by DM Sinclair
Lowell was slightly annoyed that his point wasn’t getting through. “Yeah. But I’m dead, is what I’m saying.”
Roger smiled faintly. “But you appear none the worse for wear.”
“Still, dead. I’m dead. Are we clear on that part?”
Roger finally nodded. “I understand.”
“Good. But the thing is, I find myself…” This was the part that Lowell had so completely failed to work out in advance. “…needing to not be that anymore.”
Roger frowned. “To not be what anymore?”
“Dead.”
Roger took in a long, slow breath that seemed to take a very long time to come out again. Lowell kept waiting for the exhale, but it stayed in for longer than he could stand. He found himself fearing a little for Roger’s health. He was relieved when Roger finally let it out.
“I’m not sure I understand you,” Roger finally said. But Lowell caught a hint of something in his tone, in the way he leaned forward across the desk. He does understand. But he’s testing to make sure we’re talking about the same thing. He wants to be sure.
Lowell leaned forward as well, so that their faces were barely a foot apart. They could whisper to each other. This is how illicit deals are made, Lowell thought. I’m into it now. “My body is gone, Mr. Foster. I died of disease. Heart, lungs, liver. It was a whole big disease thing, just awful. I won’t go into the details, but there was a lot of pain. Sweating. Vomiting just absolutely everywhere. You don’t need the gory details. Loss of bowel control. I’ll spare you. Also pustules. Lots and lots of pustules. I won’t even mention those.”
“How awful for you,” Roger said with silken sympathy. Lowell marveled at it.
“But I’ve heard that there might be a way to, shall we say, re-enter the land of the living, shall we say. In, shall we say, a different form. And that you’re the man to, shall we say, ‘talk to’ about that.”
Roger’s face didn’t change at all. He gazed at Lowell with the kind of cool impassivity that Lowell had never been able to master. It took a long time for him to reply. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Hammond.”
Lowell threw caution and subtlety to the wind. “I want a new body. Put me in a new body. That’s what I want.” There it was, all there for Roger to see. If it works, it works.
Lowell had come up with the idea in what he thought was a miraculous burst of deduction the night before. The seed was planted by his encounter with Rufus in the street. Rufus’s body, anyway. But not Rufus. Somebody else in Rufus’s body. It made sense. It answered a lot of questions.
Knowing full well that most of his theories eventually turned out to be wrong, he had tried subtly floating it to Margie, hoping for a hint that he might be onto something. And she had shot it down.
But he couldn’t shake it. He had spent the night turning it over and over in his head, trying to convince himself that he was wrong. He was used to being wrong. Wrongness was a frustratingly comfortable state for him. And yet he strongly felt there was something to this idea.
Even if it was, according to Margie, totally impossible, he was going to run with it anyway. He had decided to trust his instincts, despite their consistent record of stabbing him in the back. If he was even close to right, he would be solving two cases at once. Which was two more than he was used to.
Roger’s face remained inscrutable. He sat back in his desk chair. His eyes stayed locked on Lowell’s, the slightest hint of a upturn at the corners of his mouth. “Mr. Hammond,” he said finally. “I think you have been misinformed. Such a procedure is impossible.”
Lowell had no idea if Roger was lying or not. None. He had never wished for intuition more than he wished for it now. He pressed on. “Yeah, but will you do it?”
“I sympathize with your predicament. I’m sure it’s a difficult time for you. But ask literally any expert in this field and they will tell you. Ghost transplants, forced possessions, whatever term you wish to apply… they cannot be done. Full stop.”
Lowell studied the tall man’s face. Is he onto me? He couldn’t get any kind of read on Roger at all.
“I do apologize,” Roger said. “Is there anything else I can do to aid you through what must be a very trying period in your post-life?”
Lowell tried to look steely. “Money is no object, Mr. Foster.”
He thought he saw a slight flutter in Roger’s face. The corners of his mouth shifted downward ever so slightly.
