The first thing I notice is the cold.
It sinks into my body, freezing my bones, numbing and burning my flesh simultaneously. Every muscle in my body aches. I try to open my eyes but they’re sealed shut with grit, and the effort is exhausting. My head is pounding, like my heart’s abandoned my chest and moved in between my ears. My body threatens to shatter like glass if I move it, so I lay still in the darkness of my thoughts and try to remember.
I try to swallow, but my throat is tight, swollen, painful. My mouth is dry, and on my tongue I can taste the sticky, rancid mixture of alcohol, vomit, and stale cigarette smoke. Slowly it comes back in fragments, dropping into place like scattered puzzle pieces.
Michelle. The first thing I remember is Michelle, the hurt and anger in her eyes, the way her lips pouted, the way she flinched when I moved like she was expecting me to hit her. She said it hurt that I couldn’t trust her, that she wasn’t cheating on me, of course she wasn’t, why couldn’t I just believe her, our problems were ours to deal with and I wasn’t putting in the effort, and she’d tried so hard to keep it together but if I didn’t change my act that the engagement was off. I didn’t hit her. I didn’t do much of anything, just stood there waiting for her to stop talking, and then I left, and I went to the bar on the corner of 23rd and Main and drank until they closed, and then I bought a fifth of JD from the Korean who owned the liquor store at the end of the block. And after that, I stop remembering things.
Christ, this is one hell of a hang-over, I think, as I try to lift my hand, but it’s dead weight, limp rubber replacing bone, and I drop it back to my side. I wiggle my fingers, slowly, forcing life back into them, feeling the pins and needles climbing up my arm, and open my eyes with some effort.
There’s a threadbare white sheet over my face. I struggle to pull it away, realize the world is slowly rolling away beneath me. I’m lying on a hospital gurney in a hallway, dark except for the dim light of a single flickering fluorescent bulb, silent except for the bulb’s incessant buzzing. I can smell antiseptic and cleaning fluid, and other smells I don’t recognize, a jumbled mixture that makes my stomach turn, and I struggle to roll over, my muscles aching desperately as my gut spasms and I vomit on the linoleum.
I sit up, my insides shaking, and look around. I feel hollow, trembling, and there’s a rushing in my ears like I’m underwater, a liquid fog settling in my brain and every muscle resists motion, like waking up paralyzed in the dead of night when your brain beats your body to morning.
What the hell happened last night?
I look down at my body, run my hands over myself, try to convince myself I’m still here. My body feels alien, doesn’t register my touch, like the skin belongs to someone else. There doesn’t seem to be a mark on me, and I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse. I rearrange the hospital gown over my bare thighs, self-conscious, and look around again. The corridor is empty. Carefully, I extract myself from the sheet, stumble away from the gurney as it threatens to roll away before my feet are on the ground, step over the puddle of vomit, and listen to the dull slap of my bare feet against the linoleum echo in the deserted hall.
I follow the corridor, looking at the rows of closed doors and wondering why nobody’s here. The lights flicker and hum, the distant sounds of beeping machinery echoing quietly through closed doors, but there’s no one here, no sleeping family in the waiting rooms, no tired nurses going through the motions, no doctors screwing interns on desks. Just me, the ocean in my skull, and some Kenny G perversion seeping from the speakers in the ceiling.
I open a door, at random, and it’s a bathroom lined with lockers for employees. The lock’s busted on one of them, and I open it, find a pair of scrubs, a lighter, a tourniquet, and some dust. I strip off the hospital gown and start pulling on the scrubs.
Someone’s walking, in the hall; I can hear the scuffle of shoes on linoleum, and I start to hobble half-dressed to talk to them, to see if I can get an explanation from them. I hear something, muted, and it takes a minute to realize he’s singing, loudly, tonelessly, a rousing ditty to a tune familiar from Elementary school:
“Start your day on a DOA, doo-da, doo-da…”
I pull the pants up, start heaving on the shirt, fumble for the bathroom door.
“Start your day on a DOA, all the doo-da day…”
I trip over a low bench, curse, regain my balance, open the door.
“Bag ‘em before they smell, we’re all gonna burn in hell…”
I look down the hall, searching for the source of the echoing voice. There’s no one here, no shadows on the floor, no flicker of motion. Just the voice, bodiless and resonant.
“Start your day on a DOA, all the doo-da day.”
