“Why don’t you make the world a better place, hon, and stay inside?”
Julian paused in the doorway, glaring at their living room couch. In the curtained gloom, the glow of a hair product infomercial swam across his mother’s exposed teeth, and although her drowsy face remained aimed at the television, her pinpoint pupils had fixed on him.
“Want anything?” he asked.
“A man,” she replied. “Be nice to have a man in the house again.”
He didn’t lock the door after slamming it. There was nothing inside he’d miss.
Nothing.
Blinking in the sunlight, he walked west, toward downtown. “I should leave. I should move out. I should leave.” Half an hour later, he reached the square, so full of bustling shoppers and life. A redhead, his age and curvy, swerved around him without looking up from her phone. He’d like her better dead.
He took a deep breath. “Today is just a bad day. Keep it together. Don’t be a monster.” Seeking refuge from the parade of happy faces, he pressed against the nearest shop window. The Disney Store. And there, among a mob of princesses: Snow White, laughing, demanding his gaze, alive. It hadn’t always been that way: She’d been poisoned, dead—coffined in glass like a voyeur’s dream, even. But those dwarves let a stranger open that lid and kiss her, kiss her right on the lips—no protests, no fists, no picks or shovels to the prince’s skull. And when that man was done, the corpse sat up, and the two had a lovely conversation and neither must have felt anything creepy about the experience because they got happily married and had kids. Mother, how did you and dad meet? Snow would pat a head and smile. Well, I died, but your father saw I was still a beautiful person. So remember, dear hearts: You can be just as lovely and happy dead.
Julian bet the couple held onto the coffin, to keep things spicy.
He ducked into a pizza place that stayed just busy enough to keep the doors open. But locals knew it sucked, and savvier out-of-towners who checked reviews kept walking. He got a soda and a cheese slice—too simple for even them to fuck up—and sat. He might occupy this table for hours. The management didn’t care. No one else would need it.
As he ate, he fidgeted: His misery needed company. He logged onto the forum, where he could vent about loneliness and not be fed painfully ignorant advice. Sure, like these losers, he was an involuntary celibate, but not because he hated women. He just needed someone who wouldn’t hurt him. Or be hurt. He thumbed through the forum, past the ravings of sociopaths, to find the more thoughtful users pleading their cases to an unfeeling universe, but an announcement by Lenny_Go_Boom ambushed him: “I found a girl!” That happened. Someone either worked through childhood trauma or found someone willing to roll the dice. Julian liked Lenny, but he’d ghost the group, ghost them all. Sucking on his soda until the cold in his throat made his eyes water, he decided again: I need to ditch these whiners. They have options: go to therapy, realize women are people, crawl out their own assholes. Solutions I don’t have. Should have quit after that one loser shot a woman and everyone cheered.
“Julian?”
Armando stood a few feet shy of the counter. “That is you. Where you been, man?”
The emotional clench was awful: He missed Armando, and he felt shame, as if his friend could read his mind or his phone’s tiny screen—monster, monster. He shrugged. “You know. Needed to get my head together.”
“The movie night crew moved on to college,” Armando said as he paid for a bottled water. “Except for you and me. Miss those days, and farting around town. Call me next week. Let’s get together some new blood. See ya.”
Julian waved. “Sounds good.” And that was true, but sounding good and being good were two very different things. At Armando’s, that last night, while the others rated the female zombies’ hotness, Julian froze on a thin rope across a chasm: One misstep, a single slip of the tongue, and his obsession might leak out.
The brunette. The brunette in the crop top. She had been the looker.
Monster, monster.
He stormed out, speed-walking to burn off the building pressure. Need and revulsion. Always revulsion—at himself, from the world. Like in that Tales From the Crypt episode—“Abra Cadaver,” that was the name—which started wonderfully with a nerd being guided through a morgue, a bright professional morgue in a medical school, by his brother, back, back through a sea of tables each covered with a cloth, like a banquet of picnic baskets. The brother whipped away a cloth, revealing a beautiful woman, dead and perfect. The nerd, after declaring—three times!—his disgust at necrophilia, was bullied into touching the woman and she jumped up screaming at him to leave her alone instead of kissing and chatting and having kids happily ever after. Why would they put a woman on display, then shame you for wanting her?
His perfect scenario would be like in the movie Warm Bodies, where they did Romeo and Juliet but with humans and zombies.
Downtown thinned. If he kept this direction he’d hit respectable neighborhoods: lawns, yard signs, colorful flags, kids, dogs—the 1950s repackaged to make liberals comfortable—but those agreeable homeowners? His truth would convert them into an outraged mob of American Gothic couples: women, moral faces a blend of pity and fear and disgust, and men, primal expressions as grim as their thirsty pitchforks.
But how abnormal was he, really? Like Forensic Files. That show started off somewhat prim and proper, but later seasons showed the corpses. Then unclothed ones—not all, but a leg there, a back here. Then skin bloomed on the reenactment actors, even, sometimes, behind a shower’s bubbled glass. Then complete nakedness. The show did that because there must be people like him, apparently a lot of people, wanting to view those dead bodies.
