Suicide Souls

by Penni Jones

  “There are some emergency tactics that you don’t know about.” Edgar leans forward and gives me the information he should have told me ten years ago.

  Chapter 4

  Naomi

  Fucking Edgar. He could have rushed things along for Luke and didn’t. Now we’re all in peril and my second chance is delayed. Fucking Edgar. Apparently, it’s best if we figure things out for ourselves. Something about ingrained lessons, blah, blah. But surely, he could have given the poor guy some hints.

  So now I’m here with Luke. What’s weird is that if we had both lived, we would be the same age. But he still looks like a kid. His hair is to his shoulders, and he’s tall with a lanky gait that would have changed in a year or two if he had just held on. He’s wearing a Tom Waits T-shirt with those baggy shorts that go below the knees. And, of course, suede skater shoes. It’s quite the flashback for me. It was around his age that I decided to never return to my hometown. My parents had moved across the state for my dad’s job, and I denounced everyone I went to high school with. Including Ruthie Mae. I never wanted to step foot in the farm town again. I don’t know why I assigned it as the root of my problems. Maybe it was an easy scapegoat.

  “Can I ask you something?” He tilts his head sideways, looking like a puppy in need of a haircut.

  “Sure. Not like I have anywhere to be.” We’re camped out in the living room of the shit-box house his parents live in. The same place where he grew up.

  “Why are you dressed like that?”

  “Like what?” I know what he means, I just want him to say it. To have the nerve to tell me I look like a slut, then maybe he can move this shit along.

  “Like a barefoot stripper?” It’s a question instead of a firm statement of fact, but I’ll take it.

  “The night I died, I went to a party with my best friend, Eliza.” It feels good to talk about this out loud after being mostly in isolation for a year. “I was sad, so she talked me into wearing this attention-grabbing dress, so guys would notice me and maybe I would take one home and I’d be too busy fucking to be sad. Fortunately, I took off the horrible shoes before I laid down to kick up daisies.”

  “I guess your friend’s plan didn’t work out.” Luke tucks his hair behind his ears, and I know it doesn’t feel the way it felt when he was alive. Nothing does.

  “No. And now I’m stuck in this until I get my new body.”

  One of my favorite possessions when I was alive was a mink and leather coat that I bought from a hospice shop, a thrift store filled with stuff from dead people’s homes. I waited until the coat dropped from $300 to $100. Even $100 was a stretch, but I knew it was worth it. This beautiful coat once dearly loved by a 1960s housewife. She probably smoked skinny cigarettes and wore rubber gloves when she scrubbed the toilet. And then she was dead, and her coat was mine.

  I wonder if it went to another thrift store. And some twenty-something is wearing it in a bar right now. Maybe it’s getting beer spilled on it by some asshole trying to get in the girl’s pants. Or maybe it’s still hanging where I left it, forgotten. I should have been wearing it when I died. That way I could curl it around my body now like a cocoon made from dead animals. Sure, it wouldn’t feel the same, but it would still be comforting.

  We’re waiting for his dad to get home from work. His mom has passed through the room a couple of times, always humming some old hymn to herself.

  “For what it’s worth, I think you look pretty,” he says and looks away.

  “Thanks. That’s really sweet.” No one has told me that in a very long time. Even the night I wore this dress to the party I was told I was “hot” or “sexy.” Not “pretty.”

  “I’ve been on my own a long time.” He tucks his hair behind his ears again.

  “I know.” I put my hand on his shoulder. The temperature shift makes him jump a little, but he relaxes quickly.

  “I’m not trying to be a pervert or anything, but I wish I had paid more attention the last time I had sex.” He doesn’t look at me. “I wish I had committed every touch and every kiss to memory. There just wasn’t any way to know that it would be last time”

  “But maybe it wasn’t. That’s why we have to get this done. So we can move on to our new bodies and try again.”

