The Mortification of Fovea Munson

by Mary Winn Heider

  Like magic, the tiny bright surgical lights came on. Most of them were scattered like stars across the dark blue ceiling, but some of them were pointed above the gauze, where the impenetrable dark had been. They became spotlights, revealing four faces in the air, nothing but bright faces shining out of the darkness.

  The band had arrived.

  The crowd noise stopped instantaneously. An old lady near me hooted in approval.

  Then McMullen sang one solitary, lower-than-low note.

  Howe looked nervous, but managed a smile and sang his own note, a little bit higher than McMullen’s. Then Andy, and then Lake, each with his own smile and his own note, each higher than the last.

  If someone had pulled down the gauze, they would have seen Howe standing on the metal counter and then, next to him, three heads on shelves at the same height. But between the gauze and the lights, Lake had created a spectacular optical illusion.

  He made us see something that wasn’t there. It was positively holographic.

  I glanced over and saw Em, transfixed. If it had been anatomically possible to explode from happiness, I might have been a little worried for myself right then.

  The guys stopped singing and Lake beamed. “Ladies and Germs! We are the Four Heads, One Heart!” The crowd cheered, and he gave them a second before continuing. “And we would like to thank you for coming to our official album release party! Welcoooooome to the Cadaver Lounge!”

  Then Andy counted to four and they began.

  During the encore, I decided to take a break. The guys sounded great and everything was falling into place, but I was starting to feel the long night all the way to my bones. Even though Grandma Van had opened the alley door to pull in some air, the floral perfumes had stopped smelling so fresh and it was getting steamy in there. Plus, I was sweating under the thick foam of the kidney suit. I snuck out and walked down the Hall of Innards, the music fading a little behind me as I pushed through the blue door. The lobby was refreshingly empty, though I noticed that one of the chairs had somehow gotten turned over. Those mature people were out of control. And they sure did love their activities.

  I set the chair on its feet and, as I did, noticed a slightly crumpled piece of paper under it. Probably fell out of one of their purses or something. I grabbed it and was halfway to throwing it out when a few sentences caught my eye:

  …should liken my love to the flame of a candle! Probably a rose-scented candle. Or licorice. One of those, and then combine that heavy aroma with the heat of the flame like the flame of my passion, hot enough to singe the delicate hairs on your arm….

  I dropped the letter right where I was standing. Gross. Unless some mature person had the exact same ooky sense of romance, it was undoubtedly one of Inko’s love letters. The page must have fallen out of his giant bag when he showed me that fistful of notes he’d written. Yeech. I mean, I’d touched a lot of disgusting things in the last twenty-four hours, but that letter was in the top two.

  I made myself pick it up again and toss it in the trash, and as I did, I felt a huge sense of relief. Not so much about the letter as Inko himself. I was almost rid of him. Soon he wouldn’t be able to hurt my parents. And they wouldn’t have to know anything about it.

  I pushed the glass door out to the sidewalk, and the sound of the concert disappeared altogether, giving way to the relative quiet of the street. A few horns honked in the distance. I let the fresh air roll over me in waves. It was glorious out there. So glorious, in fact, that it took about five seconds for me to realize I wasn’t alone.

  Somebody was sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the building.

  No freaking way.

  Whitney.

  One time, maybe five years ago, on one of the rare occasions when my parents had a date night, Whitney babysat me. She came over in time for dinner, and as the two of us hovered over our grilled cheeses or our mac and cheeses or something with cheese that tasted great but smelled like plastic, we had the only real conversation the two of us have ever had.

  “So, I hear you’re going to be a doctor when you grow up?” she said.

  I choked on some plasticky cheese.

  “I don’t want to be a doctor either,” she said, twisting her eyebrow ring. “I keep taking those premed classes and failing them on purpose. And then I think I must be crazy and I sign up for another one, I mean, I set out to be a doctor, who wouldn’t want to be a doctor, right? But something inside me just doesn’t want to do it. I want to be famous. And you know, there just aren’t that many famous doctors. Don’t tell your folks, okay, because I still need that job, and I don’t want them to know, and are you still choking?”