“I own several genetics companies,” Lowell pressed on. He hadn’t planned on appropriating the character’s job as well as the name, but there it was. “We work with mosquitoes.”
Roger forced the corners of his mouth up again. Lowell could see him fighting it. “No amount of money can make the impossible possible,” he said. His eyes unlocked from Lowell’s and he fidgeted with a googly-eyed pet rock on the corner of his desk.
Lowell let the moment hang, hoping that Roger would crack further. But instead, after a silent pause, the Clinic Director lifted his eyes back to Lowell’s again and returned his hands to their folded position in his lap.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lowell said. Is that it? Did I fail? he wondered. He didn’t want to just leave but he couldn’t think of another approach to take.
He sat awkwardly, uncertain what to do. Roger didn’t help him at all. He tilted his head in a way that somehow communicated how sorry he was to have caused Lowell so much inconvenience, and would Lowell like a complimentary mint?
Bail, Lowell thought. Get out. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Foster. I guess I should get back to my many businesses and theme parks.” He stood and floated towards the door, struggling to find the right balance between looking casual and fleeing.
“Do we have you on file?” Roger said to his back.
Lowell paused and turned around. Roger hadn’t stood. He remained folded behind his desk. “On file?” Lowell asked.
“Your information. So that we can inform you of changes to our services, specials, things of that nature.”
Changes to our services? “I don’t think so. Your receptionist didn’t ask for any information. You know she doesn’t have a head?”
Roger stood and clasped his hands neatly in front of him as though standing in a royal receiving line. “Well perhaps you could provide your information at your earliest convenience. You never know what might come up.”
Lowell had to restrain himself from winking to let Roger know he was getting it. “Of course.”
“Be sure to include your daytime business number, mailing address. Oh, and perhaps your Energy Signature. Your SES.”
“Perhaps?”
“Perhaps definitely that, yes.” Roger allowed his smile to broaden slightly. “For our records.”
Lowell didn’t know what Roger asking for his Energy Signature meant, but he knew it meant something. And he was almost certain Roger had just confirmed—without admitting it—that he was putting ghosts in new bodies. I was right. This never happens! I was right! Lowell couldn’t wait to tell his client, Ryan, about it, probably in the form of a sizable bill. “I’ll send it over right away,” he managed to choke out past his own excitement.
“Excellent,” Roger said. “Do have a nice day. I hope your pustules and bowel issues are not too troublesome.”
Lowell drifted out of Roger’s office. Then sprinted through the corridor wall and finally out into morning traffic where he ran towards his office faster than he ever could have in his body.
THIRTY
“Did you guys bring any coffee?” Lowell asked blearily. “My ghost has been up for hours but my body’s not what you call a morning person.” He struggled clumsily to get his blinds closed and block the morning sun from streaming in.
Ryan was still stunned at how Lowell could get into and out of his body almost at will like that. Stunned, and jealous. He wished that all it took to get back to his own body was somebody slapping it in the face and waking it up, as Lowell had just asked Margie to do. It had taken thre
e slaps, but his ghost had cannonballed back into his body like a circus acrobat into a net.
Lowell finally gave up on the blinds and flopped into his desk chair, sprawled. “Could you go get some coffee? I can expense it to my client.”
“I’m your client,” Ryan said.
“Oh right. That makes it easier. Just pay for the coffee.”
Ryan sat in the folding chair across from Lowell and pulled his right foot up onto his left knee to keep an eye on it. He was worried about his feet, strongly suspecting that his toes had started to disappear the same as his hands. “What did you say about your Energy Signature?”
“Oh yeah. Roger—super cool guy, by the way. Have you met him? Evil, obviously, but so slick—anyway, get this, because this is the big deal. Roger said…” Lowell grinned wickedly, relishing the big reveal he was about to make. “…for me to send him my SES so they could keep it on file.”
