The whore.
She orders a slice of pizza with pineapple and we sit in silence, looking everywhere except at each other, until her lunch shows up.
Hydrogen, helium...
“So,” she says, through a mouthful of pale slick cheese, “tell me what’s going on with Exley & Sons.” The sight of the food churning in her perfect mouth, a wet gummy lump, turns my stomach. I look away. “You think of anything to make yourself millions yet?” She laughs. A particle of cheese or sauce or something flies onto my sleeve.
Yeah, that’s it. Laugh. A slow burn pumps from my heart to my trembling extremities.
...lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen...
“Um...,” I sigh. “Business, yes... I have a few ideas, I suppose.”
She has the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. Matte black lipstick has a tendency to make one’s teeth an ugly yellow, but not Scarlet’s. Her teeth are whiter than any I’d ever seen. I wonder what kind of toothpaste she uses, which dentist she sees.
I want to know what it might feel like to slam those glowing teeth right out of her fucking head with a rusty pipe.
“Oh, my God. Do I have something in my teeth?” she asks, staring at me with wide stupid pale blue eyes. She closes her lips and runs her tongue around behind them, holding a hand in front of her mouth.
...oxygen, fluorine, neon...
“What? Oh, no,” I say. “I was just noticing how... um, white your teeth are. Sorry.” I study the bricks beneath the table. Oh, how to interact with women. If only Four could teach me that bit of magic. He always has girls flocking around him. He is slovenly, ill-mannered, from what the Internet says, a ‘geek,’ and for some reason, irresistible to women. Such a cruel trick of fate, the DNA lottery.
I’m sorry for your loss, as we say in the business.
“Oh, yeah, I’m just lucky that way, I guess. I’ve never even been to the dentist. Huh, I can’t believe I never told you that.” She examines the remainder of her pizza. “But, I mean, like, why go if nothing’s bothering you, right? It’s all a big fucking scam, the yearly exams and all that. It’s some kind of, like, big government conspiracy— you know, getting people to create more personal records and shit so they can, like, find you if you ever kill anyone.”
Scarlet is just a hair paranoid. Or stupid. Everything is a ‘scam.’ She loves conspiracy theories and other such idiocy. It does work well with her ghost tour business. But, creating spooky drama out of something as innocuous as getting your teeth cleaned? Outrageous.
What you really need to stay away from is braces. Now that is something worth worrying about. Wearing that much metal on your teeth, you’re like a radio station. Every one of your thoughts goes out to anything with an antenna— cars, houses, TV stations, cell towers, cell phones.
“Anyway,” she says, “tell me your big get rich quick ideas.” She’s considering going out with me. I can tell by the rise in her voice, her less guarded cobalt eyes.
I sigh, replaying my best friend’s reaction to my mildest business idea in the theater of my head. Of course, over the past two years, we— Four, Scarlet, and I— joked around a fair amount regarding the ghoulishness of our respective businesses, however, I am unsure as to how she will react to my new twist on postmortem photography. She is, after all, a PETA supporter. If she does not approve of testing lipstick on bunnies, what will she think of me playing with deceased humans? She isn’t a vegan, though, so maybe it would be okay to tell her.
Besides, what have I got to lose? Only a very remote chance exists of her agreeing to a date.
“I am going to specialize in multi-media presentations,” I say, watching a bird peck on a nearby bench.
“Like, what, videotaping services or something?” She leans forward, pushing her paper plate to the side, peering up into my face, like she’s my friend or something. I have to look. It would be rude not to.
She is close enough for me to kiss.
Or bite her lips off.
With a trembling hand, I brush that lock of pink hair out of her eyes. It is so soft. I wonder what it smells like. Lilac? Lavender? Head & Shoulders? Smoke? Sweat?
She recoils into her chair looking violated, as though I invaded her personal space and molested her. She doesn’t have boundary issues like I do, the fraud. Her retreat is just another manifestation of her deflecting my awkward semi-romantic advances, of course. Her loss. I will soon have my own successful business while she’s living in some underpass wiping her fat bottom with her worthless SCAD diploma.