One stupid episode soured his enjoyment, though: an abducted ten-year-old girl. They cut to her, face down on an autopsy table from the lower back up, and did so multiple times. That, for him, went over the line. Only a necro-pedophile could want that. Julian knew he would be in the mob, up front and waving a torch. After that episode, a wall broke and other people stepped through—victims’ friends and family—all seeing their son, their former roommate, their ex-girlfriend lying in weeds or on a metal table, dead, naked but tastefully cropped. Those weepy interviews hit different. The show generated hundreds of episodes because people kept watching. And wanting.
So, too, did Julian.
Monster, monster.
He scurried across the street. He wasn’t so odd: Rubbernecking drivers scanned accidents for bodies. People peered at gurneys for pulses. Just like vanity, ghoulishness was part of the human makeup, so why couldn’t he be a ghoul? Some people wallowed in vanity or greed or lust. He merely occupied a different human aspect.
Normal, normal.
He approached a church marquee, all in Korean. Beyond, through a soaring window, a crucified Jesus hung over the pulpit. A thought hit him and he snorted: Why could they fetishize a corpse but he couldn’t? He sat heavily on a retaining wall and sobbed. Then it hit—religion: The afterlife was nothing but dead people. Heaven or Hell, all were corpses, and his attraction would be normal, unremarkable. The thought made him lightheaded. But would Heaven (he wasn’t Christian, but on the other side, he hadn’t acted on his impulses or ever hurt anyone) have carnal relations? Or Hell? Islam promised martyrs seventy-two virgins. Why would virginity matter unless the dead had sex? Otherwise why not offer video games, or golden retrievers or kittens? No, there had to be sex.
He arrived home hopeful and excited, but he entered quietly. His mom slept on the couch, painted blue in the flickering light of a nail polish commercial. He plucked the orange bottle off the coffee table and crept into the bathroom. He’d forgotten to bring a glass of water, but he didn’t want to risk waking his mother by going to the kitchen. Sometimes he’d be as loud as an M-80 and raise nothing but a twitch. Other times a fart in his bedroom would set her screaming.
He emptied the toothbrushes out of the cracked coffee mug, filled it with water, and slipped into the bathtub—not as comfy as his bed, but it would be easier to clean up. He did this not for his mother, whose only effort would be regretting the absence of his paycheck, but for whoever did that sort of thing after the body was collected.
Pills and water rolled over his tongue, tasting of wet dust, toothpaste, medicine, and rust. He closed his eyes. He would seek out famous beauties: Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Marilyn Monroe. And they wouldn’t complain. That was the wonderful thing about the dead—in the best possible way, they just didn’t care.
His mother poured into the room, stopped. Rolling her eyes, she shoved the remaining pills back into the bottle and walked out.
Julian sobbed. The next world had to be better. It had to be. And this world, this house held nothing he cared about.
Not even when he was in it.
~~~
Julian woke to bright light from a white ceiling. He sat up in a hospital bed but it could not be a hospital bed because his mother would never save him and he absolutely could never go back. But of course he would be in a hospital because he had died and dead people ended up on autopsy tables and didn’t it make sense for a soul to wake up in a hospital and be cleaned up before entering the afterlife? Weren’t babies an awful mess at birth?
The floor was firm and cold. He stepped carefully—his legs didn’t feel strong. He became dizzy. And a little sick. The looming door force-fed Julian an acidic dread that nothing behind it waited for him. He flung himself through. Outside was a door-lined hallway. A nurse jumped up from her station. She didn’t look happy. Julian faltered—why didn’t she like him? No, her face showed worry and annoyance, not revulsion. What was she worried about? What about him worried her? Oh. He was a man—that must be it: She worked here, maybe worked here for centuries, and she must be the first thing people saw and men must all hit on her and frankly she’d be tired of that so that’s why she looked so annoyed but he wanted his first time to be special anyway so he would leave her alone and hold out for better.
“You need to stay in bed for now. Here, let me help you back.”
Julian pushed away. He feared that bed like nothing else. If he went back, everything would break. Didn’t people sometimes return from death? He had to leave that bed far behind. He staggered down the hall, toward two elevators behind the nurses’ station.
A security guard appeared. “Sir, you can’t leave without permission.”
“The bed, the bed,” Julian croaked, hammering the down button. Where would Cleopatra live? Did she speak English? She’d been dead long enough to learn, and if not, wouldn’t the longing in his face be clear?
Hands gripped his arms, secure but not painful. The elevator doors parted to reveal a middle-aged couple, both wide-eyed. Julian struggled, reached out to them. “Take me with you! I can’t stay in here. Cleopatra! Where is fucking Cleopatra? Or the morgue. At least give me that.”
“Come on,” the guard cooed as the doors slid shut. “Let’s get you into bed, where this nice woman will take very good care of you.”
Julian scanned the nurse’s face for any scrap of attraction, but all he found was pity and fear and disgust. “Do you promise?” he asked. When he winked at her, her face hardened. “Hey, hot stuff,” he sobbed as he was guided through the door, “the party’s just getting started.”