CHAPTER 3

“Simon, what the hell are you doing?” Dr. Fulani says, her honeyed accent turned sour.

Simon freezes with wide, Charlie Chaplin eyes, in a Buster Keaton pose, clutching the blood-encrusted teddy bear in a rubber-gloved grip. Explanations seem elusive. His mind stutters and leaps, racing back to the events that brought him to this moment. . . .

*   *   *   *   *

The weekend.

Simon hates the weekend.

Idle hands and idle mind—he can feel the glass shards in his brain. Away from his work, his Dead Water addiction, and on this particular Saturday, away from Jane and her golden eyes.

Why couldn’t they just let him work every day?

Coin tricks aren’t cutting it. Card throwing can’t hold it back. He shivers with Dead Water jitters. He can no longer feel the love Jane had given him, more powerful than from any of his other patients. He can no longer feel the wraith plasma bubbling in his belly or flowing in his veins; it was spent. He needed it—needed a ghost tree growing in his head like an antenna to Hades.

Simon takes his coins, his cards, his black suit coat and his black bowler hat, and walks out to do what he does most every Saturday: sneak into work.

*   *   *   *   *

Look at the everyday, through Simon’s eyes, and you will see a menagerie of bizarre customs. He is now hyperaware of them. He watches, fascinated, as if he were an explorer filming the mating rituals of an exotic bird species.

Here we see the male making his mating call. Notice the repeating pattern, the staccato rhythm of the courting ritual as he flips his cell phone open and closed, open and closed, again and again, saying, “You hang up . . . No, you hang up . . . No, you hang up . . . I love you more . . . Love you more . . . Love ya more . . . You hang up . . .”

Simon ducks into a flower shop and purchases a single lily from a gray, girthy woman with a welcoming smile. Getting the flower back in his hands he carefully bends the stem, just so, trying to remember.

“You’re a romantic, aren’t you, deary?” she asks. Her name tag says Dorothy.

Simon’s eyebrows turn into question marks.

“I can tell,” says Dorothy. “You didn’t buy two dozen roses or go for an expensive bouquet. You bought a single flower, but you were very careful in choosing it. That’s sentiment, deary. That lily has some kind of meaning for you and your sweetheart, doesn’t it?”

One corner of Simon’s mouth curls up. “Yes.”

“See,” says Dorothy with chuckle. “See, we can smell our own. Truth be told, most of my business isn’t from true romance. The guy buying dozens of the most expensive flowers is usually the guy schtupping his secretary or his theatre students. But I can tell just by looking at you that you’re a romantic. True romance—eccentric, goofy, odd. That’s the kind of love that lasts forever, deary. Like me and my Sal.”

She points to a frame on the counter. It holds a younger Dorothy and what Simon at first thinks is a child, in the faded photo. On closer inspection, it is a little man, a midget.

“He’s very small,” says Simon, though he notes the well-developed musculature on Sal’s tiny frame.

“Good things come in small packages, deary. And my Sal, the things he could do with that limber little body of his . . . Oh, I won’t burden you with all the gory details.”

Dorothy sighs.

“Is something wrong?” Simon asks.

Her smile is bittersweet.

“You’re so young, deary. You probably don’t have a lot of experience with death.”

Simon only nods, too polite to interrupt.

“Like I said, that kind of romance lasts forever. I’ll always love my Sal. But . . . comes a time when we all move on, and your sweetheart moves on, and you have to let them go.”

Simon adjusts his glasses and asks, very honestly, “Why?”

*   *   *   *   *

There are freaks that walk amongst freaks.

Go back in time. Visit your dreams. Enter some mist-shrouded, autumnal nightmare. Step through a twilight-dimensional door and go to the most bizarre carnival in the cosmos, sneak in after hours. See the performers during their smoke break. See them? See them socialize and murmur? There’s the Mermaid, flopping about on the ground, giggling on too much moonshine, wriggling her fishy, mucous-slick tail, and all the male grotesques competing to see who will wriggle and writhe with her tonight. And the Illustrated Man, tattoos that move and slither over his angular muscles when no one but you is looking, tattoos that will eat you in the dark. See the Needle Man, skull pierced by nails and bolts, with an electrical halo that arcs between the metal bits; notice how he can’t walk unless he carries his enormous, Elephantiasis-bloated genitals in a wheelbarrow. See the Siblings Grotesque: Seal Girl with her flipper hands, singing and eating fish heads and tails from a bucket for thrown coins; Anteater Boy with his prehensile tongue and mangled mandibles; the Torso, the girl with no lower body and the vestigial arm growing out of her head. They have other siblings, too, ones that did not survive the inbreeding and mutation, not alive but forever performers in their formaldehyde-filled jars, staring out with their fetal eyes, staring. See them all dance and joke and laugh in their rancid-sweet voices. And yet, even in a society such as this, there will always be a misfit—a grotesque who out-grotesques the grotesqueries. His presence will put a shiver in their twisted spines and they will point at him and shun him: the Omega Misfit.

