“I want to see you, too,” I said, “but I can’t get away right now. As soon as the election’s over—”
“I’m an old woman,” she told me crossly. “I may not be here after the election.”
I managed a laugh at that, but the laugh sounded hollow even in my own ears. The words had started a grim little movie unreeling in my head—a snippet of Gran’s cold body staggering to its feet, that somehow inhuman tomb light shining out from behind its eyes. I suppose most of us must have imagined something like that during those weeks, but it unnerved me all the same. It reminded me too much of the dreams. It felt like I was there again, gazing out into the faces of the implacable dead, that enormous clock banging out the hours.
“Robert—” Gran was saying, and I could hear the Demerol singing in her voice. “Are you there, Ro—”
And for no reason at all, I said:
“Did my parents have a clock, Gran?”
“A clock?”
“A grandfather clock.”
She was silent so long I thought maybe she had hung up.
“That was your uncle’s clock,” she said finally, her voice thick and distant.
“My uncle?”
“Don,” she said. “On your father’s side.”
“What happened to the clock?”
“Robert, I want you to come out he—”
“What happened to the clock, Gran?”
“Well, how would I know?” she said. “He couldn’t keep it, could he? I suppose he must have sold it.”
“What do you mean?”
But she didn’t answer.
I listened to the swell and fall of Demerol sleep for a moment, and then the voice of the case manager filled my ear. “She’s drifted off. If you want, I can call back later—”
I looked up as a shadow fell across me. Lewis stood in the doorway.
“No, that’s okay. I’ll call her in the morning.”
I hung up the phone and stared over the desk at him. He had a strange expression on his face.
“What?” I said.
“It’s Dana Maguire.”
“What about her?”
“They’ve found her.”
Eight hours later, I touched down at Logan under a cloudy midnight sky. We had hired a private security firm to find her, and one of their agents—an expressionless man with the build of an ex-athlete—met me at the gate.
“You hook up with the ad people all right?” I asked in the car, and from the way he answered, a monosyllabic “Fine,” you could tell what he thought of ad people.
“The crew’s in place?”
“They’re already rigging the lights.”
“How’d you find her?”
He glanced at me, streetlight shadow rippling across his face like water. “Dead people ain’t got much imagination. Soon’s we get the fresh ones in the ground, they’re out there digging.” He laughed humorlessly. “You’d think people’d stop burying ’em.”
“It’s the ritual, I guess.”
“Maybe.” He paused. Then: “Finding her, we put some guys on the cemeteries and kept our eyes open, that’s all.”
“Why’d it take so long?”
For a moment there was no sound in the car but the hum of tires on pavement and somewhere far away a siren railing against the night. The agent rolled down his window and spat emphatically into the slipstream. “City the size of Boston,” he said, “it has a lot of fucking cemeteries.”
The cemetery in question turned out to be everything I could have hoped for: remote and unkempt, with weathered gothic tombstones right off a Hollywood back lot. And wouldn’t it be comforting to think so, I remember thinking as I got out of the car—the ring of lights atop the hill nothing more than stage dressing, the old world as it had been always. But it wasn’t, of course, and the ragged figures digging at the grave weren’t actors, either. You could smell them for one, the stomach-wrenching stench of decay. A light rain had begun to fall, too, and it had the feel of a genuine Boston drizzle, cold and steady toward the bleak fag end of December.
Andy, the director, turned when he heard me.
“Any trouble?” I asked.
“No. They don’t care much what we’re about, long as we don’t interfere.”
“Good.”
Andy pointed. “There she is, see?”
“Yeah, I see her.”
She was on her knees in the grass, still wearing the dress she had been buried in. She dug with single-minded intensity, her arms caked with mud to the elbow, her face empty of anything remotely human. I stood and stared at her for a while, trying to decide what it was I was feeling.
“You all right?” Andy said.
“What?”
“I said, are you all right? For a second there, I thought you were crying.”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine. It’s the rain, that’s all.”
“Right.”
So I stood there and half-listened while he filled me in. He had several cameras running, multiple filters and angles, he was playing with the lights. He told me all this and none of it meant anything at all to me. None of it mattered as long as I got the footage I wanted. Until then, there was nothing for me here.
He must have been thinking along the same lines, for when I turned to go, he called after me: “Say, Rob, you needn’t have come out tonight, you know.”
I looked back at him, the rain pasting my hair against my forehead and running down into my eyes. I shivered. “I know,” I said. A moment later, I added: “I just—I wanted to see her somehow.”
But Andy had already turned away.
I still remember the campaign ad, my own private nightmare dressed up in cinematic finery. Andy and I cobbled it together on Christmas Eve, and just after midnight in a darkened Boston studio, we cracked open a bottle of bourbon in celebration and sat back to view the final cut. I felt a wave of nausea roll over me as the first images flickered across the monitor. Andy had shot the whole thing from distorted angles in grainy black and white, the film just a hair overexposed to sharpen the contrast. Sixty seconds of derivative expressionism, some media critic dismissed it, but even he conceded it possessed a certain power.
You’ve seen it, too, I suppose. Who hasn’t?
