I felt as though I were floating outside my body. Was Ryan hinting that he knew about me and Maisie? How was such a thing possible? But if he did, so what? We were brothers in sick, fucked-up, reanimate enthusiasm, weren’t we? And even more importantly, he raised this new thought: They sold reanimates here.
Buying Maisie. It seemed too good to be true. It seemed like all the stars were lining up to make my life easy, or at least to give me an out from unbearable complications. They sold the reanimates, and they might be willing to sell Maisie in particular.
Ryan must have noticed how thoughtful I looked. He laughed.
“Before you do something rash like buy, you might want to sample the goods.”
“Sample the goods?”
He nodded. “It’s only a hundred dollars. They have rooms in the back, and you get a full hour. You can pick any girl you want. If she’s on the stage, she’s available, but if you are thinking of buying that one, you should check her out first.”
I looked over at Maisie. She was dancing around a pole very slowly, and she was looking at me. The idea of having sex with her, with any of them, was utterly repulsive to me. “No way,” I said.
“Don’t knock it. If you’ve never had sex with a reanimate, you have no idea what you are missing. They love it, man. You wouldn’t believe how into it they are. It’s like they feel alive when they’re doing it. They talk, almost like normal people. Sex and pain do that.” “How do you know about pain?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Different guys have different interests. You meet all sorts of reanimate enthusiasts here. Some are into sex, some are into . . . crazy things.”
I was already dismissing this. If people wanted to torture the dead, that was their own business. I was thinking about Maisie and sex. I was thinking about what Ryan had said, that they seemed more human during sex, and they spoke. That meant that Maisie could be telling anyone anything. I really didn’t want to try it myself, but I had to know.
I paid my hundred dollars to Yiorgio, one of the Pine Box’s owners.
He was a good-looking Greek guy with long hair in a ponytail and a linebacker’s physique. He looked like someone who would be curt and dismissive, but he was actually very friendly. He spoke with a heavy accent, but he was very gregarious and casual, like paying to have sex with a reanimate was no big deal. He made his customers feel at home, which I supposed made him a good businessman.
The thing with Maisie was awkward. Wearing nothing but a G-string, she came over to stand in front of us. “You want to go with Mr. Walter Molson?” Yiorgio asked her. “He is true gentleman.” I winced when he spoke my name. I didn’t want her to know it.
She recognized my face, but until that moment, I don’t see how she could have known my name. She did not react, and I hoped that maybe the information was lost on her dead brain.
She followed me to the room Yiorgio had given us. I was expecting something unspeakably seedy—a dusty room with cinder-block walls and a stained mattress on the floor—but the space was actually very neat and pleasant, with a bed and some chairs. The room was well lit, the walls newly wallpapered and with paintings of landscapes and fruit and the kind of bland things you see in hotel rooms. The bed looked freshly made. Yiorgio was clearly a class act.
I closed the door, and Maisie stood there looking at me, not blinking. Yiorgio had told me that whenever I spoke to her, I needed to begin the command with her name or she might not listen. I said, “Maisie, sit down on the bed.”
She sat.
There I was in that small room with Maisie. She sat on the side of the bed, her face empty and her eyes as unblinking as a doll’s. She was all but naked, but totally oblivious. She’d been beautiful when she was alive, I knew, and she was still beautiful in death if you liked that sort of thing. But even though I felt the surprising heat of her proximity, I had no intention of having sex with her—with it. She was a dead thing, a corpse made active by some mysterious mad science, and that did not get me all worked up. Plus there was the guilt, I didn’t want to be the sort of person who would both kill a woman and then fuck her dead body. That wasn’t how I saw myself.
“Maisie,” I said. “Do you know who I am?”
She did not react.
“Maisie, do you remember ever seeing me before?” Again, nothing. It was better than getting an answer, but it didn’t put my fears to rest. Ryan said it all came out during sex, and I knew I was procrastinating. I was looking for some other way to find out what I wanted to know, but I didn’t see it. Taking in a long, deep breath, I told her to take off her G-string and lie on the bed. She did that.
