Lesser Creatures

by Peter Giglio

  She knew then that she was glimpsing the past. And she knew whose eyes she borrowed: Glory’s. She tried to make out the words on the page, but then the ceiling fan of her room cut through the fading vision. She felt her stomach churning, a sensation she hadn’t felt since alive. And then a sharp pain pierced her abdomen. Physical pain, real and true. It was then that she became aware of the tears welling in her eyes and tried blinking them away.

  How the hell am I crying? she asked herself. This can’t be real.

  Her vision swam, and she found herself in the car with Eric, time reduced to a slow-motion crawl. The moment before she unlatched her seat belt and jumped onto his side of the car. Around the bend came a fishtailing truck, out of control, sliding into their lane. His focus was anger in that moment, but she saw the threat, had to do something to save them. To save him, the man she loved.

  The fan seemed to force its way back into focus, whirring in rhythm with the steady beat of her heart.

  The beat of my heart? she thought. What the hell is happening to me?

  She closed her eyes, counted to ten, then sat up, taking deep breaths. Deep breaths? Her body was a pincushion of pain, so intense that she couldn’t localize the source of anything.

  She opened her eyes and looked down at her body. Her breasts rose high through the fabric of her cotton shirt. She touched them. Could actually feel them, soft and warm—not the limp things that had hung from her chest for so long.

  She forced herself to stand. Fell back on the bed in agony; pushed her body upright once more, then limped toward the bathroom, her legs screaming white-hot rage. Taking her clothes off was an even worse ordeal, but she managed.

  Her skin was pink.

  She stumbled into the cleansing unit, but rather than pressing the button for the chemicals, she engaged the shower the normal way, like a person. The warm water felt amazing on her skin. She placed her back against the slick wall and let her body slide down, closing her eyes and feeling the sensation—the actual fucking sensation!—of water pelting her flesh. Cleaning her. Making her whole.

  She started to laugh. Stopped. Put her hands to her mouth. Felt her lips, full and wet. Then she felt something even more miraculous.

  Her breath.

  “My name is Monika Janus,” she said. The words were strained, her throat sandpaper dry, but it really was her voice. Unable to contain her joy, she laughed again, staring up into the water, letting it cascade down her face.

  “My name is Monika Janus,” she told the shower head. She splashed a small pool by the drain with her fists.

  “My name is Monika Janus, goddammit!”

  * * *

  After he and Frank Allen had put Monika into bed the night before, he had waved off Frank’s offer to drive him back to his car. The things he’d seen that night had changed him, and the less he had to see of the man the better. Sure, his nuts were in a vice, and he’d move his account to AdCorp. He had no choice. Frank had all but threatened him the night before. Not so much with words as with actions. The man was like a wolf.

  He’d walked to his car after checking in on Glory, then driven back to 913. There, he’d carried her incredibly light body downstairs and taken her here to the church, where she belonged.

  He was used to standing on this stage with hundreds of eyes staring at him. But not now; this morning it was just he and Glory. Attached to the SSA device, she lay in a recliner. Nothing, not even static, emanated from the speakers. Her eyes, vacant as ever.

  He paced the stage, and every glance at Glory brought fresh pain. He wondered a few times if she’d expired, left him here alone. But when he touched her head, she moved a little, just enough to let him know she was still with him. There was still a glimmer of hope.

  He looked around the church, at the monument built in her honor, in her name. And he thought about all the mindless meat puppets he’d championed for her. Had it all been a waste of time? Had he somehow along the way missed the point?

  “This is what you wanted,” he told her. “Your dream.”

  Then he thought back to the two words she’d spoken in death through the SSA.

  Still time.

  Those words had filled him with hope for so long. There was still time for their love. There was still a way they could be together.

  They never had much of a chance in life.

  After that night in the cemetery, they’d grown apart. It wasn’t that she chose anyone else over him. She chose solitude. They hung out occasionally and saw each other at school. Sometimes she seemed happy to see him, other times she acted like she didn’t know him. And through it all, she let herself go.

  She had once been the prettiest girl in the school, but she stopped wearing nice clothes and makeup; would go weeks without washing her hair, days without changing her shirt.

  He hadn’t cared. His love for her was unconditional, eternal, and he continued to seek her approval. Sometimes he received it, other times he didn’t. He savored the sweet moments. He tried to forget the painful ones.

  The whole matter had consumed him in those formative years. He ignored friends in her favor, even when she broke plans or didn’t show. He waited constantly for her.

  And now he was waiting again.

  He kneeled in front of her. This was his real altar. She was his real god.

  Why? he asked himself.

  Because, he answered, she believed in you when others wouldn’t. She saw beauty in the person you were—who you are! She might not have been wired to love you in life, but you were put on this earth to love and look out for her. She’s your mission, your charge, your religion.

  His love for her had been powerful enough to alter the world, to change the very fabric of life and death. Now he had penetrated the veil with Monika. And though circumstances beyond his control had taken his proof of that glorious moment away, nothing could erase the truth of it. Men had won Nobel Prizes for far less.

