by DM Sinclair
“Condition? What condition?”
“I think you know, Mr. Matney.”
“I think I really, really don’t.” Ryan struggled to recall if he had lied about anything on the forms. He was certain that he hadn’t. He had even listed his dislike of goat cheese under the Chronic Disorders heading. “I put everything on there.”
“You mean to tell me that you don’t know that you have, or rather your body has, Wedell-Gunderson Syndrome?”
“I don’t even know what that is!”
“Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear. You were never diagnosed?”
“Diagnosed with what?!” If he had a stomach, it would have been knotting up. He felt something similar but it was probably his molecules bunching up into a tight ball somewhere in his center. He wondered if it was visible, a big glowing grapefruit of anxiety.
“Wedell-Gunderson,” Roger explained, “is a degenerative condition of the para-central lobule. In ten or fifteen years, as the condition advanced, you would gradually become unable to distinguish between things that are light yellow, and things that are slightly darker yellow. In very advanced cases, patients have reported a tingling sensation in the middle toe of their right foot. And in extreme cases, the left. There is no cure.”
Ryan blinked, only partially aware that there was no physical reason why he needed to ever blink again. “What does that mean?”
“It means you are not eligible to claim the guarantee.”
“But it’s a guarantee. That means it’s guaranteed.”
“Terms and conditions, as such things are prone to doing, apply.”
“You don’t understand. I can’t spend forever in this shirt. There has to be some way.”
Roger separated his hands and turned them palms-up in the universal gesture of it’s-not-up-to-me. “This is not just a formality. Your… ‘irregularity’ is a degenerative condition of the brain. It makes it impossible to return you to your body. To even attempt it would likely kill your body and obliterate you. Permanently.”
“Obliterate? Like, not existing anymore? That happens?”
“It happens. Though obviously we do try to avoid it. For insurance reasons.”
Ryan felt desperation seizing him.
“I do sympathize, Mr. Matney. It is an unfortunate position we find ourselves in.” He shook his head a little at the injustice of it all. “But may I suggest you attempt instead to make the most of your post-mortal existence?”
Exactly what I’m trying to do, Ryan thought.
THIRTEEN
Ryan crept along the side of the Clinic, uncertain why he was creeping. There were dozens of ghosts in the street and it was broad daylight. Creeping would not make any difference. If anything, he’d be more conspicuous creeping than strolling. But he crept anyway because he was about to sneak into a place and you’re suppose to creep when you do that.
He spent a few minutes hunting for an inconspicuous back entrance before finally deciding to bite the bullet and go through the wall. He’d been trying to avoid passing through solid objects since his extraction, intimidated at the idea. Everything else he had done was more or less in line with the laws of physics as he understood them. His natural instinct still informed him that walking straight into a wall on purpose would hurt. But necessity gave him courage. With a quick scan of the street to make sure nobody was looking—uselessly, since dozens of ghosts were looking—he stepped up to the wall near the back corner. He steeled himself, balled his fists, and pushed himself into the wall.
The wall pushed back at first. Then something gave way, like he was breaking through a membrane. And then he was inside the wall.
It was quite similar to the sensation of passing through a ghost when he was alive. Except instead of getting a flood of emotion and humanity, he got a profoundly intimate sense of brick.
And then he was through and he found himself with a metal shelving unit inside his torso and the wet end of a mop poking into his head. He took a few rapid steps forward to get clear, and found that he was in a dark supply closet. The only light was the soft glow coming from himself. Seeing in the dark was a nice perk he hadn’t anticipated.
He steeled himself again and forced his head through the closet door, hoping to locate himself. On the other side was a familiar clinical/funereal corridor, and the basement stairs to his left. The basement had been his target, so he congratulated himself on picking a good spot to enter. A couple of ghosts milled around but nobody he needed to worry about. So he forced himself through the door and darted into the stairwell.
At the bottom, identical duct-lined corridors led off in two directions, both passages long enough that they vanished into vague dim. He had been here twice before, for Sye’s appointment and for his, but he was struck again by how un-clinical this part of the Clinic was. It was cavernous and dim, like a channel of a dried-up underground river. He felt like he should be wearing a helmet with a light on it.
He took the right passage, towards the exam room where he had been extracted. At least that way was familiar.
As he passed the door to the exam room, someone coughed inside. He ducked out of sight. When there was no reaction from inside he ventured a peek.
It was Margie. She had her back to him but he recognized her hair protruding from under the sanitary shower cap. She was reclining on the little wheeled stool with her back against the side of the table and her feet pressed against a wall cabinet. She was eating a sandwich and reading a paperback.
It would have been easy to sneak past, but he hesitated. Even if he located his body down in this basement somewhere, what could he possibly hope to do with it? If Roger was right about his bizarre brain condition, getting back into his body was impossible. And even if Roger was wrong, Ryan didn’t know how to reverse the extraction anyway. He would need Margie. Running into her like this, he decided, was an opportunity. He would make friends with her.