I took off my clothes. I’d been afraid I was not going to be able to perform, but I think her nudity and mine were enough to get things going. Her body was strangely warm, almost hot, but it didn’t feel like body heat. It was more like there was a chemical reaction happening just below her skin. And the texture was all wrong. It didn’t feel like skin, and her flesh didn’t feel like flesh. Lying on top of her felt like lying on top of a water balloon. I didn’t want to lick or suck or bite or even run my hands over her. I just wanted to do what I had to do and see what happened.
It was like Ryan had said: She was into it. Really into it. She bucked wildly, grabbed onto me, she grunted, groaned, and murmured. And in the middle, she began to speak. “God damn it,” she said, “you killed me. I’m fucking you, and you killed me. Walter Molson, you killed me.”
I pushed myself off her and staggered backward to the wall. It was worse than I thought. Far worse. By arranging to have sex with her, by putting her in a position where she could learn my name, I had made it worse. I was going to have to do something about this, and I was going to have to do it soon.
The real beginning of the story was two years before all this. Tori’s sister was going through a bad patch with her husband, was maybe thinking of getting divorced, and Tori wanted to go out to California to be with her for a few days. We hadn’t been married all that long, and this was going to be my first time alone in the new house. I loved my wife, and I loved living with her, but I was also excited for the solitude, which I missed sometimes. You get to thinking about it and you realize you can’t remember the last time you spent more than an hour or two without someone else around.
The first night she was gone I was exhausted from work, and basically fell asleep right away. The second night, a Saturday, was something else. I thought about calling up a couple of friends and going out, but somehow it seemed a waste of an empty house to leave it. I was in it for the quiet, for the privacy, and I didn’t want to waste it with socializing. I ordered a pizza, turned on a baseball game, and prepared to enjoy a night of not picking up after myself, of leaving the pizza box on the coffee table until morning.
I took out my bottle of Old Charter, and I swear I only planned to do one shot. Two at the most. I wasn’t interested in getting drunk, and I was sure that drinking too much would put me right to sleep.
But somehow I didn’t stop. The game on TV was exciting, and one shot followed the next with an unremarked ferocity. Come eleven o’clock, I was good and drunk.
Come one o’clock, it seemed to me like a crime against humanity that there was no ice cream in the house, like the UN Office on Desserts was going to come gunning for me if I didn’t take care of things.
I understood that I was drunk, very drunk, and that driving under those conditions was somewhere between ill advised and fucking moronic. I also understood that there was a convenience store not half a mile from my house. A straight shot out of my driveway, past four stop signs, and there you are. No need even to turn the wheel. I might have walked. The air would have done me good, but since the idea didn’t occur to me, it saved me the trouble of deciding I was too lazy to walk. Something else never occurred to me—turning on my headlights.
That was bad enough, but running that second stop sign was worse. I wasn’t fiddling with the radio or distracted by anything. I just didn’t see it, and I didn’t remember it. Wit
h no headlights to reflect against it, the sign was invisible. I had a vague sense that I ought to be slowing down somewhere around there, which was when I felt my car hit something. Sometime thereafter, I knew I had to stop, and after spending a little bit of time trying to find the brake pedal, I did in fact stop. I was a drunk moron, no doubt about it, and I realized I ought to have turned on my headlights before, but I knew enough not to turn on my headlights now.
I grabbed the emergency flashlight from the glove compartment, spent a little while trying to remember how to turn it on, but soon enough everything was under control. I got out of the car and stumbled the hundred or so feet since I hit the thing. My worst fear, I swear it, was that I had hit a garbage can, maybe a dog or cat, but when I approached the stop sign I saw her lying on the side of the road, her eyes open, blood pooling out of her mouth. There was a terrible rattling in her breath, and her upper body twitched violently.
And then I saw the damage to her skull. I saw blood and hair and exposed brain. She raised one limp hand in my direction and parted her lips as if to speak. I looked away.
