Dead Boys

by Gabriel Squailia

  The woozy rush reminded Remington of something, from which he surmised that he had, at some point in his short life, been drunk, and that it must have felt more or less like this. “Didn’t it feel more or less like this?” he shouted at a girl with a face like a jack-o-lantern in late November. “Drinking did, didn’t it? When we were—”

  “Don’t say it,” she yelled. “Nobody cares what you used to be. This is better. Death is better. Swill is the best.”

  “Swill is the best!” hollered Remington, tossing back his plastic cup. When he looked up from the stamp at its bottom the girl was gone, and in her place loomed a pile of broken chairs so tall and precarious that it must have taken hours to stack. Looking down again, he found an overflowing coconut-shell in the place of his plastic cup, then lost himself to laughter.

  Time was gone. Time was meaningless. He was standing in the midst of the crowd, swaying, directionless, leaning on the shoulders of Adam and Eve.

  Consciousness surged in and out of him. He poured drinks into the open necks of the headless. They danced on a splintered table amidst the howls of strangers. Performing for a woman whose lips had melted away, he stuffed his hand through the back of his throat and shook her hand through his open mouth. She bought him a drink and he tossed it back so hard it splashed through the back of his head. “Thar she blows!” the woman squealed.

  A child stood on a bar, his skin covered with extravagant mold like the peel of an ancient banana. He was laughing and filling cups from a gourd made of a human stomach. When all were full he poured the rest down his throat and tossed the gourd to the bartender. How old was the child? If he died forty years ago, and he was eight when he died, did that make him eight or forty-eight? Did the years get crammed into his tiny limbs, or would he be a child forever?

  “Pardon me. Excuse me. Hiya! Sorry to interrupt, but do you know where we are?” Remington said to the man beside him.

  “The Alley of the Shadow.”

  “Do you know Leopold?”

  “Yes. Have a drink.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have a seat.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” said a bespectacled corpse perched at a well-populated table piled high with moldy encyclopedias, “time is the problem, yes, and we’re in this mess because we have nothing but time, because the Magnate said from behind his mask, ‘Our time is infinite, now what shall we do with it?,’ and found a solution for all of us in a system of time-debt, a solution for which he cannot be held accountable, for if he exists as a person and not as a moneyed phantom behind a mask, who is he, and more importantly, where? Oh, there he is, over by the bar; he’s taken his mask off at last, hello there Maggie! Let me finish, God’s bodkin, it’s not as if you have somewhere to be; why patience is in such short supply around here I’ll never understand. As I was saying, yes, an economy based around an ephemeral commodity is a danger to whomever uses it, an incomprehensible mess that we can only hope is understood by its architect, for we’re unable, and therefore we spend what we have in a constant rush, before the poor sod whose sentence we’re spending is freed, we drink it away because we’ve come to believe that this impossible currency really exists, because we’re so complacent that we let eternity be reshaped by its artificial pressure, and why? Because our lives prepared us for just this eventuality, and that’s why the Magnate wins, because long before our deaths we’d already been trained to let him. All right then, Chuck, the question you’ve been so patiently interrupting me with, let’s hope it’s a good one, let it rip.”

  “Why thank you, Matthias: since you’ve got this all worked out, tell us, if you were the Magnate, what would the basis of your economy be?”

  “Teeth,” said Matthias, slapping open an encyclopedia to a discolored diagram of the human mouth. “Yes, boys, that’s right, yes, teeth, they’re simple, yet difficult to forge, yes, Issa, that’s right, and we all came down with a mouthful, so it’s fair.”

  “Her teeth?” said a corpse with flesh the color and consistency of beef jerky. He waved a pair of pliers at the woman who was leaning, stiff as a plank, against the bar. “I’ve no doubt they have fillings, Grum, but that’s not in the rules, now, is it?”

  “I say the rules is what you make ‘em, Grim!” croaked his eyeless compatriot.

  “I say that’s anarchy,” said Grim, settling down to remove her wedding ring. “Bits that’s attached are hers by right. You can have her belt, though.”

  “Hey,” shouted Remington to no one in particular, “they’re robbing this lady! She can’t move, and they’re taking all her things!”

