Sort of Dead

by Rob Rosen

  “Shit,” we heard him say. “What the fuck is going on?” He looked pissed. The look changed when he saw the letters on the screen, from pissed to anxious. “Help,” he read. He’d had Facebook on the screen. I’d typed help onto that. The letters had to have come from his side of things. “Help,” he read again as Max repeated the flick routine. Anxious morphed to nervous, with a hint of fright that seemed to quickly blossom into terror, if the look on his face meant anything.

  I reached for the keyboard again. I was growing tired. Or at least drained. What would happen if I continued? Can the dead die further? Could I evaporate into oblivion, Max right along with me? MAX, I managed to type, slowly, the effort quite real. If I could’ve sweated, I would’ve been drenched right about then.

  I looked at Max. He was barely there, just a shimmer of himself. I stared down at myself. I thought of Arby’s. We were back there in a heartbeat, so to speak.

  I grabbed for my chest. I was whole again. Max, too. Or, you know, wholeish. Or as wholey as we were gonna get. “Scary,” I said.

  “One more minute,” he said, “and I think we would’ve vanished.”

  “But to where? To here? And why, why did we start to evaporate like that?”

  He shrugged. “I think all we are now is energy. Here, in Arby’s, we’re probably surrounded by it, like we’re plugged in. Back in the real world, we have a limited supply.”

  “Felt like I was dying,” I said.

  “Moot point,” he said.

  “Still, that’s what it felt like.” I reached for his hand. The nervousness dissipated. “Weird,” I said, aiming my head at our fingers. “How long have we known each other now? A few hours? Feels like forever.”

  He grinned. He leaned in and kissed me. My energy tank was back to full. “I was sick for so long, Nord. You’re the first person I’ve kissed in years. There must be some bizarre irony in that, that it took my dying to find you.”

  I chuckled. “Schmaltz much?”

  His laughter joined mine. Such a nice laugh. Such a nice man. Too bad we were dead. “I got a shitload of Hallmark cards back in the hospital; the schmaltz must’ve worn off on me.”

  I held his other hand. “Clark must’ve shit his pants.”

  “Except that he always seems to be naked, but yeah.” He gave my hand a squeeze. “Why did you type my name and not yours. Help then Max. Why not Help Nord? You’re the one who needs help.”

  “But your name he might know; mine he won’t. Plus, your name is one letter less. Three letters were all I had left in me.”

  “But we need to tell him more than that next time. How can we type everything we need to type? How can we let him know everything he needs to know in order to help us? And why would he help us anyway? He didn’t even know us when we were alive.”

  I stroked his cheek. “We can add an or else, next time. We’re ghosts, Max. Or else would probably do the trick.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve been watching him for a while now. I like him. He’s smart. He gives to charity. He calls his mother most every day.” His usual grin did a U-turn. “He’s lonely, Nord. I was lonely. Lonely and scared.”

  “You don’t want him to be those things?”

  He shook his head, then shrugged. “Okay, or else, but only as a last resort.”

  I looked around. We were surrounded by people. Peopleish. Arby’s was chockful of ishes. In any case, there were people on all sides, but it felt like it was just him and me. But what if I was successful in this new mission of mine? What if I went poof? What if he did? Would the lonely and scared thing make a triumphant return? The thought gave me a chill—figuratively speaking, of course.

  “We’ll think of something, Max.”

  Chapter 2

  We went back to my office. The body—my body—was long gone. It was the morning of the next day. I’d not been dead for twenty-four hours yet; it felt like an eternity.

  The office was subdued. Many of my coworkers had clearly been crying. My desk was cordoned off. The carpet had been removed. There were two policemen taking notes as they interviewed what had been my friends. Well, clearly, all but one had been my friend, it seemed. But which one? Which one had flicked off my lights, so to speak?

  I listened to the police. No one knew anything. No one had seen anything. We didn’t have cameras in the office; the building was guarded instead.

  Max flew by my side. “I don’t get it, Nord. How were you killed in the middle of the day if there are this many people that sit around you?”

