Dead Boys (11 page)

“‘First of all I wouldn’t know how to go about it, and if I did I wouldn’t want to, but I thought that, given your recent innovations in the preservative arts, you might enjoy the challenge.

“‘I beseech you, Jacob, get this nasty man-child off of my divan, where he has insisted on remaining until, to use his phrase, his
situation
is made
permanent
. Isn’t that just a darling way of putting it?’

“Putting what, I wanted to know.

“‘Well,’ said Tanner, ‘it turns out that what they say about hanged men is true.’

“‘And what do they say about hanged men?’ I asked him.

“‘Zounds, Jacob, do I have to spell it out? He passed priapic! He ended engorged! His last word was “yes”! The filthy bugger’s bell-end is hard as a bone, and he wants to have it fixed that way before it drains! Now are you or are you not the man to handle it?’

“I didn’t care to answer that question as it was posed, but I told him to bring Leopold up and I’d see what I could do.

“When he left I began to consider the problem. True, I claimed to offer a full-body preservation, but I’d never considered the rehabilitation of an organ before, least of all that one. Where women were concerned, I dealt with their affairs simply and with decorum; as for men, all my male clients had died flaccid, resigned themselves to the rot of their privates, sewed up their flies, and never looked back.

“Suddenly, I realized that I’d fitted the penis into the same category as the tongue: organs made useless by death, not worth the effort to preserve. Now that such a preservation had been requested, however, I had to consider it carefully, for to my mind it wouldn’t do merely to lay the skin over a carved reproduction as I would with an arm or leg, since this would result in nothing more than a glorified dildo. No, it was clear to me that a man willing to go to such lengths to retain his genitals would need them preserved in their entirety, meaning that I would have to salvage every last vein and vesicle by teasing them out of their casing, drying them individually, hardening them by the application of lacquer, and fitting the entire puzzle back together again, with whatever resinous filler might be required, giving the client a direct and visceral sense that nothing had been lost.”

“Gross!” said Remington.

“Indeed,” said Jacob, “but fascinating, and entirely dependent on the freshness of the corpse in question. Luckily, the boy who stumbled through my window was so fresh his pimples were still pink, having just gone through his mortis on John Tanner’s divan. So, without pausing for niceties, I laid him down on the table and pressed Tanner into service as my assistant, since I needed materials and couldn’t leave to get them myself.

“The job was intricate, but I had to start immediately, and I credit Leopold’s strong stomach with the swiftness of its completion, for even with his manhood vivisected, he never flinched from the task. In fact, he hardly spoke a word: he was shy to the point of muteness, hard as that may be to believe.

“In any case, when his organ’s constituent parts had been safely dissected, I took a break to let things drain, and it was then that curiosity got the better of me, and I asked Leopold why it was so important that this feature be preserved.

“He said nothing at first, and when he did speak, he would only say that it would be his secret weapon. At first I was confused by this answer, but I saw what he meant when everything was sewed up. The boy who’d climbed through my window was a sullen thing who looked like he’d been slapped in the face at least once a day for the entirety of his adolescence, but the boy who pulled up his pants and walked to the mirror in my flat was swaggering.

“Now, although my prices were high enough to make such an exhaustive operation worth my time, they weren’t so exorbitant that he couldn’t afford a full-body treatment, but young Leopold refused.

“‘What you’ve given me is what counts,’ he said. ‘Pride is all. The rest is smoke and mirrors.’

“When I asked what he meant to do with his pride, he said only that great things lay ahead, and implored me to keep his preservation a secret, even offering to pay for my discretion. Of course, I took no payment for this professional courtesy, and while John Tanner is a notorious gossip, he was either too embarrassed by his incompetence or too mortified by the experience to mention it again, and so far as I can tell, Leopold never mentioned it, either, since in the years that intervened between our first and recent meetings I never heard a murmur about the work I’d done, which begs the question, doesn’t it—”

“Say!” said Remington, popping his head up from the middle of the raft. “If everyone kept the secret, how come the Masker knows you have a boner?”

