by Martin Rose
I wanted to continue my old habits, those physical things we do without a second thought. The way you might lean against a wall and prop up a leg with your heel against it or cross your feet in a casual stance. All these things required new strategies. I was light and unburdened without the flesh, but the cost left me desensitized and hollowed.
“I didn’t expect to see you again. At least not like this,” I began.
We had the room to ourselves. Owen was gone whether I liked it or not. He was young, too young. Was he prepared for what he would find in that basement? There might be children—but would there be anything left of them? And when he got there, would he have the strength to do the hard thing, the right thing? Kill the children he once knew as brothers?
I did not think he had such a darkness in him; I had cultivated evil in my life, I had a talent for killing what I loved. He was still learning those brutal lessons and I feared he would fail that education.
Niko spoke, breaking the thought.
“I had not intended to. I have . . . seen my share of walking corpses. I feared to be the sort of woman who looks for my past in other men, hopelessly seeking a love that can never be returned. Do not feel too badly that you see your son in him. We are always looking for those we’ve lost in other people.”
We were still in the darkness, her back to me as she faced the sink. All of her chores appeared to be done, she had no excuse to turn away from me. I longed to bridge the distance and comfort her, but I had only brittle bones, carrion to offer.
Owen could offer her so much more. Owen was alive, warm, flesh.
“And what about him?” I asked.
“Him? Who?”
“Owen.”
“What about him? Why don’t you come out and tell me what’s on your mind.”
“You seem to like him. And you’ve both been working together, for my supposed benefit, for the past several days now. Long enough to get to know each other.”
Frozen, she broke the stillness by casting a narrow-eyed glance over her shoulder.
“What impressed me most about Owen was how much he looked like you. I remembered when you came to the funeral home, you know. You were a younger man then. You looked just like him.”
“Yeah, that must help,” I said, and the words were bitter.
“Help what?”
“Don’t fuck around. If you like him, don’t pretend otherwise for my benefit. To spare my goddamn feelings. Pity the skeleton you should have buried. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you kept me around to make you feel better about yourselves, like you’re so fucking nice to always be thinking of me, bring me back from the dead when you should have left me to the maggots!”
I’d been holding it in like a writhing snake, but there was nothing left—no muscles, no flesh to bury the anger and jealousy in. It burst from my bones, words climbing out from behind my teeth without lips to snarl with. I invested the one asset I had, my blackened and shriveled lungs, with all the burning rage I could muster, and the words came out like hand slaps.
“I don’t love him,” she hissed. She held a scalpel in her hand. She’d been fiddling with it earlier and now her fingers became white-knuckled around the grip. Hollows beneath her eyes spoke of her long and sleepless nights. “And I don’t love you, either.”
My spine rattled, each knobby bone shuddering atop the other like a set of bricks. Was I really surprised?
“I’m not your lover, I’m not your guardian, and I’m certainly not your fucking mother, and it’s about time you took care of yourself!” she snapped, throwing down the scalpel. It bounced once and rolled across the countertop in a flash of light. With a stomp of her feet, she kicked a gurney out of the way. It ricocheted against the wall, wheels spinning wildly like a broken shopping cart.
“Live and die as you please, Vitus.”
She left me alone in the dark funeral home.
*
Niko was right; it was time I took care of myself.
I waited until night. Then I left the room, searching for signs of Owen. He had still not returned. Walking was difficult. All the joints were accounted for, many ligaments and tendons left intact, allowing me to move in herky-jerky motions. My fine motor skills were lacking, and I would never dance ballet. I took what I could get. I walked like a car without shocks.
I found a pile of my pus-smelling clothes by an incinerator. After a quick search I found my Glock buried inside. I emptied the weapon and broke it apart, examining it like a jeweler with a ring. Dirt in the barrel, faint smell of gun oil. It looked as pristine as the day I bought it so I put it back together, chambering a round. I fished a pack of cigarettes from the front pocket of the useless shirt left in the heap. I looked around the funeral home and half-started with a jump of fear when I met with the knight.