Simon Meeks enters the Robert J. Stein Institute of Forensic Medicine (formerly known as the Cook County Institute of Forensic Medicine). Where Simon goes, conversations stop. Snickering and whispers commence.

“What’s he doing here? It’s not even his shift.”

“He gets along better with corpses than people.”

“Well, he is the Ghoul.”

Simon does his best to be invisible, to float through groups of people, avoid eye contact and dodge small talk. He creeps through the halls in his black suit, a perpetually dapper, if slightly tattered figure—a scarecrow always trying to get back to Oz.

Simon once assumed that working at the morgue would be a sort of refrigerated, formaldehyde-scented refuge full of kindred spirits. The Medical Examiner’s Office employed many types of people, some mild mannered, some very eccentric. Simon trumped them all, and even an eccentric will stone a misfit.

Even the Island of Misfit Toys has buried bones. Eh, Jane?

But social awkwardness and problems with peers are not going to get Simon down. He is about to enjoy his addiction. He is going to see Jane again.

The Corbies sway rhythmically in the branches in Simon’s head. They hum a tune, eager to feed. The murder sings, “Scalpels and brain knives and cranium chisels. These are a few of my favorite things.”

He is very close now.

The feeling of something large and powerful passing over his head interrupts Simon’s pleasant thoughts. Something smacks his black hat and it sails away, skids on the ground, then rolls in several circles before coming to rest, performing its own vaudevillian act, even in the process of falling.

Simon turns to see Officer John Polhaus, his enormous frame casting the pathologist in an angry shadow. He is a large, fat man, but never jolly. His gut seemed to contain nothing but anger; at just the wrong side of fifty, he was a career beat cop in Chicago and there was plenty to fill his stomach with.

“Hey, Ghoulie, this ain’t your shift. Why are you haunting us?”

Simon’s mouth moves, but nothing audible comes. He clutches the lily a little tighter, careful not to crush it. A few other smiling cops gravitate to Polhaus, like moons.

“Come on, Sweeney Todd,” says Polhaus, “get the corpse dick out of your mouth. You gotta speak up if you wanna be heard.”

“I didn’t . . . know you were a fan of musical theatre, Officer Polhaus,” says Simon in a very quiet voice.

A few of the orbiting officers chuckle, despite themselves, and Polhaus’s face turns a deeper, red-tinged purple. He is the stuff that early heart attacks are made of.

“It’s a freakin’ mystery to me why that Guy Smiley motherfucker, Reeves, didn’t can your creepy ass after Twiss.”

“I’m sorry,” Simon offers.

“Sorry? Sorry!?” Polhaus jabs Simon’s chest with an immense finger. The man’s hands are proportionally very large, even on his swollen frame, and there is muscle coiled and hiding under that fat. The poke sends Simon’s light body back against the wall.

“Sorry is answering to those parents when Twiss walked. You ever look a parent in the eye and have to explain a thing like that? Huh? You don’t have to answer to breathing people. And don’t think I don’t know that there is some serious, heinously queer shit going down with you and your stiffs. You’re here far too fucking often when you’re not supposed to be—you, with your Jeffrey goddamn Dahmer vibe.”

There may have been a witty retort for Simon to offer. Or maybe he could have explained that he did answer for the Twiss case, to all the dead children he had failed. But no words come to him. Simon’s mind is snagged on two fascinating thoughts: First, in comparing their body types—his own wiry build to Polhaus’s hulking corpulence—he realizes they would make a perfect slapstick duo, a Laurel and Hardy painted in shades of blood and noir, and he regrets that they are not friends. Second, Simon finds himself wondering what it would be like to dissect something as large as Polhaus, the walls of fat, the caverns inside, the hard-hard arteries—to dive inside, completely submerged in the dead matter. This is not out of any desire for revenge on the man, or even wishing him harm, but pure, simple, tactile curiosity.

Polhaus notices Simon’s malachite eyes, wide, not looking him in the face, but examining his anatomy in methodical passes. Something cold slides into and twists in his hardboiled gut. Officer Polhaus turns away with a grunt. Simon has a habit of taking all the fun out of picking on him, without even knowing it.

“Fucking Clockwork Orange freak!” Polhaus lumbers off, his orbiting fellows following in his gravity.

Simon picks up his black bowler hat. His colleagues sometimes thought he wore it to emulate a character from a movie called A Clockwork Orange. But he had never seen the film. His peers thought he wore all black just to be morbid. The truth was that the thought of coordinating varied colors every morning filled Simon with a paralytic terror.

