Revival House (7 page)

If I do not tell her, she’ll know that I don’t trust her.

If I do tell her, she’ll freak.

Either way, she won’t go out with me.

I feel like punching someone. A waiter. A random tourist.

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

I sigh, allowing my eyes to wander to the black satin spaghetti strap of her shirt, slouching against the porcelain of her soft pillowy shoulder.

“It’s complicated,” I say.

I don’t understand why she thinks it’s so important that I share this with her. I know she does not care about my business plans. I conclude that I do not understand women and that perhaps I’d better just keep quiet.

Nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine...

She huffs. “Well, um, okay, whatever,” she says, shrugging and collecting her portfolio. “I gotta, like, bail, dude. You don’t want to tell me, that’s cool. Listen, you got the check? I’ll get you next time, ‘kay? I’ll catch ya later.”

Watching her stalk off toward some class or another, I wonder to myself whether I could ever be completely honest with her.

About anything.

Or whether I even wanted to.

I want her and I don’t.

My head hurts.

Chapter 7 – Caleb

Harlan Fillmore sits perfectly straight in the wing-back chair I’d dragged into the front parlor from the office. His hands curl around the ends of the arm rests like paralyzed talons, his legs crossed below him, locked at the ankles. I twirl the ring on the camera’s lens until he is in sharp focus.

Then he wilts out of the frame.

“Wait, wait, wait,” I shout, jumping out from behind the tripod, knocking over a silver lighting umbrella. “He’s falling forward again. Four, please, mind what you’re doing, dang it.”

Four stands up next to the chair. “I am sorry, but it’s hard to hold him up when I’m crouching next to him, you know? He’s heavy. Plus, gravity is a hell of a thing, dude. Can’t we tie him to the chair or something? He’s not going to care. He’s fucking dead, man.” Four sniffs the air buffering him from Mr. Fillmore. “Christ, he stinks.”

I sigh. No respect. Perhaps we could loop a belt around Fillmore’s neck to secure him to the back of the chair. No, that won’t work— he’s too skinny. If he had multiple chins, a belt, hidden beneath a roll of blubber, might not be obvious, but that was not the case.

Fillmore melts forward until his chest rests on his thighs. Four drains the bottle of Bud Light he had stashed beside the chair. I want a beer but it won’t mix with my Seroquel, which is just beginning to kick in. Ingesting alcohol with an atypical anti-psychotic produces one nasty hangover (sometimes I care, sometimes I don’t). Anyway, I want to get Fillmore’s pictures done quick like. Not only are the hot lights liquefying his makeup, but Uncle Sterling will be back from The Home in less than an hour’s time.

Post-mortem photography,
memento mori
, has been around since the Victorian era. Back then, mortality rates were out of control and people wanted something to remember their loved ones by, particularly their children. And, since it was hardly practical to keep a lot of physical items due to many factors, including space constraints and possible contamination of said items with deadly germs, photographs were taken of the newly deceased and displayed in a mourning family’s home.

More recently, postmortem photography has aided police in solving crimes. The practice has also enjoyed something of an art house revival thanks to some of the edgier artists, like that Jake Wolfram— the pop star who is also the darling of the post-modernist art community.

Some of the more savage races in the world keep up the custom as a matter of course, but that’s mostly in the African jungles or someplace like that. In my own position, with a faltering funeral parlor to resurrect, I am proposing a return to the original tradition, hoping it will catch on, at least in Savannah, and bring in some much needed cash. Uncle Sterling’s the one who keeps the books, but I imagine our savings must be running quite low since fewer and fewer customers have been visiting our establishment.

My photography business will, of course, be dignified and respectful. Taking photos will not only preserve one last image of a loved one for an immediate relative, but that image can also be duplicated and sent around the world to extended family, sparing the most far-flung relatives the cost of airfare and accommodations to attend a funeral for a virtual stranger. Our fair city might lose a few tourist dollars, but Exley & Sons stands to gain a ton of cash and a portion of its former dignity and grandeur. Especially if I can parlay my still photography operation into a multimedia production company.

