Revival House (13 page)

I spy Avery peeking around the doorway, poking the last crumb of a cookie into his mouth. He stares at me. I scowl at him.

The women look at each other with somber expressions, the younger one nods.

They want the video montage, including a full-color package of post-mortem photographs, with the deceased posed on his beloved Harley Davidson motorcycle.

~

Meeting Avery was the highlight of my college career. He was a lot smarter than me and did a lot more interesting work. What I remember most clearly is his work with the animals.

“I don’t know, getting it to work on dogs is one thing,” Avery had said, peering at me over the exsanguinating canine stretched on the table between us in his Safar Center lab. “But, humans... I don’t know, Caleb.” He adjusted the arterial tube that penetrated the dog’s neck. A snake of black cherry fluid wound through the clear plastic hose and emptied into an insulated steel receptacle at Avery’s knee. He flicked on the Duotronic IV (oddly enough, an embalming machine) he used as a saline infusion pump, gerry-rigged to a cooling tank. A second tube inserted into the dog’s femur delivered a stream of cold saline solution directly to its circulatory system.

I had placed my hand on the animal’s rib cage, feeling its skin cool, its heart slow beneath my palm.

Avery had been my best, and really only, friend during my course of study at the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science. He was a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh, studying neurology, participating in a study involving therapeutic hypothermia at the school’s Safar Center for Resuscitation Research. He’d been working on bringing dogs back to life after they had died of various causes, including but not limited to cardiac arrest and brain trauma.

We’d met at the Andy Warhol Museum, at the big Jake Wolfram ‘O.C. Barbie’ exhibit, the one based on some bizarre boy band murder. Anyhow, we got to discussing the complexities of the vagus nerve featured in one of the installation pieces and we became fast friends.

Avery was from Encino, California and hated the Midwest almost as much as I did. He also had a strong interest in the newly deceased, which was what had brought him to Pitt’s School of Medicine and the Safar Center. We had a lot in common, from our interest in biological science to a love of modern art.

I was thrilled to see him at Uncle Sterling’s funeral.

We hadn’t talked in years.

~

“You really think we can make something of this business?” I ask him now as we sift through all the papers Sterling had hidden from me for years.

Poring over the accounting ledgers we’d found after breaking open Uncle Sterling’s safe, Avery’s mouth hangs open. “I’m not entirely sure. It seems your uncle had a boatload of debt.” The spreadsheets we find on Sterling’s computer are just as damning (his password was easy to figure out: Billie317). Overwhelming, crushing debt. No wonder Uncle Sterling took his life. I almost felt sorry for him. Or wanted to, anyway. “It’s going to take something extremely clever and possibly illegal to get out of this mess.”

Silence.

Avery and I look at each other.

I know what he’s thinking because I’m thinking it, too.

Chapter 22 – Caleb

The service bell at the kitchen door buzzes. My pen jumps and scratches a line across my crossword puzzle. The sound also stabs me through the eye socket. I struggle out of my chair, dizzy and nauseous, and step over to the door. Scarlet. I open the door but not too much.

Her eye make-up runs down her white face, reminding me of a mime. I want to slam the door in her French clown face. She shoves the door open, hitting me in the shoulder as she crashes her way into the kitchen. “That’s it, it’s over.” She collapses in a blubbery heap on the dusty, crumby floor, and holds a piece of paper out in my direction. I don’t want to, but I grab it out of her fat hand.

Dear Ms. Lawson
, the letter begins.
While you possess some impressive credentials, we regret to inform you that the intern position you applied for has been filled. Best of luck in finding a suitable position
. It’s signed by some dildo at a production company in L.A.

“So?” I say, dropping the letter on her bowed head.

“That’s it,” she says, sniffling at me. “That was the last application. And, you know what? That was even a fucking unpaid internship.” She sobs like she’s dying or something.

I don’t need this. I spin on my heel and head up to bed. She throws a shoe at me. It misses.

I pass Avery on the stairs. He’s wearing my clothes again. I wish he’d get some of his own.

~

Scarlet pads into the kitchen wearing Avery’s (my) white cotton button-down shirt, the one with the yellow underarm stains. I bang my coffee mug on the oak table and gape at her bird’s nest of green hair, catching a glimpse of her pink satin panties as she pulls the milk from the refrigerator.

“Hey,” she says, cigarette hanging off her lip.

I don’t say anything.

What is there to say?

I don’t know what she’s doing in my house. I’m not angry, just shocked. Her heavy thighs rub together as she crosses the room to sit across from me at the table. I want to pull her hair out by the roots, scream in her face. She has bruises around her neck already.

“I’m staying,” she says, blowing smoke in my face.

Avery. Of course she’s staying... with Avery.

Damn it.

“Listen,” I say, putting my hand over hers. “I would really like that.” Or would I? “I am so happy that you have come to this decision, but can you give me a few weeks to wrap up some loose ends with the business?”

“Like what?”

“Well, this new guy I’ve got working for me isn’t working out, you know?”

She looks at me like I’m nuts and then kind of snorts. “No, seriously, I need to get him out of the house, and then you are more than welcome to come back.”
I think
. I look at my coffee mug, Avery’s shirt, Scarlet’s eyebrow ring. “I’d stay away from him if I were you.”

She looks at me as if I’d just spit in her face.

He’s a serial killer waiting to happen.

She gets ready for school and I hear her upstairs stomp out the door while I’m prepping the Harley guy for his post-mortem pictures. As I shove the straps from the new body lifter underneath his large torso, Avery walks in, dressed in a suit which I am certain belongs to me.

“Hey, give me a hand, would you?” Sweat rolls down my forehead and the back of my neck.

Avery applauds, the cigarette in his mouth— same brand as Scarlet’s— bobs up and down. I didn’t know he smoked.