Simon picks up the lily delicately; it had lost a few petals. He sniffs the flower. The Dead Water awaits.

*   *   *   *   *

You lose your loved ones every morning.

Every morning.

Ever mourning.

You sacrifice them to shrill electronic screams on the altar of the day. Then you stumble into the shower to wash the incriminating gore off your body. Remember your dreams—the deep ones, deep under REM currents and oneiromantic realities, the vivid, cinematic dreams, multifaceted plots you can’t believe your brain could weave at the speed of slipstream . . . but then, your subconscious is smarter than you, bigger than you. Remember those dreams? Don’t remember too hard, loveling. If you try too hard they’ll crumble and slip away; they can’t survive long in the barren air of rational thought.

Do you remember the cast of characters? Some of them might be original, from scratch—a gargoyle that lives in your backpack and sings Led Zeppelin. Some of them are fictional characters you always wanted to meet. Some are combinations of quirks from loved ones sewn together and brought to life. Some are family and friends. Some are high school crushes you let slip away. One of these figures might be your best childhood friend—“friends forever,” you said—but you both grew up and lost touch and the last you heard he got a girl pregnant in high school, got arrested for bringing a gun to class; in your dream, he’s still a child, preserved, best friend forever. Some are college buddies before they got old. Friends who got married before you could tell them how you feel. Dead loved ones preserved in sleep. Your mind becomes one of those paintings where dead celebrities of different eras—Bogart, Monroe, Dean, Elvis—come together to play pool in some Platonic plane of existence. But this moving painting is filled with the iconic celebrities of your life and everything is made of nostalgia so pure you could cry. All these characters. You have conversations and adventures with them. You love them. They are your whole world.

Do you remember them? Don’t remember too hard. They’ll crack.

For a few short hours they are the most important people to you. But dreamtime stretches those hours to months and years. These relationships are deep. These emotions are deeper. But then you become aware—you hear the alarm clock. You scream—you want to stay just a little while longer, just for forever, because you know that once you wake up they will be gone. No matter how hard you fight, though, your loved ones die, their death rattles echoing in your head. For the briefest moment, you mourn them in your bed. But the mundane world asserts itself.

How silly.

Their memory fades, turns to ash leaking out your ears.

By the time the shower water hits, they’re gone.

Do you remember now? You loved them more deeply than any person in the waking world. Do you remember these loved ones you killed with cornflakes? The ones you betrayed for To-Do lists and tedious commutes?

Don’t remember too hard.

Hold that thought, just a little longer.

Because you understand this misfit more deeply than you guess.

*   *   *   *   *

The cards help keep the glass shards out of his mind, dance in his hands in silent-sleight poetry—lifts, shuffles, and maneuvers for an audience of none.

Never an audience. Not living.

Simon waits in the breakroom. He convinced a fellow pathologist to take the rest of the day off and waits for her to finish up her last project. The Corbies are restless. Hungry.

They caw, “Apa morata!”

And they caw, “Mertvaya voda!”

And in one voice, the murder sings, “Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Hey, Ghoul, what’s your game?” says a voice outside Simon’s head.

Simon looks up. Names. Names always fill him with apologetic dread. A funny thing—Simon can remember the names of all his patients, but has trouble with the living. He’s good with faces, bad with names. Name tags help.

Jason is the one talking.

Brad is the one standing behind him.

And the girl . . . has a visitor pass. Brad must be showing off the morgue to another girlfriend. Simon stares up at Jason. Jason sighs theatrically.

“All right, what’s your game, Simon.” He says Simon’s name like an unfelt apology. “You always drag those cards around. Got a trick to show us? Come on. Or are you looking to start up a poker game?”

Simon shakes his head. He did not play poker. The probabilities seemed unfavorable and he was not good at reading living faces. He read ligature marks, bullet holes, and bruises; he could play poker in a room full of cadavers. Simon shakes his head, but Jason already knew the answer. They had run this pantomime before. Jason is showing Simon off to the girl, just another macabre curiosity.

The trio sits at a table at the other end of the room. Brad whispers something into the girl’s ear. She looks over at Simon, looks back at Brad, and giggles with him. For Simon it’s like being back in high school.

He never played in any of their reindeer games. Eh, Jane?

The trio eats and talks.

“So,” says the girl, “you guys work on dead people. I mean, how do you do that?”

“Objectification,” Jason says. “It’s like this: First year, they teach us respect for the stiffs. We treat them like friends. A lot of us named our first cadavers. I called mine Rambo.”

Simon nods, though the others do not notice.

“There was this one girl in first year,” Jason continued. “Molly. They were digging into the abdomen of her cadaver—I think she called him Frank—and she’s just holding his hand saying, ‘It’s all right, Frank; it’ll be okay; it’s all right.’ She goes on like that for a while before she realizes what she’s doing.”