“Curious,” said Leopold as he dipped a hand under the river’s surface. “The waters of Lethe, according to the ancient Greeks, induce forgetfulness in all who drink them, and yet here we are with our bellies full of river, contemplating old times like a bunch of biddies at bingo night. What happened when, and to whom, and with whom, and to what end? We make such pretty noises reminiscing, and it gives us a sense of power to revel in hindsight, but really, boys, it tells us so little about where we are.

“Oh, I could talk for days about my proud little member, and in the course of our journey it’s likely that I will, it being a subject my afterlife has given me little opportunity to indulge, but while the two of you, and, who knows, maybe Adam and Eve to boot, have your minds thoroughly invested in the contents of my trousers, I am more attentive to the fact that we are floating due south up the inner rim of nowhere, without any apparent care for our alleged quest.

“Really, Jacob, how long do you intend to follow the directions of a deaf-mute who has yet to open his eyes?”

Jacob drummed his fingers on the Living Man’s driftwood plaque. “Truthfully, gentlemen, I’m stumped. If we stop to consider our options, the Masker will catch up, but if we sail on, we’re that much more likely to end up miles from the Living Man’s original path.”

“For that matter, who’s to say that’s really the Living Man’s bonce you’re cradling like a babe in your arms?” said Leopold.

Jacob bristled. “His flesh lacks the river’s signature, just like the fingertip. He could not have come to the underworld by way of the river—or, if he did, he was alive at the time.”

“And what if he was dead, but crossed over in a waterproof body bag? What if his casket had a trick bottom, and he fell right through the earth onto the Heap? You’re a reasonable enough man, Campbell, but when it comes to this second cranium of yours, you insist on ignoring every possibility but the most magical, and to what end?”

“You think I’m a fool,” Jacob said quietly, “but you’re following me all the same.”

“You think worse of me,” said Leopold, “but you’re letting me follow. Look here, it’s possible that your pet noodle really is the last vestige of some world-vaulting hero. It’s also possible that he’s just an unlucky drunkard who lost a bet with a sadist. But we’ll never know the difference if you don’t put some energy into waking him!”

“And how would you suggest I do that?”

“You could always set him on fire. Isn’t that your standard backup plan?”

Deciding nothing, they drifted upstream. Jacob and Leopold nursed a long, hostile silence, the import of which was lost on Remington. He was so saturated with river-water that when he closed his mouth abruptly a little spume shot out of it.

I am the river, he thought. I’m an eddy, an eel, a piece of driftwood! We’re two of a kind, Lethe and me.

But we weren’t always. Or were we? I don’t think I thought about myself that way when I washed up. I don’t really think I thought about much at all. I got up, I saw a big pile of stuff, and I climbed it. I wonder who I was before?

I was born the day I died, that’s what Ma used to say. Just like Adam and Eve were born the day they lost their heads.

Is that really how it happened, though? Did they start over again when their heads got cut off?

Are they whole people—or
parts
of people?

If they’re parts of people, are they parts of the people they used to be?

Or are they parts of
me
?

Remington’s mind, full of the River Lethe and all that its waters contained, began racing, leaping ahead of itself, finishing his thoughts before he’d had a chance to examine them, hurtling him toward an inevitable conclusion whose shape he couldn’t see.

The headless can’t be parts of me, he thought, or I’d feel it.

Or would I?

I can’t feel my hands any more, but they’re still parts of me, aren’t they?

Of course they are, and I know it because they move when I want them to.

And so do Adam and Eve!

Remington’s body jerked, provoking some complaints from above.

I should test it, he thought. I can move my hands without telling them what I want them to do out loud. If there’s no separation between Adam, Eve, and me, I should be able to do the same thing with them.

It’ll be just like when I quickened.

He remembered that day clearly: the slow slog from darkness into light, the lack of breath in his lungs, his body’s surprising numbness, the thought itself:
I’m dead
. Then the struggle. His limbs failing to respond, his will coursing like hot liquid through his bones. His first twitch, his first thrash, his first unsteady step. Then down in the mud, then up again, then again, then again.

He’d had to reach into his bones to learn to walk. This time he’d just reach a little farther, into the bones of his friends.

