See You in Paradise (13 page)

“You’re scaring your mother, Dan,” Chloe scolded.

She shouldn’t have called attention to herself. Dan turned to her. His face relaxed, his eyes grew misty, and the wet cigarette fell out of his mouth. “Tizz,” he sighed, flecks of tobacco sticking to his chin, and he lunged forward and embraced Chloe, lifting her off the ground. She let out a yelp. His hands found her behind, engaging it in a desperate clutch. “My God,” Ruth Larsen said.

“Dan,” I offered, “put her down, please.”

“Sazz. Nisazz.”

“Thank you, Dan, that’s enough,” Chloe gasped. It seemed to get through to him. He set her on the ground, and she gently pushed him away.

“Peanut,” he said. “Fudder.”

“What have you done to him?” his mother again asked us.

“Mrs. Larsen,” Chloe said, her face red, “we’ll be taking a little break now. I think you need some quality time with your son.”

“I—”

“He needs you, Mrs. Larsen.” She motioned to me with a thin, pale finger. “Let’s go,” she said, panting.

I followed. She led me right to my apartment and into bed, where we went at it with giddy élan. When we were through we lay together, tangled in the sheets, breathing slow and even breaths. It was a relief to be alone, after the day’s shocks and embarrassments.

“How long do you have off work?” I asked her.

“Just this week.”

“Me too.”

I waited a moment before asking, “What should we do then? I mean, the two of us.”

She didn’t answer immediately. I assumed she had dozed off, so I nudged her and asked again. Her response was a sigh. “I heard you the first time.”

“Sorry.”

“Let’s not talk about that now.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s just be quiet.”

“Okay.”

“Good.”

By week’s end, Dan could almost pass for normal. He was allowed to go home, and his doctors paid him visits there. They were surprised at his speedy recovery and expressed this surprise with smug, proud ejaculations, piquant little hmms and huhs, which they delivered while nodding. Dan returned them in kind, an unlit backwards cigarette dangling from his mouth, his fingers clenching and unclenching at his sides. His speech was coherent but strange, as if run multiple times through translation software. The doctors asked him questions and recorded the answers on dictaphones.

“Please describe your tenth birthday party.”

“Hmm?” Dan replied.

“Daniel, the caboose?” his mother spat. “The magician?”

“Hmm, ahh, yes. Motherpaidaman. Parkingthecaboosein-CentralPark. Eatingicecreaminside, yes. Mymanyfriends. Yes. Andthemagicianwithhisrabbit. Ofcourseyes. Fudder. AndChloewiththequartersinherears.”

Chloe giggled. It was true, the magician had removed quarters from her ears, as a trick. All of us had been there, at that party, and all of us were here now, crowded around the fireplace.

“Peanut. JanekissedMattbehindthefountain. Yesss.”

“I did?” Jane said suddenly.

Matt turned to her. “You don’t remember? How could you forget?”

Her face crumpled. “I’m sorry, darling.”

“But how the hell did Dan know?”

Dan, however, had gone on reminiscing. “Mmmmmremmmmmemberitwell,” he said, nodding. The cigarette bounced on his lip. “Andmotherfatherfighting. Mothersayinghowcouldyou. Andwiththatwhore, she said, yesss.”

Ruth’s eyes grew wide.

“Andfatherfantasizingmurderingherinhersleep, yess. Fudder. Watchingthemagicshow, dreamingofslittingmothersthroat, yessss.”

Nils Larsen was not home. Upon Dan’s arrival he had left suddenly, and wisely, on a “business trip” from which he had not yet returned. Everyone else, though, was staring at Zombie Dan in horror. He seemed to notice not at all. He was standing beside the fireplace, leaning against the mantel, rubbing his chin. Every once in a while his tongue shot out and licked his lips. The cigarette sagged but never fell.

“AndofcourseRick, fudderfudder, Rickwasstealingmoney. Fromthehousekeeper. Yess. Stealingmoneyfromherpurse. Stealingabottleofmedicine. Tryingtogethigh, yessss, andthehousekeepertoldRick’smother. ThatRickwasstealing. Andhismotherfiredher. Fudderpeanut, yesss.”

“What!” Rick said, leaping to his feet.

“Sotrue, sotrue. Attheparty, Rick, feltsoguilty, yesss, nicetits, yesss. Butheforgot, everyoneforgot, everythingisforgotten.”

Rick was slowly lowering himself back into his chair, his face crumpled like an old newspaper. Jane threw her arms around Matt, as if for protection. The doctors amplified their hmming. Pencils scratched on little pads. Beside them, Paul gazed expectantly at Dan, his face livid with masochistic excitement.

“Do you remember, Danny? Do you remember what I was thinking?”

Dan ground his jaw, seemed to sniff the air. “Skidmark. Skidmark. Youpoopedyourpants.”

Paul’s face blazed with delight.

“AndChloedearChloe,” Dan said, seeming to study a corner of the ceiling.

Chloe sat up straighter.