#
I sit on the bench for the bus stop two blocks from the hospital, glancing edgily over my shoulder. I’m wearing a pair of scrubs I stole from an employee’s bathroom, a muted shade of neon green, and they’re too big, hanging off of me like clownish pajamas. I wish I knew what day it was. Judging from the taste still lingering in my mouth and the hangover that’s pounding in my head and filling my joints with sandy grit, I think I couldn’t have been in the hospital more than a few hours, and maybe that’s why I don’t have one of those hospital bracelets on my wrist, maybe that’s why nobody was around. Except that doesn’t explain why I was in the hall, with a sheet over me, like a piece of furniture being hidden from a painting crew.
On the horizon, the sun is starting to rise, yellow and purple light creeping out through the haze of pollution, giving the sprawling industrial-center buildings a diluted halo. The bus rolls by without slowing down or paying any attention to me, and I watch it go past with a mixture of relief and anxiety, anxiety because I’m half-afraid I’ve turned invisible, relief because if he’d stopped I have no money and nowhere to go. I stare after the bus, and as my eyes follow it I catch sight of something else, a phone booth, and the emptiness in my gut flutters a little as I stand and walk—still barefoot, feeling the pinpoint stabs of tiny gravel and shards of glass from the sidewalk, the stickiness of a city’s accumulated filth holding me back like tar—to the phone booth. I think of calling Michelle. I wonder what I’m going to tell her. I decide that when I go back to her, it shouldn’t be like this, confused and hung-over and with bleeding feet, wearing stolen hospital pajama-scrubs that keep sliding down my ass. No, I’ll clean myself up, and take something for the headache. I’ll buy her some flowers. We’ll talk like civilized people so she can’t accuse me of playing with her emotions again, so she can’t say I’m pathetic and I need to join AA or she’ll leave me and I’m like an emotional vacuum, too cold to give a damn about anything but myself but sucking the life from everybody else, whatever the hell that means.
I think, shit, maybe she was right about the AA thing.
I look back at the sun, now hanging fat and lazy and visible behind a curtain of smog, and I think, it must be Tuesday, I couldn’t have been out longer than a few hours, I must have just passed out and they brought me in and tossed me in the corner to sober up like they do in the jails—that is what they do in the jails, isn’t it? Never mind, don’t think about it—tossed me in the corner and just forgot about me. Tuesday, the sun’s up, Susan’s got to be at work by now, I’ll call in sick and hear her voice and convince myself I’m okay.
The phone booth doors close behind me and I realize I don’t have any change. I reach into the pockets of the scrubs, desperate, searching; lint, a discarded gum wrapper. I look around the phone booth, scanning the top of the payphone; I slide two fingers in the change slot, trying not to think about the stories I’ve read on the internet about sick fuckers putting hypodermic needles in the coin slots. No needles. No change, either, and I stand there with two fingers in the slot, staring at the floor, disheartened, and catch a glimmer of something on the ground, buried in the trash and grime in the corner. I kneel down and find a pair of quarters, the cap to a bottle of Corona, and the half-decayed remains of a little brown mouse. I nudge the mouse out of the way with my pinkie, rub my hand against the pants of the scrubs, and dial my work number.
“Rising Sun Times, Susan speaking.” I wish there were a volume control on the phone; she’s quiet, faded, like she’s talking across a bad line or from a very long distance. I talk, probably too loud, trying to make up for the silence lurking between us.
“Susan. Hey, it’s Jordan. I’m…um…not gonna be able to make it in today.”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line, and I can vaguely hear the sounds of the office, the ringing telephones, the relentless chatter and the clicking of keys on a keyboard, and I feel something like nostalgia. Her voice had gained an edge of coldness, impatience. “Who is this?”
“I told you, it’s Jordan, Jordan Malone, and I’m just calling to say—“ That I’ve run out of sick days and now I’m calling in dead, I think, and smile, for the first time seeing humor in the old joke.
“Hello?” The coldness broke out in a violent outburst, and I could practically see her, the flaring nostrils, the gleaming eyes, the way her hair would blossom away from her face like the mane of a rabid lion caught in a windstorm. “Look, I can hear the traffic, I know you’re on the line. How old are you, twelve?”
“Susan, I don’t—“
“All right fucker, I’m sick of the prank calls. Don’t call this number again, or I’m gonna report you, got it?”
