Mark Henry_Amanda Feral 01 (8 page)

I set the stack of papers on my desk, sprawled out on the love seat and watched the lake like a movie. I tore open the envelope and retrieved a brochure that appeared to be handmade. It did, in fact, advertise a seminar, entitled:
Getting the Most from Your Afterlife, A Field Guide for Supernaturals
. I decided to just go and call it an adventure. It would also allow me to stall on what to do about the business.

I worked through messages and returned calls: Renewal clinic—check, Rigel shoes—check.

Check, check, check, check, check.

I turned my attention to the biography sample for the website.

A
MANDA
R. F
ERAL
, Vice President

Graduate of UC Berkeley, where she earned a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology, in addition to an MA in Sociology and an MBA with emphasis in Advertising and Marketing, both from Stanford.

The winner of three AdYear awards and a Copywriter of the Year for 2005, Ms. Feral’s past campaigns include:

• Rigel Athletic,
  Cloudrunner
  (2005)
  
• The 2005 Bridge the Gap Games
  
• Peach, iMind (2006)
  
• Arhea Home,
  A New Bed for Sally and Jane
  (1999)
  
• Platinum Hotel,
  Lux
  (2002)
  
• BellyBurger,
  Swallow
  (2004)
  

Doesn’t all that sound so super impressive?
It should, I wrote it myself and some of it was even true. The education was exaggerated, a bit. I have been to Berkeley, where I spent many a hazy stoned summer evening searching for torn panties after frat keggers. I’ve also been to Stanford, where Ben Moretti, of steel-belted-radial fame and a proud Kappa Beta Pi, took me, and my drunken virginity (at least that’s what I told him). Lest you think that my only experience with education has been of the drinking and fucking nature, I did complete a degree at Seattle Community College and some work towards a BA at UW, in advertising of course. It was enough to get me started. My brazen nature (and to a lesser degree my good looks) took me the rest of the way. As for organizational psychology, I am a good judge of character
45
and a highly organized person (please note my fondness for lists). Sociology? I’m a social butterfly and I think that counts (I’m going to the Well of Souls for drinks after work—or the seminar depending on how long that took—and not just anyone can get in, now can they?). The impressive array of ad campaigns were all me. Those idiots Pendleton and Avery couldn’t come up with a decent slogan if their lives depended on it; they were along for the ride.

I sketched a smiley on a Post-It and underneath wrote:
Run with it.
I slapped it on the form and put it in the out box. Marithé cleaned it out hourly.

My thinking: I’ll just keep working, fake it until I come up with a plan.

Thinking about drinks reminded me that I needed to talk with Ricardo about the black zombie breathing on me. What was Ricardo’s last name? I was sure he mentioned it, or Gil did. Why did I want to say peanut? It was a nut! His last name was a nut. Ricardo Macadami-no. Ricardo Brazi-no. Almond? Ricardo Almandine? Almost, Amandine, that sounded right. I reached for the phone.

411. Got me a ring.

“You’ve reached Ricardo, I’m either sleeping with the dead or too busy to pick up. Leave me a message.” Beep.

“Ricardo, this is Amanda.” I paused, waited, as though my name would be enough to make the tall dead guy pick up. I assure you in most circumstances, it’s plenty. I rethought, added, “Princess, whatever. Listen. I remembered something about my death. Give me a call.”

The Oak Alley Business Park abandoned its namesake plantation roots at its ramshackle sign; a low-budget enamel-on-plywood affair, strapped across a shattered Plexiglas column. It stood unlit, shadowed, and ineffective under the dark gloom of rain clouds. It was a wonder I’d found the place. There were no oaks, as the name implied, nor any trees, at all. The site was the opposite of an oasis, a patch of bland in an otherwise evergreen landscape. The little foliage to be seen, a variegated ivy, furred the low brick structures; windows pocked their surface like mange.

6106 Suite B squatted amidst the willy-nilly cluster of buildings, like an imposter. Cars dotted the parking spaces of the other buildings, but my destination was marked by only two: a gray VW Vanagon suitable for serial killing, and a far-too-yellow Xterra, that seemed puffy, Fisher-Price, except for the heavily tented windows. Wendy’s Audi was conspicuously absent. I wheeled into the handicapped spot outside the smoked glass doors, and snatched my purse.

