ACT I


From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Alone”


CHAPTER 1


Would you like to hear a story?
This is a good one. And very short.
This is the story and the story goes: Simon meets Janie D. at work. She tells him who hurt her. She smiles. This is love. This is rigor mortis.
The end.
There is a longer story. The devils all lurk in the details. It is a story just big enough to cram into a human skull. Stories are doorways. You have but to knock. This is the story and the story goes:
He calls her name.
“Subject: Jane Doe.”
That is the first part of the ritual.
Our hero’s name is Simon Meeks. He works the late shift, in Autopsy Room 6, as a forensic pathologist. He hates hearing his voice played back, thinks it sounds metallic, like the stainless steel table. Simon stands in Autopsy Room 6 and returns the smile.
The refrigerator units hum the dirge. Our hero knows the words, knows the ritual, but his mouth goes dry. He feels the blush burn pasty cheeks and sweat slick palms under blue latex gloves. He does not know what to say. The audio recorder runs.
I wanted to tell you you’re beautiful, Jane.
“Subject is . . . subject . . . um . . .”
The pallid cast of beauty, now tinged with a blue hue, but she wears it well. Slight of frame, with a pixyish face. Mouth playful and generous in its postmortem smirk. Blond hair so light it is white, puffs of smoke and fairy fog.
Obsessions are born in the time it takes to open a door. Simon gently brushes the hair out of her eyes. The eyes.
The eyes!
Here, there, and everywhere, and there is only the slipstream of the eyes—coppery brown but gold in the light. The eyes—the largest he has ever seen. Twenty-seven . . . no, twenty-eight millimeters! Nine grams, by God! Nine-gram planets. Nine-gram oceans poured into perfect ocular cavities. Dive into them, dive deep, dive into viscous jelly, the ghost-whisper-ectoplasmic caress of vitreous humor. Dive deep, kick and swim through the dense net of connective tissue and the whiteness of the fibrous tunic. Dive deeper through the blackness of the vascular tunic. Deeper, dive deeper into the nervous tunic—O rods, O cones, O retina—and deeper still. Reach through the gateway to the soul via optic nerves. Dive deep and stay forever, stare forever through gold-stained skull windows!
Twenty-nine minutes.
“What—?”
Simon knocks over his bottle of Mountain Dew, a green-yellow spill. Only it’s not Mountain Dew. He checks the clock. He was lost in Jane’s eyes for twenty-nine minutes. Monomania is a mental trap that Simon is used to falling into, but never so sudden. Then he notices . . .
Sometimes, we do not realize how horrible the noise is—the grating of cracked femur on dry chalkboard, the noise that made our ears gush black blood—until we hear the relief of silence. He feels the relief. Jane’s golden eyes calm the jagged glass in his head, pluck out the shards the way that medication after medication failed to do, to a degree that the hand exercises and the cards and the coins never could. Peace and quickened clarity in the balm of her golden eyes.
The story begins and ends with your eyes. Eh, Jane?
Simon looks at her mouth, still curved, still smiling encouragingly. He remembers the ritual.
“Subject: Jane Doe.”
Rigor mortis. She died very recently—in the last six hours. Stiffening will continue to spread through the whole body in six to twelve hours, stay for another six to twelve, and then disappear over the following six to twelve. The newly dead are tense at first, but they eventually relax.
Time of death is important. Core temperature, rigor mortis, lividity, skin color, gut content—all clues. If the body remains undiscovered for three to four weeks, insects give the clues. Of the millions of species, only a hundred or so feed on corpses and the infestations follow one another in predictable, orderly patterns: maggots, flies, beetles, pupa, adult—all putrescent Braille to the forensically sensitive mind. One might be able to estimate time of death to within a day. Entropy, the mischievous asshole. First he erases the clues, but then, out of regret, he apologizes with bouquets of maggots.
Time of death is estimated at the crime scene, before bagging the body. But before that, death must be confirmed, vital signs checked no matter how obviously dead the victim may be. Simon has yet to check a decapitated head for vital signs, but he hears stories.
They do not allow Simon at the crime scenes. Not anymore.
His peers haunt the halls of the morgue with their whispers. “He gets along better with the dead than the living.” That is the mantra, the mythos, they whisper when they think he is not listening, and they call him the Ghoul even when he is. Ever since the Twiss case. Too odd to tolerate, too talented to fire, they banished him to the graveyard shift.