  The conversation ended after that, because the cheese was for real stuck in my esophagus and Whitney had to drive me to the ER in her dope red convertible so the medical professionals could smack me on the back until the cheese came out.

  I don’t remember my parents going out again after that.

  The dope red convertible was parked with the top down, right behind one of the nursing home buses. The two front wheels had jumped the curb, so the car was halfway on the sidewalk.

  Whitney was home.

  “You’re back!” I shouted.

  She looked at me and burst into tears.

  What. Was. Happening.

  I ran inside to grab a tissue off the desk, and when I got back outside, she was crying even harder. She took the tissue and blew her nose while I sat down beside her.

  “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. Instead, her hands worked to fold the tissue into smaller and smaller squares, the whole time staring at her car.

  “Is—is your car okay?”

  “As okay as it can be. A vehicle pretty as that runs on hope, that’s what Dean used to say. Except I think it’s run straight out of hope,” she said, a fresh wave of tears coming. She could hardly make a complete sentence, she was crying so hard. “And you—you’re—dressed—like a liver—”

  “Um…a kidney,” I said, and then bit my tongue. Correcting her was probably a bad idea. “But liver is a really good guess. I mean, whoever saw one kidney walking around by itself? And are you really back from Florida? For good?”

  She took a couple of deeps breaths and halfway nodded, like maybe she wasn’t sure.

  “You can totally have your job back.”

  “Thanks,” she said quietly. “Was everything okay while I was gone?”

  I didn’t want to lie. But the truth was kind of overwhelmingly disaster-filled. “There may have been a small situation with that cremator Inko Fredrickson, but it’s totally under control now.”

  “What sort of situation?”

  “Well…he came by and freaked out just a little because he couldn’t talk to you, and there’s a misplaced specimen, and he found out about it, and made some threats.”

  Her eyes widened. “What sort of threats?”

  “Just like how he was going to get the lab shut down and get my parents thrown in jail. But now you’re here and everything’s fine again!”

  “Er—I don’t know about fine—”

  “And the guys are going to tell me where the missing specimen is, so you can just let Inko down easy and mention that the specimen isn’t lost after all.”

  “Yeah, about that…”

  “I know I only had your job for two days, but, wow, every single thing about it is either disgusting or creepy or crazy. It’s all yours.”

  She blew her nose again. “How bad is Inko freaking out?”

  “On a scale of one to ten? I’d say maybe a trillion. He challenged your new boyfriend to a DUEL. But now you can talk to him when he calls, and maybe that will calm him down. Oh—your phone.” I pulled my arm inside the kidney, grabbed it from my pocket, and handed it over. Whitney let the phone drop in her lap.

  “It’s not going to matter.”

  “What do you mean?” I tried to sound encouraging. “Just tell him, I don’t know. It’s not him, it’s you. And that we ha
ve recovered the missing specimen. And then he goes back to cremating people. And their pets.”

  She shook her head, looking kind of dazed. I wondered if she’d been in an accident. Hit her head when she jumped the curb or something.

  “I miss Dean,” she said. “He’d know what to do about all this.”

  “Did he stay in Miami?”

  “No…not…” She hiccuped. “Miami. Not exactly. Fovea, do you know, Dean was my soul mate. I didn’t believe in it before, but I do now.”

  “Huh.” I was lost.

  “We were going to be famous,” she said. “On that show Make My Voice. They tape in Miami. We were going to sing and be famous. We could win the jackpot and start a new life. Leave everything behind.”

  “But you didn’t win the jackpot?” It was a rhetorical question. She didn’t look like a person who had won a jackpot.

  “We didn’t even make it there. Dean. Um, Dean—” The tears came again, harder this time. “Dean went and died.”