Ryan planted that in his mind and waited for it to bloom into something relevant to his body’s disappearance. It didn’t. Not a bud. “So what?”
“Don’t you see what that means?”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
Lowell looked crushed. “Really? I was hoping it did. Like a clue. Also, where are we on the coffee thing?”
Ryan leapt up, fiercely annoyed. “That’s it? That’s all you got?” He had waited all night for Lowell to produce results. Now he felt his one last faint hope leaving his grip. It made him dizzy with dread, and he had to sit down again.
Margie stepped around the dentist chair, which she had been examining with scientific interest. She looked intrigued. “That might actually mean something.”
Lowell brightened and pointed at her enthusiastically. “See? She knows things! Ask her!”
Margie leaned against the dentist chair, then quickly gave up on that when it threatened to tip under her weight. “He didn’t actually say he could put you in a different body?”
“Not out loud. But when he asked for my SES, it was like he was saying it without saying it, you know? I had like an intuition. I’m a detective.”
Margie frowned. “Why would he need your SES? What’s it going to tell him?” She pulled out her phone, turned her back to them and started swiping through something they couldn’t see.
Lowell mouthed “coffee” to Ryan and mimed pouring with his hands. But Ryan was focused on Margie’s back. She swiped over and over on her phone. It made a little musical chirp with every swipe.
A faint memory of the previous night crept into his mind, when he had sat and watched terrible TV with her. Hours of it. Stuff he would never have watched on his own. Why did he do that? It had seemed to make perfect sense in the moment but now that he looked back on it, he couldn’t recall why he didn’t find something better to do with his time, especially when there was so much at stake. He even had a vague recollection of not wanting her to leave, of wanting to watch even more terrible TV with her. It seemed plainly absurd in retrospect. He tried to recreate how he’d felt about her presence the previous night, but it wouldn’t form up properly in his mind. It was full of interference and static, like an AM radio station he couldn’t quite tune.
And then it was gone. Vanished. All that remained was him wishing that whatever Margie was going to think of, she’d hurry up and think of it.
“Okay,” she said, still swiping through her phone. It was a tortuously long time before she said anything else. By the time she did, Ryan was sure the tips of both of his shoes had vanished. And then all she said in follow-up was: “Okay.”
Finally she hurried over to them with her phone and held it up for them to see. “Look at this.”
On the display was a complex grid of black and gray squares, like several highly detailed QR codes piled on top of each other in layers, forming a three-dimensional cube. “This is Ryan’s SES. We scanned it when he came in for his procedure.”
“Looks like a pirate,” Lowell said.
Margie blinked at him. “It’s a machine-readable matrix of binary modules representing unique patterns in an individual’s spiritual energy.”
“I know. With an eye patch and a beard.” Lowell pointed at various spots on the image. “There’s even a parrot on his shoulder.”
Ryan had been thinking that it looked like a half-eaten chocolate chip muffin, but he decided against getting into a Rorschach debate.
Margie rolled her eyes. “Fine. The point is, everybody’s is unique, right?” She flipped through a few more SES images, each completely different. One Ryan thought looked like a bird, one like a car, and one Abraham Lincoln in a baseball cap. “If you’ve been to the bank you know this.”
“Of course. I go to the bank all the time,” Lowell said, in a way that strongly suggested he didn’t.
“The point is,” Margie went on, “it’s unique to you. I read about some studies done that suggest the pattern in your SES is tied to your DNA in some way. Which would make sense. Your ghost and your body are linked. It’s why you can’t put your ghost in somebody else’s body. They don’t match.”
Ryan stared at his SES pattern on her phone. He found it amazing that this was everything that constituted him, codified and represented graphically on a screen that probably also played “Angry Birds”.
“Except,” Lowell said, “Roger is putting ghosts in other people’s bodies.”