It is quiet in the morgue on this side of the A.M.—just the young pathologist and the golden-eyed cadaver, both smiling, both tense, both afraid to make the first move. Simon stares at the smile and the impossibly large eyes. His own facial expressions have the wide-eyed over-exaggeration of a silent film actor; he gives off his social cues at a different frame rate than his peers. Just a little . . . off.
Simon breaks the ice by removing the plastic bags protecting the delicate evidence of her hands and feet. He breaks the silence with his stainless steel voice:
“Blue complexion is suggestive of death by hypoxia.”
Is it time to go to the Dead Water? He picks up the scalpel. Time for his addiction? No. He puts the scalpel down. Not yet.
Eager and apprehensive—grade school dances and dying moths in the belly. Eh, Jane?
Simon reviews the crime scene notes, begins weaving the fairy tale of how this sleeping beauty came to him.
They found her dancing on the wind.
Police discovered the body of Jane Doe hanging from a noose of rope off a tree in an old beer garden, by the flickering light of a dying streetlamp. A cold wind had picked up off the Lake and, according to the only witness—a little boy who was exploring the condemned property—it looked as though she was dancing on the air. He told police, “It was pretty.”
I wish I could have seen you dance, Jane.
Simon cuts the noose from her neck, lovingly removes the rough locket and bags it. He leaves the knot intact. Knots have their own clues to offer. No other witnesses. No one in the neighborhood saw, heard, or spoke of any evil.
The three wise monkeys, Jane. All three are dead, shot in the head, and it’s up to Simon to find them.
For every cadaver there is a maze made of questions that leads from the corpse to the truth. The directions one can turn in the labyrinth are determined by binary decision trees—YES or NO.
Simon says, “Female, Caucasian, mid to late twenties, found hanging on a noose of rope, showing a blue complexion suggesting death from lack of oxygen.”
Simon is in the maze with the dead. He looks down a hall and that hall is a question and that question is: Do rope marks have the inflamed edge of a vital reaction? If NO, then the victim was dead before the hanging, strongly suggestive of homicide. From there, a hallway asks, Is the hyoid bone in the neck broken? YES is suggestive of manual strangulation. But if NO, the next hallway in the maze asks, Is there bruising around the nose and mouth? YES suggests smothering and NO suggests deliberate compression of the neck causing vagal inhibition to stop the heart. Both hint at a homicide concealed as a suicide.
But Jane does not take Simon down this path. Her rope marks show the inflamed edge, a vital reaction. YES. She was alive before the hanging.
“Odd,” says Simon. There are three distinct sets of rope marks on her neck, in three discrete places, all with an inflamed edge. Why?
Do the marks on the neck match the rope? NO suggests ligature strangulations. But Jane’s marks match the rope: YES. Do the rope marks form an inverted V at the point of suspension? YES. This suggests suicide.
The maze shatters. Something is not right.
“Why the extra marks, Jane?” Simon asks. She does not answer. Though she smiles, she is still too shy. It will take more work to gain her confidence, to get her to open up.
Simon cuts a sample of her smoke-puff hair. He takes her hand, bows his head, and tries a different approach.
“Hello, Jane. My name is Simon.”
He takes a moment to thrill at the deafening shade of nail polish on her fingers and toes, a burning orange, the glowing guts of a nuclear pumpkin. He gently scrapes under her nails. There! Flakes of skin and blood.
“Someone did this to you, Jane,” Simon says, metallic voice sharpening.
But you got them. Tag—they’re it. Eh, Jane?
Simon saves the tissue samples for analysis.
But he has to go deeper—reach through the gateway to the soul via Y-incisions and lucid madness. It is time for Simon’s addiction. It is time to go to the Dead Water.
Simon locks the door. He tips back the Mountain Dew bottle and drinks the absinthe down. All of it. With the aftertaste of evil licorice, he feels the green alchemy, the roots of wormwood growing in his brain, the upside-down tree that grows in his head and feeds off the dead, and the Corbies, always the Corbies, shrieking apocalyptic limericks.
Simon takes Jane’s hand.
I wanted to tell you it would be all right, Jane, that the worst was over. I wanted to ask you about that shade of nail polish. I wanted to tell you that you were beautiful.
In Autopsy Room 6, Jane Doe’s hand moves, squeezing Simon’s.
This is rigor mortis.
This is love.