  Luke smiles a smile that looks almost like a frown. The smile of doubt. I’m familiar with it because I’ve done it so many times myself.

  * * *

  Luke

  Naomi’s hand feels warm on my shoulder, almost like a ball of light. I had been alone so long that I forgot what touch felt like. Not that it felt like this when I was alive, but it’s close enough.

  “How do you think we’ll find vapid bodies?” she asks as she removes her hand from my shoulder.

  I want to beg, “No. Please touch me. I need it.” But I don’t. She doesn’t seem the type who finds desperation attractive.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it. I’ve been too busy trying to make my dad cry.”

  “What do you think about when you’re waiting around for him, then?” She narrows her eyes like she’s trying to work out a puzzle.

  “I try to remember song lyrics, passages from books.”

  “Look, I understand losing hope. That’s how I got here in the first place. But you have to think about the future or you’re not going to have one.”

  “Why do you want one so bad? Life sucks, Naomi. How have you already forgotten?”

  She shrugs and says, “I guess I just want to give it one more shot. I failed. I failed at life and failed myself and I think maybe I can figure it out this time. Do you think Oblivion will be better?”

  “What if Oblivion is the absence of pain?”

  “I’ve been on my own for a year and they stick me with Sylvia-fucking-Plath. This sucks.” Naomi stands up and marches toward the kitchen.

  “What are you doing?” I don’t get up. She can’t really go anywhere. At least I don’t think she can.

  “Look. Do me a solid and at least try to make this work. You’re standing between me and my new life. If you don’t like things the second go around, then off yourself again and disappear.” She crosses her arms over her chest, those perfect round boobs, and I once again I find myself wishing for a boner.

  “Okay,” I say. No one’s asked anything of me in a very long time.

  “Is your dad the last one?” She walks back over to me and sits down with her back against the wall. We’ve been here all day, I think.

  “Yeah. Should be.” Maybe. Maybe not. “There might be one more. I’m not sure.”

  “One more?” Her eyes grow as wide as an anime character.

  “I was sort of seeing this girl. Her name is Daisy. I haven’t seen her yet. But I don’t really know if I’m supposed to.”

  “Were you two fucking?” I never knew a girl who used the word “fuck” so loosely when I was alive. It’s taking some getting used to.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m pretty sure you’ll have to watch her grieve. Even if things weren’t serious it had to have messed her up when you decided to stick a gun in your mouth.”

  “What if you’re unattractive?” I ask as soon as the question pops in my head.

  She glares at me and says, “Excuse me?”

  “What if you’re not pretty and don’t have a great body?” It’s never occurred to her. I can tell by the way the question seems to slide down her face.

  “I’ll figure it out. I’ll learn how to dress for my type. I’ll figure out the best hair and makeup for my new face.” Her bravado is diminishing.

  “What if you’re aggressively unattractive and there’s nothing you can do about it?” I don’t know why, but I’m suddenly overcome with an urge to crush her. To make her understand that nothingness might be preferable to trying again. To living day after day in this miserable shit pile called life, pretending to smile when you’d rather punch everything you see.

  She turns her face to me and inches closer. I would be able
to feel her breath if she had any. “There’s always something you can do. Always. But maybe it would be nice to not be sexualized by every man who views my tits as permission to call me ‘sweetheart.’ Maybe people will think of me as someone who has autonomous thoughts instead of just blonde hair and a big rack.”

  Wow. It’s almost like I’m having ghost-pains for an amputated limb, but in the form of a ghost-boner.

  “Why the fuck are you still here?” she asks.

  I don’t understand the question. She knows why I’m still here. Is she trying to get back at me by rubbing my face in my failure?

  “Because I haven’t finished grief watch?”

  “That’s not what I mean, dingus.” She shakes her head. “You were so desperate to get away from here that you shot a gun INTO YOUR MOUTH. Why the actual fuck have you not finished your grief watch if for no other reason than to get out of here?”

