Husk (3 page)

Bury me, let me rot.

What was happening was clearly not of the norm. I shouldn't be. Couldn't be.

A brief impulse.

Maybe, given hindsight, the correct one.

But as freaked out as I was becoming, I still felt that there was a rational explanation for everything. We talk of the supernatural, we may want to believe in guiding forces outside our realms of perception, we may even pay fealty to the gods of our parents and purposefully seek salvation in the nebulous ether of the limbo beyond, but when we reach the nucleus of our being all we really want is someone to tell us in the soothing tones of a learned professor that everything that is happening is perfectly natural.

Unusual, oh yes, definitely, but not unheard of, and most certainly not incomprehensible. Just . . . odd.

That was my lifeline.

I could figure this out. This was solvable.

But not now, no. Not like this. Not with nurses and doctors and security guards and police officers aplenty rushing in with guns drawn to gawk at the charnel house I had created.

So flee it was, then. As calmly as I could, I left the room and trod stiffly down the hall toward the exit. Just another doctor, lurching his way outside for a smoke. Behind me, faint sounds of footsteps, drawing closer. Exclamations. The sounds of gagging.

And then I was outside, clad in thin cotton garments in subzero temperatures. Snow and wind battered me, pushing me across the ice rink of a parking lot. I fought to stay upright, crossing my arms tightly to keep my insides inside. My thin coat flapped behind me like a cape as I shambled past the parked cars and escaped the lot.

I had not a clue where to run, but wisps of memories were blowing through the corners of my mind. I had been in this location before. An attack of appendicitis had allowed me two full days of rest and relaxation in one of the upper rooms, accompanied the entire time by my roommate, a triple-coronary who wheezed constantly and told the most racist jokes I had ever heard. The brain of my new birth did not have this memory, not yet, but there was the familiarity of the building, accompanied by a sense of direction.

North. Thataways and parts beyond.

I stumbled forward into the blizzard, walking to the street. After hobble-sprinting across the lanes, I entered a carpark and blundered through to the streets beyond. If my internal
GPS
was working, some miles north was a copse of tenement buildings and low-rent housing complexes.

Somewhere in that labyrinth was home.

Safety.

The cold ate through the coat, freezing the water in my skin, but there was no pain, only discomfort most meager. I shushed through the rising white, my only witnesses the occasional passing car wafting plumes of snow over me. My booties fell apart in the drifts, and I could feel myself slowing. My joints began to seize, tighten, refuse. I stiff-walked the final two blocks.

Home.

My brain had been numbed to only the basest of primal urges, but it recognized shelter. The door was locked, sense memory leading my fingers to the flap of loose siding and the poorly hidden key that I had lodged behind for emergencies.

A few agonizing minutes later, my fingers stiff branches, barely able to keep the key steady and guiding it into the keyhole more by luck than skill, the door swung open and the warmth of the womb issued forth. I reeled inside, shoving the door shut with my shoulder, fell to the carpet, and slept.

Here's what I
am
sure of.

Whatever this is, whatever force has taken command over the natural process of life that I used to enjoy, it does not adhere to any logical permutation of the way life is supposed to subsist on this level of existence. Which could mean that my condition is extraterrestrial in nature.

Or supernatural.

Or ultradimensional.

Or something.

See the problem?

It's hard to define what something is when it's the only example of its kind. All I can do is compare myself to an existing standard of reality. No one realizes that, while I do indeed exist in physical form on this material plane, I cannot be expected to adhere to
all
the immutable laws that pertain to this reality.

For example, blood.

I have no need for it.

Which implies I have no need for oxygen. My body is able to function quite effectively without it. When I'm not paying attention, I can go days without a whisper of air entering my lungs.

Granted, similarities do exist. I need to eat to continue as a functional being. However, if a human, or any member of the animal kingdom, ceases to eat, that creature will invariably die, and fairly quickly. If I do not eat, I do not die.

If I forego food, I begin to rot.

I mean, rot more.

Rot faster.

There was no sleep.