* * * * *

Now, now, don’t squirm, loveling. This is beauty beyond convention. This is a love story on the other side of entropy. Witness a romance that defies the tyranny of worms. Step right up! It all plays out in Autopsy Room 6.
Simon Meeks sways to the effects of alcohol and wormwood. And the room sways, shivers, and hiccups, becoming less real by degrees. He is very nearly there—to that one place that is real.
The ghost tree, a flower of carrion bird petals, blossoms in his head. “JaneDoeJaneDoeJaneDoeJaneDoe,” the Corbies say. Was there ever a prettier name?
He closes his eyes, calls her name into the dark, and follows the echo—Simon Meeks, who is always following the echoes of things, but never the thing.
He puts an ear to her cold mouth. He can hear the ocean. The Dead Water.
He follows the echo until it is drowned out by the sigh of the night-tide. Follows until he smells and tastes the salty, bittersweet spray. Follows fast and follows faster to that place where nostalgia pulls stronger than lunar gravity—down—until his toes feel the cool water.
His latex-gloved hands move with their own automaton wills. They have honed these motions to a perfect rote. They measure and record: facts, numbers. They explore Jane, commit every bit of her to memory, every dip and swell of her, every one of the fifty-two creases in her lips. The hands take swab samples from her mouth, rectum, and sexual organ.
And somewhere distant, perhaps in a dream, Jane dances barefoot on a beach, by the ebony sea. She smiles. She waves to Simon. She—
Tick. Tock.
The clock thunders in Autopsy Room 6. Simon’s eyes open. “No.” He tries again. His hands take a scalpel and cut a Y-incision into Jane, from her shoulders to her pelvis. They undress her chest of skin.
And somewhere distant, perhaps in a dream, Jane sits on a bench. She motions to Simon to sit next to her. She opens her mouth and—
Chatter. Jabber.
Stray voices talk back and forth, on heavy footfalls, in the hallway outside of Autopsy Room 6. Simon’s eyes open, cracked with jagged green lines. “No!” He tries again, but it’s no use. Even the weight of his feet are a distraction.
But there is a more direct way, a doorway to the Dead Water, and the scalpel is the key to the lock. Simon tells Jane that everything is all right. The worst is over. And the bone sheers say, “Snip-crunch-snip-crunch.” Jane’s rib cage opens like hands after a prayer. Simon checks the lock, braces himself. His hand slips inside Jane’s chest cavity.
Ignition.
Simon’s eyes roll back and his body convulses. Cold green fire washes over him. The world melts.

* * * * *

Where are we?
Sleep has no place to call its own.
Simon and Jane sit on a bench of sepulcher stone. Bare feet dangle and dip in the black water. They look at each other—then quickly look away. They both look up—and away. Hunched forward in their seat, they both look down, kicking the black water. Shyly. Awkwardly. She is a child and he is a child, on the sepulcher bench by the ebony sea.
No moon, no stars, in the Dead Water, only the soft glow off the white sands of the lurid beach. All else is black. Simon fumbles in his coat pockets, hands coming up empty. He shrugs to Jane and rolls up his sleeves theatrically. Splaying his hands wide, he makes a motion, producing a single bent lily from nowhere. Simon offers the pale flower to Jane. With a hiccup and a giggle, she accepts, batting her golden eyes. They scoot closer to one another on the sepulcher bench by the ebony sea. Simon blushes, looks back at the water.
And somewhere distant, perhaps in a dream, Simon cuts and detaches Jane’s larynx and esophagus from the pharynx.
No moon in the Dead Water, only the ivory sand’s luminous glow. No time in the Dead Water; the hours are breathing faint and low. Jane, smiling, sniffs at her single lily. Her pale hair, painted blue by lunar light, blows in the necro-wind. But her smile turns to a frown when she sees Simon is still nervous. Then, the frown curls back up in mischief and she tags the boy with playful violence, running away, giggles trailing her wake. The shocked expression on Simon’s face becomes a grin and he gives chase. They play tag on the lurid beach by the ebony sea.
And somewhere distant, perhaps in a dream, Simon removes the organs from her body.
The black water laps the Night’s Plutonian shore, turning the beach into a region of sighs. Simon and Jane play, laughing and eyeing one another. Simon takes off his black bowler hat, holds it in front of himself, and with a clever flick of his wrist, the hat appears to come to life and leap from his hands. Jane gasps. Simon bends down to pick up the hat, but with a cleverer flick of his wrist, the hat seems to jump away from his fingers. Jane laughs. Simon runs after the hat, but with a cleverest flick of his foot, the hat skips away. Jane laughs and claps as Simon gives chase, as he tries sneaking up on the hat, as it leaps away in a climactic finish of Simon tumbling on the ground, the hat resting between his splayed legs.
And somewhere distant, perhaps in a dream, Simon scoops out Jane’s last meal, from her stomach, with the same brand of ladle he uses at home.
The black water rises. Simon gets up, brushing himself off. He and Jane stand very close, looking eye to eye, their toes curling and digging into the bone-powder sand. He licks his lips. She bites hers. Emboldened, Simon takes her hand. “May I have this dance?” She nods. They sway to the sad-jazz rhythm of the Dead Water. Jane’s eyes turn to wide golden plates and she pulls Simon very close. She opens up to him.
And somewhere distant, perhaps in a dream, Simon holds the glistening purple Valentine of her heart.
They dance all through the night-tide on the lurid beach. They put their foreheads together, eyes just inches apart. She shivers and Simon holds her even closer. “Why did the noose bite your neck multiple times, Jane?” She whispers something in his ear. “They . . . they raised you multiple times—raised you three times. But why?” He cups her cheeks in his hands, reassuringly. They stop dancing, though the Dead Water plays on.
And somewhere distant, perhaps in a dream, Simon’s scalpel makes a cut from behind one of Jane’s ears, over her crown, to behind the other ear, and, with a tug, he lovingly de-gloves her head.
They walk down the Night’s Plutonian shore, hand in hand. Simon stops. “They wanted something, didn’t they, Jane? They hanged you on that noose three times to scare you and each time they lowered you they asked you questions.” Jane nods, half smiling, with a sigh. “Why?” She bites her lower lip, shrugs, and turns away from Simon, facing out on the ebony sea. She plucks lily petals and lets them drift on the necro-wind. “Who did this to you, Jane? And why?” Simon reaches out to her and—
No.
Something slams in the distance.
Not yet.
The world melts to wax. The Dead Water evaporates. Jane falls back. Simon shrieks, reaches for her, grabs the lily and tries to pull her back, but the flower decays in his hands. The ash scatters through his fingers as he squeezes and Jane slips away like the memories of a dream dissolving under the shower spray.
No-no-no-no-no-no-no—
He does not want to let the moment go. He does not want to go back to his sleepwalk life. But he hears the tectonic explosions of someone knocking on the door to Autopsy Room 6.