Simon smiles. He always liked Molly.

Brad chimes in: “So at the end of the first year, all the students have a memorial service for their cadavers. Some dude sang a song for his corpse. Molly wrote a poem. And this guy—” Brad discretely points to Simon. “This guy—” Brad leans in toward the girl, whispers in her ear.

Her eyes bug out and she spits a little of her soda. “No way! No fucking way.”

The trio glances back at Simon.

Jason continues the lesson. “Anyway, that shit doesn’t happen after first year. You toughen up. They teach you to objectify. It’s not a person; it’s clay. You objectify it and you cope. Kind of like how we say ‘beef’ instead of ‘cow.’ We don’t say, ‘I’m going to eat a pig,’ we say ‘have some pork.’ Society, it, uh, objectifies things to, you know, cope.”

“Society marches toward its taboos,” Simon says.

Silence. Two eyes times three looking wide at Simon’s malachite.

“Objectification,” says Simon. “Personification. I remember. As a boy. There was a cartoon public service message on Saturday mornings that said, ‘Don’t drown your food.’ The food items were animated.Reasoning creatures. With eyes. They sang and pleaded not to be drowned in condiments. Someone thought that was an awfully important moral lesson, to spend the money on the ad. You should not drown them, but you can eat them and they will smile and sing. . . .”

The words continue to flow out of Simon. He so wants to participate in the conversation, having heard a topic he has something to add to, and he tries really hard. He tries to explain his theories on objectification and personification—yes, we say “beef” and “pork” but then go and humanize our food. Singing hot dogs. Dancing popcorn. Let’s all go out to the lobby—let’s all go out to the lobby—let’s all go out to the lobby . . . and eat a sentient being. Animals can sing and dance in the cartoons. Bambi is a cute, reasoning strip of venison. Aztecs believed that eating your enemy gave you their strength, and M&M’s look us in the eye and tell us to crack open their exoskeletons and suck out their milky innards, empower ourselves on their sweet, sentient guts. All the commercials and all the Disney cartoons and was it possible, at all possible, that someone, somewhere, in some darkened boardroom, had decided to subliminally steer the populace toward cannibalism?

Simon tries to convey all these things. Maybe he tries too hard. He’s not sure what words he’s used, but when he is done, when his mouth is dry, Jason, Brad, and the girl only gape. And then they leave.

Simon sighs. He looks across the room at a piece of half-eaten watermelon left on a paper plate. Simon focuses. His hands dart, surgically. Four flicks of the wrist and three playing cards shiver, across the room, from the red interior flesh of the watermelon.

The fourth card pierces, a half-inch, into its hard outer shell.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon navigates the hostile terrain of his peers and finally gets to his friends. They are waiting for him. They are always patient. They may seem still and silent, but Simon is attuned to their subtle, geological nuances. He is a sensitive boy.

The refrigerators’ hum sooths his nerves. In the vibrations he can feel their enthusiasms.

Every one of them was his friend. Every one of them broke his heart.

Simon is an archeologist. They send him these sacred temples and he explores their ruins. He digs. Bullets are artifacts to extract. He reads the cuneiform of stab wounds and bruises, deciphers dead languages and poetry.

Simon is a necromancer. Bone cutters and scalpels are foci and talismans. Science is an empty ritual, lip service to physics. He sings requiems with surgical cuts and stainless steel voice over digital recordings. All his patients are dead. None of them ever pull through.

Three phases to Simon’s absinthe high: The first is the intense colors and fading lines of Impressionist mania. The second is lucid madness. But the third phase is waking dream—fully orchestrated, epic, phantasmagoric scenes painted on the inner eyelids. Simon can reach this stage while standing. Simon has disciplined himself to reach this stage while working. When Simon sips absinthe, his scalpel bends with steel laughter. When he drinks enough, Autopsy Room 6 fades, and when he slips his hand into that Y-incision, the whole world falls away.

There is an imbalance in Simon’s head. That is what the doctors said. His mind takes shortcuts—ever intuitive and always imaginative. When Simon enters the Dead Water, his scalpel vanishes, science fades into green mists, like someone staring at binary code until blood gushes from their eyes and the ones and zeroes merge into the image of a butterfly just before they go blind, Autopsy Room 6 blurs away and Simon stands with his patient. Simon knows the science—knows that he knows, intellectually—but it all goes away. All the cuts and data go on autopilot. His brain compartmentalizes. It is just him and his patient, talking by the Dead Water.

Then the Corbies grow fat.

And Simon’s belly fills with love, the dead love, the liquid nostalgia concentrate.

Shortcuts. They can be problematic in the legal world. His colleagues and Dr. Reeves are always so frustrated. “Show your work!” they shout. Simon recalls his sixth-grade math teacher. She would rap his knuckles. She would hiss his name, “Mr. Meeksss!” Little Simon’s answers were always correct. Even so, she always rapped his knuckles. “Show your work!”