I lay on the floor in a coat of hoar, melting in the warmth and soaking the carpet. I was a tangle of limbs and bafflement, prone on my back. Arms crushed underneath in a position, to the outside observer, of agonizing awkwardness. But there was no moving me, not yet. My limbs were dead, flash-frozen, freeze-dried. I had no inclination to revive them.

Slumber was what my rime-encrusted brain craved. Dreamless dark for hours, a break in the confusion of the past few lifetimes. It
was
dark, but the streetlamps lit up my foyer through the decorative glass bricking around the doorway. Distorted shadow puppets from the fir trees that lined the house played their monster fingers about the walls. I could make out the hall closet, the hanging photos of a person I recognized as myself in a tropical paradise, a trip with some high school buds I had taken years back.

Why was I seeing this? Was I dreaming, so weary my mind couldn't be bothered to come up with dreamscapes of a more fantastical nature?

No, my eyes were wide open. Very wide, I noted. Oddly rigid. Immobile. My eyelids rebuffed my best efforts to blink. My surroundings, déjà-vu familiar, were fogged and distorted. Silently groaning with the effort, I raised an arm and wiped the back of my hand across my face. A film of ice varnished my eyes, I realized, my lids now held forcibly ajar by chilled glazing. I prodded around the sockets and was not rewarded with the satisfying squish of optic fluids being forced against the walls of their confinement.

What I felt was irregular hardness.

I tapped my pupil with my fingernail and heard an icy
clink
that I felt in the hollow recesses of my skull.

My eyeballs had frozen solid.

My head was an ice tray.

I was a meat popsicle.

This can't be good
.

I lay still, contemplating. Either I would thaw out or I wouldn't. Not yet willing to move —
What if more of me is frozen? Will my legs snap off if I stand? —
I waited for my head and body to soften, and set my mind to the situation at hand.

First, I was suffering from a bout of amnesia, one already showing signs of retreat. I remembered Jamaica, the Caribbean locale of the photos lining the walls above me. That was me, and . . . Raj and Boone, two chums I had not seen in years apart from occasional holiday emails and nonsensical Facebook updates.

I remembered Facebook. Weird that I could remember that and not my own name.

No matter. Soon, I was positive, the river of memories would crest the levies of my forgetfulness and come flooding back, destroying all fortifications in its path.

Second, let's admit the obvious: I was dead. Stiff, corpsified, worm meat. No aerial bombardment of scatterbrain-bombs could wipe that fact from my mind. Whether in command of one's wits or nay, one was never,
never
supposed to be able to remove his heart and have time afterward to contemplate said excavation. It simply wasn't done, and if it was, never more than once.

It was too much, too soon. If my heart had been attached and functional, it would have been thumping in near-panic mode. Better to concentrate on the immediate problems at hand, the whos and the whats, and worry about the whys and hows later on.

So. Who?

I had found my way home, so there was some positive indication of a retained cache of information within my presumably still-operating brain. It stood to reason that there would be things at hand that could crack the whole thing open like an egg, let the omega-3s of my past gush forth. Photo albums, journals, home movies. I prayed that I was a compulsive note-taker — it would make things much easier.

After a time of immobile self-scrutiny, my body had defrosted to a point where I could sense the heat of the room. And something more. There was an extra weight on my legs. I had been staring at the ceiling, watching as the ice melted and the room solidified into focus, taking in the flowery tiles that bordered the upper walls — whatever else I could remember, I was positive that I had never liked that pattern, a repeating rose-and-leaf motif that would have induced nausea if I still retained the ability to vomit — when I noted the mass draped over my thighs. I raised my legs slightly at the knees, just a tremor of movement. The weight shifted, rotated, and slowly made its way up toward the sternum.

Risking a snapped vertebra, I bent my neck and looked down toward my feet. Two yellow-green marbles stared back at me in the dark, regarding me with supreme indifference.

A cat.

An obscenely large calico cat, vastly overfed, placid, and very okay with my new state of non-being. It seemed to know me, as it casually trod up over my chest (sinking slightly as the bandages stretched inward under its tonnage) and began licking at my nose and forehead.

