Revival House (17 page)

Avery knows I still love this woman and I know damn well that she would never agree to participate in such a process, whether it is in the name of furthering our battle against the timelessness of death or not. Poor harmless PETA-loving Scarlet, wouldn’t hurt a fly. She fled here because of the dogs. Now look at her: a long tube snaking from her mouth, thin plastic lines filled with her most precious bodily fluids protruding from arteries, tape holding her eyelids shut; blind, bleeding, and being force-fed oxygen.

But, the recesses of my mind scream about the bitch not thinking twice about ripping out my own heart and shredding it to so much useless pulp.

I go upstairs and gather the metal ring we’ll screw into her head and its accompanying shoulder harness. Passing through the hallway from the embalming room to the basement staircase, I think of simply running out the front door and never coming back. I could buy a bus ticket, leave all this shit here, yeah, maybe join the circus.

It wouldn’t do any good. I’d never escape Avery.

Back in the Revival House, I watch Avery fiddle with stopcocks and secure rubber tubes with medical tape.

Then, he bends over, rummages in a box on the floor, and comes up with a drill.

“Plug this in,” he says.

“What? What’s that for?”

“Listen, the more questions you ask, the less time we have to make this work.” He grins at me. “Besides, Caleb, you know what it’s for.”

I plug in the drill as he shaves a patch of hair from the crown of her head and excises a wet piece of pink tissue from the crack in her head. I’m glad we won’t have to watch that disgusting thing flapping around anymore.

He places the airplane-shaped drill bit against her bare scalp, the tip just wider than the fissure.

“You might want to find some goggles. And I hope to Christ that’s not your favorite outfit. Things are about to get very messy.” He pulls the drill’s trigger a couple of times, making it go ‘whir, whir, whir,’ as he laughs.

The drill pierces her skin in a fraction of a second. Then the whine of the tool deepens as he penetrates her skull. Blood and a cloud of bone dust spray the entire room. Avery had had the foresight at some time— I don’t know when— to cover most of the Revival House with plastic tarps.

Standing at the top of her head, drill in hand, he is covered in red gore. He’s grinning and blood gathers in the spaces between his teeth. A fine mist of blood and bone covers his face and chest.

We should be wearing respirators. I never thought to bring any down here.

The room stinks of decaying organic matter— dog shit, mold— and electricity.

The poor dogs bark themselves hoarse inside their tarp-covered kennels. They have no idea what’s going on, only that it’s something bad. Something very bad.

“Hand me that screw thing that’s on the tray.”

I examine the tray, lift the translucent blood-splattered plastic sheet, and give Avery the gleaming piece of hardware. He fits it into the burr hole he’s just drilled into Scarlet’s skull, struggling the subarachnid bolt into the snug opening, with his red and slippery gloved fingers. Scarlet now has a glittering silver port in the top of her head.

Through a layer of murk in my own head, I know what he’s doing. He’s placing something called an intraventricular catheter into the lateral ventricle of her brain. Its purpose is to monitor her intracranial pressure. If there is bruising to the brain, it could swell, causing brain death (which we’re not quite experienced enough to deal with yet).

The catheter is also the means by which we’re hastening the draining of her cerebral spinal fluid.

She could suffer brain damage, infection, or brain herniation from this procedure itself. But those are the least of our concerns.

I watch Avery uncoil the thin plastic catheter as I breathe in the drilled bone stink and wipe the veil of blood from my goggles with my gore-splattered gloves. Everything is scarlet.

Next, we struggle her head into the middle of the metal halo. We fit the harness over her fat shoulders and secure it to the metal ring. Avery reaches through the cage, puts his bloody hands on either side of Scarlet’s face and lifts her head, tilting it a bit to the right. Bones grind as he tells me to start screwing the bolts into her cranium.

