Halloween Is For Lovers (3 page)

Hugh paced. "I'm not like the rest. They're all content to suffer with the suffering. Here my loss hurts worse. Your flowers are like a benchmark, a reminder of how far I've fallen."

Ana gave up searching her pockets and hunched her shoulders. "I thought I had a little charcoal left. You think the Kingdom of the Dead would be littered with the stuff."

Hugh quickly dug in his pockets and produced a walnut-sized chunk and handed it to her. "I spend a lot of time walking around with my head down. You find all sorts of things when you look down."

Ana nodded and dirtied the palms of her hands with the lump, passing it back and forth. "Thanks."

Hugh nodded and turned to leave. She caught him just before he ducked into the secret passage. "I wonder what sorts of things you'd find if you looked up?" He shook his head and disappeared into the thicket. Ana shrugged and looked down at one of her flowers. She bit her lower lip and fought back a tear. "Maybe he's right, better not to hope.” She touched a flower and then looked up at the muddy sky.

The Ministry of Life Accountancy

Hugh slumped into the dark and cluttered corner in the office. There were piles of ragged papers and yellowing charts of tiny numbers stuck to the walls. None of the papers required any urgent attention. Several stacks along the back of the desk had almost an inch of dust on them, built up in layers chronicling the passing of dreary seasons in the Kingdom.

His chair was cheap and uncomfortable. Made of bent black metal pipe, it was fitted with a tired slab of plywood for a seat and a plastic crescent for a backrest that sliced into his spine. It was shaped so that a coat or any item of clothing hung on it in an attempt to make it more comfortable would slip off and slide onto the dusty floor.

His job at the ministry was simple. He had stacks of papers with the names of people still alive and descriptions of their day-to-day lives recorded in excruciating detail. The lack of light on his desk made the job even more uncomfortable. He had to squint to read the single-spaced nine-point font anemically printed on the tissuey paper. His job was to account for the days allotted the living—sort of an actuary accounting for the risk and uncertainty in a living person’s life.

Everyone started with a certain number of days to live, depending on the circumstances of their birth. Parent health, wealth, social status, location and culture were all taken into account. In addition there was a random roll of the dice that credited a luck factor to the child's account. From that birth number, days were subtracted for risky, unhealthy behavior and every so often added for positive life changes as well as things like organ transplants and sudden windfalls of money. For example, if a guy partied too hard, a few days were taken off his life. If he became a vegetarian after a life of eating meat? Plus 5.4 years. If he bought a motorcycle? One of the charts buried on Hugh's desk was used to calculate this subtraction. The make, model and engine size were taken into account. One would think wearing a helmet would help offset the deduction, but in fact a motorcycle helmet is only effective in crashes at speeds below twenty miles per hour. In truth, the chart wasn't really needed. A twenty-year-old male buying any kind of motorcycle resulted in almost a complete deduction of remaining days.

Hugh tilted his head back and forth and from side to side. Just moments after sitting in the chair his back started to ache and his neck stiffened. Time quickly began to stand still.

He brushed the dust off his ledger and started where he had left off. Connie Fazio, thirty-three-year-old mother of two living in the suburban Midwest. Hugh had read every minute detail of her life up to her twenty-seventh birthday. The overwhelming majority of it was mundane and boring.

Drove to drugstore to buy shampoo. Traffic was light and road surfaces were dry and sound. Parked as close as possible to front door of store. On the way to shampoo aisle stopped in weight-loss aisle and looked at a few items but didn't select any. Bought drugstore-brand shampoo for dandruff and considered buying fancy European-branded conditioner. While in checkout line picked up ninety-nine-cent bag of Sun Chips ...

Hugh would write small numbers in the margin: +5, -3, -45. At the bottom of the page he would tally a number. When he finished a report, which didn't happen often, he would tally up the page totals and on the front cover write his estimate for when this person would die, or as they put it, pass over into the Kingdom.