“Susan—“
The phone goes dead, and I stare at it, confused, before setting it down in its cradle. I back out of the phone booth, and look down the street, my insides trembling a little, and I think I need something to eat, I need a drink, Christ I need a cigarette, and what crawled up Susan’s ass this morning? I turn to walk down the sidewalk, my feet leaving traces of bloody footprints behind, and the people opening shop on either side of the street ignore me as I pass by, busy in their own little worlds. There’s a stack of newspapers outside a butcher shop, and I glance around, a little guiltily, before lifting a copy off the top of the stack. It’s my paper, The Rising Sun, and I stare at the date in confusion, disbelief, uncertainty; I couldn’t have been passed out this long, no damn way it’s been three days; I’ve had black-outs, sometimes whole weekends, but this was pushing it. I thumb through the paper, not sure what I’m looking for but I find it anyway, and somehow I’m not surprised except for that sinking feeling in my gut when I find the obituaries.
Jordan Malone.
I wonder who wrote it, if my co-workers sat around cracking jokes and chewing gum while trying to put it together. It sings my praises in stilted impersonal journalism, reaching to think of nice things about me because it can’t play the father card or the loving husband card, or list off family members surviving me. So it focuses instead on what a wasted opportunity I am, how if only I’d been given a shot I could have been great, and I read it five times before it really sinks in that it means I’m dead.
But I’m not dead, I tell myself, rolling the paper, wringing it between my hands. I’m not. I can’t be. I just called my boss on the phone. I have a hang-over and my feet are bleeding and I hurt too damn much to be dead.
Except I wonder, because it occurs to me that I might not know. Maybe being dead is always like this. Maybe I’m making all of this up. I watched a movie once, about a guy who was having a dream and kept waking up into another dream, and realized he couldn’t remember what being awake was like, didn’t know what being alive was like. I think maybe it’s like that—maybe all of this is in my head, and the afterlife looks a lot like the same shit town.
I need a cigarette, I think, and I think that if I’m dead that I don’t have to worry about lung cancer anymore, and I want to laugh and cry and go back to sleep and scream all at the same time. There’s another bus stop up ahead and an ash tray, the tall cement kind; I sit on the bench and look at the cat-litter sand of the ash tray, pull a half-buried discarded Bic out of the sand and shake it off, flicking it uselessly until I get a spark. I pull all of the cigarette butts out of the sand and examine them, looking for something I can re-fry. There’s one, and I wonder how long it’s been out here because the paper’s turning yellow and I can’t read the rolling papers; the filter is stained with nicotine and someone else’s lips, and I shudder in revulsion but I can’t think of anything else to do, so I struggle with the half-dead lighter and take a drag of the cigarette and gag on stale smoke.
I flip through the paper again, skimming the headlines for some sense that the world’s gone insane. Temperature reaches record lows. Med students facing charges for illegal cadaver use. Teenage girl still missing, family offering reward. My horoscope tells me I’ll meet an influential stranger and encourages me to take the night off. And there, again, the obituary, a photo of me from college, staring back at me and daring me to find some sensible explanation for this, because clearly the apocalypse was not bearing down from the sky in a sulphuric raincloud, and yet here I am, staring at my own obituary and tasting the ghost of someone else’s lips on a long-dead cigarette. I finish it, roll the newspaper, and start walking, my hands in my pockets, up the block, ignoring all the people that aren’t paying any attention to me.
I’m not sure how long I’ve been walking, but the sun’s higher up in the sky now, and I’ve lost feeling in my feet. Somehow I find myself outside the pizza place that my roommate works at, and I think, maybe he’ll cut me a deal. Maybe he’ll sneak me a few slices, or give me a ride back to my car, and maybe he can explain what the hell is going on. I think, I’m too hungry to be dead. I walk in, and the bell chimes thickly, thudding against the echoing ocean in my head, and the place is empty but I can smell the over-sweet smell of marijuana smoke in the kitchen and I duck under the counter and walk back.
“We’re not open,” Axel says, thickly, without looking up; he’s got a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, and is leaning on a shop broom. “And, dude, your feet look like shit, buy some shoes man.” Then his eyes roll up, and he stares at me blankly for a minute, before jolting, turning, lifting his broom impulsively. “Holy shit!”
