Afterlife

by Paul Monette

  He still wasn’t sure what he wanted. Right now it seemed enough to be penetrating the secrets of his enemy. It wasn’t an act of terrorism happening here, nothing so direct. He didn’t need this to be public, didn’t care what statement it made. This was just between him and her.

  He opened the next door down the hall and entered. Right off, the smell reminded him of Marcus, though he couldn’t place it. Not enough of a smell to make him cry. Once again the light from the lampposts in the courtyard filtered through the Venetian blinds. It was some kind of central office, partitioned into several desk areas. Of course: Marcus’s office at school. A queer amalgam of ink and Xerox paper and the must of files.

  Idly Dell moved from desk to desk, not even taking care to stay away from the windows, so magic had his intrusion become. Luckily he was wearing black. The paperwork on the desks appeared to be financial, dull as any other business, money in and out. Dell stooped and set the gardenia down on one of the desks, as if it had finally become too heavy.

  Unconsciously he sniffed at one of the blossoms as he dug his hands into the luscious earth. He groped for the root ball, lifting it gently away from the pot. It came out easily, spraying dirt on the desk surface. Gently he set it down among the papers. No matter what chaos exploded in the next five minutes, the gardenia would remain inviolate, ready to be transplanted.

  He reached again into the clay pot, scraped some earth to the side, and hefted out the wide-mouthed gallon jar he had hidden under the bush. Carefully Dell screwed off the lid, releasing into the dry-ink office air a smell that was rank and horribly sweet at once. Trying not to splash it, he tilted the jar and poured the blackness onto one of the desks, messing the papers. As he moved to the next desk and poured some more, already the smell had taken over, awful as the drain at a slaughterhouse.

  A turkey farm, actually, out in Riverside. Dell had seen the advertisement in the Times—“Come out and pick your own bird for Thanksgiving!” He’d driven out that morning in his pickup and asked to buy some blood. The disconcerted farmer and his wife had never been asked that before. They tried to keep the whole experience free of blood. Their customers picked a feathered friend in the barnyard, and then later came back and picked it up, plucked and trussed and squeaky clean. They didn’t even want to think what a dark-skinned man might want with blood. But Dell got the farmer aside and gave him fifty, so he shrugged and emptied the blood drain in the barn, straining out the feathers.

  Now Dell had left a spoor of turkey blood on every surface around the room, ruining any work Mother’s staff planned to pick up tomorrow, plus three IBM Selectrics. Then he moved to the filing cabinets along the wall opposite the windows. He pulled out a drawer and poured the slick and clotting liquid over the neatly ordered files. He didn’t know what the files contained, but assumed they were part of Mother Evangeline’s master plan of hate.

  Already two-thirds of the gallon was gone, and he’d only completed one of the cabinets top to bottom. Now for the first time he doubted. With five more banks of files, he’d only made the smallest dent in the bureaucracy of hate, a single trunk line bombed as the engines roared to Dachau from every capital. Perhaps he should have poured the whole of it on the altar after all, like a terrible bodiless sacrifice, a gout of blood streaming from the cross. He stepped to the window and peered through the blinds. Only a few kids remained, still trying to play as their parents coaxed them toward the cars. Dell was seized by hopelessness, thinking about the four young men with the placards against this army of intolerance, a children’s crusade in a thousand churches.

  Dispiritedly he turned back to the room, moving past the filing cabinets. The far wall was dominated by a huge blowup photo of Mother Evangeline, standing in a field with her arms open, a sea of children gathered at her feet. This was the picture that usually accompanied the mailings of Eternal Light. It also appeared on a billboard on Route 10 to the high desert, where the church ran a retreat—eight hundred dollars for three nights in a tent on bread and water, to simulate the forty days and forty nights of Jesus.

  Dell approached the photo wall and climbed on a chair. Until now he’d been quite fastidious as he flung the blood around, making sure none spattered on his hands or his costume. He’d put a thirty-five-dollar deposit down at Western Costume, and he never threw money away. But now he had reached the stage of having nothing to lose, so he tipped the jar and poured blood in his cupped hand. He was standing eye to eye with Mother as he smeared the offal across her face, digging his fingernails into the paper, scoring her cheeks.