  But his breakthrough had also been his undoing.

  Monika had given into false love for a man who thought nothing of her. Not true love like what he felt for Glory. And now they were all paying a high price for her obsession.

  He also thought about the reporter and worried. Though it hadn’t occurred to him the night before, he now imagined her waking up at the depths of the dirty river, blind and alone. Spending her entire second life as fish food, her soul trapped.

  Julie Stewart hadn’t been kind to him; that much was certain. But she didn’t deserve that kind of fate.

  He shuddered.

  But where did the blame squarely belong? On that count, he couldn’t help coming back to himself. He was missing something; he could see that now. But what?

  “’Still time,’” he said to Glory. “What did you mean?”

  He waited for the static that would tell him an answer was on the way. And waited.

  And waited.

  CHAPTER 15

  Lazarus Estates darkened the worst part of town. Bland buildings towered from rocky, weed-choked earth, creating an inner-city skyline of smoke-hued decrepitude.

  Eric’s mother heaved a grocery sack from the trunk. “Can you help me with these things?” she asked him.

  Police sirens wailed in the distance.

  “What did you get?” Eric asked.

  “I got their favorites,” she replied. “Ten bottles of Jack Daniel’s and four dozen Triple Burger Supremes from Burger Time.” Her face lit with dutiful pride.

  Eric rolled his eyes, then grabbed a heavy bag. Bottles of Tennessee mash whiskey clanked as he struggled to keep pace. The painkillers he’d taken (leftovers from oral surgery a couple years prior) were helping his headache, and the three glasses of water he’d downed before leaving the condo were doing their part to fight dehydration, but he still felt like shit.

  The tall gray building his grandparents inhabited loomed closer, the stink of death intensifying. As he climbed the stairs to the fifth floor, the stench grew unbearable. Needful moaning and wailing rang out
from every door they passed. But his mother, a wide smile planted on her face, seemed oblivious to the horror.

  She fumbled with the keycard for a moment but finally got it into the slit above the handle. “Here we are,” she said, pushing the door open.

  Grandma hunched in the entryway, her pendulous, decomposing breasts hanging low.

  “Oh, Christ,” Eric cried.

  “Let’s get a shirt on you,” his mother said, leading Grammie into another room.

  The place was a mess. Couch cushions cluttered the floor, tattered newspaper pages—could they even read?—strewn everywhere. And the cleaning crews had just been there yesterday.

  Eric’s grandfather, wearing filthy overalls and nothing else, leaned against a wall and stared into space.

  “Hello, Pop.” Eric placed the grocery bag on the kitchen counter and pulled out a bottle. “Brought your favorite.”

  Dead eyes widened, Pop’s arms reaching out.

  Eric uncapped the whiskey and handed it to him.

  Holding it with stiff hands, Pop poured the booze down his throat, some of it leaking through a hole in his neck.

  Leading Grammie back into the room, Eric’s mother smiled. “So, Mom and Dad, how’ve you been holding up?”

  Disinterested in words, Grammie sniffed the air as she ambled toward a bag of burgers. Pop fished another bottle of Jack from the grocery bag and struggled with the cap.

  “Here, Dad,” Eric’s mother said, “let me help—”

  Pop smashed the neck of the bottle against the kitchen counter. Tilting the whiskey at a steep angle, he guzzled with greed from a jagged edge.

  Grammie chewed burgers, wrappers on.

  “This is a nightmare,” Eric moaned.

  “Hush, sweetie,” his mother reproved. “Don’t they look happy?”

  “No!”

  “Well, let’s put a funny movie in. That always seems to calm them down. We have several romantic comedies around here somewhere, maybe one of those old ones with Julia Roberts. Grammie and Pop like her.”

  “You have to be kidding. Do you think I’m going to sit in this asscrack apartment and watch Pretty Woman?”

  “Come on, Eric.”

  “No. Coming to see them is one thing, but trying to relax in filth is unacceptable.” Then something he and Julie had talked about hit him, and the words came out before he could stop them: “Maybe we should watch Dawn of the Dead.”

  “Eric Quincy Cooper,” she chided. “Where do you find the audacity to suggest your grandparents watch anti-second-life pornography?!”

  “Mom, you don’t understand. Yesterday was horrible. I’m a wreck.”

  “You still haven’t told me about it. Maybe you’d like to sit down and tell everyone now.”

  He considered the couch for a moment—disgusting—then shook his head. There was no sense dodging the truth any longer. He took a deep breath and said, “I lost my job.”

  His mother lowered her gaze, then looked up with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry.” Now her tone was soft and gentle. This was the loving mother who had raised him. The mother who was always sane, who didn’t have to contend with this hell on earth and pretend it was something better, like a retirement community in Florida.

  He put his arms around her while chaos ensued in the background—Pop guzzling whiskey, Grammie scarfing down burgers without chewing.

  “Mom,” he said, summoning all the gentleness he could manage. “Look around you.”

  Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “These poor souls had a good life. We loved them and they loved us.”

