American Dead

by PW Cooper

  “Hey man,” the guy on the couch started to rise, but seemed unwilling to fully commit, “why don't you watch your mouth, eh?” He settled for shifting to the edge of his seat and setting his mouth into a stern line.

  Jeffrey just rolled his eyes and took another swallow of beer before tumbling roughly back into his seat.

  Andrew and Trevor stood on the edge of the conversation, their bag of glass jangling.

  “Jesus Christ, Burke,” Molly gave Jeffrey a withering glare, “you're fucking wasted. You've been drinking since we got here like it's goddamn oxygen. Is this why they kicked you out?”

  Jeffrey narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “What the hell does that mean? Kicked me out where?”

  “School, Jeff, what else would I be talking about! It's not like San Diego gets out two months earlier than everybody else. What did you think, we wouldn't notice?”

  “Well you didn't notice the fucking corpse in your own damn backyard, did you?” he snarled. “And they didn't fucking kick me out. I left.”

  “Yeah? Well don't let us stop you doing it again. Actually, you know what? I think I'll leave.” Molly reached down and grabbed hold of Todd's hand. She yanked him up off the couch and dragged him towards the door, spitting an icy goodbye out of the corner of her mouth as she stalked past Andrew and Trevor.

  Jeffrey watched her go, his expression caught somewhere between regret and satisfaction. The door slammed behind her, and he slumped back down onto the couch.

  “What the hell was that, Jeff?” Andrew shook the glass in the bag.

  “She was being a bitch and you know it.” His face was sullen and stony.

  “Maybe she was right about you drinking too much, though,” Trevor added, bending down to retrieve a bit of glass.

  Jeffrey turned his bilious gaze on Trevor. “Maybe you should shut your fucking mouth, faggot.”

  Gena sunk deeper into the couch, wishing very fervently that she could turn invisible. The irony, of course, was that nobody seemed to be aware of her presence. She started to cry. None of the guys noticed, of course. Or, if they had then they were too busy with their own feelings to care. She wiped her eyes dry, sniffling.

  She wanted very much to go home. It was far too late now though, she knew that. She couldn't go back, she had to go onward. She had graduated.

  Accelerating Entropy

  It was raining. Nathan could hear the wind hissing outside. It was going to be a cold year.

  Two weeks had passed since they brought Michael up out of the gorge. Everything had changed. Nobody spoke beyond terse pleasantries, and everything seemed to have taken on an air of foreboding significance. The bar across the road was full almost every night. Around closing time he got up and looked out through the blinds to see dark inebriated shapes slouching like zombies towards their trailers. Some of them hurled their last bottles into the prison-like ring of trees which surrounded the park. The shattering glass cracked in the night like the breaking of stars.

  His family hadn't escaped. Gena was often sullen, always alone. She didn't have friends over anymore, hardly even left her room. He didn't know if the change was the usual advance of adolescence, or something different. Jessica had become unpredictable, her moods shifting without warning. You could see it around the eyes, one moment blazing with directionless fury, the next as lifeless as a doll's. She talked about Michael a lot, recounting little memories brought on seemingly at random. Times she'd saw him, times they'd spoken, those little quirks of his she had noticed. She shared these remembrances, it seemed, whenever they occurred to her.

  As for Nathan, he felt sometimes that he alone remained unchanged. It was like those terrible days after the attack on the World Trade Center all over again.

  A lightbulb flickered above his head, humming as though in a forgotten electric language. He kept expecting the bulb to burn out, perhaps flare up for a brief moment before dying. Stubbornly, it endured, one strobe-light heartbeat to the next. Nathan removed the screws which held up the light fixture, working his way one by one around the bowl's foil throat. The glass was warm on his fingertips, almost hot.

  The cover was full of dead insects, flies and spiders and ladybugs and other less-familiar species, all laying tangled together with their thin legs curled upward and inward. The shells of the beetles had lost their luster long ago, colorful red faded to a dull brown. There was a large mosquito-like creature with lacy wings and legs like long stiff threads. The dead insects shuffling wistfully about the bowl as he carried it to the kitchen garbage. Where could they all have come from?