“Sorry,” I say, feeling like a rejected child. I stack my plate on top of hers and take a long drink from my sweating wax cup. I wish for the ground to open up and swallow my chair. It does no such thing. I know she hates me. Or just doesn’t like me ‘that way.’ Her thoughts pierce my heart, or whatever part of our brains that enables us to feel love. And, oh, it hurts.
She leans back toward me, looking embarrassed, attempting a smile. She knows what I’m thinking, that I’m injured by her insensitivity.
Too late.
Hydrogen, helium, lithium...
“Anyway, um, what were we talking about?” I say, feeling heat in my cheeks, pain like a bullet in my brow. “Oh, yes, the multi-media presentations.” I clear my throat. “No, I’m not planning to tape services. This would be more like a, a tribute to the decedent. Something their loved ones could remember them by.” I look into her clear foolish blue eyes. “One last hurrah, if you will.”
“If you will,” she says, mocking me in a deep voice. She laughs. I don’t know whether to be hurt or amused.
She makes me feel inhuman, alien. Just like everyone else. Like I said, emotions were never something I’d had the luxury of experiencing until I’d met her.
“Come on, Caleb, fucking spill it, man. It’s just little ol’ me. We bullshit all the time.” She grabs my wrist in her sausage fingers. My usual placid mask must have taken on a pinkish hue. “You look embarrassed, dude.” She continues smiling at me, as if she hadn’t just killed me. Then she creases her brow and stops smiling, looks worried. The moon passing in front of the sun, my own personal eclipse. “Why don’t you want to tell me?”
“I...”
Of course I don’t want to tell you, bitch.
But, I’ll play nice. For now.
“This isn’t bullshit this time. I am not entirely sure how to explain it.” I am unaccustomed to withholding information from her. She’d become almost as close a friend to me as Four. Only I never wanted to fuck Four and he never said no to a date with me. Part of me wants to tell her everything, but most of me is afraid. Afraid she’ll think I’m insane. Or dangerous.
I just may be.
Does she know what I was thinking about her fat milky throat at that very second? Why isn’t she running away, tripping over her wrought iron chair, abandoning her art?
“Explain what? The ‘one last hurrah’ thing? Okay, yeah...?” She looks as though she’s assigned the issue a whole new meaning. It has become a matter of trust and confidence.
If I do not tell her, she’ll know that I don’t trust her.
If I do tell her, she’ll freak.
Either way, she won’t go out with me.
I feel like punching someone. A waiter. A random tourist.
Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon...
I sigh, allowing my eyes to wander to the black satin spaghetti strap of her shirt, slouching against the porcelain of her soft pillowy shoulder.
“It’s complicated,” I say.
I don’t understand why she thinks it’s so important that I share this with her. I know she does not care about my business plans. I conclude that I do not understand women and that perhaps I’d better just keep quiet.
Nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine...
She huffs. “Well, um, okay, whatever,” she says, shrugging and collecting her portfolio. “I gotta, like, bail, dude. You don’t want to tell me, that’s cool. Listen, you got the check? I’ll get you next
time, ‘kay? I’ll catch ya later.”
Watching her stalk off toward some class or another, I wonder to myself whether I could ever be completely honest with her.
About anything.
Or whether I even wanted to.
I want her and I don’t.
My head hurts.
Chapter 7 – Caleb
Harlan Fillmore sits perfectly straight in the wing-back chair I’d dragged into the front parlor from the office. His hands curl around the ends of the arm rests like paralyzed talons, his legs crossed below him, locked at the ankles. I twirl the ring on the camera’s lens until he is in sharp focus.
Then he wilts out of the frame.
“Wait, wait, wait,” I shout, jumping out from behind the tripod, knocking over a silver lighting umbrella. “He’s falling forward again. Four, please, mind what you’re doing, dang it.”
Four stands up next to the chair. “I am sorry, but it’s hard to hold him up when I’m crouching next to him, you know? He’s heavy. Plus, gravity is a hell of a thing, dude. Can’t we tie him to the chair or something? He’s not going to care. He’s fucking dead, man.” Four sniffs the air buffering him from Mr. Fillmore. “Christ, he stinks.”
