Dead Inside

by Chandler Morrison

  She does eat babies, though. She’s got that going for her, at the very least.

  But . . . she’s alive.

  I think of her warm, living flesh, the hot blood coursing through her veins, heart thudding beneath her breasts, and my first thought is . . . eww.

  But then I realize my dick has engorged itself into a burgeoning erection that struggles against the black denim of my jeans. I try to think about something else, anything else, but naturally my thoughts turn to that night in the abortion clinic, and I fear I’m going to mess myself, so I hastily pull it out and start stroking furiously, thinking of Helen’s strong thighs clenching my waist, her glassy eyes rolling up into her head as she cried out in orgasm. In a few moments I’m shooting creamy globs of ejaculate onto the nearest headstone. Sorry, Allan Griswold Clemm, beloved husband and father, January 19th, 1809 to October 7th, 1849. Taking great gulping breaths, I sit down against the one next to it, picking up the cigarette I’d dropped and relighting it.

  When, I wonder, is the last time I’d masturbated while fantasizing about a live girl, instead of a dead one?

  Sitting there smoking, my flaccid dick hanging out from the open zipper of my jeans, I think to myself, I could really be in a lot of fucking trouble.

  ***

  The death smell seizes me while I’m on one of my rounds and leads me to the doorway of a dim room with floral curtains open to a view of the nigh-empty parking lot. There is no moon, no stars, only the glow of the tall streetlamps.

  Lying in the white bed is a young man, late twenties, hairless and covered in tattoos—the kind of tattoos that make mothers hold their children to them and veer the other way. The kind that disqualify you from having any sort of respectable occupation, whatsoever. The bold swastika on his forehead, the inverted pentagrams on his cheeks, the gruesome pictures and designs up and down his pale arms—his body is a canvas of savage and frightening imagery, the cover of a Cannibal Corpse album that never was.

  Hunched in the chair beside the bed is a middle-aged priest with thinning black hair, clasping a rosary in one hand, and a weathered bible in the other. He’s whispering soothingly to the young man, speaking softly under his breath, words I cannot hear.

  “Father Benway,” the man interrupts, “I’m scared. I feel it coming.”

  “Fear not the Angel of Death, my child,” says the priest. “She is gentle. She will deliver you peacefully into the arms of Christ.”

  “What if I don’t go to Him? What if I go to hell? All those bad things I’ve done, Father. I’ve hurt so many people. I’ve raped. I’ve . . . killed.”

  The priest straightens and covers the young man’s hand with his own. “My son, when you made your vows this afternoon, did you speak truly? Were your promises from the heart? Do you reject the sins of your past, and accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”

  What a load of bullshit.

  If I was capable of laughter, this is the part where I’d burst into gales of it.

  “Yes, Father Benway,” the man says, his eyes big and doleful, brimming with tears. “Yes, yes, I did mean it. I’m sorry for everything I’ve done. I want to go see Jesus now.”

  It’s a queer thing, what death does to people. It makes them say ridiculous things they think they mean. I’m quite sure this man believes he has turned over a new leaf, that he regrets his past, that he is now a man of God, and thus, he will be welcomed through that pearlescent gateway of fabled lore, this prodigal son-of-Satan-wannabe. But if a doctor were to come in here now and tell him there had been a mistake with the prognosis, that he wasn’t going to die after all, this neo-Nazi loser would be up and out the door, on his way to find the nearest rally.

  Death is funny like that.

  “You will see Him, child,” the priest assures him. “I can see the change in you. I can see the light. The blood of Jesus is upon you.”

  For fuck’s sake.

  Neither of them has noticed me yet, but even in the dim light, I can see something in the priest’s face, something that gives me a surprising jolt of satisfaction; he doesn’t believe what he’s saying. He knows he’s selling a line of bullshit to this kid. I can’t tell how deep his skepticism runs, can’t decipher whether he’s “lost his faith”, or if he really believes his doctrine, but thinks this guy is fucked.

