Dead Still
an excerpt

1.

Once upon a time the world was flat, unicorns lived in magical glades, tended by winged sprites and tiny elves, and there was a vast difference between being dead and staying dead. That difference was a simple matter of choice. Yeah, simple as that. A man (or woman) could simply say 'I'm tired of this life business’ And give up on breathing. Then, once sufficiently dead, he could decide that he'd like to go pay cousin Eustace a visit in the countryside and he'd be there, quick as a thought, rattling chains or moaning through keyholes and doing things that made him decidedly less dead than he previously was.

Then, something happened. It was gradual of course - time being relative and the word 'sudden' simply meaning 'details lost to human memory.' - but irrevocable.

So, before this 'something' - which we will call 'the sundering' since that's what everyone else calls it- happened people had a pretty good grip on things. Flour spoiled in the jars or bread molded over because the piskies got to it, or fires would erupt in forests unannounced because will-o-wisps were angry, and people died just because, and they came back for the very same reason. And for the most part they were spot on, or as spot on as they needed to be.
But things changed around the sundering. Men wanted to understand things. They invented enzymes and bacteria that were invisible to the eye, and they invented refraction that could focus light and create fire, and they invented disease, sickness, infirmary, and they invented death, and the dead, and the insurmountable barrier between them.
Science killed the unicorns.

(But who really cares about them? Besides, unicorns - the female ones at least - are actually vile, mean-spirited creatures. Many an Elf had been trampled and gored in the course of tending the glades. This leads some to believe that they had a hand in the sundering, selling out the secrets of the universe in order to make a place for themselves in the new world. And who can blame them. It was an inevitability. And it was either them, or the unicorns.)

Where was I?

Right, so science killed the unicorns. But it wasn't all astrolabes and microscopes, oh no. Philosophy was as much a part of the physical sciences as experimentation was. So called Great thinkers would sit for hours on end and sort of guess stuff, as they had done since the beginning of time. And it would lead them to some really nutso ideas. And in that time, just around the middle of the sundering, there were four schools of thought that managed to siphon off the last of the worlds magic.

The first were the Algrins. Pronounced All-greens. They were botanists and apothecaries, healers and biologists. Their interest was in living things, plant, animal, mineral and otherwise, and what it was that made them tick. They came up with all sorts of kooky ideas, like humors - viscous liquids in the body that controlled mood and behavior - and a blood tide that ebbed and flowed within all living things. There was even a common belief among them, highlighted in the Flora Angelicas Tract, that Plants were the purest and most pious of god's creations, and that even though plants were alive and possessing of a mind, their entire being was dedicated to constant prayer.

Eventually the Algrins sort of went collectively insane. In a sudden fit of practicality - what alcoholics often call a moment of clarity - Florida Algrin, the schools founder, rounded up and dissected the his three brightest students. Finding no Humors and no blood tide he retired to his bed and made his surviving students swear to continue the explorations he'd begun that day. Then, Florida Algrin promptly died, convinced that there was absolutely nothing that was keeping his 138 year old body going.

The school continued, and flourished, and their most learned students became known as the geomancers. You've probably never heard of them.

And then there was Ignacio Giovanni. He was an apothecary, though not a very good one, and he was obsessed with Florida Algrin's teachings. The geomancers, however, would not accept him. They saw him as a bumbler, and an ignoble butcher. Ignacio was just as interested in the workings of the human body as any other Geomancer, but unlike them he wasn't so much interested in the healing arts. In fact, Ignacio killed more test subjects than any single geomancer in his time. And when he was done he would find ways to re-animate the corpses and receive second hand accounts of the land of the dead. Later, Ignacio would meet Guido Romero, a self proclaimed medium and half hearted undertaker, and they would use Algrin's teachings as a springboard into their own endless ocean of crackpot ideas.

Their school was completely unique. One had to be naturally gifted to become a necromancer - a term they gave themselves as a form of bitten thumb at their geomancers who spurned them - And as they became the last few people who still trafficked with the now alienated and often lonely dead, their school grew where others all but perished.
They built their headquarters in the open in Rome and in the Catacombs in Venice, the city of bones that kept the gilded city above safe and try, in more ways than one. When the plague struck, they moved to Paris and found it teeming and most fruitful. And when most were afraid of possessed warriors and cannibals, they found helpful friends in Zimbabwe, friends who even taught the now ancient pair a thing or two. Their school was the second most helpful in history. Though you've probably never heard of them either.

