Project 137

by Seth Augenstein

  “Migraine?” I said.

  “A weird one,” she said. “Just part of the morning sickness. They weren’t kidding about these hormones. It’s like being possessed.”

  She popped two tablets, then washed them down with a tiny bottle of water. She dabbed at the edges of her crimson lips with a napkin. She applied more lipstick to the smeared spots. She did this meticulously, with the precision of an artist, in the reflection of the visor’s mirror. I changed lanes again and slowed as our exit neared. I had to say something to her. Something soothing, at that moment.

  “So why are we going to be bad parents?” I said.

  She capped the lipstick, puckered her mouth, and closed the mirror.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s such a huge responsibility. And watching you turn green in the hospital at that appointment…”

  “Hey, that was just a momentary case of…”

  “I know you, Joe Barnes,” she said. She touched my thigh. “You had no siblings, you lost your family so young. You haven’t experienced these things. It’s not your fault.”

  Silence, for a moment. She continued.

  “All I know is we’re bringing another human into this world. And for some reason, I feel impending doom. It’s like those premonitions people get before a big heart attack. Things have been going crazy—all those patients dying, then that outbreak, then the plane crash at the school. You lost your job. The world is spinning out of control. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

  Before the traffic light at the top of the exit ramp, I steered the car over to the shoulder of the road. I put the car in park and turned to her. I reached for her hand. It was clammy and cold, the skin raw and rough, but I held it fast. I had to.

  “Dear,” I said. “We’re ready to do this. We might be nervous, the world might be insane. But it’s always a crazy place, this world. We love one another, and we’ll love our child. And that’s all anyone can ask for.”

  She smiled. A tear trickled down her cheek. She gazed again into the mirror and dabbed at her face, pulling out another tool from her bag to work at the newest blemish.

  “You’re right, Joe,” she said. “I guess it’s just hormones. They’re so…overpowering sometimes. I just want everything to be so perfect, but there’s always another loose end.

  “I get this vision sometimes right before I fall asleep,” she continued. “Total darkness, except a dangling rope in front of me, whipping in the wind. It comes apart. I fix that strand, but then other braids unwind, and I can never stop the wind from working its invisible fingers at the knots holding everything together. The rope frays, undoing everything. Chaos wins out.”

  She breathed. She shook her head, swinging her hair braids.

  “I have no idea why I see that rope. Christ, I sound like such a nutcase,” she said, closing the mirror.

  I glanced over at her, looking for the signs like she was getting bad again. This was the way she talked when she got bad.

  “Dear,” I said carefully, “is this different than when you got back from the Middle East?”

  She turned to me.

  “Yes, Joe,” she said. “That was trauma. That was PTSD. My soul had been ripped to shreds. This just feels like everyone is out to get me. Like I’m paranoid, like you are. Completely different.”

  She rubbed at her mascara.

  “Have you talked to that reporter to try to get those papers back?” she asked. “Because I have to admit, Joe—I wasn’t worried about you not having a job at first. But I started thinking about what would happen if we went through all the money in the accounts. Remember: I only make hourly wage at the shifts at the gym. We would have to sell the house, move to Omaha with my sister. It makes me short of breath just to think about it. I hate Nebraska.”

  She glanced over at me.

  “But it won’t come to that, will it?” she asked, a hopeful lilt to her voice.

  “We’ll be okay, dear,” I said, nodding. “No Nebraska. I promise.”

  I grabbed her hand and squeezed, smiling at her. I clicked the car back into drive, pulled back onto the ramp and took a left turn.

  Sweat flushed on my neck and forehead. I had to lie to her. Strange forces were at play, and my livelihood—probably even my health and safety—were caught in something much bigger than Mary and me and our growing family. In truth, her vision of a rope fraying wasn’t crazy—it was prophecy. We were indeed a flimsy rope unraveling in a gale. But it would do nothing to voice my own fears—her own were enough of a burden to her. I watched her out of the corner of my eye, remembering how she had kept her composure, her cool, through all the big decisions in our life together—a wedding, the years of living hand-to-mouth during medical school, saving up to buy a house, caring for and burying her parents. She had never panicked, never broken down, after she put the memories of the Corps behind her. Whenever I felt like I was ready to burst at the seams, she had always been there at the end of a long day with a smile, a reassuring word, a glass of wine, a goodnight kiss. It always made life livable—even if she was only offering template platitudes from a blind faith in the future, as I had always secretly suspected. But all that had now changed. Her knee-jerk optimism was gone, that invisible well run dry. The weight of bringing another person into the world had become too heavy for her. So I knew I needed to be that rock for her this time instead—even if I was terrified of what the future held.

