by Karen Heuler
Shortly after a local criminal was guillotined, his head in a basket, a sharply observant reporter noticed that the eyes of the head were slowly closing. He rushed to the head with a microphone.
“Excuse me, Sir, how do you feel?” the reporter asked.
The eyes flickered open and stared at the reporter. There was a slight movement of the tongue.
The reporter was excited. “If you feel pain, Sir, blink your eyes! Blink on a scale of one to ten to tell us how much pain.” He stuck his microphone at the head’s lips. Very slowly the eyes looked at the reporter then closed halfway again and stayed there.
The cameraman was standing by the dead criminal’s wife, conducting his own interview. “How do you feel now that your husband has been executed, ma’am?” he asked.
But what if the head was lying? This was a criminal, after all. What if it was nothing more than a bunch of nerve endings firing off without meaning anything? Go back to the science of physiognomy (about which 40 percent of the population says there is no such science, but 60 percent of the population knows someone or other who can “tell” when someone else is lying) and use its principles to decide whether the decapitated head was telling the truth when it fluttered its eyes.
Physiognomy says a glance to the right means an imaginative thought process. A glance to the left means a recall of memory.
The head glanced to the right. Now, if this were a poker game that would be considered a “tell” if the person did it autonomically in certain situations. Was this a “tell” from the dead head?
In other words, do the dead realize that their opinions still matter?
“Boss?” I asked politely. “Was that what you had in mind?”
“From now on,” he said roughly. “No live segments. We’re going to review your tapes and decide if they air.”
“You didn’t like it?” I was shocked.
“There are no guillotine executions in New Jersey,” he said. “There never have been guillotine executions in New Jersey.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “The people still need to know.”
According to a clairvoyant I consulted, the afterlife is just like this life, only without bodies. The poor are still poor, though this time they are also poor in spirit.
“How does that work?” I asked. “I mean, how can you be poor if there’s no money?”
“Oh, there’s money,” she said. “It just doesn’t weigh anything. Besides, we put the value on things. It’s not like gold has any particular absolute value. We just like it. That’s in this world,” she said. “There are 10,000 worlds, but not really that much variety. Some are physical, some are spiritual. And they all have rich and poor people.”
“What’s the point?”
“No point. It simply is. Of course, you’ll like it better if you’re rich in all the worlds.”
“So we can bring it with us?” I asked. “How do we prepare to be rich in the next life? Is there some kind of investment opportunity?”
I didn’t believe her, of course; I could feel it creeping out of my voice. She was offended.
“You’ll learn that your attitude always goes with you,” she said stiffly.
I rapped on my table just for the effect. “I think I hear some advice,” I said. “Do you know who it’s from? I want to do a background check.”
And she shut up. That was the end of the segment.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are scams beyond the grave. Some people will believe anything; other people will take advantage of anything.
So, beliefs. What are people willing to believe in? Some believe they have come from another planet; some believe they are going to one. Some believe they will gain their enemies’ strengths by eating their enemies’ hearts. Others try to claim the soul by, say, sprinkling water on the head or cutting off a bit of skin.
Almost everyone believes in some kind of conspiracy. Like my boss, I think he’s working against me.
“You can make fun of the clairvoyants—hell, everyone makes fun of those. But what was that crack about stealing the soul? That was anti-religious. That kills ratings.”
“Anti-religious?” I asked, aghast. “I just wanted to point out similarities, you know, parallels.”
“Cannibalism and baptism?”
“I’m interested in the metaphysics.”
“No.”
“No?”
“We’re not showing it.”
We sat together in a companionable way. “Well, what can I cover? That has to do with metaphysics?”
“I don’t even know what metaphysics is in this day and age,” the boss muttered. “But you seem to like death. So I’m putting you in the morgue. Anytime someone dies, you write up the memorial and you find the clips.”
“Let me think about it.”
“That’s really all there is,” he said. “And you may have to do some typing besides.”
I thought about it. I would still be on-camera, I could talk about the deaths of people who were either admirable or famous; I could wear dark colours, which I like very much. I could roam through photo morgues on company time. I could quote from poems about death. I could insist these dead people held interesting beliefs. Hell, everyone believes in something interesting sometime in their lives.
We need work, meaningful work, if we are to remake all 10,000 worlds. This is what I told the boss. “I’m yours,” I said. “But give me a little latitude here. Let me ask how people feel about the death, whether it was the right thing or not.”
“The right thing?” his mouth dropped open.
“Sometimes death is wrong,” I said sternly.
He stared at me and sighed. “You can give me anything you want, as long as you cover their lifetimes. Do it that way: give me their lives, then give me their deaths.”
I was very pleased. “I’ll tell you what I think about your death right now,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I’d like to wait for that.”
People once believed that the image of the murderer was etched on the retina of the victim’s eyes, like a photographic plate. Like a little camera snapping its own evidence. It must have come from all that “eyes are the mirror of the soul” business. The mirror caught the last reflection and saved it.