CHAPTER 2

“Wow, you really know how to cut your meat,” she says.
And then, “Jesus, that’s bloody! You’re going to make me sick.”
It would be the only compliment she gave him.
Her lips are full, but not generous. They slurp at vegetables and some kind of organic-soy-protein meat substitute—protein that never wore a face. Simon plays silently with his very rare steak, retreating inside his head where he constructs and deconstructs letters from chimerical Lego blocks, trying to build a proper acronym for the grayish substance his date is masticating. He settles on S.O.P. because it is the closest to the sound she’s making.
“Earth to Simon,” she says.
“Sop?”
“What?”
“Oh . . . never mind.”
Something flashes across her face, but she swallows it and forces a smile. Others often chide Simon for living too much in his mind. It was a little easier as a child, when imagination was sometimes encouraged, before teachers said he was too “withdrawn” and decided to hold him back in the fourth grade. And then, oh then, there was the legion of younger classmates who swarmed Simon like piranha, smelling the blood in the water, the opportunity to cut down an older kid, and they gnashed at him with those special tortures only grade-schoolers can concoct. After that, life seemed to Simon to be an endless succession of ridiculing voices and contemptuous masks that were always offended that this strange somnambulist sleepwalked through their world. He only felt truly awake in the Dead Water.
But that was then and this is now, and this is an even rarer form of torture. This is a blind date. Who had ever conceived of such a thing?
Simon adjusts his glasses, unnecessarily, and looks at his date. Her eyes are not golden; they are a pale, soul-sucked blue. Not wide and understanding, but squinting, constantly squinting and guarded, a sneering, preemptive strike on the world around her—perhaps intended to give an air of superiority, but mostly coming across as if she has a slight headache all the time.
And Simon, who could be blindfolded at any moment and still able to give detailed descriptions of everyone in the restaurant—including the individual species of fish in the tank by the door—could not remember her name.
An exquisite torture. Simon’s nervous hands fidget, every cell in his body quivers in discomfort because she is constantly looking at him and her eyes are not gold, not soothing, not seeing who he is under all the molecules and carbon. They are squinty, pale lasers, constantly scraping at him, demanding something he’s not giving. Worse still, she keeps dragging small talk out of him, like an endless strand of barbed wire shoved in and through his nose and pulled, slowly, out his mouth so that each rusty barb catches in his nasal cavity, shredding his mucous membrane.
Every barb is painful.
She talks about all her favorite reality TV shows. Simon is lost, has no point of reference.
She talks about current movies and, encouraged, Simon mentions his favorite silent film actors and actresses. He does not get very far before she cuts him off with a wince. “Silent movies? Those are so old. Everyone in them is, like, dead.”
“Yeah,” Simon says.
She talks about articles read in Cosmo and concludes, “Who has time to read books these days.”
“Yeah,” Simon says while doing a very bad impersonation of an understanding nod. He flexes his left big toe, feeling the empty ring where he wishes a toe tag dangled.
She would be considered conventionally attractive, Simon was sure of it. But looking at her lips, nose, chin, and chest, all he could see were the lines of plastic surgery incisions and nothing beyond. All he could see, through the lingering film of Dead Water, were those glowing lines, like red highways on a roadmap. All he could think of were the dead who donated their bodies, signed the backs of their licenses, thinking they would save a life, cover a burn victim, advance the frontiers of science, only to have their flesh used to smooth wrinkles, fill lips, improve a stranger’s penis.
Simon nods. Simon says, “Mmhmm,” every time the noise across the table pauses. Simon adjusts his glasses, unnecessarily, hoping it counts as social gesture. He wishes he could be someplace, anyplace, where he felt more comfortable, like Autopsy Room 6. Socializing like this is so . . . exhausting, so nerve-wracking. Simon does not eat his steak, only cuts it into smaller pieces, a tighter grid. He names each line on the grid: Here’s a street, a bloody boulevard, an avenue. Here’s the bloody, steak-sauce river. This is where the Sears Tower would be . . .