  “That’s true, son,” she choked. “Very…true.”

  “Don’t they deserve better than this?”

  She looked down and nodded.

  Eric gestured to the door. “Can we just step outside for a moment? I’ll tell you everything that happened yesterday, and maybe you can help me.”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  He glanced at his grandparents, then turned back to her. “They’re beyond help, you understand?”

  She laughed without mirth and nodded again, a smile breaking through the gloom.

  He led her onto the thin motel-style walkway outside the apartment, the chaos of the complex still looming behind them, and launched into his story. His mother listened while he talked, sometime showing surprise but never interrupting.

  When he finally finished, she said, “You could have told me this back at your place.”

  “I wish I would have. But my mind wasn’t right yet.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, then opened the door and yelled, “Mom, Dad, see you soon.” Then she started away, motioned him to follow. “Let’s get you home,” she said. “Get some lunch in you, okay?”

  He felt better already.

  * * *

  Naked, Monika curled up in a ball on the couch. Pain coursed through her body in waves, ebbing then spiking without warning, and she trembled and cried. But she also relished her newfound ability to feel.

  As her body changed, her mind remembered. Against reason, she knew more than she had any right to. She knew her organs were repairing themselves and that her fatal injuries had been internal. She reflected on forgetting to check the Organ Donor box on her driver’s license, which brought a dry chuckle to her throat. Being a notoriously forgetful person in life had, in the long run, an advantage.

  The Organ Donor second-lifers were the saddest of an already depressing lot. Blind in addition to being dumb. It didn’t matter that they no longer had a heart—that wasn’t needed for reanimation—but they still needed eyes to see.

  She also knew that second life, the whole damned event, wasn’t biological or the least bit natural.

  It was magic.

  And she knew the girl she’d killed the night before was named Julie Stewart.

  These facts weren’t gleaned via this magic, though she was sure some of her insight was supernatural in origin. The interview between Julie and Lingk replayed in front of her eyes on the small TV screen.

  She had turned it on thanks to growing curiosity, doubting she’d find anything useful. When she saw the headline Reporter Missing! and the accompanying picture of the same woman she’d killed, her attention was captured. The interview played several times every hour. Sometimes in bits, other times in full.

  She rolled the information through her mind, and the possibilities were terrifying. She’d already distrusted the pastor before, even in her limited capacity, but now—awareness dawning at an unbelievable rate—she had serious questions about his motives.

  No doubt she’d been some kind of pawn in his sick scheme to win the love of a dead girl, but had he used her to kill the reporter, too?

  She didn’t know, but she would try to find out. It was only a matter of time before the pastor came to her door.

  In the meantime, she’d let her body mend and the television educate.

  * * *

  After an Italian feast Eric never thought would end—his mother bringing him fresh salad and pasta and bread and tiramisu—he put his elbows on the kitchen table and rested his chin in his hands. “I haven’t been this full in forever.”

  She laughed and sat across the table from him. “You look like my baby boy right now.”

  “Oh?”

  “The way you’re doing that thing.” She pantomimed his posture. “Such a little-boy look. I really should take a picture so it will last longer this time.”

  He sat up straight. “You will do no such thing.”

  She threw him a dismissive wave. “Oh, you’re cute like that and you know it.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” he groaned like a kid.

  “And I think you’re doing the right thing leaving that company.”

  “Dad wouldn’t have said that.”

  “Shoot, Eric, you can’t say that. You never met the man eye to eye as an adult. He was a tough man with you, I’ll admit, but he really did you a disservice when he upped and died. Not that he had any say in the ma
tter, mind you, but I think you’d be amazed how much alike the two of you really are. Though, I have to say, I don’t think he would have put up with the shit you have for nearly as long.”

  “Really? I always assumed he put work first in his life.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, Eric, but your daddy had a good boss. You don’t. And times were very different.”

  Eric thought about that for a moment. Was it possible he’d been too hard on Frank? Wasn’t the man between a rock and a hard place with the Monika decision? And weren’t some of his feelings toward Frank potentially sour grapes for achieving the position Eric thought should be his? These were all good questions, he thought, for another time.

  Right now he had his mother’s unconditional support, and there was no angle in playing devil’s advocate.

  “You do owe the man a phone call, though,” she said. “Don’t just pull the old no-show on Monday. Never pays to burn a bridge, even one that looks like it could use a good torching.”

  He heaved a sigh. “And what if he somehow talks me into staying?”

  She laughed. “What kind of Svengali is this man?”

  “He’s not an evil hypnotist, if that’s what you’re asking. But he is a master of leverage.”

  “All right, then speak your piece and hang up on him.”

  Eric chuckled. “You make it all sound so simple.”

  “No,” she said, putting her elbows on the table and resting her chin in her hands. “It’s already that simple, baby boy.” She reached out and tapped his forehead. “You’re just making it hard up there.”

  “I’ve been told I’m hardheaded.”

  “Just like your dad.”

  He smiled. She did, too.

  CHAPTER 16