“Funny,” I say. This portly gentleman is heavy. Avery takes a long drag off his cigarette, holds it in the V formed between his index and middle fingers, and grabs hold of the corpse’s meaty side. The tip of his cigarette touches the inside of the man’s upper arm and makes a hissing sound. The unmistakable stink of burning flesh tickles my nose.

“Hey,” I say, batting away his hand, “you’re burning him, dickhead.”

“Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry.” Avery flicks his cigarette onto the cracked tile floor and steps on it with his scuffed old wing-tip, still grasping Harley’s fat-covered rib cage.

We finally get all the straps in place and haul Harley up on the body lifter. He is dressed only in a leather vest and assless chaps. We wheel him down the hallway to the front foyer, where his shined-up bike is waiting. Of course, there is no risk of anyone walking in on us as it is after normal business hours. I had drawn all the drapes, just to make sure no one walking past the building would see anything untoward.

“You didn’t tell me you met Scarlet,” I say, unbuckling one of the body lifter’s straps, unleashing a fat shoulder.

“Was I supposed to?” Avery flashes his mischievous smile my way. “You’re not my keeper.”

Avery and his lean, muscular frame, chiseled jawline. I really want to kick him in the neck.

I don’t say anything, I just concentrate on trying to get the fat leathered man onto the gleaming cycle.

Avery lets out a low whistle. “She is pretty fantastic, you know...”

“Stop,” I say, wanting to press my palms against my ears, wanting to kick Avery in the perfect teeth, wanting to vomit all that I’d not eaten for dinner all over the marble floor.

Hydrogen, helium, lithium... (That trick is becoming less and less effective.)

“She might not be much to look at, but, Caleb, oh, my God, she does this thing where she...”

Snap. I pilot my fist into Avery’s orbital bone, compressing the grape of his eyeball beneath the bend of the interphalangeal joint of my right index finger. He steps back and claps a hand over his eye.

“Ow! What did you do that for?” He looks at me for a minute, clapping his hands over his eye, then his long, lean face softens. Tears shine in his good eye and roll down his clean-shaven cheek. Realization kicks in. He may have a doctoral degree, but he is thicker than your granny’s oatmeal. “You have a thing for her, don’t you?”

I don’t say anything.

I’m sorry for your loss.

Chapter 23 – Caleb

“Just go over there and start talking, man.” Four and I stare at the girl on the bench across the fountain. She’s thin and blonde and gorgeous and reading a book. She’s dressed as though she came to the park for a run, but she’s not stretching or anything. “Talk about anything— the weather, her hair, how big your dick is.”

I shoot him a frown.

“Hey, you’d be surprised at how many chicks dig an opening like that.” He grins at me, winks. “Then,” he sighs, “there are the ones who have a mean right hook, too. You never can tell. ‘Life is like a box of choc-o-lits,’ right?” He laughs.

A palmetto bug crawls out of Four’s mouth and skitters across his cheek, cramming itself into the sanctuary of his ear. I feel like screaming.

I ran out of my pills a couple of days ago, didn’t think I needed them anymore since I was starting to feel a little more ‘real.’ But, right now, I’m sitting next to that big purple McDonald’s character, The Grimace. I’m losing my grip on reality. If I ever had one.

“Why are you so hung up on her anyway?”

I pop open a can of Coke and take a swallow. I consider his question. I’m not sure I even know the answer.

“Listen, if it’s how she looks, dude, you can do a lot better. Seriously. That hare-lip thing she’s got, topped by that little mustache.” He shivers. “You’ve known her for two years, man, why now?”

I’m not sure I know the answer to that, either.

She’s graduating. Wants to leave, start a new life. Somewhere else. Without me. I don’t tell him that it’s become a control issue. Now I want her here mostly because she wants to be somewhere else.

“Hey, man, life goes on, you know? The beauty of living in this art school town is that in about six months, there’s going to be a whole new crop of lovely new neurotic messes to choose from.”

“I want her. I’m not letting her go.” I get up and walk away.

I stick my nose into an azalea and take a deep breath. I’ll never get tired of that beautiful scent. I straighten my tie and start walking home.

I look back over my shoulder and The Grimace is getting slapped across the face by the blonde reader.

Chapter 24 – Caleb

“Some of them, we quickly twisted their heads and broke their necks. Some, we whacked over the head with a heavy hammer. Some, we just used saline.” Avery studies his manicured nails as he so nonchalantly recounts his days at the Safar Center. “When we pushed the cold saline into their circulatory systems, they went into cardiac arrest, no matter what their initial injury. Saline was about forty-five or fifty degrees, which might not sound that cold, but when your body temperature normally runs above ninety-eight degrees, that’s comparatively freezing, right?” When does he have his nails done?

I seal the Harley man’s eyes shut. But, first, I hold open his right eye and slide in this very large white contact lens object with bumps on the flat side to hold it in place. I do the same to the left. The purpose? To make it look like he’s still got eyeballs beneath his eyelids. After you die, your eyeballs dry out and sink back into your skull and your eyelids cave in. If you don’t put something underneath them, people at the viewing will be disturbed by their loved one’s hollow eye sockets. So, I insert the plastic hemispheres and apply a bead of transparent adhesive right along the lash lines. Presto. Eyes look normal. Just like he’s sleeping. Don’t want his eyelids popping open during the service and revealing the eggshells underneath so I use a good amount of adhesive, but not quite enough to be noticed. “So, this cold saline shuts down their circulatory system, rendering their hearts absolutely still. That’s when they’re dead. We kept them like that for three hours. Three whole hours, Caleb, those dogs were dead. Of course, we didn’t call it ‘dead’; we called it ‘suspended animation.’” He looks at me as though he’s expecting applause.