“What kind of car do you drive?” she asks. Simon’s answer does not impress her. Simon cuts and cuts and retreats into his head.
He sees the buildings flashing by on his drive to the restaurant. Driving, Simon could almost see the skeletons swimming in the cement—the absinthe still pulsed, faintly, in his guts. The Loop has a higher concentration of human remains, per square inch of foundation, than anywhere else in the world. The police are usually in attendance when a building is demolished, to collect the bones.
Is that the afterlife, Jane—swimming in purgatories of dark cement until, in some distant aeon, an angel in a hardhat blasts you out?
“So . . . where do you to get your clothes?” the date asks.
“Oh, uh, Goodwill . . . mostly.”
She looks more disgusted with this revelation than with the bloody grid of steak. But it was true. Simon mostly shopped at thrift stores. It was not a matter of money. Simon had money. But in thrift stores, Simon could avoid pushy sales personnel. A black suit coat and tie—that was Simon’s perpetual uniform. It kept things simple. They did not allow him to wear his black hat in the restaurant.
The conversation pauses, mercifully. Simon drifts away, way away, to go swimming with those skeletons in the cement, to ask them their secrets: forgotten treacheries, hidden plots, and buried mob treasure. He’s interrupted when his date says something to their waitress about the croutons in her salad—when she specifically said no croutons in her salad—and the something she says causes the waitress to run off crying.
The conversation continues, something about a Barbie doll collection. Far, far away, that conversation pauses.
Oh no.
Simon realizes, with horror, that he’s expected to contribute something. The skeletons shrug. Simon looks about his mindscape desperately. The upside-down tree in his head is withered away. All the Corbies huddle together, sleeping, heads under their wings, hiding from this traumatic experience. But one brave corvid shakily looks up, uses its last strength to try and help, to croak a relevant factoid through Simon’s eardrums . . .
“Barbie’s design was based on a German sex doll from the fifties,” says Simon. He lets out a breath, even smiles, proud of himself for contributing.
“Uh . . . how do you know that?”
Simon shrugs. He goes back to the skeletons and the dead crows. Far away, the conversation goes on—a childhood story, some charmingly funny anecdote about the time she put too much detergent in the washing machine. The conversation pauses. Simon realizes it is his turn to contribute a childhood story. Something embarrassing but endearing.
“Once, I petted my goldfish to death,” Simon says.
An uncomfortable silence, the sound of black holes devouring light.
“His name was Dr. Caligari.”
“I’m sorry,” says the date. “Are you that slow? You know, mildly . . . retarded?”
“No,” Simon says, considering. “That’s wasn’t the problem at all. My IQ is actually quite high.” He says the last not as a boast, but as a simple relay of data. It was true. The doctors, unsure of exactly what to say when confronted with his case, had always given a vague prognosis of “chemical imbalance” and threw out medications like darts to a board. But most drugs had little effect on Simon. Not like absinthe. All the doctors could do, in the end, was assure Mr. and Mrs. Meeks that their little boy had the best of intentions while petting that gold fish.
But the answer is enough to finally crack the woman’s polite, pleasant façade. “I gotta say, Simon, so far I’m pretty fucking underwhelmed. And a guy’s gotta impress me.” She holds her arms out expectantly. “I mean, it’s obvious you’re not going to, but are you at least gonna try? Do something. Say something. Come on. Simon says ‘talk.’ Come on—come on—come on . . .” She says it all like she’s talking to a particularly dim, diseased three-legged dog she’s about to shoot between the eyes, if it could just stumble out the back door and away from the carpet.
Simon looks out through his glasses, through his green, green eyes. But all he can think about are the dead trapped beneath the concrete foundation of Chicago and all he can see are the bits of dead trapped beneath the greasy foundation of his date’s face. The dead in her face. Just bits of the dead, but it excites the sleepy Corbies. Too long, already, since he indulged the addiction—naught but drops and fumes of green, green absinthe in his guts, the distilled nostalgia his patients give him, the liquid love, the Dead Water high, all gone. But those little bits of the dead ignite a little of the alchemy, reinvigorate the ghost crows and they caw-caw-caw out of Simon’s ears. It’s their voice that speaks.