  There were thirty-six of us. It was a small marketing firm. I got along well with all of them. “Lunchtime,” I replied. “Most everyone went out. It was a pretty day. I had a project I was working on, so I stayed.” I was frowning. I felt drained. Being a ghost was surprisingly taxing. Or maybe it was recently getting killed that did it. Oh, and, it turned out, I’d been shot in the back. The gun obviously had a silencer. My body was found within minutes, the murderer already gone. Someone had walked up behind me, shot me, pulled up the file, then skedaddled, probably taking a copy of the file with them, I was guessing. I tried to remember a noise, a scent of cologne or perfume, but all I saw was a fleeting image, an intricate pattern reflected on my computer screen, nothing I recognized. But what could it have been? “I wonder why they left the file on my computer, though. If it was worth killing over, why leave it for someone else to find?”

  Max shrugged. “The killer must’ve gotten spooked.” He grinned. He frowned “Sorry, bad choice of words. But makes sense. Maybe he or she heard someone coming.” Max pointed to the elevator out the door and down the hall. “It dings when the door opens. Maybe that scared the person off.” He again turned my way. “What was in the file?”

  I squinted at my monitor, which sat blank, lifeless. Yeah, it and me both, though not much use in pointing out the obvious. “No clue, apart from what I already told you. It was old, something financial. I don’t work in the finance department. I’d either asked for it or it’d been sent to me to approve something or to explain an expenditure. That happens from time to time.”

  “But then a lot of people had access to it. It must exist on your company’s server, right? The murderer could’ve probably accessed it in a much more, uh, expedient manor.”

  I grimaced. “Maybe, maybe not.” I shrugged and we were back at Arby’s.

  “Lost me,” he said.

  My grimace turned smile. Being in Arby’s had that effect. Or maybe it was the company I was keeping. I reached out and pulled him in. “Lost you? And so soon after I found you, Max? Not likely.”

  He kissed me. I kissed him back. No one seemed to pay us any heed. It was as if everyone had taken a happy pill and couldn’t be bothered with grousing at our PDA. Too bad you had to die in order to stop being an asshole. Or maybe all the assholes were in a different place. Maybe there really was a hell. What if I went poof and wound up there instead? What if Max did? I kissed him again, willing the thought from my already addled mind.

  “Like I said,” I said, continuing our conversation, “it was an old file. Best guess, it’d been sent to me and I saved it on my desktop. I had a folder on my desktop with hundreds of reports; they were easier to find that way. The original could’ve been wiped from the server. Maybe I had the only copy.”

  “But how could someone know that? Does anyone else have access to your computer? Or could someone else have seen it there?”

  I had to think about that for a minute—while I rubbed my hand over his ass. Max had a furry ass. I could feel the soft down of him. Didn’t make sense that I could feel it, but, then again, what did make sense as of late? Besides, beggars, choosers, blah, blah, blah.

  “If my computer went down, someone from IT could access it, fix it remotely. We used an outside firm. But why would someone from an outside firm care about that file or want to see me dead?” I shrugged. I tickled his hole. I knew I’d tickled it because he was suddenly giggling. And, yes, I also knew that talking about my recent murder while
tickling his hole seemed at odds with each other, but, then again, it also seemed the perfect time—given that Max had a perfect hole.

  He nodded, pushed his ass into my fingers. “Okay, so then who else knew about that report or had seen it?”

  That only took me a split second. “The person who sent it or the person I sent it to.”

  His eyes lit up. “And who was that?”

  My eyes lit up. But only because his did first. And only because his eyes lighting up could give a Disney fireworks display a run for its money. “I, um, don’t remember. It was two years ago. It was a boring financial report.”

  “Which might still be on your desktop,” he said. “I mean, the police haven’t removed your computer yet. Maybe they don’t know there’s a clue on there? Or maybe they already downloaded everything off your desktop and are looking for said clue back at some computer lab. And if they haven’t removed your computer yet, maybe we only have a brief window of time to find that report ourselves before said computer is removed.”

  I sighed. No sound came out. That would take some getting used to. Funny to miss one’s lungs. Through not the ha-ha kind of funny. “And maybe, if we had hands, or bodies, or weren’t ghosts, we could do something about all those maybes.”

  He grabbed my hand. He ran his other one across my body. “Do you feel like a ghost?”