You never know who you are until you are tested. I’d always thought of myself as the guy who does the right thing, but it turned out I wasn’t that guy at all. In that moment I understood that I was drunk, I’d been driving without headlights, and this girl was going to die. I could see her brain, and I could hear her death rattle. Nothing I was going to do could save her, and that was a good thing too, because if I’d thought I could save her, I can’t say for sure I would have. Even so, I ought to have called 911—I had my cell phone on me—but if I had, my life would have been over. I would have been looking at jail and disgrace. Everything I was and wanted to be would have been done.
All around me it was dark. No lights were on. No dogs barked.
No one knew I was there. In an instant both clear and decisive, I got back into the car, turned around, drove past the girl I had broken, and managed to navigate my way into the garage. Amazingly, I could find no sign of damage on the car. I was drunk as hell, and I knew it, which meant I could not trust my judgment, but to my foggy eyes, everything looked good. So with nothing else to think about, I went upstairs, got undressed, made a vague gesture toward brushing my teeth, and went to bed.
In the morning, hungover and panicked, I went out and looked at my car. Nothing. No blood, no scratches, no dents. To be certain, I took my car to an automated car wash. Then I began to relax.
The murder, as they called it, of Maisie Harper was a big story for about a day, but then there was that category-4 hurricane that started heading our way, and no one much cared about Maisie Harper anymore. The hurricane missed us, but it hit about two hundred miles north of here, and that generated enough media attention to keep Maisie’s name, if not her body, pretty well buried.
Of course, the cops kept working it, and the story made the paper, though only small stories in the back. At first they had no clue who would kill the twenty-one-year-old college student, home for the summer, out for a late-night stroll because she could not sleep. Then the police began to suspect it was her boyfriend. They arrested him, and it looked like I’d caught a break and this guy would take the fall. I cheered the cops on. I didn’t bother to think that he hadn’t done it, that he was mourning for this girl he possibly loved and very probably liked. All I could think about was that if they nailed him, I could exhale. But they didn’t nail him. They let him go, and they made some noise about pursuing more leads. Every day I would look out the window expecting to see cop cars pulling up, waiting to cart me off in shame. The cars never came. They never suspected me, never came to talk to me. There were no witnesses. No one had seen or heard a thing, and eventually the story blew over. In the process, I learned a very important thing about myself. I could do something terrible and live with it, and when the going got tough, I could keep my cool.
When I was done with my hour, I went to see Yiorgio in his office behind the stages.
“You had good time, my friend?”
“I’d like to buy her,” I said.
He laughed. “You did have good time. Ryan, he tells me you have never before been with reanimate girl, yes? Maybe you should try some others before you are so sure.”
“I don’t want to try others. I like that one. How much?”
“You’ve been good customer, so I don’t want trick you. Maisie is difficult girl. She does not always listen. She becomes maybe a problem for you, and I do not want that you come back and tell me you no longer like so difficult a girl. You maybe tell me you want your money back.”
“It won’t happen,” I said. “No returns. I understand the rules going in.”
He shrugged. “So long as you understand. Let me tell you something, though. The reanimates, we give them whatever name we want. This one come, she tell us her name. Would not listen to any other name. Very willful.”
I nodded. All of this was making me even more convinced I had to get her out of circulation. She knew who she was. She knew who I was. I didn’t know if a reanimate’s testimony had any legal standing, but I didn’t want to find out.
“I want to buy her,” I said.
“Okay, my friend. You are very determined, yes? You may buy her for eight thousand dollars. I hope you know this is cash, and all up front. But it includes lifetime servicing.”
Eight thousand dollars was a good price. An economy reanimate from one of the Big Three would cost at least fifteen thousand dollars. Even so, I did not know how I was going to get that kind of money. We had no real savings, no more than a fifteen-hundred dollar cushion at any given time. But I had some ideas.
“I’ll get you the money,” I said. “Soon. Don’t sell her to anyone else until I do.”
“Who am I to break up true love?” Yiorgio asked.
I blundered my way back to my chair. I hardly noticed Ryan was still sitting there until he started to punch my arm and ask me how I’d liked it.