In his mind’s eye he saw Adam and Eve spreading their arms into the river, hands extended like paddles, angling the raft smoothly toward the banks. Then, with an open, flowing patience, he moved the image from his mind toward their fingertips.

There was no result, but a calm seemed to suffuse the water around him. I can’t do it yet, he thought, but I’ll learn. We’ll learn together.

He closed his mouth, and the river bubbled over his lips.

Maybe I’m not reaching far enough, he thought. Maybe it’s not enough just to be myself, or to be myself
and
Adam and Eve. I have to think as wide and long as Lethe. If I could do that, moving an arm or a leg would be easy!

Remington softened his gaze and entered something like a daydream. He saw his mind as a blanket, a flowing, purple quilt made up of millions of tiny patches, a quilt that he draped with ghostly fingers along the length of Lethe, watching it billow from Dead City far into the darkness of the unknown. It wasn’t long before he felt the river tugging on its fabric, and then, in satisfaction, he started to hum a little tune to himself.

Above Remington’s unsettlingly musical torso, Jacob alternated between two types of anxiety, the first concerning the Masker, whom he had begun to imagine pursuing them on a motorboat, and the second about the Living Man, whom he had good reason to doubt would ever wake up. As his attention swung from one to the next, his worries deepened into terrors, and just as he was approaching a state of frenzy that would certainly have led to an embarrassing outcry, he was distracted by the arrival of an unexpected visitor.

For long minutes a dot in the sky had been approaching, attended by none but the mumbling Leopold, who shook Jacob from his thoughts with such exclamations as, “Is that a vulture?” and, “No, just another bloody crow.” As it drew near, however, Jacob noted an irregular wobble in its wingstroke, and by the time it had drawn close enough that all the company could hear it cawing, it was clear that their visitor was none other than Remington’s reconstructed crow.

The bird swooped through exclamations of surprise to land on Remington’s face and squawk three times.

“This is bizarre, even by your elevated standards,” said Leopold. “However did that bedraggled thing know where we were?”

“What if he was captured and trained by the Masker?” hissed Jacob as the crow hopped onto Remington’s chest. “What if he flies off and leads them back to us? I know you’re fond of the bird, Remy, but I’d feel safer if we took off his wings, at least until we’re clear of the river.”

“No,” said Remington from beneath them. “He came because I called him. I reached out to all the parts of me, and he’s one of them.”

“Jacob, the boat has gone crazy! I demand another.”

“But it’s true,” said Remington. “There’s no difference between me and them!”

“Of course!” said Jacob. “The river has saturated his skull. No wonder he’s babbling. Let’s shore up here and dry him out.”

“All right,” said Remington, dipping his head backward into the river and humming tonelessly.

At his unspoken urging, the headless turned their arms and legs like rudders, navigating straight into the shore beside them.

The raft scraped to a halt below a little cave in the valley wall, and the reconstructed crow disembarked, hopping along the stone as Jacob and Leopold staggered away and the headless let go of Remington’s limbs. As the water that rolled off their corpses stained the ashen rocks, Leopold cried, “What is this, Remington? By what dark magic have you enchanted these wretched creatures?”

“No magic! Just a blanket. Now let’s all gather around and see if we can help the Living Man wake up. If he wants to, I mean. Jake, can I hold him?”

Jacob passed the head into Remington’s hands and followed him into the deep, bell-shaped enclosure of the cave. Remington sat at the back of the bell, before a squat, forking tunnel whose branches quickly became too dark to make out. Adam and Eve sat beside him and clasped his wrists, holding out their other hands, waiting for Leopold and Jacob to join the circle.

“You guys coming?” said Remington. The crow flapped onto his shoulder, preening.

With obvious discomfort, Jacob and Leopold sat and clasped the hands of the headless. The five of them formed a circle around the Living Man, whose grimace was aimed at the alcove’s ceiling.

“What now?” said Jacob.

“It’s hard to describe,” said Remington. “I’m sort of making it up as I go along. Clear your mind, I guess, and try to reach out to him, like he’s on the bottom of the river and we’re all one long arm.”