  I was feeling a lot of things; ghost was landing somewhere near the bottom of the list. Still, I got his point. I also got an idea. “Clark has hands and a body. And Clark is a computer scientist.”

  He nodded. “Plus, Clark seemed mildly terrified just before we left him, and terrified people tend to capitulate.”

  His hand was already in mine, so, one second Arby’s, the next, apartment. We hadn’t been gone all that long. That mildly terrified state had apparently grown to hysteria. Clark had all the lights off. Clark was sitting in the middle of the living room, now fully clothed, on the floor, with a bible in one hand and a cross in the other. Clark, it seemed, had seen way too many ghost movies.

  “Well, we know one more thing about Clark,” I said.

  “Which is?”

  I grinned. “He’s not Jewish.” I pointed at the wide eyes and flop-sweat, at his hand rubbing the cross. “Maybe make that two things.”

  “What’s the second one?”

  I hovered near the living. “He believes in ghosts. Or at least two ghosts. Namely us.”

  Max hovered to Clark’s other side. “Fine, but we have little time and limited energy. How do we communicate that we need his help to somehow break into your old work computer, find the financial report, download it, and get out of there before he gets caught? Plus, how do we explain why we need his help? I mean, you were murdered; this shit is obviously dangerous.”

  I’d been smiling, now I wasn’t. “So what do we do? Let my murder potentially go unsolved? Wait decades to go poof? Maybe longer? Watch Clark grow old for entertainment? Or worse, watch my entire family die?”

  He grimaced. He’d probably had the same thoughts, the same misgivings about his own death, his own afterlife. Arby’s was practically nirvana, but only practically, not really. What if it grew tiresome, boring? Or worse: what if watching all your friends and loved ones die, year after year, was hell itself? What if we weren’t in Arby’s, after all; what if it really was Chick-fil-A?

  “Fine,” he said, “but we still don’t know how to go about doing this.”

  Except, yes, I did know. Or at least I thought I knew. “I think we can communicate with Clark. Maybe. Hopefully.”

  He rolled his hands in front of him. “Go on.”

  I’d got the idea from our earlier conversation, the proverbial lightbulb shining above my not so proverbial noggin. “We need a medium, a psychic, a spiritual guide.”

  He looked around. He looked left, right, up, down. “Seems we’re fresh out, Nord. Besides, are they even real?”

  “Are ghosts?”

  He touched fingertip to nose. Or tried to. “Still, how are we going to get him to go to a psychic?”

  I grabbed his hand. Or, again, tried to. We whooshed around the room. Everything was flicked on or off by us, just like before. Clark was now trembling, a whimper thrown in for effect. “The apartment was for rent, Max,” he croaked out, also looking left, right, up, down. “You didn’t need it anymore. Maybe we can live here together. Roommates.”

  I laughed. It’d make a great sitcom: The Oddest Couple. One roommate would be messy, the other dead. Or, you know, sort of dead. We reached the computer, the keyboard. I typed: NEED A MEDIUM. It drained me. It drained Max. Our current forms shimmered.

  Clark hopped up and squinted at the screen. “A medium what?” he asked, looking around again. “Shorts? T-shirt? Go into the light, Max. Go…into…the light.”

  I shook my head. I’d come from the light. It wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to die there. PSYCHIC, I typed.

  “Ah,” he said, then stared at the screen. Then the wall. Then the ceiling. We were on either side of him. I tapped him on the shoulder, little good it did me. “You want me to go to a psychic? Do the whole Whoopi thing?”

  I looked over at Max. “See.” I reached for the keyboard. YELP, I typed.

  We were suddenly back at Arby’s. We’d used up our reserves. I felt spent, like I’d been up for days—as opposed to being dead for barely one. Barely one, and just look at all the excitement. I’d hadn’t at all rested, and peace was fleeting, at best.

  Max looked my way, grabbed my hand for real. “Give it fifteen minutes. We can recharge. Hopefully, Clark can find a medium that makes emergency house calls.”

  I nodded. I pulled him in. I kissed him. Fifteen minutes was nothing when you were looking square in the jaw of eternity. “Do you believe in God, Max? Or did you? Before, I mean?” I pointed around.