“Embalming fluid often enlarges the penis of a male cadaver,” Simon says.
The randomness, the strangeness of the comment stops his date’s tirade. She stares, her mouth wide open.
“Did you know that King Tut’s penis went missing? Some time during his museum stay, it disappeared. Could be in the hands of some private collector. Could be used in the ritual magic of some cult. Could be lost in some random bag of jerky.”
The Corbies cackle at their little joke.
“Gross!” says his date. She rises to leave, giving Simon a better view. He can see, more clearly, the lines of dead matter injected into her body, the lines of invisible cosmetic cuts healed over. He can hear, barely hear, the muted whispers of the dead from her face. This is not a full dose of the addiction. This is not a full immersion into the Dead Water. But it is a taste; the trace amounts of wormwood still in his system vibrate and he gets a taste. The Dead Water gives Simon a quickened-calm-clarity and loosens his tongue.
“Society marches toward its taboos,” the Corbies say through Simon’s mouth. “Take Cosmo.”
This catches her attention. She waits, standing.
“Accepting for variance and aesthetic taste, most men are, on a genetic level, predisposed to feeling attracted to women with curvy hips and full breasts. Life giving. Nourishing.”
Simon traces a shape in the air with his finger, but he is the only one who can see the trailing, green afterimage.
“You can see this in the earliest statues and depictions of the earth mother figure: full breasts and hips are emphasized as the focal points of female power. But these popular magazines go step by step in the other direction—replacing curvy, plump, and healthy, with shrunken, anorexic, and shriveled, like the dead. Cosmo changes the paradigm of ideal beauty by making the living look more and more like corpses, the way morticians make corpses look more and more like the living. And so women feel more and more loathing for their living bodies and the men’s genetic instincts become confused. They are less concerned for what they are instinctively attracted to and more concerned for what they think they are supposed to be attracted to. All in all, those magazines get closer and closer every month to being necrophiliac pornography.”
Then the Corbies go silent, and Simon is left with his own mouth. “Oh . . . wait . . . sorry,” he says. “That . . . that didn’t come out right at all.”
His date stands stunned, as surprised by the volume of words flowing from Simon’s mouth as she is by the words themselves. Just as she turns to go, Simon sees them—the other scars. His green, absinthe eyes open wider.
“Oh, you shouldn’t do that,” Simon says.
“Do what?”
The cosmetic surgery that erased them was good, but through the Dead Water, Simon can see old scars across her wrists.
“Try and be like the dead.”
Simon stares through malachite eyes. The wormwood forms a tiny ghost sapling in his head. Simon can see the invisible scars and he can read their contexts. He can hear the murmurs from the dead in her face. Through the Dead Water, Simon can read scars like hieroglyphs.
“You shouldn’t purge after meals. It’s not healthy. It’s bad for the teeth and esophagus. And it makes no sense. If you are already pretty and fit. It’s just a redundancy.”
Her eyes are no longer squinted nor guarded, but wide and exposed and tears leak out of them. Simon cut her. Sometimes, surgical cuts are good.
Her mouth quivers, perhaps hovering over words more important than all the gilded small talk, words she never dared let escape. Simon holds out an awkward hand, to bridge the connection.
Sometimes, surgical cuts are good. But before the bad, black things can bleed out, she clots and scabs over into the hateful expression that forms on her face.
“Goddamn freak!” she growls, flinging water from her glass into Simon’s face and stalking off.
Simon cleans his glasses. He dries his face and he finally eats his cooling grid of steak, his twelve-ounce Chicago. In his mind’s eye he is a giant reptilian monster, risen from the lake in a burst of nuclear fire. Tearing the city apart, he rips up the beefy pavement, setting free the tiny skeletons trapped within. Rejoicing, they share their secrets with him.
* * * * *