The empty armor struck me as even more sinister now. I leveled the firearm at the helmet, the black visor slit facing off with the hollow gun barrel. I imagined squeezing the trigger, the explosion of a bullet blowing shards of ancient metal apart. My finger bone pressed against the steel before stopping short. With a sigh, I let the gun fall away and set it behind the armor display. My intention was not to shoot, not yet. That would come later. For now I needed answers, not firearms.
I found a shovel in the closet by the door and I hesitated before leaving the building. The world was quiet in the darkness outside, but what would happen if someone saw me? A walking corpse was one thing, a skeleton walking around was a different animal entirely. Did that fall into the realm of indecent public exposure? Could I get ticketed for that? Corpse flesh is the sort of thing someone could explain away, could ignore, and people were adept at creating a hundred excuses to stretch reality back when I’d been sporting my gangrene chic. But a skeleton?
I pulled a cigarette from the pack and lit up with the butt clamped between my teeth. It didn’t matter that the smoke wreathed up either side of my face without skin to hold it in. I flooded my lungs with bitter tobacco and, after a moment of deliberation, hoisted the shovel out the door with me and into the moonlight.
*
The family tombstones stood upright like doors in the light of the half moon. Cool coastal winds breathed in gusts over the land, brutal one second and calm the next. I could not feel the green grass against the bones that now made my feet; any onlooker would believe I was a skeleton ghost from an old folktale—stories they told in rural America about people who rose from the dead because they had unfinished business: lovers they never said goodbye to, wives they still wanted to be miserably married with, and stoves they had forgotten to turn off.
I, too, had unfinished business.
I thrust the shovel by the foot of the first grave: Clayton Adamson. The metal edge sank into the sod with gentle pressure, but the Jersey land was nothing but clay loam beneath, and underneath that, sugar sand. I smoked while I worked, long licks of cigarette fumes ringing my head as though I had risen from Hell itself, still singed from the visit. I inhaled deeply into my black and withered lungs, my teeth pressing into the butt with furious pressure.
It took hours. They don’t dig graves by hand anymore; they hire a guy with a backhoe to rape the earth with noise and tearing. Not dignified, if you ask me, but little about our modern times has dignity anymore. Neither do I.
By the time I dug a hole hip-deep, the moon embedded a corona across the sky at a good pace. I finished my last cigarette with an hour’s worth of digging to go, wondering how I was going to get a new pack of smokes in my condition. A mask? A hood? Perhaps I could scare a clerk into believing I was the Grim Reaper, and I would overlook his appointment with Death if he would keep me in good supply. As I pictured the scenario unfolding, I fell into the rhythm of my pumping skeleton arms until the shovel hit the lid of the casket, sending a shudder through my ulnar bones.
I stopped, setting the tool aside. The bone tips of my fingers trembled; I bowed down to touch the lid. The wood had rotted through and caved in on itself. I pulled away the in
tact slats, expecting to encounter a desiccated, rotted body beneath.
There was nothing.
I plunged my hands into the soil further. If there had been anything, any scraps left of my child, they were here no longer. Surely I had not eaten even his bones? I groaned, and suddenly my fingers met with hardness against rotted fabric. With a gasp, I pulled back my fist, my bony fingers closed around something, and opened them into the moonlight.
Dust.
Decayed, unrecognizable. The last evidence of the son I once had, a prophecy of my own future, once these bones could no longer hold together and time began to dismantle them at the molecular level. Was this my future, what awaited me? Is that what I was still living for?
I dismissed the mess and climbed out of the hole. Frustrated, I shoveled earth back in with long strokes of my skeleton arms, cursing under my breath.
Owen’s likeness to myself was unbelievable, too unbelievable. From the blond roots of his hair to the coffee-mud of his eyes, what were the odds of such similarity? I barely had flesh left to offer for a paternity test, and I dared not alienate the boy by asking for a hair sample. Dust was hardly evidence of my dead little boy, but I refused to accept that Owen was my alternative.
