A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) (17 page)

“No. Uh, yes. It’s fine, Mrs. Korjev. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Mrs. Ling was shaking the Habitrail cage. They certainly were sound little sleepers, these hamsters. She liked ham. “I take care,” she said. She tucked the cage under her arm and backed toward the door, waving. “Bye-bye, Sophie. Bye-bye.”

“Bye-bye, bubeleh,” said Mrs. Korjev.

“Bye-bye,” Sophie said, with a baby wave.

“When did you learn
bye-bye
?” Charlie said to his daughter. “I can’t leave you for a second.”

But he did leave her the very next day, to find replacements for the hamsters. He took the cargo van to the pet store this time. Whatever courage or hubris he’d rallied in order to attack the sewer harpies had melted away, and he didn’t even want to go near a storm drain. At the pet store he picked out two painted turtles, each about as big around as a mayonnaise-jar lid. He bought them a large kidney-shaped dish that had its own little island, a plastic palm tree, some aquatic plants, and a snail. The snail, presumably, to bolster the self-esteem of the turtles: “You think we’re slow? Look at that guy.” To shore up the snail’s morale in the same way, there was a rock. Everyone is happier if they have someone to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both. This is not only the Beta Male strategy for survival, but the basis for capitalism, democracy, and most religions.

After he grilled the clerk for fifteen minutes on the vitality of the turtles, and was assured that they could probably survive a nuclear attack as long as there were some bugs left to eat, Charlie wrote a check and started tearing up over his turtles.

“Are you okay, Mr. Asher?” asked the pet-shop guy.

“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “It’s just that this is the last entry in the register.”

“And your bank didn’t give you a new one?”

“No, I have a new one, but this is the last one that my wife wrote in. Now that this one is used up, I’ll never see her handwriting in the check register again.”

“I’m sorry,” said the pet-shop guy, who, until that moment, had thought the rough patch that day was going to be consoling a guy over a couple of dead hamsters.

“It’s not your problem,” Charlie said. “I’ll just take my turtles and go.”

And he did, squeezing the check register in his hand as he drove. She was slipping away, every day a little more.

A
week ago Jane had come down to borrow some honey and found the plum jelly that Rachel liked in the back of the refrigerator, covered in green fuzz.

“Little brother, this has got to go,” Jane said, making a face.

“No. It was Rachel’s.”

“I know, kid, and she’s not coming back for it. What else do you—oh my God!” She dove away from the fridge. “What was that?”

“Lasagna. Rachel made it.”

“This has been in here for over a year?”

“I couldn’t make myself throw it out.”

“Look, I’m coming over Saturday and cleaning out this apartment. I’m going to get rid of all the stuff of Rachel’s that you don’t want.”

“I want it all.”

Jane paused while moving the green-and-purple lasagna to the trash bin, pan and all. “No you don’t, Charlie. This kind of stuff doesn’t help you remember Rachel, it just hurts you. You need to focus on Sophie and the rest of both of your lives. You’re a young guy, you can’t give up. We all loved Rachel, but you have to think about moving on, maybe going out.”

“I’m not ready. And you can’t come over this Saturday, that’s my day in the shop.”

“I know,” Jane said. “It’s better if you’re not here.”

“But you can’t be trusted, Jane,” Charlie said, as if that was as obvious as the fact that Jane was irritating. “You’ll throw out all the pieces of Rachel, and you’ll steal my clothes.” Jane
had
been swiping Charlie’s suits pretty regularly since he’d started dressing more upscale. She was wearing a tailored, double-breasted jacket that he’d just gotten back from Three Fingered Hu a few days ago. Charlie hadn’t even worn it yet. “Why are you still wearing suits, anyway? Isn’t your new girlfriend a yoga instructor? Shouldn’t you be wearing those baggy pants made out of hemp and tofu fibers like she does? You look like David Bowie, Jane. There, I’ve said it. I’m sorry, but it had to be said.”