I sigh. No respect. Perhaps we could loop a belt around Fillmore’s neck to secure him to the back of the chair. No, that won’t work— he’s too skinny. If he had multiple chins, a belt, hidden beneath a roll of blubber, might not be obvious, but that was not the case.
Fillmore melts forward until his chest rests on his thighs. Four drains the bottle of Bud Light he had stashed beside the chair. I want a beer but it won’t mix with my Seroquel, which is just beginning to kick in. Ingesting alcohol with an atypical anti-psychotic produces one nasty hangover (sometimes I care, sometimes I don’t). Anyway, I want to get Fillmore’s pictures done quick like. Not only are the hot lights liquefying his makeup, but Uncle Sterling will be back from The Home in less than an hour’s time.
Post-mortem photography, memento mori, has been around since the Victorian era. Back then, mortality rates were out of control and people wanted something to remember their loved ones by, particularly their children. And, since it was hardly practical to keep a lot of physical items due to many factors, including space constraints and possible contamination of said items with deadly germs, photographs were taken of the newly deceased and displayed in a mourning family’s home.
More recently, postmortem photography has aided police in solving crimes. The practice has also enjoyed something of an art house revival thanks to some of the edgier artists, like that Jake Wolfram— the pop star who is also the darling of the post-modernist art community.
Some of the more savage races in the world keep up the custom as a matter of course, but that’s mostly in the African jungles or someplace like that. In my own position, with a faltering funeral parlor to resurrect, I am proposing a return to the original tradition, hoping it will catch on, at least in Savannah, and bring in some much needed cash. Uncle Sterling’s the one who keeps the books, but I imagine our savings must be running quite low since fewer and fewer customers have been visiting our establishment.
My photography business will, of course, be dignified and respectful. Taking photos will not only preserve one last image of a loved one for an immediate relative, but that image can also be duplicated and sent around the world to extended family, sparing the most far-flung relatives the cost of airfare and accommodations to attend a funeral for a virtual stranger. Our fair city might lose a few tourist dollars, but Exley & Sons stands to gain a ton of cash and a portion of its former dignity and grandeur. Especially if I can parlay my still photography operation into a multimedia production company.
I do have plans, you see. They just don’t stop with photography and videos like they do at Forever Hollywood. I’m thinking much bigger than that, more scientific. I’ll need some help, but whether I can recruit Four is questionable.
Before I can begin marketing the photography service (and others), to clients I have to make it palatable to Uncle Sterling. I must demonstrate that it can be done tastefully and with proper respect for the decedent. That, in itself, is quite an obstacle. But, I have to do something, whether Sterling approves or not.
My challenge at the moment is how to add a more personal and modern spin to the post-modern postmortem photography. Also, how to keep Mr. Harlan Fillmore upright in his chair.
I grab Fillmore by the shoulders and heave him back up into a sitting position. Unfortunately, I smear his makeup. A diagonal streak of Plasto Wax and light beige cover crème slides across the front of my black silk shirt. “Oh, hell.”
Four just watches, lips pursed, eyes narrowed.
A moaning hiss escapes one of Fillmore’s obstructed orifices.
“What the hell was that?” Four asks, jumping.
“That would be air escaping from Mr. Fillmore’s body, most likely through his esophagus.” I grin at my friend, the purveyor of ‘frightainment.’ “Can you help me here, please?” I say, trying to sit the man up straight, fighting through the Seroquel haze flittering into my head.
Four goes about straightening Fillmore’s delicate bashed-in head as I return to my place behind the camera. Mr. Fillmore was thirty-two years of age, and he left behind a young wife and a very young child. He had been on his way home from a day of surfing out at Tybee when a carload of drunk teenagers slammed into his doorless Jeep on the bridge, head-on. Injuries sustained included fractured vertebrae and ribs, lacerated internal organs, severe burns to his face and arms, and a particularly troublesome open head wound. I used copious amounts of waxes, compounds, and cosmetics on Fillmore’s ruined pate. Uncle Sterling thinks for certain it will be a closed casket affair.
Sometimes I surprise Uncle Sterling.