  No one paid him any mind. “Settle down there, boyo,” said Grum, pulling her belt free and starting on her pantsuit. “We’ve led her safely from the river to the bar, we’ve bought her a drink for her troubles and another for when she wakes, and she’s gone and had her rigor mortis, all of which makes her belongings legally, ethically, and in all other senses, our property.”

  “They call it the Dead City Welcome, so they do,” said Grim, holding the wedding ring up to one eye. “Lucky you escaped it yourself, lad, or you wouldn’t have those lovely dungarees to trade for swill!”

  “Get you a good rate for ‘em if you’re of a mind to trade,” said the Grum. “Even a back pocket will get you nice and toasty for a week or more.”

  “Hair of the three-headed dog, Alfie. Hey, kid, that floozy at the far end, is she on the fresher side of the expiration date, or have I got worms in my eyes? Send her one from me, then. Old habits die hard, am I right? It’s a pity men don’t. Though you know what they say about hanged men, don’t you?”

  “Have you seen Leopold?” said Remington to a barmaid the color of a deep bruise. “He has a floppy neck. Or Jacob? He’s mostly made of leather. Or Adam and Eve? They don’t have heads, and they were here just a minute ago, but everyone’s gone now.”

  The barmaid slid a drink in front of him with a chunk of rotting potato floating at the top. “A minute? You’ve been nursing that pint for a solid week! You’ll make some new friends, hon, just sit still a few more days.” On either side sat rows of corpses with swill dribbling from their sides. Remington pushed off the bar, leaving the pint untouched.

  Determined to find his friends, he sat down heavily in a puddle to cogitate. Since the only approach he could think of was a random search, he abandoned reason: pulling a bandanna from his pocket, he tied it over his eyes and waited for his drunkenness to subside.

  His mind wandered freely, and over the course of the days his drunkenness began to recede, not all at once, but in waves of clarity that were obviously tied to the prodigious growth of the puddle beneath his folded legs. Nearly sober, Remington prayed, not to any saint or deity, but to his missing companions, Adam and Eve. When his mind was finally clear enough that he could speak without slurring, he voiced his prayer aloud.

  “Dear friends,” he said into his clasped hands, “by the power of your corpses, the underworld begs you: be findable.”

  His prayer complete, he held his joined hands before him like a dowsing wand and stood, putting his faith in his pointed fingers. Within moments he felt a tug, then followed it to where Adam and Eve lay stacked by a publican atop a pile of lumber and shattered crockery. At precisely the moment the headless duo entered his field of vision, they began to lift themselves off of the pile.

  “I found you!” cried Remington, attempting to embrace both his friends at once. “I found you because I felt you. But I can’t feel Jake and Leo. We’ll have to get to them the old-fashioned way.

  “You guys can see through my eyes. Can you hear through my ears?”

  Eve raised one fist and made it nod. Adam gave a thumbs-up.

  “Good! Let’s make a totem pole. I need to be as high as I can get.”

  Eve climbed piggy-back onto Adam, and Remington scaled both of their bodies. From atop Eve’s shoulders, he could see across the pub’s vast floor, where so many sodden souls were spread that he couldn’t do much but stare for a whi
le. “They’re out here somewhere. They wouldn’t get so drunk that they’d just leave us. Would they?”

  Adam shrugged, causing them all to totter. It wasn’t long, though, before Eve clapped her hands, then pointed toward a tiny table across the hall. Remington whooped and hopped onto the floor, leading the gleeful rush toward their companions.

  “Ah, there you are!” said Jacob, holding up a plastic replica of a golden goblet. He and Leopold were seated at a scarred air-hockey table with the map spread out before them, kept safe from Jacob’s drink by Leopold’s deft fingers. “Poldy here was just saying that we should give it a count of thirty before we left you behind, but I convinced him to give you a full minute. You had seven seconds left.”

  “Believe nothing this one says,” said Leopold. “When I finally bullied him into admitting that a drink to the mysterious task ahead could only bolster his spirits, he revealed a sense of humor that may soon cause you to long for his tight-assed sobriety. I’d invite you to sit, but we were barely able to liberate these.” Jacob was seated on a wastebasket, Leopold on a log, and there were no chairs anywhere in sight. Adam and Eve, dissatisfied with this state of affairs, made a seat of flesh and bone by bending down and grasping one another’s wrists, which Remington sat upon with gratitude.