He stepped into the room, expecting that to be enough for her to notice him. Be he forgot that his footsteps made no noise at all, so of course she didn’t hear him. He attempted to approximate the noise of clearing his throat. Poorly, because what he produced was the sharp, guttural growl of some hell-beast.
Margie was so startled that she shrieked and jerked backwards. The stool flipped and she was on her back on the floor. The paperback and various bits of her sandwich rained down on her.
She leapt up again, wild-eyed.
“Sorry!” Ryan said, “I’m so sorry!” He jumped forward, trying to help her. But of course he couldn’t, and she stumbled backwards away from him anyway.
“What do you want?! You’re not allowed down here!” Once she recovered from the surprise he was relieved to see recognition in her eyes. She relaxed a little. “Oh. You again. Well you’re still not supposed to be down here.” She bent to pick up her book and the pieces of her sandwich. It was well beyond repair so she tossed it in the garbage and scowled at Ryan for it.
“I was just upstairs talking to Roger. He sent me down.” Ryan struggled not to give away the lie. He worried that some part of him might light up specially or blink when he lied, like a spectral Pinocchio nose.
She retrieved her glasses from the floor and studied him. He couldn’t help feeling like he had just been laser scanned in full 3D. “Sent you down for what?”
“Um, the guarantee. Reversing the procedure. Whatever you call it.”
She made an exasperated noise. This wasn’t going well. “Right after the extraction, I asked you and you said you were… ‘good’.”
He suspected that if he admitted he only wanted his body back for a few hours, it wouldn’t win her to his side. So he attempted a lie. “Yeah, well… now I’m… not… because…” It was such a dismally transparent attempt at a lie that he stopped halfway through it. Even he didn’t want to hear the rest.
“It was totally inappropriate for Roger to force you to go through with the procedure like that when you were clearly not comfortable with it.”
Ryan latched
onto that. It was better than a lie. It was true. “Yes! And I intend to complain.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “You said you were just talking to Roger upstairs. You didn’t complain?”
“I’ll do that in an e-mail.”
She sighed again. “Well the simple fact is that I’m not permitted to perform either an extraction or a reversal without Roger’s consent, and in your case possibly even his presence. You need to make an appointment.”
“I tried, but Roger said you might have an opening right now and I should come straight down.”
She guffawed. “No he didn’t.”
“Yeah, he did!”
“You don’t know Roger. Nobody passes gas in this building without an appointment.”
“I can say from personal experience that’s not true.”
She was seeing right through him, both literally and figuratively, so he decided to be honest about the present situation and let the chips fall where they may. “Okay, look, I talked to Roger but he wouldn’t make me an appointment. Something about a brain condition.”
He saw her forehead crease into a puzzled expression. “What brain condition?”
Ryan scanned his memory and drew a blank. “Somebody-somebody syndrome.”
“You didn’t think a brain condition was important enough for you to take note of the name?”
“Something about the color yellow. He said my body has it and that means I can’t get back into it.”
She folded her arms. She was disapproving of something and he couldn’t tell if it was him or somebody else. “Roger said that?”
Ryan shrugged. “Is it true?”
She didn’t answer. She was staring at him hard in a way that he utterly failed to interpret.
“If it’s not true,” Ryan pressed on, “then why would he say it?”
Again she didn’t answer. She pursed her lips and he could hear her teeth grinding. “Let’s go upstairs and talk to him.”
She tried to step around Ryan to get to the door, but he moved into her path. “Please… I don’t want to get into a whole thing with him. And I don’t want to wait for an appointment. Can’t we just do it now? I’ll pay you. Under the table.”
She tried to step around him the other way, but he moved to block her again. “Please,” he said, more desperate-sounding than he wanted to be.
Fed up with him blocking her, she charged straight ahead right through him, aiming for the stairs. It was the first time anyone living had gone through him. He was surprised to find that he felt nothing at all beyond a slight pressure like a strong gust of wind he had to lean into.
As soon as she was through him she stopped. He saw her shiver a little, and he remembered the chill of passing through a ghost, the surge of compressed, encapsulated emotion. He wondered what she had just felt from him as she passed through. Everything he had ever felt in his entire life, blasted at her all at once. What would that feel like? Would it overwhelm her?
She turned back to him, one eyebrow much higher and more crooked than the other.
“That’s it?” she said, like she had just come off a roller coaster that had no hills.
He couldn’t help but be a little offended. “Why? What?” was all he managed to say.
She shook her head in apparent disbelief.
“Follow me,” she said finally. “This way.”
She headed down the corridor away from the stairs. Deeper into the basement.
Margie’s footfalls echoed off the ductwork while Ryan’s made no sound at all. They passed in and out of buzzing puddles of light that stained his translucent form green. A few more doors drifted past, some closed, some open onto other embalming rooms, one stacked with cardboard boxes and plastic bins.
He wondered what it would be like getting back into his body. He hoped he wouldn’t have a bad taste in his mouth from whatever they were feeding it. He already couldn’t clearly remember what tasting things felt like. Except for Froot Loops. He would definitely have some Froot Loops after he got back into his body.