  Ever since he was a child, Nathan had been terrified of finding rats in the walls. There had been cockroaches in his family's apartment when he was a boy. He remembered pouring dozens of the squirming thing out of a box of breakfast cereal one morning. From that genesis, fear took hold in the furtive darkness of his imagination, and grew.

  He shook the corpses out into the porous garbage. They vanished beneath crumpled papers and moldy scraps of food. He rinsed the bowl in the sink, soapy fingers slipping over the dusty concave surface. The naked light flickered behind him, still spitting begrudged light. Rain lashed against the window. Outside, the gray-green world was turning to silver.

  Jessica and Gena were curled limply before the television in the next room, bathed in streams of colored light. They stared together at the screen, at a man in a suit and a woman in a tight skirt and surgical mask standing over a body set up on a sterile lab table. The characters traded innuendo-laden quips and flirtatious looks as the woman pushed her bone-saw into decaying flesh. The woman reached a gloved hand into the gaping cavity she'd opened in the corpse's chest.

  “This isn't right,” she said, brow furrowed.

  “What's not right?” replied the man, leaning anxiously forward and lifting his tie to keep it from dragging over the mortified flesh.

  She said: “There's something missing.”

  Nathan went back into the hallway. The new bulb glowed when he put it on, shining hot as he lifted the newly cleaned glass back over it, and fastened it in place.

  * * *

  “Jessie?” Nathan stared at the low ceiling above, straining in the dark to make out the spiderweb pattern of cracks running through the off-white paint. The rain had stopped, leaving a damp chill in its place.

  She shifted beside him, her every motion tugging and dragging at the bedspread. “Yeah?”

  “Do you think I'll ever do anything... great?”

  “What does that mean?” she growled irritably into the pillow.

  Nathan's eyes were wide open. A tingling energy coursed through him. Fear, perhaps. “Like a book. I mean, Wreckage was... Well, some people thought it was good. Am I ever going to be that good again? Or was it a once in a lifetime type thing? Once it's gone it's gone for good?”

  Jessie groaned. “Some of us have to work in the morning, Nate.”

  “Sorry, sorry.”

  “We'll talk later, okay?"

  And so he lay there, listening for what seemed hours to the rhythmic sounds of her breathing. Ideas burned in his head, searing, white hot with potency and yet never fully cohered. Just after four o'clock he threw back the covers and slipped quietly from the bedroom. He took his battered old laptop computer to the other side of the trailer, settling in on the tattered couch. He sat there, bathed in cold blue moonlight as he waited for his computer to come to life. The book was standing open on the self across the room, where it had always stood. The Wreckage, by Nathan Harrison, a name no longer his own. He could barely stand to look at the thing. The pages were beginning to yellow with age.

  In retrospect, the book hadn't really been that big a deal. At the time, though, it was probably the most amazing thing that had ever happened to him. Validation, at last. For years he had been too embarrassed to tell anybody that he wanted to be a writer. “A writer?” he imagined them all saying, “you?” He had lived in fear that the world was going to punish him for his arrogance. The book had been proof, proof th
at he could do it, proof that it wasn't a pipe-dream, it was tangible.

  He turned back to the screen, and his hands fell to the keys.

  He wrote for hours. Deep into the morning, after Jessica had awoken and gone, he was still writing. He wrote about himself, about his marriage, about the vermin-infested Syracuse apartment where he'd grown up, there on the banks of the Erie Canal. He wrote about The Wreckage, a book he'd written just out of college, nearly twenty years ago now.

  He wrote about walking into a bookstore and finding blood dripping from the spines of the novels there. Row after row of detective stories, each of them four hundred pages wrapped around a human life created for the single purpose of being destroyed. The simplest sort of logic to it, an easy catharsis when the curtain was pulled back and the investigator deconstructed the murder into its component parts: motive, means, opportunity, execution. Drag the killer off the stage, watch the prose world right itself. Watch the book write itself, again and again and again, and America never tiring of the experience.