Once upon a time, a stranger approached Simon at a park. “Afraid?” asked the stranger.
“No,” Simon said. “Statistically, I’m much more likely to be murdered by someone I know.”
The stranger backed away. Slowly.

* * * * *

Outside the restaurant, Simon stares down, wondering where the sidewalk ends and the skeletons begin.
“You sure know a lot of trivia, don’t you?”
The voice comes from behind Simon, slinking like a cat.
Simon shrugs. “I know the longest word in the English language.”
“What’s that?”
“Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.”
“Wow.”
“It’s a lung disease caused by breathing in volcanic particles.”
“That right? And here I thought it was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
“No. I suspect Mary Poppins was a compulsive and habitual liar.”
“That bitch.”
It seems so natural—talking to the voice, not worrying about its source, not feeling curious about who was there. But the Corbies peck at the tree in his head, chipping bark and nerve.
“Danger,” hiss the Corbies. “Look, Simon!”
Simon looks up from the sidewalk, but sees no one. He has that feeling—like in grade school when he couldn’t find his Math homework in his folder, but he knew he did it. The stomach-dropping panic of not finding what he knew had to be there and the anticipation of that mean, mean math teacher.
Simon looks around, up and down the street and all about. No one there. Just him and the Corbies and the skeletons.

* * * * *

Mother shows Simon the little corpses.
He nods approval.
“This one gave me so much trouble,” she says.
And she stabs.
“Actias luna.”
And she stabs.
“Acherontia styx.”
And she stabs.
“Attacus atlas!”
And she stabs.
The ritual is complete. Simon admires the colors and the wings of the moths now pinned in their showcases. His mother’s hobby is collecting hobbies, and moth collecting is her latest acquisition.
“This one is called the ghost moth, dear, or the white witch moth.”
Simon nods, making a coin appear and vanish in his hand, for no one in particular. He picks up an X-Acto knife off the table, plays with it in his hands . . . and puts it down, not liking the heft.
“So, tell me. How did your date go?” Mother asks, pointing at him with a number-two pin.
“Hmm?”
“Don’t be coy. I went to all the trouble of nagging your father into going to all the trouble of getting one of his pretty young patients to go on a blind date. Now I want to know what all my meddling has reaped.”Mother smiles, skewering another nocturnal arthropod.
Simon winces at thoughts of the blind date. He lets his mind drift to pleasant memories, to Autopsy Room 6, to Jane, to her golden eyes.
“She was . . . wonderful.”
“Oh, I’m so glad to hear. See, sweetie, I told you—you just needed to get out more. What’s she like?”
Simon thinks of Jane Doe smiling to him, squeezing his hand.
“She’s very nice, Mother. I feel like I can be myself with her.”
“What did you go out and do?”
The happy snip-crunch, snip-crunch of the bone sheers sounds; weighing her organs one at a time; gently peeling her scalp from the skull.
“We danced.”
“Oh, fun. Did you—” Mother leans in conspiratorially, “Did you kiss her?”
“Mom!”
“Well?”
“No, Mother.” Simon blushes. “Not on a first date.”
“You know, I didn’t think anyone was that old fashioned anymore. That is so sweet.”
Simon thinks of Jane in her freezer unit, her chest lovingly sewn up—the Y-shaped gateway to the Dead Water.
“Yes,” says Simon, “it is.”

* * * * *

Simon walks from his car to his house. Above, moths bash their heads into sodium streetlights like punch-drunk fallen angels who just want to go home.
The specter of lost math assignments follows him all the way to the door.
The Corbies look over his shoulder.

* * * * *

Once upon a time, little Simon was allowed to pick out his own clothes for the day. His mother found him, hours after he should have been in school, sitting in his underwear on the floor of his bedroom, sobbing, wads of his own torn-out hair clutched in his hands.
“Simon, what’s wrong?”
Little Simon indicated a pile of clothes of various colors. Perplexed, his mother was only able to calm him down by suggesting he put on the black suit he wore to his grandfather’s funeral.