He was joined by another guy now, a regular named Charlie—older and almost entirely bald but for a strip of white hair and a very white goatee. He was well dressed and spoke very deliberately. He spoke like a rich man.
“This is Walter,” Ryan told Charlie. “He and Maisie have that thing.”
I was not about to ask what he meant. Better to just be cool, be one of the guys.
We sat around and talked and drank, and then finally, Charlie turned to me. “I’m having a party at my house tomorrow night. Ryan knows about it, but I think it’s time you joined our circle. It’s the sort of thing a hobbyist like you shouldn’t miss.”
I was going to have a hard time explaining to Tori where I was going without her. She was about five months pregnant now, starting to show in earnest—not as big as she was going to get, but still new enough to being big to be sensitive about it. You try telling your pregnant wife not to get all worked up about it. You try telling her that she desperately wanted to be pregnant, and now she was pregnant, so maybe she should stop complaining about it. Dealing with a touchy pregnant woman who is self-conscious about her appearance makes negotiating with North Korea seem like a pretty sweet deal. There was something about the way Ryan and Charlie spoke that told me that if I skipped the party, they wouldn’t quite trust me, wouldn’t quite consider me one of them. I didn’t know what Ryan might already suspect about me and Maisie, and I didn’t want to give him any reason to worry about me.
Tori was furious with me, of course. I was always going out, she said. I was being secretive, she said. I was one of those asshole husbands who cheats on his pregnant wife because she is now fat and ugly. Of course I told her I had never touched another woman, but she didn’t believe me, which bothered me. I ended up leaving for Charlie’s party with her shouts ringing in my ears and the thin satisfaction of slamming the door.
Charlie lived in a verdant old neighborhood, and his house was massive to the point of being intimidating, probably five thousand square feet and gloriously appointed. Ryan was there, and I recognized quite a
few people from the Pine Box, but even so, it was hard at first to shake off the feeling that everyone was judging me for my creepy interests. I drank too much beer too fast, but that made me sociable, and that made things easy. The beer was served by unmasked reanimates in tuxedos. All of them, I soon learned, were black market. And that began to put me at ease. Charlie had illegal reanimates. Why shouldn’t I have one?
The party had gone on for a couple of hours, and it seemed like just a regular party to me—people talking and eating, taking hors d’oeuvres from trays. Ryan had promised something wild, but I began to think I was missing something. Then, at about ten at night, we all went outside to the fenced-in, private yard. The mood changed at once. It was tense and charged, full of an almost sexual expectation.
Everyone spoke in low whispers. A couple of men even giggled nervously. I asked them what was going to happen, but they wouldn’t tell me. “Better to be surprised,” one said, and then his friend gave him a high five.
There was a big sheet of heavy plastic set out in the middle of the backyard, and Charlie ordered one of his reanimate servants to go stand on it. The thing lumbered onto the plastic and stopped. Charlie told him to turn to face the crowd, and it did so. It looked like it had died when it was in its forties or so. It was a slightly heavyset white man with thinning reddish hair and sad gray eyes.
Charlie turned to his guests.
“Hey, guys,” he said, “this is Johnny Boy.”
“Hi, Johnny Boy!” the crowd shouted.
“Johnny Boy has been a little slow to obey orders lately,” Charlie said. “He’s not disobedient, but he’s getting a little old.”
“Awww!” cried Charlie’s guests.
“What do you think? Should we retire him?”
Charlie’s guests cheered.
Charlie turned to the animate. “Johnny Boy, would you be so good as to remove your clothes for us?”
With the fumbling and mechanical efficiency of its kind, Johnny Boy began to remove its clothes. Perhaps out of habit or training, it folded each piece of clothing, and it left them piled on the plastic sheet. When it was done, it turned back to us, entirely naked. Johnny Boy looked like it’d been killed in some sort of accident: Its torso was all messed up, not exactly scarred, but exposed and purpled in places. Its belly was distended, its flesh swollen, its penis and testicles so shriveled as to be almost invisible. Charlie’s guests raised their drinks and toasted it.
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