  Or it all could be paranoid delusions. There were no larger forces, no conspiracy, no danger threatening me and my family and Wetherspoon—it was all just a product of my own tortured imagination. The scariest thought of all hit me: that the only threat was my own crumbling reality, and the only thing to fear was fatherhood. I watched Mary dabbing at her nose, and I shook my head to push the thought away.

  Either way, I could not tell her about the money. Not now, not amid all this, on a drive to a memorial service for a dead friend.

  The mortuary was on a hill, the oldest of its kind in the area. I drove up the driveway, past the big sign that shone “Funerals” in mustard-colored neon script. A line of mourners processed toward the lit doorway, where a dark figure stood, eclipsing the lantern over the entrance.

  “I’ve never heard of a funeral at night,” I said, suddenly feeling the night around me.

  “They won’t bury him in the dark, will they?” said Mary.

  * * *

  I parked in the last spot on the far end of the lot. We left the car and walked toward the entrance. Her heels clicked in time on the pavement, mine dragged slowly across the hard concrete. She took my arm. I squinted at the dark figure as we approached. And I recognized who it was. Within five feet, I made out the shabby outline and frizzled hair of Jim O’Keefe. The reporter’s face widened in a smile.

  “Evening, Doc. Mrs. Barnes,” the reporter said, doffing an imaginary hat.

  “And you are?” Mary asked.

  “Dear, go get us a seat—I have to have a word with this gentleman,” I said, guiding her past with a hand at the small of her back.

  Mary took one blank look at the stranger, and then continued inside. When she was through the door, I looked at O’Keefe, then jerked my head over toward the shadows at the corner of the building. When we got to the spot, I jabbed a finger in his face.

  “A funeral?” I hissed. “Harassing a grieving family at the sendoff for a dead loved one? You’re a goddamned vulture, O’Keefe.”

  “It’s news,” said O’Keefe, nodding. “A doctor dying from an outbreak of the Black Death is news.”

  “I can’t stop you,” I said, through gritted teeth, shaking my finger at him. “But so help me God, I will physically restrain you from approaching that family.” I stepped toward the door.

  “I’m not here to see them,” O’Keefe said. “I’m here to see you, Joe.”

  I stopped in my tracks.

  “What about?” I said, without turning back.

  “The documents. I finished translating them. I’ll give them back to
you, you can hand them over to the hospital and get your job back and all that. Then everybody’s happy.”

  At this I turned. O’Keefe pointed at me, and he stepped close.

  “But Doc, you’ve got to seriously consider whether you’d ever want to go back. When you read everything we’ve got, you’ll want to steer clear of the whole place.”

  I grabbed the reporter’s threadbare sleeve. His eyes were wide and unblinking.

  “Tell me right now. Just tell me what’s in those papers,” I said. “I need to know.”

  O’Keefe gazed beyond me, at the doorway, a shadow of something flitting across his face. He pulled away from my grasp.

  “We can’t talk here,” he said, sidestepping me toward the entrance. “But it’s huge, I promise you. Meet me out here after the service. We’ll go somewhere safe we can talk.”

  Before I could grab him, the reporter strode away, through the lighted door, and into the crowd. I had to go inside and just pay my respects to Rothenberg—there was nothing else I could do at that point. So I followed him inside.

  The line of people in black ran down an ornate hallway wallpapered in flower patterns, lit by low lamps. Whispers drifted for just a second as they all took stock of the new person—me—entering. My face felt hot. I recognized a dozen doctors and nurses. I waved at one or two of them. Betty Bathory appeared and grabbed my elbow; she wore a slinky dress without sleeves that ended at her ankles. Mary was suddenly at my other elbow.