  The blood dripped through his fingers and sopped the black cuff of his costume. Again he took a handful and drooled it down her body in the picture. With a wet finger he began to write in the sky beside her head. D–E—dipping his finger in the mouth of the jar again—A–T–H. He meant that she was Death, but it felt good just to write on a wall, making the mark of his gang of one.

  Only then did he notice that the counter below the blowup picture was covered with computer equipment. Two terminals with screens, a laser printer—all alien territory to him. But even in the dim banded light he could see the vents on every piece, so he happily tipped his jar and funneled blood into the works. There was something peculiarly atavistic in the gesture, a deeper clash of alien magic than blood on any cross.

  As he finished the last of the jar, the final drips on the printer, it gave him the deepest satisfaction, acting like a gorilla. He was finished now, or at least his ammunition was. He set the jar down and was turning to go when he caught sight of the plastic unit at the end of the counter, like a miniature file cabinet. He felt a pang of defeat to think he’d overlooked something. He reached to wipe a bloody hand on it, then registered the printed sign along the top: MAILING LIST.

  He pulled open one of the drawers, full of computer disks. It was like an electric surge, not knowing where a thing would lead him till he got there. He turned and gripped the clay pot, poured out the last of the dirt, then began removing the disks in bunches. He worked with incredible swiftness. Finally the stakes were high enough that he feared getting caught in the act. There were four drawers, about twenty-five disks in each, and the clay pot was nearly full to the brim by the time he was finished. Though he knew next to nothing about the technology, he could feel the weight of the names he was stealing—ten thousand strong, a million.

  He skulked to the door and retraced his steps along the dark passage, the hero returning from hell with the devil’s own address book. He reached the double doors that led to the courtyard. One bloody hand on the knob, he pushed it open enough to peer out. The coast was clear, all the budding Hitler youth scattered to their homes, gnawing their candy. Dell capered out into the mist-shrouded night, bearing his vessel of names. The pickup truck was the only remaining vehicle in the parking lot. He stowed the clay pot among the shovels in the bed, then got in and peeled away.

  He was light-headed with merriment, perversely enjoying the caked feel of his bloodied hands. He knew he stunk like Death itself. As he ran yellow lights on Alvarado, he grinned to think what a cop would do if he got pulled over, a Frankenstein monster covered with blood who’d taken the holiday too literally. But the magic of the moment held. Having got away with the store, he was a full-fledged outlaw now, at least for tonight. It would take an entire posse to catch him, marshals and G-men and vigilantes.

  Traffic slowed as he came into Silverlake, low-riders out for an evening’s haunt. In the next lane was a BMW with a het couple inside. They had noticed the ghoul in the pickup, and they were waving at him with unconcealed delight. Dell rolled the window down, twisted his face in an exaggerated grimace, and waved back. His red-streaked hand was grisly. The woman in the BMW gave out with a mock shriek of horror. Dell blinked a red-rimmed eye and announced with lascivious glee, “It’s real.”

  When he reached the apartment complex and pulled into the garage, he wondered for a moment if he should have tossed the evidence, disposed it like a body in a dumpster. But it fel
t too good to heft it in his hand, bearing the urn up the back stairs to the garden court. Besides, somebody might want it for further mischief.

  He stowed the pot in the utility closet at the back of the kitchen. Then he stripped off mask, wig, and jumpsuit and stuffed them in the trash, fastidious as a hatchet murderer. Fuck the thirty-five dollars. He tramped to the bathroom and turned on the shower. As he dried off after, the only evidence of his ghoul status was a faint red rim in the hollows of his eyes, where the circles were already dark and tortured. He pulled on a robe from behind the door, a robe that used to belong to Marcus, and he was moving toward the phone beside the bed when the doorbell rang.