“Axel. Calm down.” He’s staring at me with wide, bloodshot eyes, and his grip on the shop broom is tightening. He’s always been a few cards short of a full deck, and just now he’s looking at me with all the comprehension of a cow in traffic; times like this, I think I really need to find a new lease. “I’m having a fucking weird day and I need your help.”
“You think you’re having a weird day?” He asks, incredulously, still staring at me, backing away a little. He looks at his hands, his forehead wrinkling up in deep thought or confusion. “You’re dead, man.”
“So I hear,” I say, dryly. “What happened to me?”
“I don’t know. They found you by a dumpster someplace, don’t know where. Michelle called to tell me, that she, you know, went to go identify your body and stuff.” He eyes me distrustfully, shifting the broom to one hand and holding it like a sword, lifting a spatula from the rack behind him. He throws the spatula at me, and it bounces off of my chest, clattering to the floor, and his eyes widen further. “Oh shit man, you’re like…you’re a fucking zombie!”
“I’m not—“ he jabs me, hard, in the side with the handle of the broom, and I back away, bump against the front counter.
“I’m not listening to you, zombie! You’re gonna eat my fuckin’ brains.”
“Axel—“ He jabs me again, and I clumsily climb over the counter, falling and landing in a heap on the other side. I climb back to my knees, peering over the counter. “Axel, I’ll…I’ll come back when you’re less stoned.”
He blinks down at me from across the counter, tilting his head. “I’m just hallucinating this, right?”
I’m not quite sure the answer of that myself. “Can I have the keys so I can get back in the apartment?”
He looks at me, a little awkwardly, sheepishness creeping into his eyes. “I…well, I mean, I didn’t figure you’d be coming back,” he says, and flinches a little. “So I kind of, y’know…let some buddies move in.” Then, quickly, almost stumbling over his words in his rush to get it out, “And I kinda sold all of your stuff to get my guitar out of hock.”
This is going to be a really long day. “Good Christ, Axel, I’ve been dead less than a week and you already got rid of my stuff?” I dust myself off, lean on the counter. “I’m not even in the ground yet. You couldn’t, say, wait around a little bit? To, I don’t know…make sure I’m really fucking dead?”
“I just…,” he begins, staring at me. “Look…you really need to move on, buddy. Your funeral’s in a couple days, how are we supposed to bury you if you’re the living dead?” His eyes narrow, thoughtfully. “I dated this girl a few times, she’s like a witch, right, and she can conjure up a spirit guide for you…or maybe we should hire a priest…” He shifted the broom handle from one hand to the other. “What brought you back? Nuclear radiation? Some weird virus? Voodoo ritual?”
“Nothing brought me back,” I say, my voice growing weary. “…Since you sold all of my shit, can I at least have some pizza?”
He blinks. “Zombies don’t eat pizza. They eat brains.”
Oh for the love of Christ. “Right. I’ll keep that in mind.” I groan, pulling away from the counter, rubbing my head. “I’ll see you when I get this all sorted out and figure out if I’m dead or not.” I can’t believe I’m saying this, and I feel an absurdist giggle bubbling up, but I suppress it because I don’t want to be undead and insane at the same time.
Axel watches me distrustfully as I leave, and I shake my head, thinking, shit, if I’m dead, will I be this hung-over forever?
#
The sun is starting to go down, and I’ve been walking all day. My feet have gone numb. My whole body’s gone numb, and I feel empty inside, like my body’s gone hollow. I’m the only place I can think to go, and now that I’m here all I want to do is leave again. I didn’t want things to work out like this, and now here I am, crouched in the bushes outside of Michelle’s house, too chickenshit to ring the doorbell again, and knowing it’s not going to do a damn bit of good because she’s screwing some guy I’ve never seen before. The blinds are open and I’m watching her body move up and down on top of some jackass without a face, and I think, Jesus, it didn’t take her long to move on, and I also think, so I was right, there was somebody else. I want to be angry. I want to break through the window, throw something, yell, do something, but I can’t make myself move because the emptiness inside keeps me glued down, and I watch as the sheets fall to the floor, and I listen to the muffled screams, and I wonder why she never screams like that with me.
They roll over, and Michelle looks up, looks over the guy’s shoulder, and I see her eyes but they don’t see me, she looks straight through me and for the first time, I can really believe that I’m dead.