  “Glad you two made it,” said Betty, pushing herself up to peck me on the cheek. She and Mary kissed hello and embraced.

  “Let’s go pay our respects,” Mary said.

  “After you,” I said.

  A few minutes of handshakes and sad smiles brought us to the viewing room. Mourners sat in rows, staring ahead at the open casket, leaning and whispering. Soft organ music piped in from a speaker somewhere overhead. We stepped up to the end of the line—right behind the white tufts of Wetherspoon’s head. I leaned over the Old Man’s dandruff-flaked shoulder. I smelled whiskey, and a tang of musk.

  “Good evening, Doc,” I whispered.

  “I thought you’d make it,” the Old Man mumbled, not turning. “We need to talk.”

  “Hello, Neal,” Mary said softly.

  Wetherspoon swiveled at the sound of her voice. A rare smile crossed his lips.

  “Well now, you made it, too,” Wetherspoon said. He leaned in and kissed her cheek gently. “Looking every bit the glowing mother-to-be. How are you?”

  “Pretty good,” she said. “Some rough parts to this whole motherhood thing.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” the Old Man said. “I’ve seen some pregnancies so difficult, they look like terminal cancer. I’m sure you’re fine.

  “So, Joe,” he continued, turning to me. “We’ll talk…afterward?”

  Mary shook her head at both of us, rolling her eyes.

  “Sure, I’ll be right behind you,” I said. “Let’s just pay our respects to Stuart.”

  The line had vanished in front of us. Wetherspoon stepped up to the casket and bowed his head, without kneeling. Then he walked away, after only a moment or two. How rude, I thought, as I walked up to the coffin.

  But just a glance told me why the line had moved so quickly through the mourners, why no one had prayed for long by the side of the box.

  Inside the casket was an envelope of thick, opaque plastic. The light glinted off the thick milky material, and it extended to either edge of the coffin. The dark shape hermetically sealed within was barely discernible as Rothenberg’s dead face. Red blotches dotted his cheeks, and there were black smudges high on his rotten scalp. The whiteness of the skin outshone the plastic. The eyes were open, dry and desiccated. His mouth was sewn shut with thick dark spool. Half his nose had already rotted away around one nostril. It was a nightmare vision, and it was right there in front of us. Mary’s hand slipped into mine. We bowed our heads for a moment, then we too moved on.

  “Can you believe…” Mary whispered, grabbing his wrist.

  “No,” I said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Rothenberg’s family—the widow and two young, plump teens—hugged each and every person in the receiving line. Their puffy and raw faces stared, their heads nodding like off-timed metronomes. I embraced the widow Shelley for a few extra seconds, our eyes locked for a moment upon withdrawing. Nothing was said, a look was exchanged, nothing more. I never knew what to say at such moments. Then Mary and I moved on, finding Betty and Wetherspoon talking over a water cooler in the adjacent sitting room. We were the only ones inside.

  Wetherspoon was in midst of one of his more intense diatribes. Betty just nodded along. Mary went over and gave her a hug. Wetherspoon stopped and shook my hand. All four of us were fidgety, shaken by the nightmare in the coffin. Mary laid her head on Betty’s shoulder, and the nurse stroked her hair, saying something softly. I grabbed my mentor’s elbow and pulled him aside. We were in a darkened corner of the room, near a dust-covered piano. I thought it would be safe to talk.

  “Why is Stuart sealed up like that?” I asked. “He looks like a NutriFast dinner, for Christ’s sake.”

  “The Bureau of Wellness released the body on the condition it would stay in a prophylactic sheath, and would be incinerated immediately after the services,” Wetherspoon said, scratching at his eyes.

  “Bullshit. They can’t just demand that. The Rothenberg’s are Jewish, they probably don’t want to cremate him.”

  “Don’t believe me? Take a look at that warning label on the coffin.”

  The Old Man pulled me by the sleeve to the doorway, so I could see the foot of the casket in the adjacent room. A yellow-and-black label was affixed to the edge. I couldn’t read it; it was too far away.

  But curiosity pulled me closer, and I approached the coffin. From a few steps away, I saw it was the same Bureau of Wellness emblem I had found on the intake pipe at the river. I drifted to it, the horrible fascination drawing me within feet, until I could read it clearly.