The story of the elementalists is a sad one. They are, if I may use a school analogy without reproach, that kid that always gets picked on because they're too smart for their own good. No one took the elementalists seriously, you see. There was very little space for their sciences in a world ruled by faith. So when they said things like 'Everything is made up of spinning particles' everyone laughed. When they said 'said particles get hot when they spin faster, and cold when they spin slower' they were scoffed at, and when they said 'everything in the universe spins: The particles, planets, the stars, even god spins' they were run out of town, usually by the geomancers. They were the least loved of all the schools, the smallest, the frailest, the last picked in any sports. If anyone had taken the time to actually look at things the way they looked at things, they might have learned that they were the closest to the truth.

The final school was founded by a man known only as 'Greyface'. He was a merchant by some accounts, a Duke by others, but most usually - and most believeably in my mind - he was a priest and advisor to a certain line of kings. Whatever he was he had the funding needed to organize his school without anyone knowing, until it had grown to match the size of the geomancers, and spread to rival the reach of the necromancers. They were hermetics, they were gnostics, they were alchemists. They did not know The Truth, but they knew A Truth and it was the most important truth of all. "There is no god." says the preamble to the principia hermetica. "There is only the faith in one. And faith, being a product of man, can be turned with the slightest of gestures. It is not a god who makes the sky stay up and the ground stay down, it is not a phantom hand or the devil that plucks the breath from mens chests and leaves their rotting husks. It is faith, belief, concentrated from every living being that makes this things happen. And with the faith in our hands, we are the gods."

A grim truth to be sure, especially when a certain greyface - as their most learned members take on their founder's dour persona as a mark of prestige - caught wind of the other lingering schools. Radicals that were an afront to their paradigm. How could they control the masses, and as a a result the universe, if there were these other wackos out there filling people with ideas like praying petunias and communicative corpses and spinning. And so, Greyface waged war on the other schools, silently but effectively. There were witch hunts and crusades in those times. Churches that had once told stories of spirits impregnating virgins and men reviving their best friends from the dead because they were REALLY looking forward to that dinner party, suddenly spoke of loathesome tales of defilers and commune with evil spirits. Kings that had once been mostly concerned with counting their coffers and mounting the prettiest virgins in the land became suddenly transfixed with the ways of the universe and had scientists, real scientists, on their pay-rolls.

The other schools were slowly having their last bit of power torn from them. The necromancers sounded the horn. The geomancers said 'leave us heathens' and slowly died out. The Elementalists? They'd switched sides, sold out, became hired geeks for the goon squad. Whatever or whoever remained went into hiding, and took their bit of magic with them. The alchemists called that time, and the time just before it - the time when all the schools had formed - the sundering. And as a result, so does everyone else.

2.

Ki-ki really didn't care much for the park. Nature just wasn't her thing. She could see what other people saw in it, sure. Trees, grass, birds, fresh air; it was nice. In her mind, however, nice was a poor substitute for cute. A sudden downpour could ruin a nice day, but cute cut through the rainclouds. Cute was what made the world go 'round.
She smiled as she looked down at her feet. On her right foot she wore a blue and white converse, speckled with their trademark star logo. She'd put them on this morning, deciding they'd go nicely with the cute five-point-star, turquoise studs she had in her ears, which in turn matched the sky-blue satin top. It was the first thing she picked out when getting ready that morning. The color and the material made her feel, in a private moment of romantic fancy, like she was wearing the sky itself, and her breasts were the size of the world.

On her left foot, she wore a silver shoe with a stiletto heel. It was a bit tight around the toes, and she imagined she could take about ten or twenty steps in it before it completely eroded her heel. But it was undeniably cute, and gave her that clearance sale feeling everytime she looked at them. There was a garment bag in her closet that held a dress – a really cute dress – that called to these shoes through her the very moment she saw them on the shelf. In that dress and these shoes, she might as well be the moon when she walked into the harvest ball tomorrow night. She would be full, round, and radiant. All eyes would be drawn to her, and those that did not worship at her beauty would be driven mad by it. Ki-ki shook her head. There go those silly romantic thoughts again.