I do have plans, you see. They just don’t stop with photography and videos like they do at Forever Hollywood. I’m thinking much bigger than that, more scientific. I’ll need some help, but whether I can recruit Four is questionable.

Before I can begin marketing the photography service (and others), to clients I have to make it palatable to Uncle Sterling. I must demonstrate that it can be done tastefully and with proper respect for the decedent. That, in itself, is quite an obstacle. But, I have to do
something
, whether Sterling approves or not.

My challenge at the moment is how to add a more personal and modern spin to the post-modern postmortem photography. Also, how to keep Mr. Harlan Fillmore upright in his chair.

I grab Fillmore by the shoulders and heave him back up into a sitting position. Unfortunately, I smear his makeup. A diagonal streak of Plasto Wax and light beige cover crème slides across the front of my black silk shirt. “Oh, hell.”

Four just watches, lips pursed, eyes narrowed.

A moaning hiss escapes one of Fillmore’s obstructed orifices.

“What the hell was that?” Four asks, jumping.

“That would be air escaping from Mr. Fillmore’s body, most likely through his esophagus.” I grin at my friend, the purveyor of ‘frightainment.’ “Can you help me here, please?” I say, trying to sit the man up straight, fighting through the Seroquel haze flittering into my head.

Four goes about straightening Fillmore’s delicate bashed-in head as I return to my place behind the camera. Mr. Fillmore was thirty-two years of age, and he left behind a young wife and a very young child. He had been on his way home from a day of surfing out at Tybee when a carload of drunk teenagers slammed into his doorless Jeep on the bridge, head-on. Injuries sustained included fractured vertebrae and ribs, lacerated internal organs, severe burns to his face and arms, and a particularly troublesome open head wound. I used copious amounts of waxes, compounds, and cosmetics on Fillmore’s ruined pate. Uncle Sterling thinks for certain it will be a closed casket affair.

Sometimes I surprise Uncle Sterling.

“I don’t like his eyes, dude,” Four says. “Did you have to tape ‘em like that?”

“No, I didn’t have to, but I wanted to make sure they stay open for the picture.” I had folded tiny pieces of duct tape in half and stuck them between each of Fillmore’s upper lids and the hollows just beneath his thick mud-colored eyebrows. Such an effort was likely unnecessary, but I wanted to be sure his eyes remained evenly open. As he was reported by his widow to be quite the booze hound, it would be fitting if one eye drooped in a kind of drunken leer. I would personally find that quite amusing, but there is Uncle Sterling and the Fillmore family to consider. If I could make Fillmore look natural and alive in his postmortem portraits, I just might have a shot at saving our business, taking it in an entirely different direction, bringing it into the twenty-first century at last. I did make Fillmore look a bit bug-eyed, but he could pass for someone with thyroid issues.

“Well, some people close their eyes in pictures, you know, on purpose.” Four says, being a wiseacre. “I always try to close my eyes whenever someone snaps my pic.”

It is true. I have roughly three hundred pictures of Four. His eyes are closed in every single shot. Asshole.

I finally snapped Mr. Fillmore’s photograph, put away my camera and lights, and had the body secured in the washable nylon straps of the body lifter when headlights washed across the parlor.

Uncle Sterling.

“Hurry up. Sterling is going to skin me if he finds me playing with the bodies again,” I snap at Four, who juggles my photography paraphernalia along with his three bottles of beer. I shove at the steel frame of the body lifter, gliding it into the hallway, back toward the embalming room on its squeaking casters. Fillmore’s body swings back and forth, his head thumping and his hair leaving a greasy trail along one ugly flocked papered wall above the chair rail. Four snickers behind me, clinking his bottles against my lighting kit.

Uncle Sterling rattles the lock on the kitchen door.