I leave, and realize I’m not hungry anymore, realize my headache isn’t bothering me anymore, realize I can barely feel my body. I don’t know what time it is, or where I’m going, I just know that my body’s going somewhere and I’m following it. My body takes me to the edges of town, to the suspension bridge over the river, the trumped-up sewage draining system that masquerades as a tourist trap during the on-season and would be frozen over now if it moved just a little slower. I sit on the edge, my legs wrapped around a bracer pole, and stare at the water rushing between my feet.
“It’s late,” a voice says, and I grunt in reply before turning to look, seeing a girl who looks more like a spider, all arms and legs and black-mascaraed eyes and layers of black clothing that somehow still manage not to cover any of her body. “What are you doing out here, this time of night?”
“I should ask you the same thing,” I say, looking at her. She can’t be more than fifteen, I think, and she’s staring at me with owlishly large and expectant eyes. I should be uncomfortable, but somehow she seems like the right person to meet here, and I sigh. “Don’t you have someplace to be?”
She shakes her head. “Not anymore.” She shrugs, looking up at the sky. “Ever notice how you can’t see the stars when you’re in town? It’s like they’re invisible, like they disappear, but that’s not it really. It’s just that everything else gets in the way, and they’re still there, shimmering away while nobody’s looking.”
I’m still looking at the river, where stars and city lights are reflected in a blur. I think maybe she’s onto something. “Have you ever wondered if you were dead?”
She blinks, her eyes growing and seeming to consume her face entirely, and she scoots closer; her skirt rides up, and I try not to look, but she doesn’t seem to notice, playing with the hem of her shirt, a half-dozen bracelets rattling on her wrist. “All the time,” she says, and her voice lowers to a hush. “I thought I was the only one.”
She’s next to me now, and I can smell her, a mixture of clove cigarettes and some kind of flowery smell, maybe lotion, and as she leans uncomfortably near I can see her in the light of the moon and see all the spiderwebbed lines of scars along her inner wrists. I ask if she has a cigarette and she hands me one, and I light it with my stolen lighter, fished from the ridiculous pants, and take a long deep drag and somehow it’s the best thing in the world and almost fills up the void that’s settled in my chest. But not quite.
“I heard, somewhere, that since the stars are so far away, that it takes the light years to travel and some of the stars in the sky are already gone. Like they’re dead and we wouldn’t even notice for years,” I say, finally, looking up at the sky. “How would you know? If you were dead, I mean.”
She shrugs. “How do you know if you’re alive?”
The question sounds absurd, but after the day I’ve had I’m not in much place for judgment. I think about it a minute, and decide that I’m not really sure. “It’s just that I don’t know what dead feels like.” Except I think I’m starting to get an idea—it feels cold, and empty, and terribly lonely. Then again, I’m not quite sure how that’s different from life.
“It’s like this,” she says, and stands up, leaning over the barricade between the bridge and nothingness. “If you’re alive, and you step off this bridge, you’ll fall.” She steps over the barricade, standing balanced on the six inches of cement on the other side, hooking her arms around the steel railing, and glances at me over her shoulder. “But if you’re dead, and you step off, you’ll fly.”
I wonder if she’s on drugs. But I think, this almost makes sense, as much sense as anything has made today. I think, maybe I’ll wake up. Maybe I’ll feel something other than emptiness. I think, nobody misses me, what difference would it make if I’m wrong?
I think, maybe dying a second time might be easier.
I step over the barricade, edge closer to her, look at her sidelong. She smiles at me, and I can see she’s breathing heavily, and I say, “Are you going to try it?” And she nods, and I ask if we can have another cigarette before we go, just in case, and she doesn’t ask me just in case what. I smoke it slowly, lingering over the smoke on every exhale, and think I should be remembering Michelle, I should see my life flashing before my eyes, but I don’t have anything else to look at. I think, any memories I had of life are ruined by today. I think, what have I got to lose.
The girl—I don’t know her name, I should ask, it seems wrong to do something like this without knowing someone’s name, like this is a kind of intimacy that shouldn’t be shared with strangers—smiles at me, hopefully, and gives my hand a squeeze. I squeeze her hand back and close my eyes.
If I’m still alive, I don’t have much to lose. I’m already falling, I think, I just have to hit the bottom or I’ll fall forever.
But if I’m dead…if I’m dead, then maybe I’ll fly.
I take a deep breath, and the girl’s hand tugs mine, and I step forward, feeling the world fall away beneath me.
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