“I don’t like his eyes, dude,” Four says. “Did you have to tape ‘em like that?”
“No, I didn’t have to, but I wanted to make sure they stay open for the picture.” I had folded tiny pieces of duct tape in half and stuck them between each of Fillmore’s upper lids and the hollows just beneath his thick mud-colored eyebrows. Such an effort was likely unnecessary, but I wanted to be sure his eyes remained evenly open. As he was reported by his widow to be quite the booze hound, it would be fitting if one eye drooped in a kind of drunken leer. I would personally find that quite amusing, but there is Uncle Sterling and the Fillmore family to consider. If I could make Fillmore look natural and alive in his postmortem portraits, I just might have a shot at saving our business, taking it in an entirely different direction, bringing it into the twenty-first century at last. I did make Fillmore look a bit bug-eyed, but he could pass for someone with thyroid issues.
“Well, some people close their eyes in pictures, you know, on purpose.” Four says, being a wiseacre. “I always try to close my eyes whenever someone snaps my pic.”
It is true. I have roughly three hundred pictures of Four. His eyes are closed in every single shot. Asshole.
I finally snapped Mr. Fillmore’s photograph, put away my camera and lights, and had the body secured in the washable nylon straps of the body lifter when headlights washed across the parlor.
Uncle Sterling.
“Hurry up. Sterling is going to skin me if he finds me playing with the bodies again,” I snap at Four, who juggles my photography paraphernalia along with his three bottles of beer. I shove at the steel frame of the body lifter, gliding it into the hallway, back toward the embalming room on its squeaking casters. Fillmore’s body swings back and forth, his head thumping and his hair leaving a greasy trail along one ugly flocked papered wall above the chair rail. Four snickers behind me, clinking his bottles against my lighting kit.
Uncle Sterling rattles the lock on the kitchen door.
“Shhhhh,” I say, heading for the embalming room door at a livelier clip. I throw a glance over my shoulder and see Four biting his fat bottom lip in an attempt to stifle a laugh. Unfortunately for Mr. Fillmore, I smack the top of his head directly into the em
balming room’s fluted door casing. The impact snaps his left arm loose from its strap and the limb catches on the doorframe as I struggle to heave the lift across the marble threshold, into the embalming room.
A squeal from the kitchen means that Uncle Sterling has managed to open the door.
The body lift’s front wheel catches on the strip of marble. I haul the entire contraption back a few feet and take a running start. The damned caster catches again, and the lift’s back end rises into the air. Fillmore’s body dips head-first toward the cracked ceramic tile floor, his arm stuck between the door and my left side. I hear the unmistakable snap of bone.
“Boy,” Sterling shouts. He shuffles through the kitchen, coming closer. “You home, boy?” My heart seizes.
At that very moment, the Titan Body Lifter’s front caster snaps off. The whole framework topples into the embalming room, Fillmore hanging like a drunk in a hammock, frozen in time for endless seconds.
I hold my breath and watch the scene unfold from somewhere outside my being.
“What in hell are you doing?”
I whip my head around to see Uncle Sterling standing at the end of the hall behind me, his reptilian head, his forked tongue flashing out at me. My slick hands slip off the steel support in slow motion.
My head whips back around. I catch a glimpse of Four’s shocked face, hear the clatter of his beer bottles falling to the floor, watch him make a frantic grab for the cartwheeling lifter.
Then, with a sickening muffled crack, the top of Fillmore’s head makes contact with the floor. The wax I’d rebuilt his skull with mushrooms out and makes a farting sound as it splats on the floor. His feet fly straight up into the air, one of his penny loafers launches into the stainless steel sink across the room. The nylon straps that hold him suspended above the floor rip or pop, and down he goes.
This may be a closed casket affair after all.
Chapter 8 – Scarlet
Oh shit, he’d better not...
A spray of dirty water fans into the air, sparkling beneath the streetlight, held motionless for a split second. Then gravity shows up. All that disgusting gutter water rains down hard, drenching me from the neck down, totally ruining my favorite Victoria’s Secret cami. It was all lacey and ivory. Now it’s a fucking Damien Hirst spin art piece of shit.
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