  Holy crap.

  “Right in the panhandle of Florida, we didn’t even make it to the city of Miami. I buried him behind a gas station before I turned around and came back here. I couldn’t have won that thing on my own.”

  “You buried him?”

  She nodded, hiccuping.

  “By yourself?”

  She nodded.

  I didn’t even know what to say. “I’m sorry. Was it hard?”

  She nodded, still hiccuping. “Emotionally. Very”—hic—“hard.”

  “Did you even have a shovel?”

  She shook her head. “I just dug a little hole and put him in it. Took about five minutes.”

  “That seems awfully…efficient of you.”

  “It was a little hole.”

  Oh no.

  “Just about this big.” She held her hands up to her head.

  No no.

  There was a sour feeling in my stomach. “Please,” I said. “Tell me that Dean was not a head.”

  “Dean was a brilliant man. He was a magnificent singer. He had this way of looking at you so that your insides became one of those caves that they find that nobody ever knew existed before, but suddenly, it’s a real place, and it has like eleven new species and waterfalls and lakes and rainbows and trees that have grown for hundreds of years. He was hilarious and inspiring. I wrote him poetry. In the short time that we knew each other, he was my best friend.”

  “Whitney?”

  “Yeah. He was a head.”

  “You stole a head and took him to Florida? AND THEN BURIED HIM BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD?”

  “That sounds so much worse than it is.”

  “No. It sounds exactly as bad as it is.” I didn’t remember standing, but I was suddenly on my feet.

  “It was a perfect plan.”

  “It was not a perfect plan! It was a terrible plan! Half of your plan died it was so bad!”

  She gasped.

  My whole body was shaking now, and I felt like someone else was talking for me. I couldn’t stop. “You wanted to change your life, that’s fine. But when you pulled Dean into it, you messed everything up for my parents! He was their specimen before he was your boyfriend!”

  “I know, I know—”

  “You don’t know! I spent all this time trying to save my parents, thinking that there was just a misplaced head in some cabinet somewhere. But there never was a way to save them!” I was having a hard time breathing. “Inko knows the specimen is gone, and I mean, Dean is gone gone, and my parents are getting sent to jail! There is no way out!”

  “I didn’t mean to mess everything up. I can talk to Inko!”

  “And, what, date him again?”

  “Um…I think there was sort of a misunderstanding about that. We didn’t actually date. We met when he cremated my cat. And then we went out to coffee some, and he was comforting. Sort of. I remember him being comforting, but I was also really sad about my cat. I may have said some things I don’t remember about love and stuff. But I was talking about my cat.” She blinked her eyes hard, like they hurt. “I can do the duel thing.”

  I was so angry. At both of us. “You can’t duel him. He’s blackmailing you, which makes him a straight-up creep.”

  “But he’s unpredictable, Fo. What about the lab?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, resting my head in my hands. “I think it’s just too late. Too late for everything. Dean’s in a hole in Florida. The lab’s getting shut down the moment Inko rats. My parents will go to jail. I guess I’ll have to live with my grandmother in the Swan Song.”

  The enormity of it hit me. “You should go home.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “I know.”

  And I left her there, still sniffling, as I walked back into the building.

  Whitney’d taken Dean. And my parents had been handling the situation. Trying to figure out who could have misplaced him, tracking down anybody who’d been in the lab. That’s clearly what they’d been talking about yesterday when they went over to the hospitals. A missing head would have been a problem, but they’d have dealt with the fallout. I was the one who turned it into a catastrophe by letting unpredictable Inko Fredrickson eavesdrop on the phone call with my parents. Whitney had started the fire, but I was the one who poured gasoline all over it. Whatever happened now was my fault.

  “Attention, please! Your attention, please!” I stood on the counter opposite the stage, and from there, kicked the light switch so the spotlights on the guys went off. They stopped singing awkwardly, and the crowd turned around to see where the noise was coming from.