Perhaps my suspicions were misplaced, and Owen was the genuine article. The dust in the child-sized casket six feet below me suggested it. Owen was ready to do anything for me, other than follow orders. How like me he was.
Suspicion continued to hound me. If Clayton survived the massacre, he would only be twelve years old today. Owen appeared to be eighteen, a man. The disparity could not be explained. I had been irrational, my foundations shaken in the basement when I finally confronted Jessica, withdrawing from the Atroxipine and surrounded with a hundred-fold images of little Clayton. I had allowed emotion to rule me, to sway my better judgment.
Here, in the cold graveyard surrounded by figures of stone I could reflect on my confused circumstances, my poor handling of the situation with Jessica. The only asset I truly possessed was my functioning mind, brain matter that refused to rot or decay, but transferred all my body’s resources over to its smooth operation. My mind was the last great asset I possessed; it was time to use my strongest muscle.
Despite my fierce desire to penetrate the mystery, the answers would not come. In a rage, I threw the shovel and watched it roll away into the grass. I groaned and made bony fists of my hands. This is how it would be for the rest of my life—a barely functioning skeleton forced to roam the earth like a ghost.
Forever.
*
I found Niko coming in as the sun rose. I waited for her on the gurney as she swept through. She wore a long black coat fashioned after a nineteenth-century style. She looked like she stepped out of a Gothic music video, complete with sweaty rock stars and scantily clad extras. When she reached out to flick on the lights, carrying a scent of rose oil with her, I stopped her with my voice.
“Please—no lights.”
Her arm fell away. Lips moist with gloss. She set her purse down on the counter and I remained seated on the gurney. She worked quickly, setting up the pump. The smell of formaldehyde permeated the air as the machinery whirred to life, and she put off the moment until she could do so no longer and reluctantly turned to face me for the first time.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d be here,” she spoke curtly.
I shrugged. Two knobs of bone lifted, then sagged.
She unwound the rubber tube, approaching my bones, and I lay back like a sedated animal while she pressed the tube into my viscera, winding through my rib cage, more slats of bone. The steady pulse of the machine began, pumping my heart in time. The sensation was like being tickled on the inside of my body. Drugs racing up the shreds of spinal tissue to circulate into my brain.
Suck. Thump. Suck. Thump.
“Niko,” I said.
She looked up, waiting.
“When we’re done with this dose, I need you to do something for me. It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask you to do, and you don’t need to worry about me barging in on you in the middle of the night anymore. I want you to stay with Owen. He seems like a good kid.”
Her mouth, pouty before, parted like a strawberry sliced in half—warm, red, ripe.
“Look at me, Niko. I’ve been limping through this life, and I don’t know why. I thought it was noble, maybe, to keep on going when it would have been so much easier just to end it. A part of me didn’t want to die. I was twenty when it happened. Is anyone ready to die at twenty?”
A silence spun out between us as I considered that, and then, taking a breath, I pushed on.
“I was young. I remembered being young, held it close to me. That kept me going, for a while. And then after the first couple of years, I forgot. I forgot what a heartbeat sounded like, or how to kiss, or those things that make life relevant, vital. After long enough, I’ll forget everything all together, I imagine. I’ll become like those zombies Jamie swears he’ll never let me be.
“Look at me, Niko. Would you go on, like this? I barely have a body at all. Nothing but bones. I’m a shadow of a man. I want you to finish me, when the time is right. I’ll be here, and promise me, when I say to do it, you’ll do it. You’ll take the scalpel and sever the spinal cord at the base of my skull—”
Unbelievably, she was crying. I didn’t stop, even as I saw the wet tracks spill down her cheeks, wet mascara painting mouse feet at the dark corners of her eyes.
“—and when you’re done, take the head and throw it in the incinerator. I don’t want there to be any chances of coming back. Will you do that for me?”
