Entropy in Bloom

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  They’ll want to apologize for the worry they’ve caused me.

  They’re used to apologizing, I’m sure. Mistakes like this . . .

  Sweat beads along my hairline. If it runs I’ll get hairspray in my eyes, like some cosmetic company test rabbit. My stomach is not altogether in the right place now. It’s plastic-wrap tight around a belly full of nothing, relocating acid to the back of my throat.

  The phone call has had the necessary effects.

  It’s the unnecessary effects that have me so goddamn confused.

  Moments after I hang up the phone I get this feeling—warm, sweet molasses spreading down the inside of me from underneath my belly-button. That’s the start. Then fullness, a subtle pressure as I expand against the fabric of my underwear. Then my heartbeat heads south, steady, filling me up, exposing my nerve endings.

  The phone call’s natural response should be crying, right? Even with my textbook denial there should be tears at the rims of my eyes, waiting to run down my cheeks.

  No tears. And I need to get off.

  I try to rationalize. This sudden urge is a biological sidekick to mortality. It has nothing to do with Darry. I’m not a whore, not sick. We oppose death by fucking. It’s our weapon.

  But Darry can’t ever know how the false news of his death has triggered this need . . .

  He can’t know how much his death makes me want to fuck. More precisely, how I have never before, not in the recorded history of Elloise, so desperately wanted to be fucked.

  These responses, my denial, my instant want . . . I can see them for what they are, but I can’t shake them. So I stay in motion. I start packing bags for the drive up to Oly.

  The new focus—grabbing my toothbrush, deciding which gas station will have the best mocha for the road, not looking in the mirror, not getting my vibrator out of the closet, picking my favorite towel because I never like hotel towels, wondering how long my sandals can go without falling apart, remembering that Darry is still alive, remembering that mistakes like this are commonplace, getting the gummies out of the corners of my eyes, putting fresh saline solution in my contacts case, not calling Darry’s gorgeous friend Peter, not even thinking about how big Peter’s hands are, not even letting this stream of thought go any further . . .

  STOP!

  Deal with the problem.

  I flop onto our bed and catch a quick whiff of Darry’s sweaty sleeping-boy smell, soaked into our lumpy old goose-down comforter. I’m so used to Darry’s smell that my nose won’t pick up the scent for long. An accepted part of my life. No need to process.

  I undo the top button on my pants. I can’t separate the buckle of my belt quick enough. Reason has vacated this moment.

  My fingers do their work, tracing the paths of familiar sense memory, making my back arch and my stomach tighten. I can’t remember the last time I was this wet.

  I can’t remember the last time I felt this good.

  Slow circles turn to pressure. I close my eyes and there’s Darry’s friend Peter, watching me, lying next to me, sliding one of his huge hands up and down my belly. I can feel the calluses on his hands, an accumulated roughness that Darry’s data marketing job would never give him.

  I’m close to coming and Peter turns into the checker at the grocery store, the one with the jet-black hair and blue eyes, the one that told me about the detergent coupon. His breath still smells like black licorice.

  Behind my closed eyes, far from my desperate hand, parades of men are waiting for their turn with me.

  Hips are lifted, calves are squeezing tight. So close. My body drops back into the comforter and stirs up another wave of boy-smell.

  I smell my boy. My Darry.

  I can’t come.

  The wave crashes that quickly.

  Fucking Darry.

  I try again, try to climb the peak, but now I’m numb. I’m only touching myself now, meat on meat, no sacred shock of nerves. Just a sudden guilt, virus-quick through my system, flushing me with heat. Staring at the ceiling with my right hand cupped against pulsing warmth. Thinking about the last thing I want to acknowledge.

  Darry and I have been together so many times in this bed. Too many times, I guess. That’s why I’ve needed more lately—my fantasies, the images that I’ve transposed onto Darry’s body while he’s inside of me.

  I don’t think he’s caught on. Even with me always turning the lights off beforehand, and asking him not to make noise, and asking him to come in from behind. Even with all my delicate fantasy preparations—these little tricks that allow me to screw another man when I’m married and faithful to a fault—he hasn’t seemed to notice.