  It was only nine o’clock, the witching hour barely begun, but he knew it was Linda. He was always too proud or diffident to go across to her, and sometimes when he was on the sex line he didn’t answer, pretending not to be home, though of course she knew he was. But tonight he could think of nothing better than talking to his sister, even if he couldn’t tell her what he’d done.

  He shrugged into a pair of Jockey shorts under the robe and hurried out to the living room. As he opened the door, he was already talking. “I hope you saved me some supper,” he growled playfully, teasing her like a patriarch.

  She stood with a shy smile under the porch light, a blanket over her arm. Instinctively he reached out a hand, but just then she moved back a step. “Lorenzo, this is Emilia,” she said, drawing the other woman into the light.

  She was dressed like Linda in jeans and a Mickey Mouse shirt, but was shorter and rounder, with a brown moon face and spiky hair. “Hey,” said Emilia cheerfully, no shyness at all, “she never stop talkin’ about you.”

  He was flustered right from the start, ashamed to be so undressed. He bustled them in, sat them down on the sofa, insisted on getting a bottle of wine. As he fumbled with the cork in the kitchen, he could hear her talking to Linda, chattering really. He couldn’t make out the words, but the playful tone was clear, the bursts of laughter, so unlike the sober quietness of Dell and Linda. He tried not to feel resentful. He poured the wine into three jelly glasses, then dumped a bag of taco chips in a bowl and placed it on a tray with the wine. He was determined to make Linda proud.

  He strode into the living room and set the tray on the table, gallantly offering glasses to the women. Animatedly he told them about the carnival crowd in West Hollywood, the opulent drag and celebrity send-ups. Emilia roared. Linda reached for the bowl of chips and offered them to her friend, who grabbed a fistful.

  “This guy I do his house, he’s a big fat queen,” she said, plumping her own full breasts with cheeky nonchalance. “Every year he model his costume for me. This year he have a beaded gown, fit him real tight.” She made a slinky motion with her hips, then took a gulp of wine, making a smacking noise as she set the glass down. Dell winced at the broken cadence of her English. “He not a pretty girl,” Emilia clucked wryly.

  How was she good to Linda, that’s all he should care about. They had been seeing each other for weeks. She made Linda laugh, that much was obvious. They probably laughed in bed. No men ever laughed in bed anymore, he thought.

  Somehow he missed the transition, as Linda took the folded blanket from the arm of the sofa where she’d laid it. “We brought this to show you before we send it,” she said, modest again and not quite meeting his eyes. Even Emilia looked subdued now. Dell was puzzled, but he could see how excited his sister was as she moved to the dining-room table. He and Emilia followed. If Linda was happy, then nothing else mattered. As she began to unfold the blanket on the table, Emilia was beside him. She put an easy arm about his waist. So, he thought, they would be a family, and Linda would have somebody when he got sick and died.

  She undid the last fold and drew it out to its full width, holding the two corners where it flowed off the table. It was a flag, he thought at first, green on a yellow ground. Then he read the name sewn in red across the center—MARCUS FLINT—and below that the dates. The green figures were cutouts like Mayan glyphs, appliquéd around the name. Dell stared without any expression.

  “It’s for the big quilt,” said Linda breathlessly. “The one that was in Washington. Emilia did one for her husband too.”

  He could feel Emilia squeeze his waist, and he stepped away, bending to study the panel closely because he didn’t know who to look at or how he felt.

  “I a widow two years,” declared Emilia. “My husband, he get it from a needle.”

  There wasn’t any superiority in the disclosure, just the matter of fact. But Dell Espinoza got angry at infinitely smaller things. He felt a spurt of white rage at the slovenly stranger beside him, bearing her official heterosexual grief, but because he was in pain he turned it on his sister. “Haven’t you had enough yet?” he demanded in a seething whisper, watching Linda’s eyes flinch. “When are you gonna start to live your life, huh?”

  Emilia seemed to move back a couple of paces. In any case, she ceased to exist; now she was no longer family. “I’m sorry,” said Linda, her voice quavering, fighting to endure the punishment stoically, without tears. “It’s like a memorial, all of them together. We don’t have to be so alone.”