Simon pulls answers from the Dead Water and they are always correct. He’s learned to trust those answers. The Dead Water is smarter than him, bigger than him. But absinthe is only half the ritual. To get to the Dead Water, every cadaver must break his heart.

Jason was right: After first year, they taught students to objectify, to cope. Simon went in the opposite direction. Simon personifies. Simon does not cope, he feels. It has to hurt. That is the way of his addiction.

You have to feel the needle before the high. Eh, Jane?

Personify.

Personify.

Simon readies himself in Autopsy Room 6, snaps latex gloves over shaking hands. He recalls footage he saw in a documentary—a study on the importance of the sense of touch in mammals. Scientists took two infant monkeys and put them in separate cages. They fed one monkey milk via a furry, soft puppet that could cuddle and caress the baby. They fed the second monkey via a metal milk bottle. Same nourishment, no cuddling. Over the subsequent weeks, monkey two became a shaking, neurotic mess. When, at the end of the study, they offered it the soft puppet, it desperately leapt to its new mother, shivering and hugging manically.

Simon has so few opportunities for intimate contact, for socialization. But his patients are always so patient with him. During the initial, external examination, Simon touches them as intimately as anyone did in life. And after, going inside, Simon touches them more intimately than any living being had, sifting through sentiment and entrails. Finally, in the Dead Water, he talks with them, and though his time is short, the Dead Water stretches moments into days and months of dreamtime. Simon befriends them, asks his questions.

When did you die?

What does that bruise mean?

Who shot you?

What did they bludgeon you with?

Did they stab you before or after they raped you?

Why did your mother smother you?

Were you scared?

In and out come these sleeping friends. Simon leaves behind his sleepwalk life, sheds his somnambulist skin, and lives and feels, feels deeply, deeply in the Dead Water. But it always has to end. He is always called back.

Every one of them is his friend.

Every one of them breaks his heart.

They all swim away.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon pushes a gurney through the halls like a sugar-hyped child with a shopping cart terrorizing a grocery store. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office performs some five thousand autopsies a year. Plenty of opportunity for his addiction.

“Hey!”

Simon screeches to a halt. A hand and arm flop out from under the sheet, dangling over the side of the gurney.

Simon looks up, catching his breath. A woman. From the office. Her name tag says Amy. She waves a toe tag.

“Hey, Simon. You need to stop leaving messages for people on these. It’s creeping everyone out.”

“Sorry. Ran out of Post-its. Plenty of toe tags.” Simon smiles. He could not help it. The bass of his heart bangs out amphetamine rhapsodies.

“What are you on?” Amy asks.

Simon shrugs. “Mountain Dew. It’ll tickle your innards.”

Amy shakes her head and walks down the hall. Simon could have told her his drug is absinthe, but that was not a good idea, and it was not the truth. Absinthe is just the medium, the accelerant, the lubricant. The active ingredient is the dead. The dead are his drug.

Simon takes the dangling, pale hand in his, holds and tenderly examines it a moment. He likes hands. Hands are very expressive. Simon is not very good at reading faces, but he can read a hand. Hands have more trouble lying.

Simon gently tucks in the hand and arm back under the sheet and wheels away. There is more work to be done.

Every year, five thousand chest cavities yawn open and scream.

Simon hears them all.

*   *   *   *   *

“Simon, what the hell are you doing?” Dr. Oba Fulani yells. She has an authoritative yell, like some sort of Mama goddess. The senior pathologist, she runs the day-to-day affairs, directly under Dr. Reeves.

Simon freezes.

“Is that from the evidence locker?” she asks in a Nigerian accent.

Simon looks at the bear in his hands. Caked in blood, with one eye missing, stuffing trailing out of the socket hole, it looks very sad.

Can teddy bears suffer survivor guilt syndrome, Jane?

Simon looks down at the tiny body, chest freshly sewn shut, ready to be slid and closed away into cold sleep, their Dead Water adventure finished.

“I was bringing it to her—her bear,” says Simon.

“In God’s name, why?”

“She’s scared. She died scared. Very scared. She thought something would come and save her. Like in stories. She did not understand. She died holding her bear.”

Dr. Fulani stares. Her mouth does not hang open, but she stares. This is not the strangest thing she’s seen Simon do. The anger evacuates her body; she wants to hang on to it, but, dammit, Simon has a way of saying these sorts of things so . . . genuinely.

“What did you find out?” she asks, shoulders slumping, looking at the girl.

Simon puts a tender hand to the girl’s head. “Blunt force trauma to the head. Cause of death was a brain hemorrhage.”

