, or shock people quite a bit stronger than the usual I-shuffled-my-feet-and-now-zap.

  It has evolved.

  Now, I can do this surge thing. When I am startled, or scared, I send a shock out and BAM, electronics fail. So far I’ve only managed to blow up my own shit—bye-bye the possibility of morning toast or midnight margaritas. Now I am blowing up other people’s shit.

  I relax against the side of Mr. Lovett’s desk and steady my breath. Once I feel somewhat ‘together’, I pull out a small Phillips-head screwdriver from my rainbow wig and start to disable his computer.

  I hold my hand above Mr. Lovett’s computer listening for any kind of electric static crackling around my skin. When I feel none, I begin. I can’t fall apart over the fried electronics. I have to do what I came up here to do.

  Three of the six tiny screws are out of the computer, the ones that would release the hard drive from its little plastic nest, when it gets worse.

  A wave hits me. I rock back on my heels, topple, and hit the wall. My shoulder brushes something and I hear a crash. I quit moving, knowing that because I can’t see, I’ll only knock more shit over if I continue flailing blindly.

  “No, no, no,” I whine as if that will make Julia’s death turn on its heels and leave. Because that is what I’m feeling—her death.

  I work faster.

  First I reach out for the desk, find its edge and pull myself back to the computer. In my hurried panic, I start dropping the little screws on the office floor. They give little ping-ping noises as they bounce off the wood and roll away.

  I have the last screw loose, but not completely out, when my vision changes entirely.

  The world dissolves from its usual s
olid self into a shifting world of color. The only equivalent I can think of is heat sensory, like the way they show it on TV or in the movies where someone puts on special goggles and then the world turns into an orange-yellow-red blob. This isn’t exactly right, what I see in the moments before a death, because I see more color and nuances, but it is close enough that you get the idea.

  The problem with it happening now is two-fold. Problem one—I can’t see the last freaking screw anymore. I can’t clearly define anything, now that the world has reduced itself to something less substantial than an acid trip.

  Problem two, Julia Lovett is about to die and I’m not close enough to save her.

  I can feel her out there, moving around in the yard, feel the pull surrounding her, centering around her and drawing close. If she dies and I am not near her, she can’t be saved. Proximity is required for a death replacement.

  The only thing I can do now is force myself to focus. And even after my best effort, the colors are still there. I try to use my fingers to work the screw out by hand and loosen the hard drive, really hoping that it is the hard drive I’m removing. I’m not a computer expert. I only know how to do this because Brinkley, my ex-handler, showed me on an old garage sale computer making me practice until I practically wept for a break. This time I have to rely on my fingers, the feel of grooves against the tips just to figure out what I’m doing.

  Finally, it falls free of its case. Clutching the stolen hard drive in one hand, I rush back toward the stairs. I can’t afford to be casual. I can’t afford to take my time or even stop to turn off the bathroom light or open the door. In fact, I’m forced to crawl down the stairs the way a baby would, butt first so I don’t fall. I make slow progress, but I can’t save Julia’s life if I break my own neck before even getting to her. Somehow I manage to make it back to the sliding kitchen door and see Ally on the other side. Sure she is a blur of color like everything else, but I know Ally. I know what she looks like even in this form. Maybe it is because I’d saved her life once, or because she’s been on a bagillion replacements with me, or even because she is my best friend. I don’t know and I don’t care as I pry open the glass and croak her name.