* * * * *

Simon holds her cold body.
“Not again.”
In his malachite eyes, the stinging prelude to a tear.
Another night, another dead goldfish. No, he does not pet them anymore, not since he was a boy, but he cannot seem to keep them alive. No matter the species, no matter how much he researches, no matter how he adjusts his husbandry techniques, temperatures, pH levels, the fish always dies within forty-eight hours.
Oh, a cat.
Oh, a dog.
Oh, a parrot.
How he wanted a companion animal as a boy. But he was too terrified to allow himself anything more complex than a fish, terrified that cuddling would infect a furry friend with mortality.
Death by osmosis, via active cellular transport, seemed imminent. Eh, Jane?
He is vaguely terrified of touching human infants. Thankfully that situation rarely presents itself.
He even tried plants. He cared for them as best he could, heard that they like being talked to. No matter how much he pleaded with them, they all died.
I never said the right thing, Jane.
“It’s not you, it’s me,” Simon whispers to the fish. He kisses the mucous-slick of her face and, very sadly, lays her down to sleep. He consigns her to the beyond.
Flush.
Water is always a medium between life and death.
He walks through the rest of the house, touring all the empty fish tanks, dead houseplants, withered flowers, and other failed attempts.
Tomorrow, he will try again.


INTERLUDE:
True Black


“Blackbirds t’ain’t black.”
He said it to me as Michigan Avenue moaned and all I could see was the lightning-shock of his beard in the dark.
Before that, he told me how he’d been plagued by undead moths made from aborted fetuses and vomited up by crones who practiced conjure-magic on the South Side, so he couldn’t stay at his place no more.
And before that, he warned me to be weary of twins because we all have twins, in the womb, he said, and they are our evil shadows and we battle and we kill them because it’s our first test in life, and twins outside the womb are the result of weaker babes making pacts with their demon selves. Don’t mess with twins, he said.
“’Less you got their placenta. Chew a body’s placenta, and they is yours.”
His voice sounds like sewage and the Blues. He might be crazy. Might have something sharp and metal in his hands. But I stay, because I’m at the bottom of the Michigan Avenue Underground. There’s nowhere lower to go. And the nights are getting cold and it’s a few degrees warmer down here, and maybe I can survive my first winter. Besides, his meat-rot voice drowns out the memories of how I got here.
“No real black in nature. That’s a fact. Black birds t’ain’t black, just dark, kinda organic purple that came about on the pallet in the Before, at the beginnin’ of squishy flesh-life. False black.”
I spit the last of my Copenhagen. Too dark to know where it lands. I’ve never seen total darkness. There’s only the ghost beard and it says:
“But there are things that remember before the Before, things in the deep pockets and dead boxcars. Seen ’em. You’ll know them because they wear true black. You think that’s crazy crack-jabber? Hmmm? Can’t trust rationality, not in a world where blackbirds t’ain’t black.”
“I saw the Black Dog,” I say.
“No such thing as—”
“Not a real dog. the Black Dog. A hallucination. Used to drive a rig. They always said if you drove long enough, you’d see it. I did, driving twenty-three hours straight. It was black, but it was more like a bear. It lumbered into the road. I slammed the breaks. Nearly tipped the rig.”
The beard grins.
“Oh-ho-ho you seen it. True black!”
“I saw nothing. I was ripped on amphetamines and sleep deprivation. I wasn’t in my right mind.”
“Nuh-uh. Skewed view. You saw something because your view was skewed.”
“What do you—?”
“I used to be a magician!”
Flash of metal. I stop arguing.
“Oh, I lost my magpie wings. Just a mean Mother Hubbard scar now. But when I had them, baby, when I had them, up above, I could swing—I could croon honey and the birds and the kids came to see, and I’d flip aces and queens and slick-card Monte and I’d fool them every time. The crowd, staring at me, head on. Upright. Sober. Healthy perspective. Fooled! But let’s say I change it up—”
I hear the vicious slash-grind of metal on asphalt.
“Let’s say I take one of those kids, a little girl, and I cut her hamstrings. She’s on the ground. Writhing. Screamin’ ragged red. Unhealthy perspective. But, see, laying there, bleeding out, at that funny angle, she looks up and sees my double lift, busts my trick, ’cause I t’ain’t playing to that angle. See? See! The skewed view sees the double lift ’cause the Flim-Flam Man is panning to the conventional crowd!”
He laughs and I close my eyes and pray the river washes away the rancid sound—washes away my memories—and dammit, but I can hear a cadence in the sputter of the water.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.