Unkillable (3 page)

“Whoa,” said Bruce, “I mean WHOA. You look awful, I mean.” Bruce had one of those pleasantly round faces that seemed immediately trustable. This effect was counteracted by the fact that Bruce also had a lazy eyelid and eyeball to match. They would both wander off on their own from time to time. But now, both his eyes were wide open and his mouth made an O shape. It was almost funny.  “Did you get hit by a car?” he asked.

“Yeah, and then some.”

“What happened?”

“Some asshole killed me.”

I slumped into a chair and told him the whole story. He took it pretty well, but then he was stoned to the gills. I can’t even imagine what embalming fluid does to you when you smoke it.

“Whoa. Like Wo----hoh-oh. So what are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know why I came here.”

Bruce’s head lolled over to the side. Like talking to somebody on a long distance call, there was an unnatural lag in his response. “Well that’s easy, man. E-e-e-e-e-e-verybody comes here when they die.” Bruce said this with such a natural, cheesy smile that I had to laugh.

“Are there Vampires and Werewolves?”  Bruce asked, exactly like an idiot would.

“How am I supposed to know that? I do know there are talking rats.”

“Yeah, the one who gave you these powers?”

“Powers? You gotta be kidding me. Power is being able to fly, or being able to turn invisible. Power is having a lot of money or being able to order a nuclear strike. I don't have power. I have a liability. I have a deadline. I can’t even walk straight. Car shattered my kneecap.”

“Let me see that.”

“Are you sure you--”

“C’mon, I’m a pro-fess-see-o-nal. Fully Licensed and Bonded.” He looked at my kneecap for a minute and then said, “Get on the table.”

I began to realize just how much Bruce was into his job. As he checked out my knee, he talked about ligaments and anatomy, the nature of the embalming process, everything. In a way, I would have been more comfortable if he was into having sex with corpses. But no, he got off on being an embalmer.

“The body is a fragile thing, so fragile. And life is so precious,” he said as he lit another joint, “It’s a temple, you know what I’m saying? People should respect it more, ‘cause when life is gone, it’s just gone.” The joint did its work and he was overcome with a coughing fit.

“Then what’s with the left-handed lung rocket?”

“This? Oh no man, this is just to take the edge off. You know, some creepy shit happens around here. There’s ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, they’re around all the time. That’s what I thought you were at first. This place has been a mortuary for over 200 years. Sometimes it’s like Grand Central Station for ghosts around here. Do ghosts creep you out?”

“No. I don’t really get creeped out anymore. I mean, I just don’t feel the same inside anymore. I’m different.”

“Yeah you’re different. Way different. What happened to your blood?”

“Ask the rat.”

“This shouldn’t even be possible. You don’t have any blood left. There’s really not any fluid of any kind. That’s seriously messed up, like the fat girl,” he said, pointing to the large female corpse on the slab next to me.

“That’s no way to talk about your girlfriend, Bruce.”

“Yeah, yeah. She’s so fat, her circulatory system collapsed under her own weight. I don’t know how the bitch didn’t have a heart attack. Normal person, you can just stick a tube in their neck, fill them up with embalming fluid, whoosh, all the blood and lymph goes out the other end. You just flush them right through.

“But her, you’ve gotta do each limb separately to make sure there’s nothing left in her.”

“Why? Why do you embalm people at all? Why not just bury them?”

“Well, it’s so people can look at the corpse at the funeral, that’s really it, right? And if there’s any blood or lymph or anything, it will decompose and start to smell. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that pockets of gas build up in the body. So, say I miss a spot in her gut, right? Gas is going to build up inside of her, until pretty soon –” He made a popping noise by sticking his index finger into his mouth and levering it against the side of his cheek. The sound was surprisingly loud and echoed in the tile room.

“Pop?”

“Oh yeah, it will blow a coffin apart. It’s some ser-i-ous-ly nasty boom.”

“Okay, so what’s going on with me?”

“I don’t even KNOW man! That’s what’s so cool. This shouldn’t even be possssssssssible.”

“So is my knee gonna heal?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t see how it could. It’s not like you’ve got living cells. But if they’re dead,” he shook his head in disbelief. “We need a microscope, man.”

