Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 13

"Did you even hear what I said about The Man Who Got Marketed to Death?"

"Are you talking about a movie or my life?"

Here come more bra.s.s, a trio of them now, jolly, spines bent back into concavities while the arms beckon, thrust at forty-five-degree angles from their bodies, a grandparently come-here-you-rascal kind of hug-inducing posture. Neethan rises and accepts their cheek kisses and let-me-get-a-look-at-you affections. He's never met them before but they don't know that. They feel they know him intimately. Have watched his genitals do their magic on the big screen as well as the magic of his acting skills and uncanny comic timing. More than know him, they feel they own him. And like an objet d'art in a gla.s.s cabinet they want to take him out for a quick polish and a moment of admiration. His face is fused in their minds to spreadsheets, and they like the numbers they've been looking at. Leathery little men with little hair, they run their hands up and down Neethan's arms, pausing at the elbow, sharing confidences and dirty jokes. The duration of this encounter is say about two minutes. Then they depart, leaving Neethan free to chew on something that involves fish eyeb.a.l.l.s.

It is Kirkpatrick's will.

Neethan'd really been looking forward to kicking back with a movie in the theater at his place off Mulholland tonight but, thanks to Bickle's sudden appearance, that isn't going to happen. No refuting the wishes of Mr. K. Neethan knows as soon as he is powered up on sushi and receives the figurative b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs from the executive cla.s.s, he will be locating the exit and striding along the red carpet to wherever it might lead. Behind him he will leave a lousy release party under way in a decent j.a.panese restaurant with waitresses rigorously trained to pretend they don't recognize him. Already, mentally, he is out the door but physically he is rooted here with his agent who is laying down project after project that begs to be rescued by his involvement. He can play an autistic savant, a tennis pro, a gay hustler, a frustrated novelist, a blind violin maker, a psychoa.n.a.lyst on the make, a ship captain harboring a deadly secret, a mutant capable of spitting poison from his eyes, a mortgage company representative, the Pope. None of it sounds Native American enough. Now that Bickle has laid down all the cards with regard to his ethnic ident.i.ty, it would be nice to parlay that knowledge into a role in which he gets to play that ident.i.ty and maybe in the process learn about what that ident.i.ty is like. Because now when he thinks Native American he thinks casinos and smallpox blankets and that's about it. And if he gets bored being Native American he'll move on and be something else for a while, like an unfrozen Viking with a lightning bolt sidekick.

A mixed-s.e.x group of studio people cross the room to the table, midlevel departmental directors and such, people responsible for budgets, shouting compliments on his performance over the restaurant's derivative music. Flock-like, they glom on to the table and chortle borrowed insights, eyes spreading wide in expressions that have as much to do with plastic surgery as with emotion. They are all drugged, Neethan figures, strapped to a biochemical thrill ride that approximates optimism. Or they simply conceive the world this way, an endless series of release parties and occasions to get close enough to smell the rancid breath of the talent. They appear pleased with themselves. They throw their heads back when laughing as if to make sure no one doubts the magnitude of the hilarity they are enjoying. Across the restaurant he catches sight of Myra's open mouth similarly engaged in laughter and pictures her lips curling around the tip of-hey now, here is the Klan again, igniting a cross in some poor Southerner's front yard. Neethan looks down in time to see a twitching fin of something on his plate. Rory chortles with the ring of midlevels that fortifies the periphery of their table. Now there is nudity happening at a table nearby; things have progressed to that level pretty quickly. The open bar gushes libations into marketing department bloodstreams. A man in a bow tie visibly vibrates at a table across from the disrobing table, jacked up on some kind of Bionet-delivered kick. Pretty soon someone will discharge a handgun, Neethan suspects. It feels like that kind of night.

It is Kirkpatrick's will.

Neethan stands up so fast his knees strike the underside of the table, upending gla.s.ses of sake. "This is f.u.c.ked. I gotta get out of here," he says, though no one hears him over the laughter and music. He heads instinctively for the men's room. On the way he b.u.mps into a baked-looking busboy.