Jane put her arm around his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. “You are so sweet. Bowie is the only man I’ve ever found attractive. Let me clean out your apartment. I’ll watch Sophie that day—give the widows a day to do battle down at the Everything for a Dollar Store.”

“Okay, but just clothes and stuff, no pictures. And just put it in the basement in boxes, no throwing anything away.”

“Even food items? Chuck, the lasagna, I mean—”

“Okay, food items can go. But don’t let Sophie know what you’re doing. And leave Rachel’s perfume, and her hairbrush. I want Sophie to know what her mother smelled like.”

That night, when he finished at the shop, he went down to the basement to the little gated storage area for his apartment and visited the boxes of all of the things that Jane had packed up. When that didn’t work, he opened them and said good-bye to every single item—pieces of Rachel. Seemed like he was always saying good-bye to pieces of Rachel.

On his way home from the pet shop he had stopped at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books because it, too, was a piece of Rachel and he needed a touchstone, but also because he needed to research what he was doing. He’d scoured the Internet for information on death, and while he’d found that there were a lot of people who wanted to dress like death, get naked with the dead, look at pictures of the naked and the dead, or sell pills to give erections to the dead, there just wasn’t anything on how to go about being dead, or Death. No one had ever heard of Death Merchants or sewer harpies or anything of the sort. He left the store with a two-foot-high stack of books on Death and Dying, figuring, as a Beta Male typically does, that before he tried to take the battle to the enemy again, he’d better find out something about what he was dealing with.

That evening he settled in on the couch next to his baby daughter and read while the new turtles, Bruiser and Jeep (so named in hope of instilling durability in them), ate freeze-dried bugs and watched
CSI Safari-land
on cable.

“Well, honey, according to this Kübler-Ross lady, the five stages of death are anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Well, we went through all of those stages when we lost Mommy, didn’t we?”

“Mama,” Sophie said.

The first time she had said “Mama” had brought Charlie to tears. He had been looking over her little shoulder at a picture of Rachel. The second time she said it, it was less emotional. She was in her high chair at the breakfast bar and was talking to the toaster.

“That’s not Mommy, Soph, that’s the toaster.”

“Mama,” Sophie insisted, reaching out for the toaster.

“You’re just trying to fuck with me, aren’t you?” Charlie said.

“Mama,” Sophie said to the fridge.

“Swell,” Charlie said.

He read on, realizing that Dr. Kübler-Ross had been exactly right. Every morning when he woke up to find another name and number in the day planner at his bedside, he went through the entire five-step process before he finished breakfast. But now that the steps had a name—he started to recognize the stages as experienced by the family members of his clients. That’s how he referred to the people whose souls he retrieved: clients.

Then he read a book, called
The Last Sack,
about how to kill yourself with a plastic bag, but it must not have been a very effective book, because he saw on the back cover that there had been two sequels. He imagined the fan mail:

Dear
Last Sack
Author:

I was almost dead, but then my sack got all steamed up and I couldn’t see the TV, so I poked an eyehole. I hope to try again with your next book.

The book really didn’t help Charlie much, except to instill in him a new paranoia about plastic bags.

Over the next few months he read:
The Egyptian Book of the Dead,
from which he learned how to pull someone’s brain out through his nostril with a buttonhook, which he was sure would come in handy someday; a dozen books on dealing with death, grief, burial rituals, and myths of the Underworld, from which he learned that there had been personifications of Death since the dawn of time, and none of them looked like him; and the Tibetan
Book of the Dead,
from which he learned that
bardo,
the transition between this life and the next, was forty-nine days long, and that during the process you would be met by about thirty thousand demons, all of which were described in intricate detail, none of which looked like the sewer harpies, and all of which you were supposed to ignore and not be afraid of because they weren’t real because they were of the material world.

“Strange,” Charlie said to Sophie, “how all of these books talk about how the material world isn’t significant, yet I have to retrieve people’s souls, which are attached to material objects. It would appear that death, if nothing else, is ironic, don’t you think?”

“No,” Sophie said.