  It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing for me here. I’ll see this guy’s corpse downstairs in the morgue soon enough, but it will just be part of the audience, in the background, irrelevant.

  Not drastically different, I suspect, from its living counterpart.

  Call him evil, label him a monster, brand him a menace to society, whatever. He’s not so different from your suburban PTA moms, your corporate office drones, your own goddamn kids, even. Everyone’s a parasite, each a small part of a collective plague upon the planet. Somewhere, there might be some uninteresting plot to destroy the world, but I don’t think so. I don’t think they even know they’re doing it. They all just exist, with specific roles, not so different from the next.

  This young man, like so many others, is here for one purpose.

  To die.

  The priest is here to make people believe dying really isn’t so bad, that there’s something on the other side. He’s here to make dying easy. To make it attractive.

  And me?

  I just fuck dead girls.

  ***

  I go outside for a cigarette, and there’s a raccoon by the trashcan. It’s eating some small, hairless animal, probably a baby opossum, standing on its hind legs and cradling the thing in its tiny, hand-like paws. It looks up at me, eyes glowing, red innards hanging from the sides of its mouth, but instead of scurrying off, it buries its snout back in the stomach of the dead animal and resumes eating.

  I sit on the curb and watch it as I smoke.

  ***

  Helen’s sitting in the security room with me while I stare listlessly at the monitors and try not to look at her, just kind of watching her in my peripheral. Her hair is tied back with a black bow, and she’s wearing a new pair of glasses.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” she says after a lengthy period of awkward silence.

  “Like what,” I ask.

  “Like this. All, you know, weird and uncomfortable, or whatever it is right now. It’s . . . not like it used to be.”

  “We fucked. Of course it’s not like it used to be.”

  “Nothing’s changed. We just . . . had fun, that’s all. It was a fun night, and we can move forward from there. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

  “I don’t have fun. I have moments of satisfaction in between long bouts of plain existence. That’s it. I don’t even know what fun is.”

  She bites her lip and tilts her head sideways. She says, “Okay, well, did you experience a moment of satisfaction?”

  I don’t answer because both of us know I don’t have to answer. I feel trapped, a rat in a cage, a cornered animal, but with less aggression.

  “It can’t happen again,” I tell her.

  “Okay. That’s fine.” There’s something in her face that suggests she doesn’t mean it.

  “I fuck dead girls. Not live ones.”

  “Okay,” she says again.

  For a while neither of us says anything else. I watch people go about their normal routines on the monitors, and I can feel her watching me.

  “You know,” she says eventually, “you never did answer my question on our date.”

  “What question.”

  “I asked you what you wanted out of life. Your hopes and dreams.”

  I tense up. I, for reasons that should be pretty clear by now, never discuss details about things like this. With anyone. But Helen’s pushy.

  “No,” I say cautiously, “I guess I didn’t.”

  “You’re in school, right?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “For what?”

  I’m quiet for a moment, not wanting to have this conversation. “Business management,”
I tell her.

  “That doesn’t sound like your type of field.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I say, hoping she’ll stop talking about it.

  She doesn’t take the hint (or maybe she does, but doesn’t care), and she says, “What do you plan to do with it?”

  Giving her another chance to drop it, I shrug and say, “What does anyone ever plan to do with a college degree.”

  “Most people have some sort of ideal occupation.”

  “I guess,” I say, shrugging again. She doesn’t say anything, apparently determined to drag this out of me. I sigh. “I want to open a business,” I tell her.

  “What kind of business?”

  “A funeral parlor.”

  She doesn’t answer, and I swivel to look at her, trying to read her reaction. She’s biting her lip, looking, strangely, like she’s about to cry. Instead, she explodes into laughter. “That’s fantastic,” she says, wiping at her eyes with her middle and forefinger. “I mean, it makes sense. I’ve always wanted to open an abortion clinic, but it doesn’t really work like that.”

  “No, I don’t suppose it does.”