The lobby was humdrum; flat white paint, industrial grey carpet and dropped ceiling; boring. It could have been a prison common room. A copper-topped zombie head examining nails that wanted a French manicure, bad, stopped and glared up at me. Gerilyn would be my greeter and warden for the day’s event, and happy to be so. Though her teeth were in desperate need of veneers, she showed them off with the pride of a psychotic pageant mother, albeit a white-eyed and dead one. She sat prim-postured at a cheap plywood table skirted for the Fourth of July, in pleats of red, white and blue plastic. A handwritten table tent read:

REGISTRATION

A–Z

She extended her hand with the stiff-jointed squareness of a robot. I took it.

“Welcome to
Getting the Most from Your Afterlife with Bernard Krups
.” The words flowed out from monotonous practice. I could, almost, hear the italics. “I’m Gerilyn. Did you get a field guide?”

I broke off from her jerky handshake. “Just this brochure.” I extracted it from my purse and held it in front of me like a used Kleenex. It was a poorly produced tri-fold of the kind I could have manufactured at age seven. “I’m Amanda Feral. I’m supposed to meet my friend Wendy. Has she checked in?” I knew the answer, but one could hope.

Gerilyn scanned the names on a brief list and returned a pert, “Nope, not yet.” She handed over a stapled stack of lightweight bond printed with the title of the seminar in slipshod blurriness. Under Bernard Krups’s name, I saw that the workshop was subtitled,
A Field Guide to the Supernatu
real. I hadn’t caught that the first time. The sloppy creators loved their plays on words. Me? Not wowed.

The woman wrote out my name on a “Hello my name is…” sticker and passed it to me, along with a pen that pronounced, “You’re a winner.” Duh
46
!

Gerilyn pointed to double doors to my right. “The seminar is through there. There are snacks if you’d like, depending on…well, you know.” I didn’t pick up on her meaning until I saw the buffet.

I slapped the Balenciaga and paperwork down at a table near the back of the room, the kind you don’t cross your legs under for fear of becoming attached to it by a wad of moldy gum.

There were two others in the room, one held a bottle of red liquid and slurped at it, occasionally gnawing on the spiral threading the top, with a fine-pointed canine. She was a woman, vampire, clearly, and bored. Her head rested in her palm. She stared at the wall, window and then the other person in the room, a man wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt, a beige polka-dot oxymoron. Gag! My eyes followed hers, from the man’s laptop, to its connected projector. Oh shit, I thought. The woman turned her gaze to me and mouthed, “PowerPoint.” Her head rolled back on her shoulders as though she was near death and she shoved a pretend stake through her heart.

The man was average height and weight—you’d never pick him out of a crowd, except for one oddity. Grey hairs sprouted from above his ears like wings on either side of his bald head. Was this Bernie Krups? If it was, we were in trouble, in real danger of being bored to death. Or else, we had been dropped in the middle of a pyramid scheme. I feared I would be forced into selling knives or participating in a Ponzi.

Where the hell was Wendy and how did I let myself get roped into this?

The food
was
interesting; I’ll have to admit. Eight bottles of a red liquid, surely blood, in plastic bottles, were kept warm in a chafing dish of water. A tray of appetizers displayed cracker-sized spinal cord segments, each dotted with a spherical glob of jaundiced fat; if we were at a French restaurant, it would be called an
amuse bouche
. Severed fingers protruded from a crystal bowl of ice—the fingernails had been removed
47
. The blood and body parts shared space with humdrum turkey subs and bags of Doritos
48
. I snapped up one of the vertebrae and cracked through the bone like a carrot.

I scanned the room for reading materials, a
Vogue
or an
Entertainment Weekly
, some bit of glossy gossip—you know, news. Nothing but laminate covered in the greasy fingerprints of past attendees. I popped another nibble down my craw, this time a tasty finger—and not bad, probably Gerilyn’s specialty. I took my seat.

As I was fumbling for my phone to text Wendy, a pair of regular flesh-toned humans strode in chatting about the weather, traffic and other sundry blah, blah. Their name tags—which reminded me that mine was mixed in with the papers on the table—read Tim Torgerson and Shanna Tate. They looked exactly how you’d expect them to, blond-haired, blue-eyed, Ken and Barbie fresh from Malibu. Suhnore. They sat at the table in front of me, but didn’t offer a greeting. So, screw ’em.