None of it seems real. It’s like watching a 3D movie through a red filter, complete with piped in odors. But lucid flashes pass through me every now and then, and I know that I’m operating on this woman, my movements controlled by an unseen puppeteer’s strings. It’s unnerving. But exciting and intoxicating. I want to run from this dungeon. Yet, there’s no place I’d rather be.

“Hey, Avery,” I say, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

He laughs.

We sit on the floor playing Uno, feeding the remaining dogs treats and sporadically cleaning up their shit, letting Scarlet chill. I run to the kitchen, bringing back Cheez-Its and Coke, stopping off at the bathroom to clean up and then at my bedroom to change my crusty brown blood-stained clothes. Back in our Revival House, Avery and I play cards some more, talk about old times we shared in Pittsburgh, doze, check Scarlet’s vital signs.

Finally, after about ten hours, Avery gets up, stretches, and takes Scarlet’s temperature. We stayed down there all that time, worried that she might die on us.

“Exactly 32 degrees centigrade.” He smiles and pulls on a fresh pair of latex gloves.

I watch him place a rectal probe inside Scarlet. It will keep her insides chilled, and later it will re-warm her. We hope.

I am skeptical, but hopeful. Hopeful that it works; hopeful that it doesn’t work.

Avery and I head upstairs to get a couple of hours of much-needed sleep, our backs and necks sore from leaning against the stone walls. Our legs cramped from sitting on the floor for so long. We’ve done all we can for now.

I crawl into my bed, feeling the cool sheets gradually warm against my skin, my mind whirling with images of Scarlet. Scarlet the ghost tour ghoul. Scarlet the innocent naïve SCAD student. Scarlet with her silly dreams of making a life in Hollywood. Scarlet and her beautiful cerulean eyes and full black lips. Scarlet and her ever-changing hair.

Scarlet with the tube snaking out of her head and the corrugated plastic snake taped into her mouth. Scarlet with the metal cage screwed into her skull.

My heart aches. I can’t help it.

I wonder if Avery, the shit-heel she chose over me, feels anything at all.

Out of morbid curiosity, I slide out of bed and creep across the hall to peek into his room. It’s dark but I can make out his flattened silhouette.

He’s snoring.

Chapter 34 – Four

Hanging out at the Market just isn’t the same anymore. I guess I finally pissed off all two of my friends. Huh. Well, fuck them. I just hope Scarlet’s not hanging out with Caleb. I think he could really hurt her. I mean, we’re talking grievous bodily harm. Something isn’t right. And since when does she like this Avery dork? He’s all intellectual and shizzle. So not her type. I don’t know where Caleb gets all the fucked up stories he tells me about the guy. Avery seems harmless enough to me. But him and Scarlet? Hm...

I don’t get those two.

Whatever, dude. I’m just going to stop caring. Fucked up human drama.

Who needs it, right?

I must’ve gotten a bad pack of cigarettes— this one tastes like shit. I drop it to the bricks and grind it out with my ‘antique’ soldier boot. I have to duck into the gift shop and buy another pack. A group of elementary school kids crosses my path, every one of them staring at me. I bare my fake vampire teeth, dripping thick red corn syrup down my chin, and tiptoe down the Market after them. A number of them sneak glances at me over their shoulders. They cringe and hug each other. Their teacher, about fifty with gray-threaded hair pulled back into an old-fashioned bun, glares at me and I stop in my tracks. I’m eight years old again, afraid of being sent to the principal’s office. Old bitch. I hate teachers. I was just having a little fun with the kids, trying to make their field trip a little more interesting.

I forget the cigarettes and walk back to my platform to hawk my tour.

“Good people of this City Market,” I shout, “when is the last time you saw a ghost? How would you like to see one? How would you like to come face to face with a ghost,” I say pushing my face into that of an anorexic young woman in over-sized sunglasses, “in the dark, dank tunnels beneath the city?” The disgusted young woman grabs her dad’s (date’s?) arm and walks away. “Savannah is the most haunted city in these now United States. I can give you the scare of a lifetime.” A handful of tourists gather, one by one, in a semi-circle in front of me. Others standing in front of shops turn and look my way.