She will rise from her grave to haunt you, the opening title card reads, and the image holds in utter silence for maybe half a second too long. Long enough to be unsettling, Andy said, and you could imagine distracted viewers all across the heartland perking up, wondering what the hell was wrong with the sound.
The words dissolve into an image of hands, bloodless and pale, gouging at moist black earth. The hands of a child, battered and raw and smeared with the filth and corruption of the grave, digging, digging. There’s something remorseless about them, something relentless and terrible. They could dig forever, and they might, you can see that. And now, gradually, you awaken to sound: rain hissing from a midnight sky, the steady slither of wet earth underhand, and something else, a sound so perfectly lacking that it’s almost palpable in its absence, the unearthly silence of the dead. Freeze frame on a tableau out of Goya or Bosch: seven or eight zombies, half-dressed and rotting, laboring tirelessly over a fresh grave.
Fade to black, another slug line, another slow dissolve.
Dana Maguire came back.
The words melt into a long shot of the child, on her knees in the poison muck of the grave. Her dress clings to her thighs, and it’s a dress someone has taken some care about—white and lacy, the kind of dress you’d bury your little girl in if you had to do it—and it’s ruined. All the care and heartache that went into that dress, utterly ruined. Torn and fouled and sopping. Rain slicks her blonde hair black against her skull. And as the camera glides in upon Dana Maguire’s face, half-shadowed and filling three-quarters of the screen, you can glimpse the wound at her throat, flushed clean and pale. Dark roses of rot bloom along the high ridge of her cheekbone. Her eyes burn with the cold hard light of vistas you never want to see, not even in yo
ur dreams.
The image holds for an instant, a mute imperative, and then, mercifully, fades. Words appear and deliquesce on an ebon screen, three phrases, one by one:
The dead have spoken.
Now it’s your turn.
Burton for president.
Andy touched a button. A reel caught and reversed itself. The screen went gray, and I realized I had forgotten to breathe. I sipped at my drink.
The whiskey burned in my throat, it made me feel alive.
“What do you think?” Andy said.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think.”
Grinning, he ejected the tape and tossed it in my lap. “Merry Christmas,” he said, raising his glass. “To our savior born.”
And so we drank again.
Dizzy with exhaustion, I made my way back to my hotel and slept for eleven hours straight. I woke around noon on Christmas day. An hour later, I was on a plane.
By the time I caught up to the campaign in Richmond, Lewis was in a rage, pale and apoplectic, his acne scars flaring an angry red. “You seen these?” he said, thrusting a sheaf of papers at me.
I glanced through them quickly—more bad news from Angela Dey, Burton slipping further in the polls—and then I set them aside. “Maybe this’ll help,” I said, holding up the tape Andy and I had cobbled together.
We watched it together, all of us, Lewis and I, the entire senior staff, Burton himself, his face grim as the first images flickered across the screen. Even now, viewing it for the second time, I could feel its impact. And I could see it in the faces of the others as well—Dey’s jaw dropping open, Lewis snorting in disbelief. As the screen froze on the penultimate image—Dana Maguire’s decay-ravaged face—Libby Dixon turned away.
“There’s no way we can run that,” she said.
“We’ve got—” I began, but Dey interrupted me.
“She’s right, Rob. It’s not a campaign ad, it’s a horror movie.” She turned to Burton, drumming his fingers quietly at the head of the table. “You put this out there, you’ll drop ten points, I guarantee it.”
“Lewis?” Burton asked.
Lewis pondered the issue for a moment, rubbing his pitted cheek with one crooked finger. “I agree,” he said finally. “The ad’s a frigging nightmare. It’s not the answer.”
“The ad’s revolting,” Libby said. “The media will eat us alive for politicizing the kid’s death.”
“We ought to be politicizing it,” I said. “We ought to make it mean something.”
“You run that ad, Rob,” Lewis said, “every redneck in America is going to remember you threatening to take away their guns. You want to make that mistake twice?”
“Is it a mistake? For Christ’s sake, the dead are walking, Lewis. The old rules don’t apply.” I turned to Libby. “What’s Stoddard say, Libby, can you tell me that?”
“He hasn’t touched it since election day.”
“Exactly. He hasn’t said a thing, not about Dana Maguire, not about the dead people staggering around in the street. Ever since the FEC overturned the election, he’s been dodging the issue—”
“Because it’s political suicide,” Dey said. “He’s been dodging it because it’s the right thing to do.”
“Bullshit,” I snapped. “It’s not the right thing to do. It’s pandering and it’s cowardice—it’s moral cowardice—and if we do it we deserve to lose.”
You could hear everything in the long silence that ensued—cars passing in the street, a local staffer talking on the phone in the next room, the faint tattoo of Burton’s fingers against the formica table top. I studied him for a moment, and once again I had that sense of something else speaking through me, as though I were merely a conduit for another voice.
“What do you think about guns, sir?” I asked. “What do you really think?”
Burton didn’t answer for a long moment. When he did, I think he surprised everyone at the table. “The death rate by handguns in this country is triple that for every other industrialized nation on the planet,” he said. “They ought to be melted into pig iron, just like Rob said. Let’s go with the ad.”