“Nice shoes.” Said a voice from beside her. “They look good on you.” Parks being public places Kiki had expected there to be people around and had become so absorbed in her latest purchase – stars. They would be stars around her, all of them. - that she hadn't even noticed when the man sat next to her on the bench. The good news is he didn't stink like the usual sort you might find milling about in a park. The bad news was Kiki was only wearing one foot of her 'get as far from this uncomfortable situation shoes. “Thanks” she said and threw in a slightly proud smile for sincerity. She took the stilleto off and gingerly placed it back into the shoe box next its partner, and proceeded to put the box back into the shopping bag.

“What?” the man asked. He heard him slur slightly, softening the beginnings and ends of his words. “Hua?” he had asked. “Nothing. Thanks. Um.” Kiki hardly ever knew what to say in these situations. She stood with her bags in hand and looked at the man for the first time. She'd seen the type before. It was two in the afternoon and he still was wearing his club clothes. His hair was mussed and short of a really good dry cleaner that would be the last time he'd be wearing that silk shirt. His pants, a cotton and teflon blend, had that stain-resistant, iron-free shine to them still, but the way he sat in them indicated that he'd been wearing them longer than anyone should wear any article of clothing with teflon in it. Kiki was surprised he didn't reek of the club, of alcohol and cigarettes and sweat. She smiled politely at the confused look on his face, as if embarrassed for him. Then, without another word she left him there and hurried along her way.

Kim and Maggie looked like overpriced whores. They weren't unattractive, but there was nothing particularly stunning about them either. And their sense of fashion seemed to hinge on the ability to show off as much skin as possible without getting arrested. The two considered themselves cute, and their clothes sexy. Somewhere along the lines something had been lost in translation. Perhaps it was a matter of finance – their lack of it coupled with their desire to hide this fact as best they could, and their resulting failure to do so - that had them buying hundred dollar styles in ten dollar materials. Perhaps they thought the clothes looked good on the models and, in a self delusional fugue, decided it'd look good on them too.

They stood in front of the department store window looking bored and sharing a single cigarette between the two of them, their attempt at cutting back so they could one day quit. Smoking was cool when they were both fifteen, so they started. It wasn't cool now that they were both twenty, looked thirty, and had the lungs of eighty year olds. Kim's regular early morning cough wasn't why they were quitting though. Maggie was quitting because she saw a feature on entertainment tonight, and decided that not smoking would be so Hollywood. Kim was quitting because Maggie was.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Maggie croaked as Kiki approached and she passed the cigarette to Kim. “We were here having a fit. I thought you'd gotten dragged into an alley and raped or mugged, you just took off without warning. I turn around for a half-a-second to check out some heels - which would be perfect with my red dress by the way. Oh. My. God. Red Pumps. You have to see them - and you wander off like some kind of...”

“Like a puppy.” Kim added, and she passed the cigarette back to Maggie

“Sorry.” Kiki said in a way that made her sound nothing of the sort. She was smiling, beaming in fact, in the way her alcoholic uncle did whenever they left him home and returned to find the liquor cabinet raided. She swung her shopping bag ahead of her for those final few steps in such a way that the two girls could see the name of the shoe store on the bag. They hid their envy poorly. “I sensed a sale nearby. What'd you guys get?”

“Nothing.” Maggie said, with such venom that it made her ugly and not simply unattractive. She took one last drag from the cigarette before dropping it to the ground. A narrow brown thing with a shoe attached to one end extended from under her skirt and crushed the glowing end.

“What happened to the heels?”

Kim bit at her bottom lip in what might have been modesty and whined “They were too expensive.” Maggie sucked her teeth and said “They were out of season.” as if shoes were pheasant birds. The red pumps were never spoken of again.

The man in the overworked club clothes watched Kiki go. A thousand thoughts rushed through his mind and he wasn't able to grasp any one of them. He told his feet to move, his body to get up, his muscles to tighten and relax or at the very least help close his mouth shut so he could stop gawking. They didn't listen. His muscles were treating him like a homeless person. Ignoring his pleas, pretending he wasn't there, then, when he least expected it and really didn't want it, they'd do something alarming and call it help, then treat him like dirt all over again.