  My mom walks past us into the kitchen. She turns the oven on for the preheat cycle, which is as long as one sitcom episode.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it seemed easier to accept this as my fate.” This. Listening to my parents talk about dinner and watching my dad drink beer. What is wrong with me?

  Chapter 5

  Naomi

  This is more boring than Jamie’s house. More boring than my parent’s house where contemporary Christian music played from a speaker on the bookshelf all day long. Much more boring than Eliza’s, where I could at least watch reruns of Friends. The only upside is I’m not alone, though Luke isn’t very entertaining.

  “Did you live anywhere else?” This place is a disaster. It’s the kind of home that’s always on the verge of being uninhabited. Not necessarily abandoned but given up on. No happiness ever happened here.

  “Just the college dorm and then an apartment. Neither was any better than this place,” Luke is counting the faded orange flowers on the wallpaper.

  I grew up in a brick, middle-class home with taupe walls and a dedicated powder room. Before I died, I lived in a decent apartment. It wasn’t fancy, but I decorated it with the best furniture and art I could find at the thrift stores and Target. There is a rush that comes with beautifying a living space on a small budget. I don’t think anyone has ever told Luke or his parents, though.

  “Thirty-two!”

  “Shit.” He starts over at one.

  It’s mean, but after that unattractive bullshit, he totally deserves it.

  “You died before the internet got good. You died during dial-up.” I don’t know how long we’ve been here. I don’t know if it’s possible to lose my mind after I’m dead, but I’m starting to believe it is.

  “It got better?” He looks at me with his eyebrows scrunched together.

  “So much better. But also worse because it was a constant distraction and a constant source of misinformation.”

  He nods and turns back to his faded orange flowers.

  “Twenty-eight, twelve, thirty-seven.”

  “Would you please stop that?” He sighs and stomps, or at least tries to do both but neither really turns out right.

  I would kill myself all over again to get out of this house. It’s a wonder he made it to the age of twenty.

  “What did you expect to happen when you blew your brains out?” I ask.

  Luke stops counting again. This time at one hundred and ten. He’s made it past two hundred a couple of times.

  Maybe his dad moved out when we weren’t watching. Maybe we’re in the wrong place, bored and waiting for the creepy Death Shadow. Maybe we’re not even dead and this is all just a dream like a reverse Jacob’s Ladder scenario.

  I had no idea that death would be so boring.

  “My mom took me to church when I was a kid. Dad was usually too hungover to go. All those stories about God, this grandfather figure who took care of us in life and death. I don’t know if I still believed it when I grew up. But I wanted to. I thought there would be peace on the other side. A kind of permanent Zen.” His eyes are a shock of aquamarine, and I don’t know how I didn’t see that before. “You?”

  “I didn’t really think it through. But I liked the idea of some sort of Zen.”

  “Maybe the darkness is the Zen.” He starts counting again.

  * * *

  Luke

  Naomi doesn’t see the Shadow behind the curtain. Maybe it’s only for me, and she’s not privileged enough to feel its constant threat or subtle pull.

  “I’ve jerked off in every corner of this house.” I don’t know why those words come out of my mouth. It’s a surprise revelation, and now I have someone to tell these things to.

  “Of course, you did.” Naomi sits crossed-legged on the floor, humming the theme song from The Muppets. “I caught my brother fucking a pack of lunchmeat once.”

  I struggle for a response and all I can offer is, “He didn’t take it out of the package first?”

  My dad finally walks in the house. He throws a duffle bag down, and I’m glad to know that he has been gone for more than a day. That my concept of time isn’t so destroyed that it’s only been an hour in this room with Naomi and her snark.

  “He’ll grab a beer or six from the fridge. Then he’ll sit down.”

  Naomi stops humming and looks at my dad. “No offense, but he looks gross. I bet he smells like beer and Gouda.”

  My dad would never, ever eat Gouda. Far too exotic for his Velveeta-loving pallet. But there’s no use saying that. There’s work to do.