  He nodded. “I did. I still do. Life was beautiful. Death is beautiful.” His grin amped up. “You’re beautiful.”

  I blushed. Or would’ve had I could’ve. “But you died a horrible death. I died a horrible death. What was beautiful about that?”

  “I made peace with the cancer before I died, Nord. Don’t get me wrong, it was awful knowing I was going to die, but it freed me from worrying about it, too. I spent time with the people I loved. I watched sunrises, sunsets. I stopped and smelled the roses. Life was beautiful, even though it was short. There’s beauty in just about everything if you look hard enough for it.”

  I had my doubts, but, then again, I didn’t know I was going to die. Truth was, I was mightily pissed off about it. At God, too. And where was He, anyway? Where were the angels? Where was Gabriel blowing his horn? If this was some sort of grand plan, I would’ve preferred being cued in on it. Of course, on the flip side, I had Max, I had Arby’s, I felt amazing, so, yeah, there was all that to consider.

  I squeezed his hand tighter in mine. “Maybe God lets us figure it out on own, in life and sort of death.” My smile then amped up. Watted up, too. Volted up. “And you’re beautiful, too, Max. No roses to stop and smell, but, well, you know.” I pointed all around at the you know.

  He kissed me. “I do know, Nord. I do know.” He smiled. “God answers,” he added. “It’s just, sometimes it’s not in a way you expect.”

  We were suddenly back in his old apartment. This dimensional jumping would take some getting used to. Clark was sitting in the living room now. He still looked nervous, but at least he’d set the bible and cross down. Besides, I was a ghost, not a vampire.

  The doorbell rang. He jumped. I jumped. Max jumped.

  “He’s here,” said Clark. “I told him it was an emergency. Is it an emergency, Max?” I grabbed Max’s hand and whooshed us to a lamp. On, off, on, off, it went. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “Yes!” I shouted, not that it did any good. “Go fucking open the fucking door!”

  He opened the door. In walked a man. Grandly. And with great aplomb. A man in a cape, actually. And a turban.
Clark blinked. Clark blinked as if he’d suddenly been struck by lightning. Meaning, Clark blinked in shock.

  I glanced Max’s way. “We’re so fucked.”

  He nodded. “Maybe this was all Yelp had to offer. I mean, all-last-minute-like.”

  “Um,” Clark managed.

  The man whipped the cape off with a flourish and handed it Clark’s way. “Voltan!” shouted the man, who then doffed his turban, revealing a shocking mound of ebony hair. “There are spirits here, sir. You called just in the nick of time.” The man looked like Woody Harrelson. Except with hair. A shocking amount of it. Plus, he was no more than five and a half feet tall, so Woody Harrelson in miniature. Plus, he was young, maybe twenty-five at most. So, yeah, a shorter, hairier, younger Woody Harrelson. But Woody Harrelson just the same. Natural Born Killers Harrelson. All in all, it was a fitting analogy—my all and all, that is.

  “Spirits?” squeaked out Clark. “Plural?”

  The door was closed. The cape and turban were hung on a coatrack. Voltan grandly walked into the living room, his arms held up, fingers wiggling, eyes big and wide, unblinking, hair like a mane.

  I again looked at Max. Max again looked at me. “Gay,” we said in unison, meaning our gaydar had come along for the undead ride.

  Voltan pointed directly at me, then directly at Max. “Two!” he shouted. “There are two spirits here. They are uneasy. They have unfinished business.” His aim then aimed at Clark, who again jumped in place. “They have come for your help, sir.”

  I hovered next to Max. “You think he’s for real or simply making lucky guesses.”

  Voltan smirked. “I am quite real, spirits! Voltan sees all. Voltan knows all!”

  I chuckled. “Voltan has a flare for the dramatic. Voltan would’ve made a great drag queen.”

  “Voltana,” said Max. “Voltana sees all. Voltana knows all. Voltana reads all for filth.”

  Voltan didn’t reply. Perhaps he didn’t hear all. Instead, he sashayed to the couch and sat down—grandly, of course. Clark sat down across from him. Not so grandly. In fact, he looked like a deer caught in the headlights.