“ChloeChloe, alwayslovedhersoverymuch. Betsywasmygirlfriend, yesss, JenniferAmyPaulaNancy, but Chloe, fudderfudder, Chloemysecretlove. Yesss.”

“Oh, my,” Chloe said.

Dan turned and looked at her and smiled. The cigarette tipped up and for a brief moment he looked quite a lot like FDR.

“Peanut,” he said. “Nice ass.”

Chloe had gone pink. “Thank you, Dan.”

Ruth Larsen stood up suddenly. “I want you all out of here. All of you. Now!”

Jane obeyed immediately. She pulled Matt to his feet and began to drag him toward the apartment door. He appeared lost as he stumbled after his terrified wife. Paul followed, a wry smile in place on his lips, and Rick slouched after, his face shattered.

I glanced at the exit, hoping that Dan wouldn’t notice me. I motioned to Chloe, and she got up from her chair, but she headed for the hallway and for the room where she had been staying. I offered a questioning look, but she only winked. I supposed she wasn’t going back to New Haven just yet. Meanwhile Mrs. Larsen was shouting at the doctors. “Liars! Liars! You didn’t tell me they could do this!”

A squirrelly-looking man in thick glasses was nodding, and stroking his plasticine goatee. “Yes, well,” he said. “Yes, well, we’re still researching this particular … unexpected … ah … quirk …”

“Hmmm, DoctorGiles,” Dan said, gesturing with his cigarette, “youreallyshouldhavethatlookedat.”

“Pardon me?”

“Thethingonyourback, hmm, couldbefudderprecancerous …”

The little man’s eyes widened as he backed out the door, his coterie of associates encircling him like a hedge.

“Out!! Out!!” screamed Ruth Larsen.

I wanted to go after Chloe. But instead I turned and left.

I went back to work. I was a graphic designer for a natural-products company. It wasn’t something I’d ever intended to do—I’d begun there as a copy editor—but when the previous graphic designer had quit to move to Wyoming and raise pigs, I temporarily plugged the gap. Temporarily turned to permanently, though I was still making my old salary. My boss, Patty, had rejected eight drafts of my new herbal douche label and was now demanding changes to my ninth. We sat alone in the conference room with the reeking remains of lunch pushed to one side, and she squinted at the proofs, curling her nose in disgust.

“It’s too girly,” she said.

“It’s for girls,” I offered.

“Not for girly girls. For womany women.”

“You want it womanier?”

“Womanier, yes.”

When I spoke to anyone at work, for any reason, this was usually the kind of conversation that resulted. I missed the crass directness of Chloe. I yearned for her, in fact. I masturbated in the men’s room on our floor with a cardigan sweater over my head, in protection against the surveillance camera. And of course I called Ruth Larsen’s apartment several times a day. Nobody ever answered. I even looked up Chloe’s boyfriend in New Haven and called him to see if he’d spoken to her. “That sick bitch can go fuck herself,” he replied. Matt and Jane hadn’t seen her—“We would both like to put this behind us forever,” Matt said sternly, seeming by “this” to mean, among other things, me—and Rick’s girlfriend wasn’t letting him come to the phone. Paul just laughed at me. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “You don’t want her.” I didn’t have the guts to ask why not.

I spent my afternoon womaning up the douche label with some elegant Edwardian script and digitized sprigs of ivy. Then I went home. There was a message on my answering machine—a woman’s voice. She had left only a number, and an unfamiliar one at that. I called it. Ruth Larsen answered. It sounded like she was out of doors—I could hear traffic and voices.

“Meet me at the Homburg Bar,” she said, and gave me an address downtown. “We have business to discuss.”

“What kind of business? Have you seen Chloe?”

Mrs. Larsen tsked and let out an impatient sigh. “All in good time,” she said.

What, then, is the soul?

No, really. If there was one issue revivification raised that could not easily be resolved, it was this. If you believed in the soul, in heaven or hell, in eternal life, what did revivification tell you? On the face of it, not much. Revivs often could remember their death trauma and the events leading up to it, and they had no trouble remembering their return to life. But in between was a blank. None of them ever remembered a single moment. They didn’t even seem to have noticed the passing of time—there was death, and there was life, and nary a wisp of a dream intervened between the two.

One school of thought held that the revivs disproved the existence of the soul. They remembered nothing, the argument went, because there was nothing. When you’re dead, you’re dead. The restoration of life, then, was no big deal—it was like starting up a car. God was nowhere shaking his shaggy head in divine disapproval. There was only man and nature and eternal oblivion.

There was another school of thought, however, that regarded revivification as proof of the soul’s existence. The evidence was that the revivs were different. Something, the argument went, was missing. That thing was the soul. The revivs were zombies. Their souls were in heaven, or in hell, and what limped around on earth was an empty shell, a machine.

I had never been much for religion, but the second school certainly seemed to have a lot going for it. When asked to describe their revived friends and neighbors, when asked to choose a word that best characterized this new breed of human being, just about everybody said the same thing.

Soulless.