“I need a knee that works, and an arm that isn’t all fucked up.”

“Oh, your arm. That’s easy; I think it’s just dislocated.” And with that, he lifted it straight up. I felt something slip and grind inside my shoulder. There was a hollow thunk as my shoulder joint slipped back into place. I moved my arm around and it seemed to work pretty well.

“Cool,” Bruce said, “I wasn’t sure that was going to work.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“What’s the worst thing I can do, you’re dead already, right?”

“Rip my arm out of the socket.”

“Oh, that’d be cool. Do you think you could still move it?”

“Let’s not find out. What about my knee?”

“It’s fucked. You have trouble walking on it because you’ve got no lateral stability.”

“What?”

“You can’t stop your knee from bending sideways. I think you ripped some tendons. I could cut you open and see if I could sew them back together.”

He was way too eager to cut me open. I was getting the idea that my afterlife was all about going from bad to worse, but I didn’t want to accelerate that journey. “What do you think the odds are of you getting that right on the first time?”

A huge grin split Bruce’s moon-face and he shrugged, “I don’t know man, but it’d be cool to try.”

“Try it on somebody else. What else you got?”

Bruce thought for a minute. “Let me see if I still have it.” He rummaged around for a while and came back with a hinged knee brace in his hand. He strapped it on to my leg. He also took a minute to apply some make up and cover up my cuts and scrapes. When he was done, I looked in the mirror and was amazed.

“Jesus, didn’t he look like himself?” I ask.

“What?”

“Nothing, you do good work. I look almost -- human.”

Bruce smiled another smile. “Thanks man, I’ve never had a friend I could talk about this stuff with before. Everybody just thinks it’s gross.”

“No, it’s still gross,” I said “but at least you’ve got something you’re good at.” I practiced moving with the leg brace. It was heavy, but it gave me enough stability that I didn’t look like something out of a George Romero movie. Still, I was pretty sure if I saw my reflection in a mirror I would have jumped.

“Yeah, well you’re a talking dead guy. That’s got to count for something.”

“Doesn’t get me a discount a Starbucks.”

“Taxes,” he said all spacey like.

“Whaddya mean, taxes?”

“Gets you out of paying taxes.”

“Whatever. Look, if I don’t figure this out, a rat is going take my soul.”

“I thought you said you didn’t believe in all that religious bullshit?”

“Yeah, well I didn’t believe in life after death, that’s for sure. But now I’m having to re-evaluate a few things.”

Bruce snapped his fingers. “I know somebody who can help you.”

“Who?”

“Let me put her away,” he jerked his head towards the corpse, “And we’ll go.”

As we wheeled her into the freezer Bruce said, “Such a waste, she was so young. Even though she was overweight, you could see how she was pretty.” He brushed a strand of hair out of her face and said, “You know, the dead are very seductive.”

“Dude, that's sick.”

“No, man, not like that. It’s the peace. The pain is over. She’s never going to say the wrong thing again. She can never make a bad choice. Nobody is ever going to look at her again and think that she didn't live up to her potential. She is exactly who she should be and she’s doing exactly what she should be doing. She is at peace.”

“Then what about me? I’m not at peace. Why don’t I get a helping some of this rest in peace bullshit?”

“Man, that’s what I’m sayin’. That’s what I’m saying we are going to find out. I think we need to see an expert.”

Bruce closed the heavy freezer door. It slid into place with a rumbling boom. It was the kind of a noise you would feel throughout your whole body. Portents of doom echoing, and all that.

“So who do you want me to go to go see?” I asked Bruce.

“Y’know, somebody who can help you understand what has happened to you. Help you get in touch with your feelings, be a complete person again -- “

And right there I tuned him out. I had listened to touchy-feely bullshit like this my whole life. I had been forced to spend time in rooms with people, sitting in circles, talking, talking, talking, talking. Endless talking. And what was the point, we were supposed to get in touch with our feelings? How do you feel now that your parents are split up? How do you feel about substance abuse, pre-marital sex, and diversity in the workplace? But nobody ever asked me how I felt about sitting in circles talking to people.