Its collar tag banged against my face as it stretched up to tongue the moisture from my hair. It then wandered back down and curled up in the depression of my chest, staring at me, awaiting . . . what? I cautiously wiggled my fingers, and hearing no cracks of frozen bone, I lifted my arm and stroked the cat across its back, earning a gratifying purr in response. I took the collar in my fingers. My eyes were able to shift and focus now, and I took a look at the metal tag. The inscription read
Sofa
.

Sofa. Sofa the cat.

A trapdoor sprung open and a few boxes thumped out. I had picked her out at the cat shelter with a boy. Zane something, Fabbrizio or Fazzio, Italian probably. He volunteered with the
SPCA
. Zane had this gorgeous vein in his neck that throbbed and bounced when he was excited. I wanted Zane in the worst way, yearned to suck that vein up to the surface and gorge on his skin until I was full. Eager to find common ground to build a tryst on, I had agreed to foster a cat when the shelter got too full. I picked out a bright and feisty kitten named Sofia, and the way Zane cooed and gasped at the fuzzy little bundle, I felt a bout of mutually satisfying fellatio was imminent. Sadly, there was no forthcoming fucking: Zane was uninterested in local strange, soon splitting to Edmonton with a rough trick named Jeffrey. The cat stayed with me. The city had misread her license application, and the tag had come back
Sofa
. By then, the cat had already begun to pack on the pounds, and somehow the name fit. So Sofa it was.

Sofa
, I mouthed. I remember you, cat. And she, me, I thought, unless she was indiscriminate in her affections.

Sofa gave my neck a final sandpapering and gracefully galumphed her vast bulk off my torso. She waddled down the hallway and entered the room beyond.

I'd likely been gone for a while. The enormous feline must be hungry. I slowly rolled over and heaved myself to my feet. My joints cracked, and flakes of wet snow and ice fell about. Sofa poked her head back in and gave a contemptuous meow. Plainly, my absence had been noted, and dinner had best be served with utmost haste lest I risk her wrath that, from the size of her, could be deadly. To anyone bound by the corporeal definition of the term, of course.

I shuffled into the room and fumbled for a light switch. The sudden illumination blinded me, my eyes still slightly refrigerated, slowing dilation. As the glare receded, I could make out the aqua-blue Formica countertops and mechanical doodads that signaled a kitchen.

Sofa pawed at a door next to the refrigerator, loudly protesting my sluggishness. I walked over and opened it, finding a sparsely occupied pantry. I was apparently not much for cooking. I didn't suppose that would be much of a hindrance anymore. Did I even eat? An open bag of dry cat food was on the bottom shelf, and Sofa immediately plunged her head inside and began contentedly munching. I left her to it and looked for her dish, which lay empty near the doorway. I filled her water bowl at the sink and placed it back down. She was famished, but she'd get to the water when she wanted it.

Leaving the kitchen, I wandered through the house, turning on lights as I went, step by step re-opening my brain and topping up my remembrance depository.

Bedroom. Quite likely mine, blankets jumbled in heaps over the queen-size. Nothing triggered. I switched off the light and moved on.

Bathroom, messy. Toothpaste muddied the faucets, soap stains dulled the shower tiles.

Closet, disorganized. Medicine and towels fought for dominance.

Another bedroom, this one more ancient, not used for some time. Furniture older, all polished wood and curved legs. Thick white carpet. A faded photograph, framed, placed on the end table; two people, posed and artistically blurred, Sears quality. A room of absent parents.

My father was dead.

An impersonal memory, no emotional impact yet. Workplace accident when I was child. Fell off a ladder as he was replacing a light bulb. Quick concussion, coma,
pfft!
I didn't think he was in janitorial services, though. Something whiter in the collar, something that added just the right touch of crass humor to his mode of exit from this plane of existence. Something in government. A civil servant or something. Accountant, maybe.

A joke rang through my head, chanted by particularly intelligent children who knew how to craft cruelties for maximum devastation.

How many civil servants does it take to screw in a light bulb?

More than one, apparently.