  He wrote that true art was an aberration in the texture of American mythology. The real artistic legacy of the nation was in the refinement of death. After all, he wrote, our greatest generation dropped the atomic bomb, our greatest artists churned out endless reconfigurations of Cain and Abel for the hungry masses. We have embraced destruction, he wrote, we have absorbed it into our very soul. Death animates American culture.

  He wrote about the first time he saw a dead body.

  1975. He was twelve years old. His brother William fifteen and his sister Katrina nine. They still lived in Syracuse then. His father still worked at the steel mill, still came home every day smelling of smoke and decay. His mother worked at a bakery just down the street from the house. Sometimes they let her bring home the stale bread. Other days, there was no bread, and they were hungry.

  It was the year that William stopped going to church with the rest of them, first expressed his independence. Dad fought him on it for the first few weeks, but William was stubborn. Eventually, they stopped fighting, and he stopped going. The rest of the family would drive away together and Nathan would look back and see his brother watching from the apartment window. He never dared to ask William what happened while they were gone.

  He saw the body on a Friday in March. He knew that it was Friday because Friday was the day they got rid of the old bread at the bakery. He remembered the look on his mother's face when she saw it, remembered her dropping the stale bread at the door. He remembered walking across the room, dizzy with confusion. He remembered picking up a loaf of hard French bread and sitting there in the open doorway, holding it, knowing in some primitive corner of his mind that he must protect it from the rats that lived in the walls.

  William had always liked to choke people. From a very young age, perhaps even from the first sparking of his forming consciousness, William had been inclined towards sadism. Nathan was his first and primary target. The first time it happened, their mother found William standing over Nathan's crib, wrapping his hands gently around his infant brother's throat. He was only four years old at the time. Their parents wrote it off as youthful foolishness, just as they wrote off the next ten years of bruised throats and black eyes.

  It wasn't that William was a violent person. It was just that, sometimes, he changed. Sometimes he shut out the world, shrank without warning into a blind and miserable rage. He worked very hard to hide these rages from their parents. Before it happened, Nathan and Katrina were the only ones in the world who had ever witnessed that part of William. In the years that followed, he regretted that he'd never done anything, never told anybody. Maybe if he had, things would have turned out differently.

  Nathan remembered everything. The weight of the heat, that unusual heat that drove the cockroaches out into the open. William had drawn all the blinds and closed all the windows and shut off all the lights. The three of them sat at the kitchen table, listening to the crawling all around them and feeling the sweat run down their faces. Katrina and Nathan knew better than to try and argue with William. They sat quietly together, playing checkers and trying not to notice the scurrying shapes in the corners of the room. William read a book by Robert Lewis Stevenson, a library book which was, afterward, never located.

  And then Katrina and Nathan began to argue. There were so many things which Nathan remembered, even all these decades later, with absolute clarity: the look on his mother's face, the sound his sister made when William wrapped his hands around her throat, what he had eaten for lunch at school that afternoon. He could even remember the smell of the cardboard checkers box when they opened it. But he could not remember what he and his sister were fighting about that day.

  William told them to shut up, but they barely heard him. He said it again. Then he screamed at them to shut their fucking mouths. It was the first time Nathan had ever heard that word, fucking, and it frightened him, the cruel way it tore from William's lips. It only made Katrina more indignant, and she turned her high young voice on them both.

  William threw his book on the floor. Pages folded awkwardly, spine bent open. Before either of them knew what had happened, he was standing behind Katrina's chair, wrapping his thick fingers around her neck. His face twisted and red with fury, her face twisted and red with fear.

  Nathan just watched.

  He stared for a very long time, frozen with terror. A cockroach crawled up his pant leg. At some point he called the police, said nothing. He had no memory of picking up the phone. They arrived just after his mother came home.