  The thing making it easy for me to ignore who he is while he’s inside of me—his weakness—is that he loves me too much. I guess his love is my weakness, too, because the love itself—his fingers running through my hair at night, his hand soothing my sore belly after I developed my first ulcer—is wonderful. His type of true, warm affection is more suffocating and alluring than any hotel fling or office tryst.

  The idea that this lust, even now creeping back through my skin, is suddenly upon me because Darry’s dead and now I’ve got a chance to be with other men . . . it worries me because it feels true. And knowing that it’s wrong hasn’t given me power over it.

  If he is dead, I’m sick. Sick and alone.

  I’m thinking too much. I sigh a long, shaky sigh and can feel myself on the verge of tears now, but I don’t know if I’d be crying for Darry or myself. I just know I hate the delicacy of trembling air leaving my chest.

  In five more minutes I’m in my car, headed north on I-5.

  Even as my right leg becomes fatigued to shaking from the two hundred mile drive, I take comfort in the inappropriateness of my situation; in the fact that I’ve received this misguided message. It’ll make for a crazy story at the least. I wonder how Darry will respond when I tell him that the rear end of a semi-truck tore off his head.

  He’ll want details, of course. To flesh out the morbid fantasy of his own brutal, blood-and-diesel demise. I’ll tell him about this drive—how I flinched at every bit of sulfur-smelling road-kill that littered the roadside, at every tuft of skunk hair shifting in the wind of traffic. How the bright red flashing brake-lights of each semi-truck I passed were fists squeezing my heart.

  Tonight, as we’re curled up in bed together, I’ll lay out the whole absurd affair for him. And he’ll laugh. That’s the easy thing to do. I’ll feel the familiar heat of his breath on my neck, rub my head against his chest, and we’ll both acknowledge this strange truth:

  For a moment, he was dead.

  This is what the world, excepting us, had believed.

  THE CORONER’S NAME is Brad Fuller, and he has hands that could casually palm a basketball. Or a human skull, which must be a more common occurrence for him. He’s tall and butterfly symmetrical. Strong forehead. Wide jaw. Alpha all the way. He smells like nothing because he works in a place that goes to great lengths to smell like nothing, provided you don’t take a deep whiff. Brad’s younger looking than I expected from his professional demeanor on the phone, and I wonder if he’s even past his third decade.

  I’m smiling at him and extending my hand, saying, “Nice to meet you, Brad.” I want to feel the size of his hand over mine. He seems a little off-center, unsure of how to respond to my casual greeting.

  “Good to meet you, Mrs. Broderick.”

  Even hearing myself addressed as Darry’s other half doesn’t save me from the feelings that have returned to my belly. Brad Fuller is politely dressed in a dark blue suit that I’d like to peel away from his skin.

  The fact that I’m standing in the clinical foyer of an Olympia morgue does not make me want Brad any less.

  It should. I know this as a basic truth. But it doesn’t.

  The desires that I’d managed to repress on the long drive up are soaring through my skin now, crashing into my borders, speeding up every breath.

  I’m not letting go of B
rad’s hand.

  “Mrs. Broderick?”

  “Oh, sorry.” I release my grip, feel the heat from his fingers slide off the thin skin on the back of my hand. “My first name’s Elloise.”

  “Are you expecting any other family members to arrive before we view the body?”

  “Um, no. It’s just me. Darry’s mom lives in Tennessee, and his Dad’s passed on. So it’s just me.”

  “Okay. We can proceed unless you’d like a moment for yourself.”

  “Aren’t you closing soon?”

  “Only technically. In our line of work, we can’t assign any set hours to our responsibilities. So take your time if you need to. Chantel at the front desk has already prepared the required paperwork.”

  My pulse picks up, faster now, this time because of the confidence Brad Fuller has that I’m the right person to identify this body. He’s willing to go through with this charade.

  I can do this. I’m not afraid. Go in there, give my negative identification, and head across town to Darry’s hotel. Surprise him with the best sex of his life. Behind my eyes, I’ll be seeing Brad Fuller. Darry won’t care. He won’t know, and I’ll make him feel so good.