At eighteen months Sophie answered all questions either “No,” “Cookie,” or “like Bear”—the last Charlie attributed to leaving his daughter too often in the care of Mrs. Korjev. After the turtles, two more hamsters, a hermit crab, an iguana, and two widemouthed frogs passed on to the great wok in the sky (or, more accurately, on the third floor), Charlie finally acquiesced and brought home a three-inch-long Madagascar hissing cockroach that he named Bear, just so his daughter wouldn’t go through life talking total nonsense.

“Like Bear,” Sophie said.

“She’s talking about the bug,” Charlie said, one night when Jane stopped by.

“She’s not talking about the bug,” Jane said. “What kind of father buys a cockroach for a little girl anyway? That’s disgusting.”

“Nothing’s supposed to be able to kill them. They’ve been around for like a hundred million years. It was that or a white shark, and they’re supposed to be hard to keep.”

“Why don’t you give up, Charlie? Just let her get by with stuffed animals.”

“A little kid should have a pet. Especially a little kid growing up in the city.”

“We grew up in the city and we didn’t have any pets.”

“I know, and look how we turned out,” Charlie said, gesturing back and forth between the two of them, one who dealt in death and had a giant cockroach named Bear, and the other who was on her third yoga-instructor girlfriend in six months and was wearing his newest Harris tweed suit.

“We turned out great, or at least one of us did,” Jane said, gesturing to the splendor of her suit, like she was a game-show model giving the big prize package on
Let’s Get Androgynous,
“You have
got
to gain some weight. This is tailored way too tight in the butt,” she said, lapsing once again into self-obsession. “Am I camel-toeing?”

“I am not looking, not looking, not looking,” Charlie chanted.

“She wouldn’t need pets if she ever saw the outside of this apartment,” Jane said, pulling down on the crotch of her trousers to counteract the dreaded dromedary-digit effect. “Take her to the zoo, Charlie. Let her see something besides this apartment. Take her out.”

“I will, tomorrow. I’ll take her out and show her the city,” Charlie said. And he would have, too, except he woke to find the name Madeline Alby written on his day planner, and next to her name, the number one.

Oh yeah, and the cockroach was dead.

I
will take you out,” Charlie said as he put Sophie in her high chair for breakfast. “I will, honey. I promise. Can you believe that they’d only give me one day?”

“No,” Sophie said. “Juice,” she added, because she was in her chair and this was juice time.

“I’m sorry about Bear, honey,” Charlie said, brushing her hair this way, then that, then giving up. “He was a good bug, but he is no more. Mrs. Ling will bury him. That window box of hers must be getting pretty crowded.” He didn’t remember there being a window box in Mrs. Ling’s window, but who was he to question?

Charlie threw open the phone book and, mercifully, found an M. Alby with an address on Telegraph Hill—not ten minutes’ walk away. No client had ever been this close, and with almost six months without a peep or a shade from the sewer harpies, he was starting to feel like he had this whole Death Merchant thing under control. He’d even placed most of the soul vessels that he’d collected. The short notice felt bad. Really bad.

The house was an Italianate Victorian on the hill just below the
Coit
Tower
, the great granite column built in honor of the San Francisco firemen who had lost their lives in the line of duty. Although it’s said to have been designed with a fire-hose nozzle in mind, almost no one who sees the tower can resist the urge to comment on its resemblance to a giant penis. Madeline Alby’s house, a flat-roofed white rectangle with ornate scrolling trim and a crowning cornice of carved cherubs, looked like a wedding cake balanced on the tower’s scrotum.

So as Charlie trudged up the nut sack of San Francisco, he wondered exactly how he was going to get inside the house. Usually he had time, he could wait and follow someone in, or construct some kind of ruse to gain entrance, but this time he had only one day to get inside, find the soul vessel, and get out. He hoped that Madeline Alby had already died. He really didn’t like being around sick people. When he saw the car parked out front with the small green hospice sticker, his hopes for a dead client were smashed like a cupcake with a sledgehammer.