  “It’s a little unholy, what you three have going,” said Leopold, standing unsteadily. “In principle, I approve, but in practice, I’ll have another drink.”

  “So far, Remy,” murmured Jacob, chugging his goblet. “We’ll go so far!” And then he passed into a reverie so near to dreaming that Remington grew worried. Now that he wasn’t drunk any more, he could see how easy it would be for the company to accidentally remain in this very bar, at this very table, for the rest of eternity.

  When Leopold returned, he set three sloshing drinks on the table and adjusted his head, which had been hanging on one side of his broomstick. “Well, this place has gone to the vultures!” he said. “Just now I collided with a giant lunk of a corpse who seemed to believe such a mistake could reasonably be answered with fisticuffs. ‘You’d best proceed posthaste to the Plains of War,’ I told him before he had the chance to swing. ‘The advantages will be threefold: first, the dry desert air will preserve your bulk before it turns to blood pudding; second, you’ll cease to bother those of us who prefer to spend eternity enjoying our immortal good looks; and third, you’ll find yourself in company you can comprehend, surrounded by other brutes who find the prospect of pounding one another to mulch for centuries on end appealing.’ He thanked me for the insult, if you can believe it. Why, to such a brute, I daresay the Plains would be like Heaven!

  “In any case, here are the drinks, which haven’t lost a drop. Now, what shall we toast to?”

  “We drink,” said Jacob, “to the Living Man.”

  “To the Living Man!” said Leopold. “To Saint Nick and his rotting reindeer! To Twice-Dead Lazarus and the lotus-scented carcass of Buddha!”

  “To the Living Man,” said Jacob, “and the path we’ll walk when we find him.”

  “Cheers!” said Remington, and they drank.

  “Hold on a mo,” said Leopold, “you weren’t serious, were you?”

  “Of course I was,” said Jacob. “Finding the Living Man is the whole of our purpose in the Tunnels.”

  “You’ve hired me to help you find a character from a fairy-tale? Why, Jacob, what a delightful little delusion! A pity for you, since a man can only follow a fantasy to its dissolution, but at least it will make a decent barroom tale of your otherwise flavorless existence.”

  “Why’s Leopold poking fun at you?” said Remington.

  “For the same reason a sheep bleats. You must understand that the average citizen treats the tale of the Living Man as an urban legend. I first heard the popular version soon after I’d opened the shop, when a client said to me, ‘Freshen me up, Jacob: make me feel like the Living Man for a day.’ To put her at ease (since your average corpse is nervous as a virgin when under the knife, and will talk about anything for the sake of distraction), I asked her what this figure of speech referred to.

  “‘He’s just what he sounds like,’ she said: ‘a man from the Lands Above who found his way down without dying.’ His story, as most citizens know it, is a corruption of the Orpheus myth. The Living Man was a newlywed whose bride died on their honeymoon; driven insane by grief, he glimpsed the veil between worlds, which he crossed with the aid of the devil.”

  “Nonsense!” said Leopold. “He sang a song so heart-rending that the veil between life and death parted right there in their honeymoon suite. He bounded from a heart-shaped bed onto the peak of Bald Mountain.”

  “In another version he’s a scientist who builds a machine to open an inter-dimensional portal,” said Jacob. “But regardless of his method, our mourner made the passage and found himself in an inhospitable underworld with no idea how to find his beloved. Lost and despondent, he began to search Dead City, armed only with her name.

  “The trials that follow make up the bulk of the story, and only exist to show off the features of our decrepit metropolis in ways that mock the limitations of the living.”

  “Why, those are the good parts!” said Leopold. “The best is the bit at the end where he’s lost in the Tunnels and maddened by thirst. After he runs out of piss, he downs a cup of swill, which sends him around the bend; he ends up mistaking a barmaid whose brains are leaking out of her nose for his sweetheart, and drinks himself to death trying to catch her eye.”