  “Attention! The concert is over! Please leave through the front exit! I repeat, the concert is over!”

  “Why?” yelled the heckling old man from before.

  I looked over their heads, straight across at Andy. “We are closed for business. Officially, permanently closed.”

  I left Howe and Em at the front door helping the last few old people as they trickled out. Howe was supposed to make sure Em didn’t wander back now that the lab was being undecorated.

  Then I walked back down the Hall of Innards. Grandma Van was in her chair again, pulling down the streamers strand by strand. Harsh white streaks of light broke through the hazy underwater.

  “Fovea!” cried Lake. “That was only our second encore! We had at least one more in us! Maybe more!”

  “Normally, I’d disagree with him on principle, but he’s right,” said McMullen.

  “It was quite…abrupt,” said Andy. “Is everything all right?”

  I looked at them for a moment, too upset to speak. They were still in their places, and flushed with the excitement of performing. I’d done so much to make this happen for them. And the whole time they knew.

  “Whitney came back,” I said. “Alone.”

  “Alone?” Andy asked. The question hung in the air.

  “Alone,” I said again.

  “But completely alone?” asked Lake.

  I crossed my arms. “When were you going to tell me? After I’d done everything you asked for? Or were you just going to lie?”

  “Fovea…” Andy let the thought hang.

  “No, tell me.” I didn’t even know I could be this angry. “What can you possibly say to make this better? Why would you do this to my parents? To me? You knew. My parents are going to go to jail.”

  “Dear girl—” Lake started to say.

  “You know what?” I said, cutting him off. “Don’t bother. Don’t try to smooth it over. I get it now. You were just stalling until I got through your stupid favor. You were all out for yourselves. You aren’t my friends, you never were, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Grandma Van, do you mind?” I carefully handed her the oven mitts. And I walked out of the lab, down the Hall of Innards, wondering if I’d feel this bad if my heart was in Detroit.

  I stepped into the cadaver lab lobby and saw Em and Howe locking up as the last of the Swan Song’s residents shuffled down the sidewalk outside.
A quick glance past them confirmed that Whitney’s red convertible was gone. Howe sank into one of the waiting chairs and I sat on the desk. Em leaned against the locked door with a giant grin on her face.

  “So, Eyeballs,” she said. “Tonight was awesome.”

  Fifteen minutes ago, I would have exploded into a thousand molecules of hope. Now, after everything, Em and our squashed-up-thrown-out friendship was only the second most important thing in my life. I missed her, down to my guts, but it was still a lousy trade-off for losing my parents. On the other hand, I was going to need a friend more than ever.

  And Em looked so happy. “Do you think she’ll let me work there for the summer?”

  “Wait,” I said. “What are we talking about?”

  “Nussbaum’s. You know, even though it’s a bar? Is that legal?” She saw the look on my face and stopped. “What did you think we were talking about?”

  “I thought—you had fun tonight. I mean, I know you didn’t want to be part of the club. I know I kidnapped you. Technically and, um, actually.”

  “Eyeballs,” she said.

  “I know! You were right. But—I thought you were having fun. You know. With me.”

  There was a way too long pause.

  She checked her watch.

  Oh.

  After our crazy night, nothing had changed for her.

  Over in the corner, Howe yawned. “Why do you keep calling her Eyeballs?”

  “That’s what her name means, nerd.”

  “Not technically.” He stretched out his long legs. He wasn’t scared of her. Huh.

  Wait a minute. “What?” I asked.

  “That’s more of a loose translation.” He turned to Em. “Who’s the nerd now?”

  “Still you,” said Em.

  “No, go back,” I said. “What are you talking about? Of course it means eyeballs.”

  “Not in the Latin,” he said.

  “Nerd,” whispered Em.

  “Guys, stop,” I said. My head was swimming. I was too tired for all this. “Em? This didn’t change anything? Between us?”