I pawed through dresser drawers and closets, searching for clues. Socks brought me nothing. Shirts made me realize I had
way
too many flannel tops. Old receipts indicated I shopped at Sears and The Bay almost exclusively, with an occasional excursion to the sale racks of The Gap.

No triggers. No memories. The person who had slept in this room was a shadow to me, insubstantial, ether.

The next room was better by a trifle. A guest bedroom converted to an office space. Bookshelves offered proof of an interest in the arts. Books on acting by Stanislavsky and Uta Hagen. Monologues from famous movies. Was I an actor? Was I any good? A photo album displayed head shots, pictures from plays set in abandoned railway stations. Images of me in period costumes, helpfully labeled — Orlando in
As You Like It
, Tranio in
The Taming of the Shrew
, Biff in
Death of a Salesman
. A younger me standing in a group snapshot behind Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. No name yet, but I was getting closer. I could remember plays, anyway. And the names of movie stars.

Strange that I should remember Arthur Miller and
Star Wars
better than my own name.

A laptop offered cyber-clues. I turned it on — no problems remembering anything tactile — and searched through the files. A file titled
Resumes
looked promising, and finally bequeathed me a name to hang my hopes on.

Gary.

Huh.

Gary Jackson. Nondescript sort of name. Unmemorable. So dull it activated nothing. Meant zip.

I was Gary Jackson, zombie. Whoopity-doo.

Disheartened — HA! — I wandered through the rest of the house, getting glimpses and shapes, no results. The basement was wood paneled, 1950s mod. A tiki bar lounged in a corner, and a matching pastel couch and loveseat faced an elderly cathode-ray television coated with dust, the whole set screaming future yard sale, two bucks
OBO
. The connecting laundry room showed signs of use, but cleanliness was obviously not high on my list of priorities. There were power tools on the shelves, but they were aged, worn, coated in dust. Hand-me-downs from my father, I suspected. Kept for remembrance's sake rather than practical use.

Disappointed, I doddered back upstairs and wandered into the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator, seeing that I must have a taste for sushi and vegan pizza, but if there was an epiphany to be had on the sagging white metal shelving, it escaped me completely.

I
was
hungry, though. Not hungry, not exactly that, but there was a hole in my stomach that needed filling. I opened a bottle of Diet Dr Pepper and took a tentative swig. After a moment of swishing it about my mouth, I spit the black fizz out into the kitchen sink. It's not that there was no taste; there was simply no
need
for it to be anywhere near my digestive tract. I tried again, this time a healthy gulp of Brita water. The impulse was to expectorate but I fought it, forcing my throat to expand and let the liquid sluice down my esophagus.

I waited. There was no burning, no nausea, no bodily signal that I had imbibed something unwanted. Emboldened, I took another few swallows, deeper. Again I waited. Then, the entire mass came roaring back up, hurtling out of my mouth like an enraged fire hose. I drenched my front, the sink, the window above, the curtains.

After that, I took it slower. My body craved
something
. I nibbled at a cookie and spat it out. An apple looked promising, but a few chews convinced me to let its juice and pulp dribble undigested down my chin.

I looked to the freezer and found an antique half-pound of raw hamburger wrapped in cellophane and Styrofoam. Freed of its wrapping, the iced meat looked — what can I say? It looked right, or rather,
righter
. I took a lick and felt a tingle. I gnawed through the ice and let the raw beef sit nakedly atop my tongue.

Definite tremors of the tastebuds, buzzing. There was excitement in the air. But not quite right.

I gnawed off another sizable chunk and held the ball in my mouth, savoring it. The buds were dancing, screaming as the beef slowly thawed and released thickly chilled blood over the budscape of my tongue.
So
close
, I thought, so close to being
exactly
what I wanted. Like ordering a Coke and getting Pepsi; who really cares
that
much to return it for partial refund?

It would do, I decided, and swallowed the mass in one enormous gobble. I felt the ball tumble down my throat, snagging on nooks and crannies as it fell, and fancied I could hear a splash as it hit whatever juices remained in my stomach.

Nothing.

Check that.

Rumblings of unhappiness.

Murmurs of insurgency.