No, wait. The eyes are the windows to the soul, I think. So what if it works the other way—the eyes record what the soul sees, it doesn’t record what the body sees? No one ever found the murderer’s image in the victim’s eyes, but did they find something else? Did they see bits and pieces of things that made no sense? A line here, a curve there, none of which added up to anything individually? We are always leaving hieroglyphics, aren’t we? Faery stiles, crop circles, Aztec ridges, Nazca lines. Little nicks on cave walls, rocks piled in patterns, dots and dashes. So why not messages for those left behind? It’s hard to break that human compulsion to say one more thing.
What if there are imprints on the eyes of the dead after all, and they form a message when you put them all together? It’s very exciting, when you see a puzzle for the first time; when you sense its solution. Human instinct; human intelligence; the human need to organize information and pass it on. What are polls for but to find the patterns we’re secretly storing? What are books and films and TV shows and reports from all over the world except to find the pattern? Who says we would stop the trail, the interpretation, the insight, the comment, when all is said and done? Those who talk never stop talking. Those who reason never stop reasoning.
So I took the job. The boss said Morgues and I went to the morgues—not the library of clippings that he meant but the actual morgues. I spoke to the attendants, who told me that they kept music on to counter their fear of hearing whispers. They don’t like the silence because it seems to be waiting. But then they laughed and they winked at each other.
I interviewed them myself and I taped them and I took their pictures. They want to believe they might be famous someday, though we never discussed for what.
“Boss, t
his is interesting,” I said. “They dress the dead and take their pictures. They pose them. The families request it. The families of the long-lost ask to see them in a natural pose.”
“Disgusting,” he said. “Wait. Maybe an expose?”
But I won’t expose them. The attendants let me in after hours. They don’t say a word as I open the eyes of the dead and take their picture. I zoom in on the iris, on the retina, I snap them looking back at me on high-speed, on digital. I run home and I blow the photos up, looking for the shapes in the back of their eyes, the shapes that reflect something. Already I have pieced together, from selections of their eyes, the angle of a room, a white room with a doorway and a hall. The doorway has crystal doors, opened and not quite flat to the side. The hallway—I only see a little bit of the hallway and there is a shadow of a hand in it, just beyond the opened door. I can’t see who is throwing that shadow. But I will find it out.
My walls are lined with rows and rows of these photos, the blown-up retinas of the dead. They all seem to be looking in the same direction. And in every one of them, there is a clue.
CREATING COW
“That one looks good,” her mom said, rocking the plastic-wrapped package so that the juices flowed back and forth. It was bright red behind the plastic, cheery almost. Definitely looked clean. Pink and fresh and lovely.
Her mom put it in the cart. Doreen picked it up and poked it. “I wonder if it minds?” she asked, thinking out loud. This past year she had become unable to let go of connecting the meat to the animal. She kept picturing it, eyes wide with terror.
“It doesn’t mind,” her mom said soothingly. “Why would it mind?”
“Being killed. Getting sliced up. Wouldn’t you mind?”
Her mom shrugged absently. “How about some potatoes? Or would you like noodles?”
“Do you think the other packages were the same cow? If I got the other packages, would it all fit back together again?” Doreen touched another package speculatively, testing it. She was seventeen, a senior in high school. She had refused to dissect a pig for Biology.
“Doreen, it’s got nothing to do with you. That’s what they’re made for; that’s what they want, really, when you think about it. Besides, it already happened, it’s just meat now. You can’t put it back together again like a jigsaw puzzle.” Her mom’s voice was soothing but automatic; she was used to Doreen’s nonsense.
“I’ve heard people eat people,” Doreen said thoughtfully, putting a fingertip on the package and poking it. “I wonder how they taste. What if that’s really human meat?”
Her mom wheeled over to the produce department, pointing out fruit to her, covering up the meat with bananas and pears. “That will be lovely, won’t it?” she asked. “Nice for dessert, with ice cream? Bananas and ice cream?” She had a great deal of hope in her voice.
At dinner she served the meat, covered in gravy, with mashed potatoes and peas. She snuck the meat under the mashed potatoes on Doreen’s plate. She knew enough not to give her gravy, the girl was almost religious when it came to animals, but Doreen’s father had gravy and he loved it. He looked away from her, mixing the stuff into his potatoes. Doreen wondered thoughtfully if cooking people made the same kind of gravy?
Doreen generally wore sneakers to school instead of leather shoes—cowskin shoes; she had told her mom last year that she would no longer wear animals. It was cold out and her gloves were good, microfiber. She kept the old leather gloves and the old leather shoes in her closet. She had looked at them last night, considering things. There were all these animal parts lying around, casually, innocently, and no one saw it but her. She was the kind of girl who saw patterns, and who tried to undo the bad patterns; she was the kind of girl who didn’t pretend that today made yesterday irrelevant; she was the kind of girl who never doubted that unpleasant things should be changed.