  She interrupts the awkward silence that follows by saying, “I wish you’d reconsider. I don’t want that night to have been . . . the only time.”

  “No,” I say, my shoulders suddenly tensing up. She won’t let it die. I don’t know how to be any clearer with her. I grit my teeth and clench my fists and say again, “No.”

  She frowns. “What’s it going to take to convince you? I know I’m not exactly your type, being that I have, you know . . . ”

  “A heartbeat,” I say for her.

  “Right. But it was good, what we did. It had been a long time since I’d had sex.”

  “No,” I say again.

  “I know you want it, too. I can see it in the way you look at me.”

  I turn back to the monitors. “It was an isolated circumstance. It can’t happen again. I told you that right after it happened.”

  “Yes, well, I didn’t think you meant it.”

  “I did. And I do.”

  She clasps her hands on her lap, looks down at them, shifts in her seat. “Well,” she says quietly, not looking up, “if you change your mind . . . ”

  “I won’t.”

  She nods. I would think this would be the end of it, but it’s not. “You’re not dead, you know,” she says firmly. “Sometimes I think you want to be, but you’re not. Everything in your life is about death, but you are not dead. I don’t think you realize that. You’re not dead.”

  “I might as well be.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We’re quiet for awhile. Then I look at the floor and say, “That night, you said you wished you were dead. You’re not really in a place to give this kind of lecture.”

  Sighing, she says, “I think what I said was that sometimes I wished I was dead. I think that’s probably true of anyone. Besides, I was emotional.” She sighs again. “Listen,” she says, “you’ll have your chance at death. You’ll have a whole eternity of chances. But you only get one chance at life, and it’s a very small window.”

  I snort. “That’s original.”

  “Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what.”

  Her pager goes off. She glances at it and gets up. “I have to go.”

  “Okay.”

  “If you change your mind . . . ” she says again.

  “I won’t,” I say again.

  She leaves, and I watch her go as soon as her back is turned.

  ***

  I’m in the morgue, leaning against the wall and smoking, not really horny, but needing to be around dead people.

  I think of my dream of owning a funeral parlor. It seems distant, almost surreally so, but I know I can’t spend the rest of my life fucking corpses in a hospital basement, as much as I’d like that to be the case.

  Sooner or later, I’d get caught.

  Helen got caught. She’s just lucky I was the one who caught her.

  A shudder goes down my spine as I think of her in the state in which I’d found her—naked on her sheet, covered in blood, holding the half-eaten dead baby in her arms like some fucked up anti-abortion ad. Or a pro-abortion ad, depending on the kind of shit that tickles your fancy.

  As I look over the covered bodies, I think of horror movies, where they sit up and start walking around. If that happened, they’d be able to fuck me back.

  Like Helen had.

  Like Helen could, if I so desired.

  The point, though, is for them not to fuck me back.

  Isn’t it?

  I take out my cell phone, turning it over in my palm. I don’t get any service down here, but I could go upstairs and call her. I don’t remember when she gave me her phone number, but I have it, and I know she’s not working tonight. She’d answer on the second ring, maybe the third, voice sleepy but alert. I’d tell her I want to come over, and she’d ask how soon I could get there.

  No.

  I have to stop thinking like this.

  If I’m not careful, everything I’ve built within myself could unravel. My solitary mind palace, composed of every dead girl I’d ever fucked, would come crashing down. I’d suddenly be . . . one of them.

  The normal people.

  The people who have real sex with other humans, living humans.

  I’ve always stayed true to myself—to my unique passion—and because of that, I’ve remained safe, untouched. If I start to become like all the other flea-ridden sloths of this country, I’ll become vulnerable, stripped bare, unprotected against the elements. I am fortified by that which makes me different. As long as I remain on the outside, on the lunatic fringe, if you will, I cannot be harmed. But if I allow Helen to pull me into the swarming mass of walking, talking, slobbering trolls, I’ll instantly be trampled.

  I just can’t have that.