  Dell made a slashing motion with his hand, cutting the sentiment off. “He wasn’t your husband,” he trumpeted with savage contempt. His hand thumped his bare chest, a gorilla again. “He was my husband.”

  A wave of tears was in her eyes, but she would not let them spill. She still held the corners of the quilt panel. Carefully she folded it again, closing the window on memory. In the tense silence that followed, she tucked it as carefully, as ceremoniously as a flag off a coffin. When she was done she hugged it to her chest and would not meet his eyes. He was furious at her shame, her cowering submissiveness. It wasn’t what he meant at all.

  “I won’t send it,” she said quietly.

  He wanted to gather her into his arms. She didn’t know she was the only thing keeping him from the edge, the last thing of life that mattered. But he was stuck in his foolish pride like any of his moron brothers-in-law, ridiculed by the love he had gotten wrong between the two women. It almost made him feel cuckolded. “Send it,” he said, cold and blunt. “I don’t want it around here.”

  She nodded and stepped by him, and he didn’t reach out with an aching hand. Emilia, sober as a sentry by the door, fell into step with Linda as they headed outside. “Buenos nochas,” the plump woman said punctiliously, bowing to her host as she left.

  And now it was as if it hadn’t happened at all, his victory over the forces of darkness. The million names of his enemies frittered away in the closet. His mask was over, his brazen disguise evaporated like the wisp of an old nightmare. He stood dumbstruck in his borrowed robe, neither reveler nor spectator, and couldn’t even make himself plod to the phone for a little relief. The darkness was over the world, and he and Linda would never escape it. Half alive, they would wander the world like ghouls, locked in a death embrace, afraid to love anything else except each other.

  8

  Hey, wake up and smell the coffee, guys. I’m alive.” The sandy-haired boy hunkered on the upper bench, elbows on his knees, his rangy frame like that of a cowboy sitting astride a fence. “This group is a fuckin’ downer,” said Andy, caustic with contempt. “Sometimes I think you guys wanna die.”

  “Excuse us, Mary Sunshine,” said the thin gray man. “If your life’s such a dream, then why don’t you join a Tupperware group? We like a little reality here.”

  “I, not we,” cautioned Tim with an upraised finger.

  The planeload of refugees numbered about twelve tonight. Sometimes there were twenty-five or thirty, lined up body to body on the carpeted benches. But all the regulars were here. Charlene, philosophical and far too patient, knitting her cocoa hands quietly in her lap. Emmett from Tallahassee, who lost his heart twice in October, unrequited, and stood determined to be in love by Christmas. The bearded uncle, Fred, racked with certainty that his mom would be putting the star on the tree this ye
ar for the last time.

  But please, they had Thanksgiving to get through first. November 11, and already the holidays yawned before them like a primal swamp, full of the bones of mastodons and the bodies of lost explorers. Nobody in the group had informed his blood family about his antibody status, except for the thin gray man, whose people had basically told him to make a reservation for one with a TV dinner. Several members of the group were planning to make the annual pilgrimage to home and hearth, and dread was thick. Not that they didn’t feel it every year, but now the stakes were dizzily raised by what could not be said.

  “It’s bad enough they ask if I’m seeing someone,” said Marina, looking lost tonight in her big Italian sweater. “They knew Jim died, but they don’t know how. They keep waiting for me to get over it. My sisters’ll flaunt their kids, and I’ll want to die.”

  “Uh-uh—don’t use the ‘D’ word,” Mark piped in, and a ripple of black laughter went around the little room.

  “Sorry,” said Marina, wincing. “But how do I sit there smiling and passing the gravy, pretending I’m dating, when all I want to do is crawl in my mother’s bed and cry?”

  No answer. The gay men looked at the floor and the ceiling, unable to imagine such a wish. Tim the facilitator licked his lips delicately and offered: “So maybe you should tell them?”

  “And ruin Thanksgiving?” retorted Marina, bitter and comic at once. “You think they’ll care? We’re talking Chula Vista. My sisters’d have their kids out of there in five minutes. And Mother would spray me with Lysol.”