  “Thus ends this ignoble tale, full of anachronisms and Dead City in-jokes, and thus the greatest explorer the worlds of life and death have ever known becomes a laughing-stock.”

  “And why not?” said Leopold. “What about this quaint little tragedy makes you think there’s any truth in it?”

  “Nothing, on the face of it,” said Jacob, “and in fact I had put the story out of my mind until I came across a peculiar piece of evidence.”

  Removing his knapsack, he pulled a plastic vial from one of its pockets. Remington examined it with particular care for the benefit of the headless, then passed it along to Leopold, who rattled its contents and snorted. “This could be anyone’s. I myself have ten of them.” Inside the vial was the tip of a pinky finger, its flesh and nail blackened around a brilliant white core of bone.

  “The day that I came across this artifact,” said Jacob, “was in the midst of a curious season that Leopold will no doubt recall: for several months, the River Lethe dwindled to a muddy stream, and its current brought no corpses into the city. Old-timers told us of past droughts and insisted that the river would soon be restored, but the city succumbed to a lassitude that concealed the panic in its heart. Precious little flotsam floated in, and the scavengers sat idly on the quayside, while rumors of the Magnate’s bankruptcy quieted the action at Caesar’s to a mere rattle. For months I received not a single client, and since this was before Shanthi’s tenure, I couldn’t leave without risking a squatter.

  “I don’t expect you to understand what transpired in my flat, left alone with my own thoughts for such a prolonged period. How I coped with that—nothingness.” He drank deeply, thumping the cup down hard enough to slosh. “Suffice it to say that was a trying time, and one that led me to think, time and again, ‘You must find a purpose, Jacob, before you tear yourself apart!’ And that was when I heard the voice, caroming off the buildings for hours before it reached my window, rendering sensible the single word it had been chanting: ‘Blessings!’

  “Recklessly excited by the sound of a human voice, I rushed to the window and invited the salesman up. Into my flat climbed a mountain mummy, a man patient enough to sit atop Bald Mountain until he’d dried out entirely, his bark-like flesh lending him an ascetic air despite the portable storehouse of charms, trinkets, and amulets strung around his neck with knotted scraps of shoelace. ‘Blessings,’ he said, time and again, ‘blessings,’ showing me object after object, observing the mess I’d made of the flat with a keen eye.
‘You are need of blessings. I sense—wait—yes. Yes! I sense—loss. Great loss. You have lost—someone. Very close someone.’

  “I could only stare at him, astonished by the idiocy of his tactics, but still more astonished that they comforted me. ‘I—suppose I have,’ I whispered, so near to the end of my rope that I was only vaguely aware that this carnival-psychic’s argument applied to every last soul in the underworld.

  “‘The loss,’ he said eagerly, ‘invites the soul-maggots. You know soul-maggots? You have the fat ones.’

  “‘Fat soul-maggots,’ I pronounced.

  “‘This one, he is small, but very powerful spirit.’ He held up a discolored rubber frog strung on a length of fishing line. ‘Named Bimby the Voracious. He eat them up. Snap! Make your maggots go away. Your crazy go, too. Make you whole.’

  “Even in my weakened state, I thought this was a bit much, but I didn’t have the strength to dismiss him. Instead I attended to his every guttural word, willingly feeding him those small details about my existence that he needed to perfect his pitch. At last, having exhausted both his repertoire of invented maladies and his stock of worthless tchotchkes, he knelt, digging deep into his tattered cloak. ‘Let us be honest, Yacob. You need not many cures, but one. All these maladies can go at once. Curse of the river-ghast. Poof. Bone-blight. Poof. Even soul-maggots. Poof, poof, poof. All will be gone if spirit is healthy. Awake. Strong. But now? Spirit of Yacob—is lost.’ He pulled a small object from the folds of his cloak, keeping it covered by his knotty fist. ‘One man can find it. Find you. And point the way. From now until end of eternity. Make you free.’ He opened his palm and held out this vial, swinging it around until the tip of the finger was pointing directly at the husk of my heart. ‘Make you stop searching for him you’ve lost. Find true path instead. The Living Man knows how. This is the last piece of his corpse. Last, and most powerful. Always point the way forward. Forever. So tell me, Yacob, how much forever is worth to you?’