“-- And she knows, man. She’s a beautiful human being, she just gets it, I can tell --”

‘Cause if they had, I would have lost it. I would have told the truth. And the truth is, just because you arrange a bunch of confused idiots in a circle and let them talk doesn’t mean they have anything to say. It’s not like they magically come up with the answer. What primitive superstition was this -- arrange the rocks and the dullards in a circle and they will sing the music of spheres like druids at Stonehenge? It was bullshit. Sitting in a circle didn’t make me smarter. It made me dumber. It made me angry. The next time someone asks you to sit in a circle, do yourself a favor. Check your horoscope; it’s quicker and less confusing.

“-- And she knows, man, she knows about people like you. Y’know, the life-challenged individual --”

I had no idea what Bruce was talking about, but for the first time I wasn’t confused about anything else. I knew exactly what I had to do. More to the point, I knew who I needed to do it to. I picked up a scalpel from Bruce’s work tray.

“You mind if I borrow this?”

“Wh- What are you going to do with that?”

“I’m going to drum up some business for you.”

* * * * *

Chapter 6

I laughed when I saw the line outside the club. My whole life, those lines had prevented me from going where I wanted to go. There hadn’t been a line the night before, that was for sure. Had it suddenly become popular? Where had this line of wannabe’s come from? Maybe they had just put two guys and a velvet rope in front of the door and it took off from there. Hot new spot. Undiscovered. A few hundred text messages later and it had come true.

The living, they are such sheep.

I walked right to the front of the line. Nice and slow. The two bouncers at the door looked at me in a way that suggested that I wasn’t cool enough to breathe the air in their vicinity. It was kind of marvelous, the way they could look at a person without acknowledging them. A rare skill but no matter how good at it they were, it wasn’t going to save them. My heart was warm with anger, my fist was bright with scalpel and I had come for revenge.

For the first time since I died, I didn’t feel like I was completely screwed. Sure I was still in a shit ton of ill-defined trouble, but I was going to step through that door and kill the man who had stabbed me in the heart with a screwdriver. And anybody else who got in my way, including the rented pretty-boy thugs at the door. They didn’t think I was cool enough to be allowed into their transitory, bullshit, ecstasy-ladened paradise. But tonight, the low-grade electrical impulses that flitted through their brains masquerading as thoughts were irrelevant.

As I grew closer, they had to work overtime not to notice me, and they weren’t very convincing. With every other step I took, the ancient knee brace made a terrible screeching noise. Oh yeah, everybody saw me, and they all were slavering for the entertainment of watching me be turned away. Sure they might be nothing more than supplicants, but they felt like they had a chance of getting in. They were still in the lottery; they could get lucky and still be cool tonight.

But I saw it clear. They might be cool tonight, but tomorrow – when they woke up and their coke was gone and all they had left was the story of a wild night they would never remember in any detail – they’d have to chase it all again.  Fuck them. Fuck their drugs. Fuck the tweakers and the skinny girls chomping on the inside of their mouths because their discount X was cut with speed. They looked down on me. They knew I wasn’t cool. I wasn’t. I was something better than cool. I was cold.

I knocked the velvet rope over and kept walking.

“Hey, hey, hey,” cried one of the bouncers as he reached out to stop me. I didn’t try to make it past his arms. I stepped right into his face. Preppy tough guy didn’t know what to do. Part of his brain was wondering how to deal with me, but more of it was thinking about how to keep me from messing up his suit. How he could do his job and look still cool for the people in the line? Shit like that.

I slid the scalpel in between two of his perfectly sculpted abs. I didn’t twist. I didn’t slice. I just stuck it in about an inch and a half and pulled right back out. At first, he didn’t feel it. His mouth kept vomiting words. But even as he was trying to talk me into obeying him – showing off for the crowd, “Wouldn’t you be happier at some other club?” – the drop in blood pressure had registered in his hypothalamus. Even though this kid was too stupid to live, his body’s autonomic nervous system was going to try and keep him alive anyway. The blood drained out of his face.

“Don’t make me hurt you, douche--” He never got to finish the word with “-bag.” He collapsed like a puppet after the strings had been cut.