This was, he decided, the worst drug trip ever. Though for the life of him he couldn't remember what it is he took that got him this messed up. He went through the list in his mind more time. There was the line of coke before getting ready. Another after. A few drinks at the bar to meet up with...someone he couldn't remember. A third line just before driving to the club. The table in the VIP room was scattered with pills. He took one. It may have been X. Alcohol at the club. Lots of alcohol. He was knocking back every shot or cocktail brought to him on the dance floor, most of which he was sure weren't intended for him. Some weed with the kitchen staff as he tried to get some fresh air and cool down at the same time – it must have been a hundred degrees in there – Some more alcohol once he was back inside. And then....

And then the migraines came, just like they did every other time he tried to remember last nights events. He had his eyes shut now and held his head...no, he was squeezing his head in his hands, as if trying to squeeze the pain out. The muscles in his arms were tight. He didn't remember wanting them to be. The sounds of the park were helping – birds, people chatting softly, occasionally a child's laugh. He remembers wanting that. He remembers thinking he'd sleep off the hangover in the park, with his shades on and a lot of gatorade. It always used to help. He didn't remember walking there.

The migraines were probably the only thing that didn't get easier with experience. This migraine was really no different than the one he had this morning, the one that made him want to open his head and eject whatever demon had surely taken up residence there. No, not easier to handle, but he knew that he could handle it. He wouldn't die from it, and if he sat still long enough and squeezed his eyes shut like he was doing now, that it would eventually go away.

“So how are you feeling?” someone asked. He was about to snap back at whoever it was with 'How do I look like I'm feeling?' when someone else, a woman this time, replied.

“I dunno. I don't feel any different. And I'm not sick in the mornings like they say.”

“Nah, that won't come until later.”

The man in the silk shirt could see them now. A woman sat at his right shorts and a tank top, her sports bra visible underneath. She had Hispanic features and there was a light sheen of sweat on her face giving her honey colored face a healthy glow. She sipped water from a sports bottle.

“But what I meant was, how do you feel about it? Still think we're doing the right thing?”

There was a man talking to her. He was sweating a lot more and it soaked through his gray t-shirt. He had no hair except for the tiny black curls that were on his wide chest. The shirt drooped a bit with the weight of his sweat and the hairs were visible if one turned just so. The man in the silk shirt would have found him incredibly sexy were it not for the splitting headache and the foot placed inches away from his crotch.

It was the fifth time he’d been completely ignored today, and only the third time since he’d been at the park. He wanted to tell them something, to let the fury fly from his lips and the profanity, like sparks, would ignite something catastrophic or simply burn for an instant and leave them that much more humble. He wanted to give them a piece of his mind but every time he tried to think of something to say his head hurt all over again. The hangover was in his stomach now. He could feel the hunger burning there while at the same time he was certain that anything that came that close to his mouth wouldn’t stand a chance of making it all the way down to his stomach. Then again, throwing up might not be such a bad thing. It would at least get rid of whatever was left in his stomach. Whatever was fucking him up.
If only I could find some food, he thought to himself. His head was in his hands again. It throbbed in his skull but felt cold and clammy under his fingertips. He was vaguely aware of a bistro nearby. It would be just a short walk away if he could only get his legs to move when he wanted them to.

The headache suddenly pulsed again, this time more of a grind than a throb. The wind in the trees grew deafeningly loud. The sound of the birds warped into something loud and ugly, an intense hissing that he could almost feel giving off heat. The voices of the two people who had so rudely invaded his quiet suffering warbled and dipped, as did their conversation. Instead of talking about kids the woman, who’s voice had changed considerably, was talking about smothering French fries and the man was simply making agreeable sounds in a woman’s voice.

The Bistro wasn’t as nice as he remembered. The tables seemed unsteady, the chairs flimsy, and it was much too close to the traffic on the street. Perhaps it was the hangover, or just his mood today, but it seemed grey and drab, though no one else seemed to notice. He wondered if he'd stumbled on the way here. Had he stopped at any of the crosswalks or did he simply wander aimlessly through the traffic. He tried to remember, tried to search for a memory of ten minutes ago. His head started to ache again.