  I put my phone back in my pocket and jerk off into a trashcan.

  ***

  Helen tells me I need more light in my life.

  We’re standing on her porch; I had to drive her home because her car wouldn’t start again. I walked her to the door because I think that’s what I’m supposed to do. Not chivalry. Just . . . I don’t know, a weak attempt at politeness, I guess.

  I ask her, “What light.” I ask her where it is.

  She says, “Everywhere.”

  I tell her no, and she says I have to look for it. I look at my shoes and say quietly, “I can’t see, anyway. I really can’t see anything at all.”

  “Don’t you want to see?” she asks.

  “No,” I say, looking up and meeting her gaze. “No, I really don’t.” She starts to speak. I cut her off. “Your problem,” I say, “is that you spend too much time running from your own darkness. You should accept it. Embrace it. Hide in it, instead of hiding from it.”

  “What’s so bad about the light?”

  “You can see better. And most things aren’t worth looking at.”

  She reaches up and unties her ribbon, shaking her hair out. I’m not sure why.

  “I don’t think I have as much darkness as you do,” Helen says. “Or as much darkness as you think I do.”

  “You eat babies,” I say. “You have plenty of darkness.”

  She frowns and puts the ribbon in her pocket and then opens her front door. It wasn’t locked. “Do you want to come in?” she asks hopefully.

  Maybe that’s why she shook her hair like that. Some sort of human mating ritual that’s supposed to induce arousal. It doesn’t work.

  “No,” I say. “I have to go.”

  “To check the monitors?” she says tauntingly.

  “Yeah,” I say. “To check the monitors.”

  ***

  The janitor and I are outside smoking when an ambulance pulls up under the awning. Its flashers turn off, the back doors open, and three paramedics file out hurriedly. Despite their rushed urgency, their faces are calm, shoul
ders relaxed, their movements quick but languid.

  They pull out a gurney and there’s a man on it, looking to be about my age, but in worse condition—he’s covered in blood and puke. The bleeding seems to be coming from his nose, but it’s hard to tell. He’s raving about some girl named Vera. I think of that Pink Floyd song on The Wall. A blonde girl gets out and stands close to the gurney, face wrought with concern. She’s not Vera. I don’t know how I know this.

  Two of the paramedics wheel the gurney inside with the blonde girl closely in tow. The third paramedic hangs back and asks the janitor for a cigarette. The janitor complies, and the paramedic lets him light it for him. He leans back against the ambulance and runs a hand through his hair.

  “What happened to him?” the janitor asks.

  “Alcohol poisoning and drug overdose,” says the paramedic, as he lets the smoke roll from his lips. “Coke and pills, it looks like. Lots of it.” He shrugs. “He’ll probably die.”

  The janitor shakes his head sadly and tosses away his cigarette. He sticks his hands in the pockets of his gray coveralls and says, “These kids, I don’t get it. All the drugs. Why? What’s it doing for them?”

  The paramedic shrugs again. “Who knows? It seems like every night we’ve got some idiot who’s OD’d on one thing or another. It’s usually heroin, so this guy is a nice change of pace. Fucking morons, though, the whole lot of them.”

  “I don’t think they’re morons,” I say, surprising myself by speaking. The two of them look at me as if they’re just now realizing that I’m here. “If people want to do drugs, let them do drugs. Who are we to judge.” I’m thinking of Helen. Helen and all of her pills. The pills that give her the eyes that I so adore. The dead eyes. The eyes of a ghost.

  “If you saw some of the shit that I’ve seen,” says the paramedic, “I think you’d feel differently.”

  “I doubt it,” I tell him dismissively. “People all have something that gives them pleasure. What makes doing drugs any different than golfing, or collecting stamps.” Or fucking dead girls. Or getting raped. Or eating babies.

  “I like watching Boris Karloff movies,” says the janitor. “And collecting Boris Karloff figurines. And posters and such. But that isn’t going to kill me. Drugs kill people.”