Dr. Fulani nods. “Her mother’s boyfriend said he found her like that. Said there was a break-in.”

Simon shakes his head. “No. The boyfriend did it.”

Dr. Fulani walks farther into the room, very interested now. “Yeah? How do you know?”

“She told me.”

Dr. Fulani slams her clipboard down on a counter like an angry goddess throwing lightning. “Dammit, Simon! That does not cut it. You need to give me something better than hunches and—”

“But it’s correct, Dr. Fulani,” Simon interrupts. “It’s always correct.”

“Still doesn’t cut it, Simon. Not in court. Or do you want a repeat of the Twiss incident?”

Simon flinches. His head falls. “The murder weapon was a heavy flashlight, the boyfriend’s flashlight. He was too frantic to wipe it clean.”

“How do you know that?” asks Dr. Fulani.

Simon shrugs with his eyebrows. “He dumped the flashlight in a Dumpster behind the apartment.”

Dr. Fulani almost protests, but jots something down on her clipboard. “I’ll tell them to look for it. And Simon, put that bear back in evidence before Dr. Reeves sees it. Okay?”

“Pugsley,” Simon says.

“What?”

“The bear’s name. It’s Pugsley.”

“How—?” Dr. Fulani takes an exasperated breath and leaves.

Simon waits for the door to close, waits for the footsteps to trip-trap far down the hall. Then he places the teddy bear in the arms of the dead girl.

“Sweet dreams, Tamara.”

Simon slides her back inside and shuts the freezer door.

He misses her already.

CHAPTER 4

Feel it.

His veins are Stygian rivers. The ghost tree grows, upside down in his head, wormwood roots snaking through the gray wrinkles. The crows cackle in their branches.

Feel it.

The bittersweet tang of chemical licorice and loved ones gained and lost in a single night.

A good night’s work.

Malachite eyes wide and green, and green and quickened. Synapses surging with ghost fire. Everything easy. Nothing awkward. Graceful and sure. At his best—yes!—at his best with this much Dead Water. He can solve any puzzle, walk between raindrops, run on falling leaves.

“Crisped and sere,” sing the Corbies. “The leaves they were crisped and sere.”

“Sere?”

“No, seer!”

The black birds argue in his head.

Simon stands in front of the final cadaver of the night, scalpel in one hand, bent lily in the other.

“Hi, Jane.”

He hesitates. He’s a schoolboy again. Why? She gives him butterflies. Oh my! He hasn’t had butterflies in the stomach since . . . since his last girlfriend.

She was my girlfriend for one night, Jane.

Memories are often locked in a sensation and Simon finds happiness in the sticky-sweat seal of a rubber mask. It was a junior-high Halloween dance. And the girl—oh, the girl was pretty and was so suddenly there the moment Simon noticed girls. She liked Band-Aids and wore such colorful ones. Every cut and scrape she received in play was her pride and joy. Another chance to show off, to decorate herself in Band-Aids.

She turned hurts into joys, Jane.

But little misfit Simon, all in black, did not travel in her social circle, did not travel in any circles, just in books and in his head. At the Halloween dance, though, social lines and circles faded to nothing under strobe lights and Jack O’Lantern laughter. Everyone was something else, no more students, only walking, dancing dreams. Simon, under his rubber mask, was as close as he’d ever been to being one of them.

He and the girl danced. Even in her costume, she wore Band-Aids. Later, they hid under a table and, with a flashlight, he performed a shadow puppet show for her. Simon was very skilled at shadow puppets. She had clapped, quietly, and then kissed him.

For one night, she was my girlfriend.

The next day, Simon drew her a Valentine. It was after October, but he drew her a Valentine. He drew her a heart.

I tried so hard, Jane. I spent so much time. It was such a good heart. The coronary arteries were perfect and to scale.

The girl fled the misfit and his Valentine. The social circles rose again, and they never went away.

And now, Simon hesitates in front of Jane. Then he looks into her golden eyes. He feels the peace wash over him, doubts banished. The Dead Water is sweet, but Jane is different. More powerful. The dead love, deeper.

He places the bent lily in her hand, feels the cool, dry caress of her skin. With scalpel and nimble fingers, he cuts each stitch of the Y in her chest, plucks out each thread.

“She loves me.

“She loves me not.

“She loves me.

“She loves me not.”

He plucks the last black thread, considers it with a boyish smile. “She loves me.” He tosses the thread and drinks the last of the absinthe from his Thermos.

Manias are born in the time it takes to open a door.

You have but to knock.

Her chest opens with a sigh. Inside are all the post-autopsy organs, all stuffed back into place, all the glistening things he needs to see her soul.

Knock-knock.

Open.

Simon dives inside.

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

“Were you scared, Jane?”