I haven’t seen my so-called friends for two days.

I don’t give a shit.

Maybe I’ll swing by the parlor on my way home.

Chapter 35 – Caleb

We warm her up, refilling her circulatory system with the blood we’d kept on tap for forty-eight hours.

“Can’t we just pump it in all at once, with an electric pump?”

Avery rolls his eyes.

“Slow is the only way to go, my friend,” he says. “Get comfortable, it’s going to take all day to do this. Plus, we have to get her CSF flowing again. Then, we’ll see what we’ve got.”

I wonder if it’s going to work, but I don’t say anything.

It’s a long day, filled with cleaning up blood-spattered everything. This is the kind of job one would normally call the CTS Decon for— that’s ‘Crime and Trauma Scene Decontamination,’ of course. I’m not certain we’ve actually committed a crime according to Georgia state law, considering my position as a certified embalmer, but I’d rather keep this situation as quiet as possible in any case. Fortunately, I am OSHA certified in the containment and disposal of blood borne toxic waste, and a company comes and collects biohazard bodily fluids from me on a regular basis, so nothing will look suspicious. And so, we handle the clean up on our own, rolling up plastic sheets covered in gore, moving the dogs upstairs to the kitchen, wiping down the rudimentary cement walls with a bleach solution, throwing our soiled rags into a big orange bag.

We break for dinner and head up to the kitchen, dead tired from the last few days’ work. I’ve had the ‘closed’ sign on the parlor’s front door and let the answering machine collect calls for the past few days. Everyone in town thinks I’m mourning Uncle Sterling, so they’re keeping their distance anyway. Avery and I are left alone.

“Do you know what she was? To you, I mean?” Avery watches me eat a ham and cheese on rye, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “She was a sandbag. You couldn’t concentrate on anything with her around. Your business was falling down all around you. Your research, with all those rats and guinea pigs, was going exactly nowhere. All you were doing was spinning your wheels, pining after some fat girl when you should have been working. You’re lucky I came along, Caleb.”

Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen.

“So,” I say, swallowing a crust of bread, already knowing the answer, “why do you want to bring her back?”

“Science. Pure science. Someday doctors all over the world are going to do this procedure, or one similar, and we— you and I— are going to live forever. If not in body, at least in name.” He smiles. “Plus, it’s a fun way to torture you.”

“But don’t you think people will be, you know, different after they’re resuscitated? What about the so-called soul?” I’m ignoring his ‘torture’ statement, though it did nearly cause me to jam my thumb into his eye a second ago.

Avery looks at me with a smirk.

“Come on. I know you don’t believe in that mumbo jumbo. You never have.”

I’m sick of him telling me what I know, what I need, what I believe. I want to tear my own face off.

Fluorine, neon, sodium.

~

We trot back downstairs and through the dank tunnel.

And Avery gets the paddles. I look at them as if I’d never seen them before. They hold a different meaning to me now, one more sinister than when Avery used them on the dog.

He hands them to me.

“You wanted her, loved her,” he says, challenging me. “Here, take her.”

I don’t want her like this. Am I in favor of researching the possibility of immortality and bringing beings back from the great beyond? Of course. Well, maybe. But this is Scarlet. She never would have wanted this.

I look at Avery’s hard-planed face. His steely eyes narrow, the beginnings of crow’s feet showing in the corners, as he examines my face. His temporal mandibular joints bulge as he clenches his jaw, holding out the paddles as if offering me a hors d’oeuvre.

One that I do not want.

I grasp the paddles in both shaking hands as he powers up the defibrillator, just as he did with the dog. I survey the dimpled and folded surface of Scarlet’s now-naked body, scan her tattoos, look at the white tape securing her eyelids. I take a deep breath and blow it out through pursed lips.