  After that day, everything changed. Katrina couldn't be resuscitated, though they tried for what seemed hours before giving up. William was taken away. Father lost the twinkle in his eye. Mother never spoke to Nathan again, save when she had no other choice. Where had they taken William? Nathan never knew, never asked. What if he was still out there today? Waiting some where in the outer dark.

  Everything changed. Everybody around him changed. Just like they changed when the planes hit the towers. Just like they changed when Michael died. Yet through it all Nathan remained the same. Watching fear kill empires, feeling nothing, sitting rooted in place while parasites clawed up his shin.

  * * *

  There was a service for Michael later that week. Everybody in the park was invited, though only a handful came. Most, it seemed, were uncomfortable with the idea of setting foot inside the house. It was marked by the dead, grim as an old fairytale castle.

  It was dark there when the Rileys arrived. The empty foyer seethed with dusky second-hand illumination. An assortment of damp coats hung in the front closet like bulky hides put up to cure. There were pictures of Michael just inside the doorway. Michael at age six, wearing a bow-tie in the photo center at the mall. Michael at age nine, wearing a baggy little league uniform and resting a baseball bat against his shoulder. Michael at age seventeen, dressed in a glossy tuxedo and a mortician's smile, arm around his equally ill-at-ease prom date. The pictures seemed to have been hung quite recently.

  Gena touched his arm. “Have you ever been in here before, Dad?” She looked concerned, her brown eyes open wide under long lashes, her small mouth set in a tight and worried line.

  He shook his head.

  She held herself, “Feels weird.” She kept her coat on.

  Nathan wondered if she had ever been inside a real house. She must have, of course, but he couldn't remember. He felt a sinking sense of parental dread. Had he made a mistake? Had he ruined her somehow? “Never mind,” he said, “we won't stay long.”

  Gena nodded. She followed him reluctantly out of the foyer.

  The Conner's house was eerily sparse. It had the air of a house which had lost something. The walls were bare. Houses turned empty without children in them. He put his arm instinctively around his daughter. She usually would have shrugged him off, but this time she offered no resistance. They followed Jessica into the large room where the others were gathered for the service.

  Nathan saw Kim Burke sta
nding by the refreshments table, by the arrangement of store-bought chocolate cookies spread into a flower-shape on a glass plate, the pale red punch in a silver bowl next to a stack of Dixie cups. Her boys were running wild; her little girl sat in a wicker chair beside the door munching on a cookie. She looked up at the Rileys when they entered, her eyes round and her mouth full. He saw Stephanie Mae Burgess talking quietly on her cell phone in the hallway. He saw her husband Joel speaking with the painter Richard Ewan, the two men standing beneath a framed photo of gray fog rolling across one of the Finger Lakes towards a dull morning shore. He saw Taylor Lesher and Roberta Perez sitting in the corner of the room, as far as possible from the general crowd. The two women were holding hands and eying the congregation nervously.

  “I don't see the Conners.” Jessica stood up on the tips of her toes, peering out across the crowd. “They are going to be here, right?”

  Nathan shrugged. “I would think so.”

  “Jesus, look at that!” she hissed, eying something at the far end of the room.

  Nathan looked. There was an empty coffin there, standing open and blackly inviting, dark mahogany wood polished to an obscene shine. He could see the room dimly reflected in the varnished surface, the people there looking as though they were deep under water. He felt a sort of magnetic attraction to the yawning box, an automatic desire to crawl inside and look out from it. He thought of the pictures of Michael, and imagined all those faces staring dead-eyed back at him.

  “Kind of ghoulish.” he said.

  “Kind of?” Jessica scoffed.

  They waited for the Conners, waited until Nathan lost track of the time. He stared at the glossy dark wood of the coffin, hypnotized almost by the shifting images reflected in that smooth surface. The people became restless. Jessica began to click her tongue quietly against her teeth and there moved through the room a low grumble of sublimated impatience. A few people left, slipping quietly out without having ever seen their hosts.

  Eventually, Jessica made her way over to Roberta and Taylor. “Are you guys doing okay?” she asked, smiling hungrily, “I haven't seen you in months.”