Her mouth forms a squiggly line—half-grin, half-frown—and she deflects with a playful shrug. The ebony waves sigh nearby. The world is a blur of trailing lines. There is only her face, her huge eyes blinking at him, and the blurred background as they spin on the Wheel of Fate.

Spinning.

Whirling.

They laugh and slam their bare feet down into the soft, bone-powder sand. The creaking merry-go-round slows to a stop.

“You liked playgrounds, didn’t you, Jane? Even as an adult. Especially as an adult.”

She nods.

“You liked sneaking into playgrounds after hours. Play at night. Do something ridiculous.”

She nods.

“You liked the feel of your bare feet in sand, especially at the start of fall. Just the hint of a chill, dipping your feet deep into cool September sand.”

She nods thrice.

Runs off.

Giggling.

Simon follows, running through the white sand. Empty merry-go-round, slide, jungle gym, seesaw. Empty swings sway in wind and memory. Just the two of them frolicking in a Plutonian playground somewhere after ever-after.

They climb the stairs on the slide, impossibly high.

“Jane, who did this to you?”

They climb.

“You knew them, didn’t you, Jane?”

Way, way up, they sit at the top. Simon’s legs dangle down. Jane sits behind, her legs wrapped around his waist, arms wrapped around his shoulders. No moon or stars in the Dead Water, but they watch the lunar glow of the playground below. She whispers in his ear, nuzzling chin into his shoulder.

“There were four of them,” says Simon, looking down. “You knew them from before. They hung you to scare you. They wanted something.”

And they push off—

Slide.

Weeeeeeeeeeee!

Down into the white sand in a giggling tangle of limbs. They get up. They play.

Up.

Down.

Simon and Jane go up and down on the seesaw.

“One of them was large, Jane, very large and very strong. He was the hangman, all by himself—hoisted you up.”

Up.

Down.

“He lifted you. One of them laughed while you choked. One of them asked you questions. One of them cried.”

Up.

Down.

They stop, Jane high and Simon low. She slides down the seesaw plank, buries her head in Simon’s chest.

“Jane, what—?”

She tickles him and runs off. Simon follows. They laugh again and play on the jungle gym. Simon walks high atop the monkey bars with vaudevillian gestures, shows off his perfect balance, shows off for the girl—then takes a comically timed tumble into the sand. Jane hangs upside down, legs locked in the bars. They stare each other, eye to eye, upside down for a timeless beat.

“They played Hangman, Jane. They wanted something. They wanted you to tell them something.”

Jane plops down next to Simon and whimsically draws pictures in the white sand.

“You scratched one of them—the big one. Is that why they killed you? What did they want?”

Simon looks down to see Jane drawing a game of Hangman in the sand. A stick-figure girl with a frown hung on a stick gallows. Next to her, a mystery word of six letters: _ _ _ _ _ _

She draws an H in the sand.

H _ _ _ _ _

She draws an A in the sand.

H A _ _ _ _

She dips her finger into the osseous sand for a third letter . . . but there is a groan, a deep groan from below, deeper than space, and it grows into a growl. The sands under the entire playground undulate and quiver. Something struggles. Jane pulls back her hand in horror.

All is quiet again. She looks up at Simon, troubled. She does not want to continue. He does not rush her. They walk away and play on the swing set. They swing, lazily, side by side. Simon’s hand reaches across and takes Jane’s.

“This is one of the things you’re going to miss the most—playing in playgrounds after hours—isn’t it?”

Jane smiles. Nods.

And then, they kick off.

They swing harder.

Higher.

They’re laughing again.

Higher.

It is the dare that every child faces: How high can you swing? It is a wonderfully frightening dare. Higher and higher and braver and braver, until you are parallel to the ground. Then it is the question that every child asks: Can I go higher? Can I kick the sky? Can I go farther? Can I do a three-sixty? And then it is the wonder in every child’s mind: What would happen if I did the impossible—what if I did a three-sixty? What would be my reward? Could I keep on doing the impossible? Could I keep doing three-sixties? Could I reverse any sorrow? Could I reverse death? Would the world be reborn?

Simon and Jane swing higher and higher. They are now parallel to the bone sand. They kick harder.

“Simon,” says the starless sky. “Simon!”

No. Oh no. Not yet. Please . . .

The Plutonian playground vanishes. All the sand falls away. There is an hourglass as big as galaxies where souls are just grains.

*   *   *   *   *

“Simon! Earth to Simon.” Dr. Reeves smiles his plastic, game-show-host smile.

Dr. Reeves is a man made of smiles.

Meteors smile at dinosaurs like this.

Simon, startled and caught, yanks his arms out of the Y-incision with a slurp, tears off the latex gloves, throws them away quickly, guiltily, self-consciously. Dr. Reeves eyes the used rubber gloves in the trash, raises a perfectly plucked eyebrow.

“Well?”