  “No, I’m ready to go now.”

  “Alright then . . . I’d like to let you know in advance, that once you’ve made the identification, you can request to spend time with the body, if you want to. If you believe that this is something you want, you just let me know and we can facilitate it. In this case, Dar-ry’s body will need to remain covered, due to the extent . . . ”

  “I won’t want to spend time with the body.”

  “Okay. I’ll take that into consideration. But you can still let me know, once you’ve seen him.”

  Darry’s body. What the hell am I doing here? And I just checked out Brad’s ass. Strong, if a bit high up on his back. I’d love to feel it, love to wrap my hands around it and pull him into me over and over again. If there was ever an apex of wrong place/wrong time, I’m shooting for it. Drowning in compulsion, surrounded by the dead, fantasizing about this stranger in a sharp suit.

  I should be hungry, but I’m not. Should be sad, but I’m not. Should be scared . . .

  I am scared. I stood by my car for twenty minutes before entering the morgue, and now I’m headed into what Brad’s told me is the viewing room.

  The viewing area is a carpeted closet with a window separating it from a tiled room. Two cheap chairs, a 10 gallon trash can with a fresh plastic bag in it, a small wooden table adorned with tissues and fake light blue flowers, and a wall-mounted microphone round out the décor.

  Brad is in here with me, and his forehead shines with sweat even though the room sits at that clinical un-temperature. The sweat reads as discomfort. This is the part of the job he hates.

  He flips a switch by the microphone and says, “Go ahead, Dale.”

  Dale, looking uncomfortable in a gray Sears bargain-bin suit too tight for his many pounds, wheels a polished silver cart into the room. An opaque black bag is resting on top. Dale is sweating, too, with moisture beading on his polished, bald head as he struggles to push the cart in a straight line to the center of the room. No one is looking forward to this.

  The body on the cart, it’s much shorter than my Darry. I take comfort in that.

  The comfort lasts maybe half a second. I remember the words “under-ride.”

  Dale unzips the body bag and reaches into it with one hand, his fingers twitching like latex-coated spider legs.

  I DID NOT WANT to spend time with the body. I didn’t want to stand next to it, or touch it, or hold it.

  I did not want to spend another second in that low-ceilinged, piece-of-shit morgue.

  I did not want to spend another moment looking at that tattoo of my name—Elloise—with nothing but torn flesh and empty space above it.

  I know I didn’t cry, although you could ask me until the end of time what look was on my face and I couldn’t give you an honest answer. Can a face show nothing?

  Paperwork was easy. I left Darry’s mother’s phone number with them so she could handle their questions about what to do with his body. I signed another sheet that let me have his effects, which turned out to be a wallet and some breath mints. His car keys were still in the wreckage.

  I grabbed Brad’s business card while at the front desk.

  Through the whole process, I just sighed. Constant, shaking sighs—contents under pressure. No tears, and I still wanted to get off.

  I’m sick and I’ve pinned a confirmation on alone. The widow, throbbing and numb.

  So now I’m solo and sitting shocked in Room 202 at the Valu-Rest hotel off I-5. The key to the room was in Darry’s wallet. It’s one of those plastic cards that pops in and out of the lock and greenlights your entrance.

  Darry had already been here a day. His toothpaste tube was uncapped, and a towel was sitting in a wet lump on the floor of the bathroom. One twin bed remained unmade—the Do Not Disturb sign was on display when I arrived—and his open suitcase rested on the other, the clothes from inside sprawled across the bedspread. I always admired Darry’s tidiness at home so I’m a bit shocked by the disarray here.

  By the bed stand there’s a half-gone cup of tap water and Dar-ry’s alarm clock from home. He never trusted hotel alarm clocks. Press the over-sized snooze button on one of those and you miss the meeting you traveled so far to attend.

  I can’t ignore the thought—Darry should have hit snooze just one more time.

  My mind flashes on Percy and SHIT HAPPENS but not even a twinge of smile follows.

  Television makes me anxious. Not an option. I want distraction.