“Shhhhh,” I say, heading for the embalming room door at a livelier clip. I throw a glance over my shoulder and see Four biting his fat bottom lip in an attempt to stifle a laugh. Unfortunately for Mr. Fillmore, I smack the top of his head directly into the embalming room’s fluted door casing. The impact snaps his left arm loose from its strap and the limb catches on the doorframe as I struggle to heave the lift across the marble threshold, into the embalming room.

A squeal from the kitchen means that Uncle Sterling has managed to open the door.

The body lift’s front wheel catches on the strip of marble. I haul the entire contraption back a few feet and take a running start. The damned caster catches again, and the lift’s back end rises into the air. Fillmore’s body dips head-first toward the cracked ceramic tile floor, his arm stuck between the door and my left side. I hear the unmistakable snap of bone.

“Boy,” Sterling shouts. He shuffles through the kitchen, coming closer. “You home, boy?” My heart seizes.

At that very moment, the Titan Body Lifter’s front caster snaps off. The whole framework topples into the embalming room, Fillmore hanging like a drunk in a hammock, frozen in time for endless seconds.

I hold my breath and watch the scene unfold from somewhere outside my being.

“What in hell are you doing?”

I whip my head around to see Uncle Sterling standing at the end of the hall behind me, his reptilian head, his forked tongue flashing out at me. My slick hands slip off the steel support in slow motion.

My head whips back around. I catch a glimpse of Four’s shocked face, hear the clatter of his beer bottles falling to the floor, watch him make a frantic grab for the cartwheeling lifter.

Then, with a sickening muffled crack, the top of Fillmore’s head makes contact with the floor. The wax I’d rebuilt his skull with mushrooms out and makes a farting sound as it splats on the floor. His feet fly straight up into the air, one of his penny loafers launches into the stainless steel sink across the room. The nylon straps that hold him suspended above the floor rip or pop, and down he goes.

This may be a closed casket affair after all.

Chapter 8 – Scarlet

Oh shit, he’d better not...

A spray of dirty water fans into the air, sparkling beneath the streetlight, held motionless for a split second. Then gravity shows up. All that disgusting gutter water rains down hard, drenching me from the neck down, totally ruining my favorite Victoria’s Secret cami. It was all lacey and ivory. Now it’s a fucking Damien Hirst spin art piece of shit.

“Asshole!” I scream at the jacked up pickup that assaulted me by hauling ass through the giant puddle next to me on Oglethorpe Avenue. I collapse my umbrella and throw it after the asshole. Worthless piece of crap. What difference does it make if I keep my fucking head dry now?

Yes, it is still raining.

No, I don’t give a shit.

My phone vibrates somewhere inside my dripping purse. I’d better answer it before it fucking electrocutes me or something. I wipe my wet and filthy hand on the back of my Levi’s and root around for the thing.

Him.

Shit. Like I want to talk to that fucking weirdo.

“Hey, sweetie,” I say, mounting the steps to my apartment, fishing around in my purse for my keys.

“Hey. It’s raining... um, kind of hard,” he says.

Duh. Am I too old to say that?

“Oh, really?” I decide on the fly that ‘duh’ is kind of, like, immature. “I hadn’t noticed,” I say, opening the door and flipping the light switch. I heave my giant wet purse on top of a mound of clothes and other shit on the couch. I’m not in the mood for talking. Especially to this guy. I mean, he didn’t want to talk to me at lunch, when I was willing, right? Besides, I’ve got shit to do.

“So, what are you up to,” he says, “working?”

“Um, no. You know people just don’t like to go walking around graveyards during a monsoon. Go figure.” I hope my blatant sarcasm is enough to get him off the phone. I hear him sigh, but he doesn’t say good-bye or anything. “So, what’s up?”

“Well, I was just wondering if you might like to go out for dinner.”

Ha. After his total weirdness at lunch, not a chance, disco dance pants. Besides, I thought we already, like, covered this. Oh, and, like, ick. I may not be Ashley Simpson or whatever, but I could do better than that skinny insect weirdo.