  “We need him to turn on the TV or radio,” I say, even though Naomi knows this. Edgar told us the same things at the same time.

  We can’t turn on the TV or radio ourselves, but once one of them is on, we can manipulate the energy. So Edgar says, anyway.

  “I grew up in a house with Jesus on the cross pictures, too. But my parents didn’t drink.” Naomi stands up.

  “Only my dad drinks. The Jesus décor is my mom’s touch.” The battle to save his dad’s soul rages on long after my demise.

  “They raised you with two theologies: Christianity and alcoholism.”

  “It’s almost like we were a multi-cultural family.”

  Dad grabs three beers and kicks his shoes off in the kitchen. His worn leather recliner accepts his droopy fat ass easily.

  “Which will it be? The TV or radio?” Naomi asks.

  “TV. He likes to drink and doze off in front of Fox News.”

  “Did you have a roommate in college?”

  “Yeah. A pothead named Donnie. We moved from the dorm into an apartment together about six months before I died.” Trevor and I had planned to live together in college. That plan changed when he didn’t live long enough to graduate from high school. Donnie was a decent compensation prize. He shared his Vonnegut books and Buddhist ideals. I looked up to him in that way a man recognizes a more experienced man.

  “Did you do it here or there?”

  “There.” Dad grabs the remote from the plywood end table next to his recliner. “Donnie and his mom had to scrub my brains from the wall.”

  “Did you have to watch?” She looks almost excited by the idea.

  “No. I listened as he described it to his therapist.” Dad turns on Fox news. Now we have to figure out how to do this. “Donnie kept talking about the smell. He was really hung up on that.”

  “I’ve never thought of brains as having a smell.”

  “It was my blood and tissue and all that stuff that’s supposed to stay inside the body. Donnie said he could taste the smell for a long time.”

  “How long?” She puts her hands on the TV.

  “I don’t know.” I put my hands over hers. The pleasant warmth follows.

  “Manipulating energy, right?” she asks.

  “That’s what Edgar said.” The Shadow moves across the living room floor, waiting for me to fail.

  “What’s it going to be?”

  What show, what commercial, what jingle? What will shake my dad out of this apathy over my premature death?

  “I
was learning to play guitar in high school. I played ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ about a million times. He hated it.”

  She smirks and says, “Oh, Luke. You didn’t live long enough to stop being a cliché.”

  “Like a pretty girl choking down a fistful of pills isn’t a cliché?”

  “That’s a fairly subjective question.” She looks down to the TV and looks back to me. “I’m trying to save your ass. You better be concentrating.”

  Both of us with our hands on the TV, thinking about Nirvana, trying to bend airwaves to our own demands. I don’t know how long it takes because I don’t know how long anything takes these days. But something happens. But it’s not from the TV. The song blares from outside. It’s a car radio, tinny and distant. The car is at the stop sign in front of our house. Kids with the windows down, blaring their music with a complete disregard for the residential neighborhood. Or maybe they’re self-absorbed enough to think that they’re doing these people a favor by giving them a great song in the middle of their mundane day.

  But it is a favor, isn’t it? They’ll just never know what type.

  My dad stands up faster than I’ve seen him do since I was ten and threw a baseball in the house that sailed through the bay window. At least I tried to be sporty.

  He walks over and pulls up the blinds so quickly they make a ripping sound. He sees the car full of teenagers and puts his hands flat on the glass. His forehead follows, leaning against the hard surface that’s probably cold but I don’t know for sure. Dad’s body starts to jerk, small spasms in his back and shoulders. Plump tears roll down his face.

  “That’s how you do it,” Naomi whispers in my ear, and I can feel it. Actually feel what seems like breath down my neck. “Kiss this dump goodbye.”

  The pull starts, this time in my ear where Naomi’s breath is still warm and moist.

  We’re in a mobile home now. A trailer with plastic on the windows to seal out the winter.