I thumbed a quick message out to Wendy:

Where the fuck r u bitch
?

The doors behind me banged open, slamming against either side of their frame. A squatty shirtless creature appeared, with the streaky bronzed skin of a last-minute invite. Despite its hairy-pitted maleness and smirking Buddha head, the beast wore C-cups like a pinup, and the muscled legs of a goat. The pink hot pants were the clincher. He was fabulous.

“Welcome!” he bellowed, spreading short arms as wide as possible. “Oh…so few attendees. That is too bad. I’m Bernard Krups the Third. I guess you could say I’m a benevolent gift to the malevolent. A real helper.”

Gerilyn trailed behind him, her lips spread in a giddy smile. She clapped her hands with the enthusiasm of a game show contestant. Bernard marched to the front of the room and shooed the tech geek away, with two quick flicks of a wrist. He hopped onto the table there and spread across it like a centerfold, dragging a stubby finger up his side, circling the thick aura of skin around his nipple. I could imagine him crowned with grape leaves and carrying a diamond crusted pimp cup, but his origins escaped me. I was thinking Roman, but it could have been Greek. God of parties, or something.

“Bacchus?” the little thing offered, plucking the question from inside my head.
Was he reading me like a goddamned book? Am I that transparent?
“But that was so very long ago, what makes you go there? Miss? Miss?” he asked, searching for my name.

I looked around to see if he were talking to someone else but his bloodshot eyes were trained on me. “Amanda, Amanda Feral.”

“Mmm, feral, makes me want to come over there and tangle with you, you feisty little pussycat.” Bernard was on his hands and knees and reached out with a curling movement and clawed at the air. It would have been sexy if he was remotely pleasant to look at, or I was completely drunk.

“That can be remedied,” he said, growling.

The woman in the front of the room was heaving. Tim and Shanna’s mouths hung open, wide enough to attract flies.

I didn’t respond. Bacchus started his song and dance.

“Getting the most from our afterlife. Isn’t that why we’re all here?” He spread his fingers and fluffed an imaginary pillow in front of him. “This afterlife can be so boring, really. Eating people, sucking blood…” He gestured to Tim and Shanna. “Seemingly pointless attacks under the full moon, or…whenever. Isn’t there more?”

Of course, there is, I thought.

“Exactly, Amanda.”

“I—”

Tim, Shanna, and the bored vampire looked back at me with questioning eyes. I had a question.
How the hell did a vampire get to a daylight seminar?
I wondered about the dark tinting on the car outside. Was it dark enough?

“There is more to this life than pretense. An entire world is available to you, if you’ll just open your eyes.”

“Duh,” Shanna said. “Preach to the choir much?”

He waved off her comment, with a shudder that rolled through him like that first bite of lemon.

My cell began to vibrate on the table. I snatched it up and quieted it, maintaining eye contact with Bacchus in the process.

The little troll pressed a key on the laptop; the screen lit up with a slide show of undead hot spots: The Well of Souls, Convent, and other clubs, but also retail stores, dry cleaners and restaurants that catered to our kind, all open twenty-four hours per day. Shiny-skinned zombies with white eyes danced together, silly vampires laughed at tables with friends. Same old crap.

“And none of this we share with our living cousins. They cannot see them, as you are probably aware. How many of you have been to a supernatural bar since you were turned?”

We all raised our hands, like some pathetic AA meeting. We all know those people are quitters.

“Good, a wicked fun time to be sure, but there is so much more.” He flicked another key, and a book flashed onto the screen. A thick hardback with the title:
The Bacchus Guide to the Supernatural World
.

Here it comes, I thought. He caught my thought and winked. Was I the only one thinking—they all looked pretty vacant—or could he only read zombie thoughts?

“‘Here it comes,’ is right, ladies and gentlemen. The Bacchus Guide is the premiere…” His voice trailed off along with my interest. Wendy had sent me to a sales pitch.

I glared at the message on my phone.

Ha ha ha luv wend c u.

I responded with,

U bitch the well 7

I reached for my purse. The last words I heard from the sales pitch were, “…and hundreds of dollars’ value in coupons, all for $79.99. You can’t beat it…”