“Sir—” Dey was standing.
“I’ve made up my mind,” Burton said. He picked up the sheaf of papers at his elbow and shuffled through them. “We’re down in Texas and California, we’re slipping in Michigan and Ohio.” He tossed the papers down in disgust. “Stoddard looks good in the south, Angela. What do we got to lose?”
We couldn’t have timed it better.
The new ad went into national saturation on December 30th, in the shadow of a strange new year. I was watching a bowl game in my hotel room the first time I saw it on the air. It chilled me all over, as though I’d never seen it before. Afterwards, the room filled with the sound of the ball game, but now it all seemed hollow. The cheers of the fans rang with a labored gaiety, the crack of pads had the crisp sharpness of movie sound effects. A barb of loneliness pierced me. I would have called someone, but I had no one to call.
Snapping off the television, I pocketed my key-card.
Downstairs, the same football game was playing, but at least there was liquor and a ring of conversation in the air. A few media folks from Burton’s entourage clustered around the bar, but I begged off when they invited me to join them. I sat at a table in the corner instead, staring blindly at the television and drinking scotch without any hurry, but without any effort to keep track either. I don’t know how much I drank that night, but I was a little unsteady when I stood to go.
I had a bad moment on the way back to my room. When the elevator doors slid apart, I found I couldn’t remember my room number. I couldn’t say for sure I had even chosen the right floor. The hotel corridor stretched away before me, bland and anonymous, a hallway of locked doors behind which only strangers slept. The endless weary grind of the campaign swept over me, and suddenly I was sick of it all—the long midnight flights and the hotel laundries, the relentless blur of cities and smiling faces. I wanted more than anything else in the world to go home. Not my cramped apartment in the District either.
Home. Wherever that was.
Independent of my brain, my fingers had found my key-card. I tugged it from my pocket and studied it grimly. I had chosen the right floor after all.
Still in my clothes, I collapsed across my bed and fell asleep. I don’t remember any dreams, but sometime in the long cold hour before dawn, the phone yanked me awake. “Turn on CNN,” Lewis said. I listened to him breathe as I fumbled for the remote and cycled through the channels.
I punched up the volume.
”—unsubstantiated reports out of China concerning newly awakened dead in remote regions of the Tibetan Plateau—”
I was awake now, fully awake. My head pounded. I had to work up some spit before I could speak.
“Anyone got anything solid?” I asked.
“I’m working with a guy in State for confirmation. So far we got nothing but rumor.”
“If it’s true—”
“If it’s true,” Lewis said, “you’re gonna look like a fucking genius.”
Our numbers were soft in the morning, but things were looking up by mid-afternoon. The Chinese weren’t talking and no one yet had footage of the Tibetan dead—but rumors were trickling in from around the globe. Unconfirmed reports from UN Peacekeepers in Kosovo told of women and children clawing their way free from previously unknown mass graves.
By New Year’s Day, rumors gave way to established fact. The television flickered with grainy images from Groznyy and Addis Ababa. The dead were arising in scattered locales around the world. And here at home, the polls were shifting. Burton’s crowds grew larger and more enthusiastic at every rally, and as our jet winged down through the night towards Pittsburgh, I watched Stoddard answering questions about the crisis on a satellite feed from C-SPAN. He looked gray and tired, his long face brimming with uncertainty. He was too late, we owned the issue now, and watching him, I could see he knew it, too. He was going throu
gh the motions, that’s all.
There was a celebratory hum in the air as the plane settled to the tarmac. Burton spoke for a few minutes at the airport, and then the Secret Service people tightened the bubble, moving us en masse toward the motorcade. Just before he ducked into the limo, Burton dismissed his entourage. His hand closed about my shoulder. “You’re with me,” he said.
He was silent as the limo slid away into the night, but as the downtown towers loomed up before us he turned to look at me. “I wanted to thank you,” he said.
“There’s no—”
He held up his hand. “I wouldn’t have had the courage to run that ad, not without you pushing me. I’ve wondered about that, you know. It was like you knew something, like you knew the story was getting ready to break again.”
I could sense the question behind his words—Did you know, Rob? Did you?—but I didn’t have any answers. Just that impression of a voice speaking through me from beyond, from somewhere else, and that didn’t make any sense, or none that I was able to share.
“When I first got started in this business,” Burton was saying, “there was a local pol back in Chicago, kind of a mentor. He told me once you could tell what kind of man you were dealing with by the people he chose to surround himself with. When I think about that, I feel good, Rob.” He sighed. “The world’s gone crazy, that’s for sure, but with people like you on our side, I think we’ll be all right. I just wanted to tell you that.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He nodded. I could feel him studying me as I gazed out the window, but suddenly I could find nothing to say. I just sat there and watched the city slide by, the past welling up inside me. Unpleasant truths lurked like rocks just beneath the visible surface. I could sense them somehow.
“You all right, Rob?”
“Just thinking,” I said. “Being in Pittsburgh, it brings back memories.”
“I thought you grew up in California.”
“I did. I was born here, though. I lived here until my parents died.”
The Living Dead Page 6