At school her class was given mice for the year-end science project. The mice were going to be fed different fast-food items. Girls screamed at the mice and a boy picked one up and bit its tail off before anyone could do a thing. He grinned and looked around with the tail still twitching in his mouth. The teacher sent the boy (Wallace, a continuing problem when it came to small animals) to the principal, which didn’t bother him in the least. A janitor came and took the mouse away and wiped up the mess. It would have been gravy if the mouse had been packaged, Doreen thought.
Doreen picked the mouse out of the garbage after school, waiting till everyone else went off racing, jumping and slapping each other. She always preferred to wait till the others were gone anyway and she knew better than to let anyone see her doing it. The mouse’s head was bashed in, but she thought it might be useful, so she put it in her pocket. She had made a decision. It took a first step, weren’t they always saying that? Someone had to stand up for the right thing, and she couldn’t put it off any longer: she was that someone.
On the way home she stopped at the deli and bought five packages of cow. She was a little perplexed, since she wanted to get slices from the same cow. That way, when she put them all back together she wouldn’t have to worry about rejection, which she had read about recently, when they had put a chimp heart into a man. They had showed the chimp being wheeled away, its hand outstretched.
She checked the date-stamp and divided the packages into piles, putting all the same dates together, and she took the pile with the most pieces. She put them in the cart, and the cashier laughed at her—a big eater? she asked—and double-bagged them so the blood wouldn’t run out. Doreen watched her pat each one through the plastic. People were always patting meat.
The bag was heavy and dragged her down a little on one side, but she liked the weight of it; she had seen women carrying small dogs in carriers; perhaps that felt like this. When she passed another store she decided to go in just to check, and they had packages of cow too. Some of them had the same date as the ones she carried, and she thought this through. Sure, if they cut up the cow it would be all on the same day and then they’d send it around, so she bought all the packages that matched the date on the packages she already had. She was thinking of them as pieces of an animal she needed to rescue. She saw things that most other people did not; she made connections that other people ignored; she acted when others stood back.
She got the big sewing needle and thread her Mom used to sew the turkey shut with the stuffing inside it, making it neat and tidy, a process that appealed to Doreen. Making it whole and not empty; that must have given the turkey a sense of relief, if only for a while.
She knew she would have to keep the cow cold, so she began to sew it together in the garage. It was harder than she thought because only three pieces actually fit together with the same shape. She tried to settle on a way of putting the others together, moving them around and up and down and flipping them over, lots of various combinations, but she needed more shapes. She got paper and pen and outlined some of the pieces, and then she went to a larger supermarket, where she was sure there would be more date-stamped pieces. She had always been good with puzzles so there was a pleasure in strategizing.
It was bright and cheerful in the store. The refrigerated aisles hummed, the lights blinked. She passed by the ground meat—could that be something from her cow? Maybe those were the pieces that would have fit? She took out her tracings at the cut meats section and found three packages that might work, but she thought that the ground meat might be useful too, so she took two of those.
She got outside and then scooted around the back, passing the dumpster, where she found chicken feet and some wads of fat, like thick ribbons. And skin! It might have been pork skin, because it was pale, but all animals needed skin, so she rolled it up and put it in the bag, along with an expired fish and some turkey rolls.
It wasn’t that hard, then, putting it all back together. Finding the pieces. She felt like she was doing a great good thing. Wherever the slices didn’t come together, she put in some ground meat. In order to keep that from pushing out again, she
got some gauze and put the gauze around the ground meat and then sewed that to the firm meats. She wrapped skin at the joints and patted it all together gently, as if she were petting a dog or primping hair. She said little words occasionally, to encourage it.
She didn’t know whether it was a he or a she, because she had to take different parts as she needed them from different things. There was the pork skin, yes, and she was inclined to think of it as a he, but as she put the meats together she realized she needed to support it, and so she got some bones (“for a very large dog”) from the butcher. The cow was really a mixed cow.
It had a shape, kind of. It sort of stood up and hunched over. It had patches of hair on its lumpy head. When it oozed, she used plastic wrap to keep it firm.
It had a mouth. She had found a tongue, set on a foam plate and sealed and dated. She had made lips from the gloves. She’d put in marbles for teeth, then replaced them as she found false teeth in a dentist’s garbage bin. She looked for the scarlet bags of medical waste around the clinics late at night and she pulled out a thumb. She had heard in school that what made humans rank high above the animals was an opposable thumb. She wanted the animal to rank high.
She gave it two hearts, still in their plastic sacks. She found a brain and put it behind its fish eyes. And finally she thought it might be ready. She took it out of the cold and let it warm up, braised it with chicken stock, beef stock, minerals and herbs, stood it in a pan of stock, let it absorb some of the vitality, waited and stepped back. She threw in some Echinacea. Maybe an electric shock? An electric shock then, a curling iron turned on and sunk into the stock.
Phffft! The meat jolted upright. Should she do it again? Then it opened its mouth and screamed.
Slaughterhouse scream. Horrible.
It staggered around, lifting its head again, screaming. Doreen, heart pounding, threw juices at it, because it banged around like it was burning, and the juices seemed to help. Not enough skin? She threw all the juices and it stood there quivering, so she got plastic wrap and wrapped it tight around it.