There was a brighter light ahead. They rounded the next corner into a long, tiled room with a high concrete ceiling. The walls were lined with what looked like oversize filing cabinet drawers, he guessed a hundred at least, stacked six high to the ceiling in every row.
“Morgue?” he blurted.
“The same idea,” she said, “except the bodies aren’t dead.”
“I’m in here?” He looked along the rows of drawers, thinking that he must be cold in there. It couldn’t be comfortable.
“Somewhere,” Margie said. She moved to an alcove set in amongst the drawers where there was a thin desk with a computer monitor. She brought up a touchscreen keyboard. “Matney?” she asked. She was already typing it.
Ryan stepped along the cabinets, wondering if maybe he’d sense a cosmic connection and be able to tell which one he was in. But he felt nothing.
“You’re in seven-seven-one,” she said. “We’re lucky. You’re close to the floor.”
He couldn’t make sense of the numbers pasted to the front of each cabinet, but she seemed to know what she was doing. A gurney sat loose by itself and she snagged it and wheeled it with her as she moved about a third of the way down the room. “Here.”
He drifted beside her, but she didn’t open the cabinet right away. “Just so you know,” she said, “I could get in a lot of trouble for this.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
She shook her head, grabbed the handle on the second drawer up, and leaned her whole weight into pulling it open. The drawer scraped open like a knife edge dragged across a cinder block, the grind reverberating thunderously through the morgue.
Ryan leaned in to look.
He felt his anxiety grapefruit re-form in an instant, intensely clenched and so bright that he thought it might be illuminating Margie’s astonished face.
A few IV tubes ran down both sides of the cabinet, presumably carrying vitamins and water and whatever else kept Ryan’s body alive. But the ends of them dangled free, one of them hanging over a puddle of fluid already dried to a yellowish crust in the corner of the cabinet. It was apparent that the tubes had recently been plugged into a body. But the body wasn’t there now.
Ryan’s body was gone.
FOURTEEN
Margie half-closed the cabinet so she could check the label on it. “Hold on,” she said, and hurried back to the computer.
“Where’s my body?” Ryan asked feebly, still staring at the empty drawer.
She tapped on the computer screen a few times and studied it gravely. “Well it has to be a typo. You’ll be one drawer up or one down or something.”
She marched back to him and unlatched the cabinet above his. But Ryan took the faster route and shoved his head through the front of it into the empty space beyond. It was dim inside, his own glow the only illumination, but he could see a woman’s feet. Definitely not his. He crouched to check the lowest drawer, and all the drawers in a square around the one they had opened. Of the eight, two were empty, two were women, one was a man much hairier than he remembered himself to be, and three he had to check their faces because he wasn’t convinced of his ability to recognize the bottom of his own feet. None of the drawers were empty, and none were him.
He emerged from the wall of drawers shaking his head. “No.”
“Well you’re here somewhere,” she said. “You were probably just misfiled. Ethan would have processed your body after the extraction, and he’s not the brightest.”
He thought she meant it to be reassuring, but it didn’t prevent a sense of dread from seeping in around the fringes of him. What if his body had already been immolated? Or buried? He’d be stuck with the shirt forever. The thought was too much to take.
Margie studied the rows of cabinets. “I’m going to ask Ethan if he remembers anything.” She caught the worried look on his face. “I won’t tell him you’re here. I’ll make something up. I’m the one who can get in trouble here, remember?” She wa
s already striding back to the end of the morgue and the passage out. “Just stay here and stay quiet!”
Left alone, Ryan couldn’t stay still. He had to keep looking. He pressed himself through the cabinet wall, feeling that membrane pop as he cleared the surface, and adjusted himself until his head was inside a cabinet. From there he walked the length of the room, bending and straightening to see inside the bottom three rows of drawers as fast as he could. Pairs of feet whipped past him one after another. It took effort, like walking through deep water, but he moved at a good clip.
He froze.
Were those voices? In the morgue?
One sounded like Margie. Her voice was muffled by the thick walls of the drawer he was in, which barely managed to contain the body of a very tall and overweight man. He had trouble hearing her at all over the big man’s slow, labored breathing.
He was uneasy being so close to a body that didn’t have a person in it, especially one that filled up so much of the available space. So he shifted positions to another drawer and another until he found an empty one.
He could hear another voice with Margie’s. A male, muffled and too distant to understand. Roger? Maybe. Ryan strained to distinguish his words, but they were crushed by the structure of the cabinet.
Oh God, Ryan thought, she’s in trouble. Roger caught her and she’s in trouble and it’s my fault. He considered stepping out of the wall to take responsibility, but decided to wait and see how she handled it. Maybe she could still salvage the situation, and if he revealed himself he’d ruin her chances.
Another few words from the man. A response from Margie. None of it intelligible.
And then silence. A long, agonizing silence. He could hear nothing, see nothing but the pale bluish glow from himself reflecting off the inside of the cabinet.
Were they gone? Or were they waiting? He had to risk a look.
He leaned forward, shuffling his feet until he was close to the front of the drawer. And then he forced his head slowly through into the open space beyond, allowing as little of his face to pop through as possible.