Simon tries to maintain, tries to hide his Dead Water high, but he can feel the dead love surging through his system. He nudges his Thermos out of sight with a toe.

“Well what, Dr. Reeves?”

Dr. Reeves’s smile expands. It’s a handsome smile. A white sun setting over the majestic peak of his prominent, tanned chin and strong, tanned jaw.

“I thought we were finished with Dangling Jane,” says Reeves. “Why do you have her out?”

Everyone else in the office had started calling her Dangling Jane. Simon did not.

“Something I missed in my initial report,” says Simon. “Wanted to be thorough.”

“Oh? What did you miss?”

Simon stares.

Silence.

Dr. Reeves’s smile becomes a mentor’s smile. Simon squirms. Between the two of them, they have all the pedagogical chemistry of a spider eating its young.

“You know, son,” says Reeves, leaning in, all broad shoulders and gym-grown body, “you get a lot farther in life with a smile and a handshake than you do with just a handshake. You’d certainly get farther with a smile than you do with that creepy scowl.”

People skills. Simon had often been told to work on his people skills. People skills cure cancer. Dr. Richard Reeves was Simon’s boss, Cook County’s current medical examiner. Chicago had changed from the system of electing a coroner to appointing an expert in the seventies, but Reeves was still a politician at heart.

“Now, why don’t you give Dangling Jane some rest, huh?” says Reeves. “And please, Simon, don’t come back until Monday. I don’t want to hear any more about you sneaking in off shift. Just enjoy your weekend. We don’t want any more . . . strangeness, do we? You know, there was pressure after the Twiss case to let you go.” Reeves grabs Simon’s shoulders, smiling, squeezing just an infinitesimal degree past comfort. “I held on, but I can’t keep fighting that same fight for you.”

The Dead Water burns bright and green in Simon’s nerves, giving him preternatural clarity. All he can see in Reeves’s face are the layers upon layers of cuts, laser incisions, injections, lines on top of lines of cosmetic surgery, much of it performed by his father—the dead injected in his face, injected in his—

It’s too horrible to contemplate, Jane.

Dr. Reeves lingers, dangling the anti-carrot in Simon’s face. “Good talk, Simon.” Finally he leaves.

Simon releases a breath, unclenches his hand, drops a scalpel now dripping his own blood. Simon knows Reeves’s darkest secret. He knows the good doctor illegally sells cadaverous bits and pieces, even whole corpses, to whomever it is that buys such things. It’s a lucrative trade. He takes from Simon’s helpless patients, plunders the dead to pay for better cars and toys and, of course, the building and rebuilding of his ninety-seven-percent artificial body.

Simon would like to pretend that Reeves keeps him around because he’s deathly afraid of anyone turning him in. But Simon knows the real reason. The truth wriggles in his stomach with parasitic spasms. The reason Reeves keeps Simon on staff is the same reason Simon could not tell anyone about the plundering: If ever it came to light that nefarious deeds were being perpetrated at the Medical Examiner’s Office, who would suspect the handsome, tanned doctor, when they could blame the Ghoul?

*   *   *   *   *

Jane is all tucked in, slid back into her refrigerator. Simon closes the door, then flips it open and closed, open and closed, again and again.

You hang up . . . No, you hang up . . . No, you . . .



INTERLUDE:

Silhouettes

The slam of the clip thrills my guts.

God, I love that sound. Sounds like . . . sounds like when they used to call me G.I. Jane and give me shit and I’d kick their asses and then we were all warriors. Before the crazy talk. Before the boogies.

I once saw aerial footage of a beach—Florida; Hawaii, maybe. There were tiny people swimming and splashing, but also big, dark silhouettes weaving in and out of the shoreline and the people. Statistically, shark attacks are rare. People think the irregularity is a shark deciding to come into our space. Wrong. The sharks are always with us, not a hundred yards away. We’re in their space. The irregularity is when one decides to reach out and bite.

Would people really want to know that?

Would they still go to the beach?

Attacks are rare, so the civilians don’t really need to know. They do not have to see the water at that angle.

I look through the scope—tiny, warm bodies, reds and greens swimming in a blue sea. I pan through the crowd. I know it will be there soon.

There.

A blue silhouette swims through, barely perceptible against the nearly identical blue of the background. It walks, passing inches away from the red bodies. None of them know. They all walk on.

I caress the trigger and try to remember bliss. I track the blue boogie, and then freeze. What if it sees me?

Stupid irrational fear. I curse my weakness and crush it. No one can see me up here.

I take aim.

Then I hear it—the high-pitched, girly scream that I hate so much, that I spent years and bullets and boot camp hell to escape. But that’s what comes out of me as the boogie looks up with its cold blue head, staring me down through the scope with its impossibly cold, black-hole eyes.

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.