  What would I do if today were a normal day? How much better would it feel to be at home now, in bed, drinking an iced coffee and reading one of Darry’s Nabokov books and waiting for him to call?

  But Darry won’t be calling. Darry doesn’t exist anymore. Jesus.

  How alone am I now?

  How hard do I have to deny this entire day to make it disappear?

  I don’t know. I don’t. Stop thinking. Stay in motion.

  I use the bathroom and smell Darry’s musky cologne amidst the stronger smell of mildewing towels and the fermenting, hair-clogged tub drain.

  It’s easy to picture Darry running his morning routine, applying a spritz of cologne to each side of his neck before heading out for work.

  Instead I picture rubber-gloved hands trembling under the weight of dead flesh, pressing into too-white skin beneath the black-ink scrawl of my name.

  I picture myself, doing ninety down the interstate, looking for my own under-ride.

  This is not the way. I may be sick, but I don’t have to be alone. There’s an army of men out there, lining up for me. They don’t know it yet, but I’m available. And I want them all. Right now it might take a legion to fill me whole.

  I’m a goddamned widow. Which isn’t right. It isn’t the way my life is supposed to be.

  A mistake like this has happened to me.

  Darry’s clothes are quickly shoved off the made bed—I can’t bring myself to touch the one he slept in—and I have a seat by the phone.

  Eleven digits, a nine and Brad Fuller’s cell phone number.

  His voice comes through after the third ring. “Hello?”

  Then, “Who is this?”

  I almost hang up. Then I remember the width of his jaw, his broad shoulders.

  “Brad, this is Elloise. Elloise, from earlier in the day. I need someone to talk to. I’m all alone, and I just . . . I’m thinking the wrong things and I can’t . . . ”

  “Do you have any family in the area, even that you can talk to on the phone?”

  “Nobody.”

  He’s hesitating, looking for an out. This call is going beyond the boundaries of his job. I use his words against him.

  “‘In our line of work, we can’t assign any set hours to our responsibilities.’ You said that, right?”

  “Well, yes I did, but . . . ”

&nbs
p; “Please, Brad, please come over. I can’t sleep and I can’t think straight and I’m afraid I might hurt myself.”

  He asks where I am. I tell him. He’s ten minutes away, headed my direction.

  I’m not wearing underwear, just a thin blue T-shirt and a pair of faded, soft khakis. My skin feels too hot, so I turn on the A/C and cool and wait.

  I’M CLOSE ENOUGH TO smell him now. No longer overwhelmed by the morgue, I can really take him in.

  His cologne—Drakkar backed with a hint of formaldehyde, giving me fetal pig flashbacks. He’s been chewing on breath mints, some sort of spearmint.

  My perfume—Arden’s Sunflowers, thinned by salty sweat, slightly undercut by the smell of sex on my right hand, which I hope he can detect.

  He tries to talk to me from the doorway but I turn and walk into the room, sitting on the bed and leaving an obvious space for him next to me. He hesitates, but follows.

  It’s his responsibility to be sure I’m okay.

  His right hand is holding a thin slip of something papery that looks almost like a grocery receipt against the span of his fingers.

  Those hands . . . the idea of his hands underneath my shirt, wrapped around my ribs, forcing me down onto him, it’s flooding through my brain and I can barely remember his name.

  “Mrs. Broderick . . . ”

  “Elloise, please.”

  “Elloise, I brought you a short pamphlet about the grieving process that I think might help you to understand how you’re feeling right now.”

  I doubt this pamphlet can tell me why I’m ready to tear the shirt off the man who showed me my husband’s corpse today. Even if the person writing it understood, they wouldn’t write about what I’m feeling in there. There are truths about this that will never make pamphlet-grade. But I don’t want to understand this experience. I just want to smash it away.

  “Brad, will you sit down by me?”

  He sets the pamphlet down on the coffee-table to the side of the television hutch and has a seat.

  Before he can say anything I shift my body right up next to his and put my head on his shoulder. He doesn’t move away. I start to hitch my body and blow puffs of breath from my nose like I’m crying.