“We don’t know that,” Margie said. “But what if he’s trying? Roger is a funeral director, not a scientist. Maybe he thinks a ghost transplant is possible if he just has the right ghost and the right body. Maybe he thinks if they’re close enough to a match, the body won’t reject the ghost. So… say a client comes in looking for a new body. Roger doesn’t just choose a body at random. He chooses one that’s a close match for the client. Better chance of success, correct? So I searched the Clinic client database for an SES similar to Ryan’s. That will be who Roger gave Ryan’s body to!”
Ryan leaned forward, seeing where her wildly circuitous train of thought was going. “And?”
“No matches. Nothing closer than 20%.”
Ryan sat back again. “So we’re back to square one. I’m dead.”
“Deader,” Lowell said. “You were already kind of dead.”
“Not quite,” Margie said. She swiped to a new SES on her phone and held it out towards them.
Lowell squinted at it. “Pirate again. It’s Ryan.”
“Wrong,” Margie said. “It’s somebody else’s. By my analysis, it’s a 97% match for Ryan’s.”
Ryan was puzzled. “You said there were no clients that matched.”
“That’s right. This is not a client.” She pointed at the text under the SES image. “It’s an investor. Specifically, the Clinic’s biggest investor, Clifton Caldwell. The Clinic wouldn’t exist without him. Well, without his money.”
“Clifton Caldwell.” Ryan stood up. He wasn’t yet sure if he could be excited about this, but he wanted to be. “So, this is the guy who has my body?”
Margie shrugged. “If my guess is right… no, wait, technically, I just made about five or six guesses. If they’re all right, it could be that Roger put this man’s ghost in your body. Caldwell is wealthy. And Roger has never been above pushing the ethical envelope when there’s a payout in it.”
Lowell leaned forward across his desk. “You said ghost transplants don’t work. If Roger gave this guy the body, how long before it’d go belly-up?”
“I don’t know that. If the body didn’t reject the ghost immediately, it could be days or weeks. I just don’t know. There hasn’t been extensive experimentation in this kind of thing.”
Ryan leapt out of his chair. “So there’s a chance it’s still alive?”
“There’s a chance.”
“So I can be excited about this now?”
“I think so. But Ryan… think about it. If Caldwell has your body, he paid Roger a fortune for it. He’s not going to give it up without a fight.”
THIRTY-ONE
Clifton Caldwell
’s house was a big Colonial in Chestnut Hill with an expansive front lawn dotted with sprinkler heads. The property was surrounded by a waist-high stone wall that was an implied barrier rather than an actual one, although there was a cast-iron arch at the foot of the long driveway with a closed gate. From what they had read in an online article, Caldwell’s money had come chiefly from his national chain of hardware stores. None of the three of them could say they had ever heard of these stores, much less visited one. But then, none of them were big on home maintenance. Apparently Caldwell had enough stores, selling enough hammers and caulking, to finance seven thousand square feet and a balcony where one could sit and think about teeing off at the very exclusive golf course across the street. They had also found the report of Caldwell’s death a little over a year ago after a long and unspecified illness. Though by most accounts his death hadn’t interfered with his success and he had continued to run his hardware business just as before.
“What do you think?” Lowell asked from the driver seat. They were parked some distance down the street where only the front of the house was visible through the old trees pressing in close over the road. A few ghosts meandered in the space between them and the house, but none showed any interest in them.
Margie had stayed behind to try again fixing the Box. Her reasoning being, even if Caldwell had the body, and even if he gave it up, they still needed to get Ryan back into it. And they couldn’t do that without the Box. She had insisted that she could still fix it, although the tone of her voice suggested too much uncertainty for Ryan’s liking.
“Hey,” Lowell said with a hint of genuine concern, “you’re not looking so good, man. Like, blurry.”
Ryan’s sense of disconnection was getting stronger by the hour. It had become all-consuming, like a fevered state that made him feel walled off from the world, in a bubble. He had to constantly fight it to concentrate on anything at all. So he didn’t need Lowell telling him he looked blurry. He felt blurry. He thought blurry. His entire existence was blur.