The two girls were chattering away like park squirrels. He tried to remember the park, specifically how he got from there to here. He tried to think back. Did he walk on the sidewalk or stumble through the streets? What path did he take out of the park? Which direction did he go? Did he meet anyone on the way? His head stabbed. The girls laughed suddenly and their shrill tittering made it worse.

“I can only imagine!” said the skinny one. She had a face like a horse. A horse with emphysema. “I wonder what she’s gonna squeeze her ass into this year. I bet you anything it’ll be cheap and covered in sequins. I mean, what was she thinking with that dress last year?”
“Oh, but I liked that dress.” The other wasn’t as skinny. There was still some life in her but one could see in her eyes how much she begrudged the slight pouch on her belly and the extra baggage she carried in her hips. Her skinny friend scoffed.

“It was like putting silk on a pig.”

“Actually, I think it was satin.”

“Well I think it was embarrassing. Someone should tell that bitch she's not cute. She's got nerve for a fat girl.”

“She's confident.” The other shirked. “There's nothing wrong with that.”

“What the fuck have you been drinking?”

The two fell quiet suddenly. The man with the headache realized that it had a lot less to do with the skinny girl's chiding than it had to do with the third girl that joined them. She'd been in the restroom and had come out to find the ice in her iced tea almost completely melted.

What does one do when one discovers one’s killed one’s self? Weep. But a dead man’s weeping isn’t the same as a live man’s. A live man has the obligation to hid his weeping, either through shame at being found crying like a little girl or through a simple, self destructive desire to suffer alone. If you’re dead, however, there’s nothing holding you back. And letting it all out can seem like quite an arduous task.

The tall, dark funeral director was playing jazz while he attended to Monty’s body, The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s ‘Take Five’ to be exact. Monty told himself he wouldn’t watch. He sat in the same place on the leather love seat where Kiki had left him, suddenly feeling cold and rather dead indeed. He could hear the music coming from the steps leading to the basement. He could hear strange gurgling, slurping sounds and at one point the lights had dimmed and he heard the sudden grumble of a pump. He hadn’t seen the great care the man was taking with his body. He hadn’t seen how he’d washed him like a baby, scrubbing the club stamp off his arm and washing the smell of cigarettes, booze, and his own vomit out of his hear. It probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since immediately after he had his guts sucked out through a hose.

By the time Monty’s curiosity got the better of him, the man who he presumed was either Mr. Romero or Mr. Giovanni, was applying makeup to Monty’s former face, mixing and matching until he had a close shade of what Monty would have looked like had he seen the sun more than twice on a weekly basis. John Coltrane was playing ‘Alabama’ and there was a rubber bung in a hole in Monty’s abdomen, a bellybutton he never had before. He looked dead, except for where the mortician was now applying color. His lips were blue, his skin nearly so. His eyes were sunken deep. He didn’t look asleep. He looked dead. He felt dead. He wished that it could be like the atheists had promised him. He wished he could just go to a dark place and simply be dead.

The light in the room flickered and the CD skipped. The mortician stopped what he was doing, placing his makeup on a table next to the slab of metal that housed Monty’s corpse and staring at the lights, then at his radio. He walked over, removed his gloves and stopped the CD. Then he held up one hand as if feeling for a draft as his eyes scanned the room slowly, carefully, taking in every detail. Something in the room was off and when Monty saw the man’s seeking eyes stop seeking and settle somewhere around the center of his chest, he realized that he wasn’t the only thing that was off.

A dark hand went up with its palm facing Monty and he could now see the faint outline of a shape in the man’s palm, under the skin, as if it had been there for ages and had been grown over. “Go Away” he said. His voice was so deep it made the ground shake and Monty’s Vision blurred like milk in water. The world fell away and Monty was left with darkness and his own mind. He was still not as dead as he truly wished he could be. But at least it was quiet there, no one to see him when they shouldn’t be able to, or ignore him all together. Quietness is the surest sign of being dead. He’d read that somewhere, but when he tried to remember where his head hurt again.