She bit her lip, tasting salt tears across her wet lips. She remained mute, and I waited for her answer, not satisfied with silence. I needed her agreement.
“Do it, Niko. For me. Give me your word.”
She gasped, like pulling a razor out of her skin, a sob shaking loose from her frame.
“Yes. If that’s what you want, Vitus, I’ll fucking kill you.”
I tried to close my eyes, but then remembered there was nothing to close them with. How can one live like this? Forever staring, with no respite from the terrible images that we may look upon in one lifetime.
*
Empty.
I stared into the empty cigarette pack, white paper, crackling cellophane against my carpal bones. I could not acclimate to seeing my hands without flesh. Our identity is so much more than bones—skin and hair and blood and breath. Here I was without most of them.
And no cigarettes.
The final insult: I couldn’t even smoke. I threw the empty pack, where it bounced against the baseboard wall. Bony fingers tapped frenetically against the counter.
Fuck that. I was going to have my cancer sticks.
I tapped my bony feet across the linoleum, to a pile of sheets on top of a gurney. Cursing, I attempted to untangle them from each other, pulling one out with questionable stains. I tried to sniff them, but without a nose, I failed miserably. Soldiers used to talk about the amputations, the persistent sensation of the limb even after the loss; but the feeling amplifies by the power of ten when you lose everything.
I wrapped the sheet around me as though I were a college boy at a frat party, putting on togas. Minus the alcohol and unnecessary hazing.
I left the room, the door slamming behind me. I would have my cigarettes, by God. I deserved a last meal before I died.
*
“Cigarettes, please.”
Suburban areas always had an odd mix of teenagers desperate to be anything but suburban, aping the urban fashions of their favorite musical artist, or on the other extreme, desperate to align themselves with a southern country sensibility. This kid was the latter, wearing deer hunting camo over his flannel. He had a confederate flag on his belt, I noted with distaste. He could use a good scare.
The fluorescent lights were not doing me, or the kid, any favors. He was a ginger brat, with a ruddy, pocked complexion; the lights expanded my skull, enlarged it to titani
c proportions. Every bone stood out in high relief, every craggy fracture, the deep, ivory lines where my teeth were embedded in my jawbone, the knobby sections of spine connecting from the back of my skull and all the way down like an eviscerated snake.
The kid had been reading a newspaper. At the first sight of me standing before his scratched and dirty counter, his hand clenched, tearing the paper with a snapping noise; a wad of tobacco he’d been nursing in his cheek came to a stop on the left side, frozen.
“You’re a little young to be using chew, aren’t you?” I asked. “And where are my cigarettes?”
He refused to move, staring. His eyes were vacant, which I suspect was no different from his usual expression, but in this case, they were vacant—so panicked he’d lost the ability to engage in logical thought. I suspected this was not a stretch for him.
I sighed and set a ten on the counter. The wadded bill sat on the surface like a curled worm and I leaned over to pluck a pack from behind the counter. The cellophane whispered between my bony fingers and filled me with a thrill of pleasure. Thank God for smokes. It was the only vice left to me. God took away everything else.
“Thanks, kid. Stop doing chew, that shit’ll give you cancer.”
A small shred of tobacco leaked from his open mouth, and he continued to stare after me as I left the shop. When I looked back, I saw him moving to the door to shift the sign from OPEN to CLOSED.
*
Back at the funeral home, I stood in front of the knight.
Picture, if you will, a collection of naked bones staring at an empty suit of armor. The visor a black, horizontal slit, a void evoking terror. The metal plates old and warped out of true; while they had been polished years ago, dust and particles had settled along the surface, giving it a mottled, stained appearance, blackened where metal met metal. I regarded it as nervous as a bridegroom on his wedding day, pacing the floor only to stop in front of it, contemplate it for a few moments, and then pace the floor anxiously again. The carpet in the lobby padded my bone-tapping feet, silencing my presence into a midnight hush.
It was down to me and the knight.