These finished reports were supposedly used for top-level planning, but the final number was speculative and it was often ignored. If a person lived past their estimate, there was no way to enforce their death and there were no refunds for dying too young. Hugh started to accept that his job was created for a more sinister reason. What could be worse than losing your life? Sitting in a cold, dark corner and reading about someone else wasting theirs.

The citizens of the land of the living took their lives for granted. That went without saying. Occasionally, rarely, an actuary would get a juicy bit of text. A brief but torrid sexual encounter: -50 to -275 depending on the type of sex and whether protection was used. A drunken bar brawl: not as dangerous as the sex.

The actuaries would discreetly rip these passages out and pass them around the room. Hugh had learned that finding a good one and sharing it elevated his status and kept him in the loop.

Hugh squinted to read the last passage over again. Shaking his head clear, he studied it and made sure his eyes weren't playing tricks on him.

Undresses and takes hot shower. Washes hair with drugstore-brand dandruff shampoo. Washes body with ocean breeze–scented shower gel. Doorbell rings. Stops shower and wraps in towel. Answers door. Husband's best friend Randy dropping off golf clubs. She invites him in ...

Could it be? Hugh's eyes bulged as he continued to read. He looked from side to side slowly and then carefully ripped the passage out of the page and folded it into a tight package. He stood up and walked toward a coworker’s desk.

"Excuse me."

Hugh turned to see his boss, Ms. Swindon, watching him in the reflection of a small hand mirror.

"Excuse me. What is that you have there?"

Hugh tried to play it off, hunching his shoulders. "What? Nothing, I ..."

"Come here with it." She held out her chubby claw. "Come here."

Ms. Swindon wore the most comfortable shoes ever invented—black foam sandals with padded Velcro straps—but she still walked with pain. The Velcro on the toe straps had given out the first day she wore them. It was too much foot for any shoe; she needed more of a giant terry cloth slipper and a chair with wheels so the soles would never have to bear the crushing burden. She had a lot of weight to move around and her knees had checked out a hundred pounds ago. They went on strike first, screaming with compressive pain. Then they just quit and walked out. The joints locked and threw away the keys. Now she waddled from side to side, somehow generating movement from her ankles.

She didn't have to move around much. A large overstuffed love seat at the center of the room had been raised up on a series of platforms so she could witness, without effort, the suffering of her charges. She had stuffed several bags with crumpled snack wrappers and used them as pillows and wedges to ensure her body needed no effort to hold itself in place.

A tarnished pewter hand mirror decorated with tangled tassels was kept at the ready so she could keep an eye on the staff behind her. Even the trouble of holding that, with its whiplike decorations, was becoming too much, so she had a series of small mirrors with bendable arms installed around her like orbiting satellites. With a darting of her bloodshot eyes she saw everything that happened in that dank chamber.

Hugh had found it was best to stay at his desk, with hands folded and head slumped. Every so often a deep sigh and a grimace were advisable, just something to let her know he was miserable and hopeless.

Ms. Swindon's only daughter, Missy, had recently relocated to the Kingdom, struck down in her prime by a sudden and unexpected attack of smoking-related lung cancer. Her final moments in the Land of the Living were traumatic for all those involved but especially for the attending physician, who had to dive for cover when Missy snuck one last smoke in the oxygen tent.

Speaking of a painful shortness of breath and a lot of sweating topped off by a brief pop, the circumstances around Missy's conception are a story that fits in one sentence. A transient Uruguayan laborer helps himself to Ms. Swindon's scotch while hanging floral wallpaper in her bedroom, spends the night, wakes up sweaty. That story makes sense only if you're aware of the fact that Uruguayans find scotch, even the cheap stuff, irresistible. Put a bottle of Fighting Kilt blended scotch whiskey in front of anyone south of Brazil and north of Argentina, and poof, empty bottle.
Pantalones
shuffled off like loosened shackles.

"Hand it over." Ms. Swindon didn't wait for Hugh to comply. She reached out and inspected him, shoving and tugging at his sewn-in pouches. Unbeknownst to Hugh, she was not only searching him for contraband notes, she was also using sleight of hand to deposit empty snack wrappers on his person.