  BOW-137—that same serial number, yet again.

  It was the same call number, too. I repeated it over and over again, committing it to memory, because I didn’t dare to pull out my Atman and type it in at that moment.

  Just then, the soft electronic piping of the organ grew louder. A stream of people crushed into the room closer to the body—though the front of the crowd kept a good fifteen feet away, a force-field of horror repelling them all. Wetherspoon edged us in closer to the threshold, and I could feel Mary and Betty behind us, straining to look over our shoulders.

  The crowd hushed. A screen descended from the ceiling. It rotated to face the audience of mourners. The face of a holy man, black-clad and spry, wearing the blue collar of the New Church of the Unified Three, beamed out of the high-definition 3-D pixels.

  “Friends,” the reverend’s head said warmly, as it swiveled the crowd. “We gather here today to hail and farewell our dearly departed friend. Would we be so kind as to silence our Atmans and make time for our final reconnoiter on this earthly plane?”

  Hands came out of pockets, blips hiccupped around the room and screens flickered through the crowd. The minister pursed his lips knowingly, an affected grace tempering the movement of his lips and brow. He pulled a pair of FocalSpecs from a breast pocket. Squinting, I watched the off-screen teleprompter reflected backward across the top of the lenses.

  His baritone droned for a long time. The holy man mouthed the typical platitudes about a life free of death. More words—a better future, a calmer place beyond everything mortals could ever know. The same syllables of empty solace, of hollow pathos, which an orphan had committed to memory at his parents’ funeral two decades before. My mind wandered over that night I had been left so alone, and I got so lost in my past I was unsure, for a moment, whether I was an adult or a teen.

  The voice kept on, the holy man’s eyes tracking back and forth, back and forth. I pulled my mind back from the memories, and I
scanned the crowd of faces, the prim mouths and hard stares of the mourners around me. I recognized almost all of them: colleagues, Rothenberg’s family, the occasional acquaintance within the hospital’s social circle. I saw a local politician leaning over and laughing as he whispered into the ear of a pretty aide—until he caught me watching him, and his face quickly twisted with crocodile tears.

  “There are no Gods but Allah…and Yahweh, and the Lord…and there are no messengers other than Muhammad…and Moses…and Jesus.”

  The holy man paused, nodding at the ground, swept up in his own performance. Wetherspoon snickered, leaned to me.

  “Never understood how this Church unifies all three,” the Old Man whispered. “Back when I was a kid, they all hated each other. Wars were fought. Millions died.”

  I nodded. The broadcasted face of the holy man glared at the two of us. I averted my eyes toward the crowd, where a few family members were dabbing at their eyes with white tissues—a white that punctuated the rows of black suits and dresses like seagulls in a night sky. Except—there was one splash of color, a single red kerchief in a suit’s breast pocket at the back of the room. I squinted.

  It was Yoshiro Fujimi. My replacement. The crimson cloth disappeared. The doctor’s expressionless eyes glared forward. Next to him was the grimacing face of Suzanne Kranklein.

  I scratched my beard and stared hard at Fujimi. The scab’s moustache was a thin dark arc over his lip, his glasses squared and severe at right angles. His black-and-white hair was cropped short at the sides, but his bangs were gray and long. His face was pinched with intelligence, wrinkled with the long stress of thought and exertion. It was an unkind face, and I struggled to reconcile this hard visage with the far-off figure who had waved a fond farewell down the hospital corridor at me. Fujimi had Asiatic features—but something in his haughty grimace and upright posture made him distinctly American.

  The holy man’s amplified voice lifted, filling every corner of the room. In the front row, just feet away from me, the widow sobbed. It was uncontrollable; an utter primal despair raged from deep down inside her. It was a kind I remembered from that night a lifetime before when I had lost everything I ever had. The minister paused for a melodramatic second, then closed with a five-second prayer. The holy man’s face on the screen ascended into the ceiling. Everyone rose from their seats and grouped around Rothenberg’s wife, consoling her. I kept a short distance away, watching the crush of embracing hands and arms around the wailing widow.