Nobody did laundry in the Kingdom, but even the most miserable souls would shake the excess dust off their clothes now and then. On shake-out day Hugh always puzzled at how so many candied escargot wrappers ended up in his pockets.

Missy watched as her mom jostled Hugh. Like so many girls with South American roots she had beautiful brown eyes and a natural gentle curl to her long brunette hair. But it was her derriere that was her most prominent feature. It was enormous and entirely out of proportion to the rest of her body. A patootie that could stop traffic. Meaning it was big enough to physically block an entire lane of traffic. Somehow the Uruguayan ass size genes had combined with Ms. Swindon's ampleness genes, and with a little scotch added to the mix... Suffice it to say the thing got freakishly huge.

It was too much for an average chair so she had a seat widener, an enlargement spacer of sorts that she carried around to increase the chair's platform strength. It was like a ... stabilizing cushion. It's difficult to dance around what it really was. It was an extra-large inflatable doughnut with a pink terry cloth cover. The faintest floral pattern could be made out, up close.

Nobody got close to it and it was faulty. The seams weren't up to the job and the abused air bladder needed constant topping off via its inflation nipple. Missy dreamed of the day a charming man would offer to re-inflate her "seat cushion" for her. She displayed her not so secret desire by constantly flirting with any and all male types and by frequently applying a heavy spume of Jean Naté perfume.

Ms. Swindon uncovered the note and quickly scanned it. Rolling her eyes, she shoved it between her thigh and the back cushion.

"Do you get some kind of enjoyment from passing these saucy little notes? That's not why we're here, Hugh. Maybe I should send you upstairs. Do you know what kind of work they do in the top-floor office? Windows all around, views as far as the eye can see. They transcribe the hopes and dreams of the living so they can read them back to them when they’re dead. Let no broken dream be forgotten, that's what they do." She looked over at Missy, who was feverishly soaking herself with perfume and shifting back and forth on her mushy cushion. She made big eyes at Hugh and nodded excitedly to her mom, mouthing from across the room, Yes Mom, him.

Ms. Swindon softened her tone and turned back to Hugh. "You know, Hugh, the path to a better death down here just happens to lead past my daughter. Then back down the path with my daughter, holding hands." Ms. Swindon took pride in her ability to stretch an analogy. She held her head up and raised her voice. "And it continues along the path, maybe turning around when it gets dark, but always staying on the same path, together, and agreeing not to wander from the path ..." She looked off wistfully. "To have and to hold, from this day forever, not wanting better, expecting the worse, in increasingly debilitating sickness with no hope of health, to obey and worship 'til never do us part." Humming an out-of-tune hymn, her voice trailed off. "We don't have enough weddings down here."

Hugh slowly backed away, careful not to make any sudden movements that would wake her from her trance. Once off the platform he went around the long way back to his desk, to keep a buffer zone between him and Missy.

It wasn't that he found Missy unattractive. Truth be told, Hugh was an eyes and hair man all the way, but Ms. Swindon's thinly veiled proposal had only made him more aware of his desperate fate. He would spend the eternity of his death in a suffocating corner tabulating the remaining days for the living, days of sun and air he would never have again.

Sitting back at his desk, he stared straight ahead at the endlessly widening chasm of dark, meaningless existence that lay before him. He let out a painful sigh, then a few whimpers and finally some tiny sobs.

Across the room, Ms. Swindon nodded approvingly.

Café de la Torture

There was no such thing as quitting time in the Kingdom. That glorious moment around 4:35, that time of transitioning a work space into storage for the night, or better yet the weekend, didn't exist. Quitting time would give the dead something to shoot for, an arbitrary end to a working misery that might be followed by something slightly less miserable. Too much like hope. The shifts in the Kingdom never ended, but when a denizen became overwhelmed by the immeasurable task or completely frustrated by the futility of it, it was permissible to leave and wander the streets alone in despair, knowing that a return to the ceaselessly unfinished, unfulfilling work was inevitable.