"Which way to the red carpet?" Neethan asks.

The busboy nods his head toward the kitchen. In a few long strides Neethan is through the double doors, the red carpet of the restaurant contiguous with the strip of carpet wending through this steamy zone of screams and clangs, a couple dishwashers engaged in an honest-to-G.o.d fist fight, a sushi chef cursing in j.a.panese about his a.s.sistant's lack of a work ethic, clouds of rice steam, airborne plates, and impolite language in three languages flying across various planes of vision. Neethan barrels onward, somewhat unnoticed, past the walk-in freezer to the back door and a clump of waitresses taking a smoke break, to the alley, where the red carpet slithers around a corner and intersects with Hollywood Boulevard. Neethan stumbles onto the famous thoroughfare and sees that the carpet stretches ahead as far as his eyes will focus, block after block, westward toward La Brea. The glittering s.l.u.tty trinket shops of a reconst.i.tuted Hollywood frame his gaze. How is it that after the world seemingly ended, this obnoxious place rebuilt itself from scorched rubble to resume the manufacture of dreams? Why had this, of all places, been a priority? It feels as improbable as his own destiny and origin, beckoning to him from beyond the lights.

WOO-JIN.

AND ABBY.

"Who are you?" Abby gasped and rose to her feet.

"I'm Woo-jin Kan."

"The championship dishwasher?"

"No, the writer."

"Did you do this to me?"

"Did what?"

"Kill me?"

"No, no, I wanted to help you when you were dead but the cops wouldn't let me."

"I need to find Rocco." Abby propelled herself one-shoed in a direction. The editing felt off. She'd blinked in the theater beside Kylee Asparagus, surrounded by Federicos, as her life played out in gross caricature onstage. So where was this? This field? The roaring of jet engines? Some smelly guy with f.u.c.ked-up hair?

"I need a phone," Abby said. "I need a shoe."

The only place Woo-jin knew to find a phone and shoe was at the Amba.s.sador's house, so he pointed Abby along the narrow brick streets of Georgetown on a trajectory toward the Emba.s.sy.

"What happened to me?" Abby choked.

"You died three times," Woo-jin said. "Or two and a half times. Dr. Farmer has your other bodies at the morgue."

"I was watching a play. I'm confused."

"That is correct."

"I saw a ghost. There was a clone funeral. An orgy."

Hoping to sound helpful, Woo-jin communicated elements of his last few days. "My sister got hauled away by a helicopter. The Amba.s.sador gave me a shower. I got diamond-coated steel wool. I saw an old man in the desert with piles of books. Dr. Farmer asked me to suck his wiener."

The two characters paused in the street and looked at one another. Their different brains arrived at precisely the same conclusion, which only Abby could articulate.

"Nothing makes sense," she said. "A permutation of me is stuck in some sort of f.u.c.king zone."

"The Emba.s.sy is close," Woo-jin said.

Abby stumbled, clutching Woo-jin's arm, which she continued to clutch even after she wasn't stumbling. She was perplexed to find herself trusting this guy. They turned a corner in a part of the neighborhood undergoing a perverted, reverse urban p.u.b.erty, where infant industrial buildings grew up into homes, and came to the Emba.s.sy. The most intense light they'd ever seen radiated from the windows and the seams around the door. The house appeared to bulge, barely able to contain whatever produced the light within. Shielding their eyes they proceeded up the front walk. Woo-jin rapped on the door. A moment later Pierre the imitation chauffeur answered, hat off, hair berserk, looking glazed and happy.

"Is the Amba.s.sador in?" Woo-jin asked.

"Oh, he's in all right," Pierre said. "Is he ever! Whoa!"

"We're looking for a shoe."

"He's really busy right now. I mean really busy," Pierre said.

"I'm an official delegate," Woo-jin said.

Pierre impatiently nodded for them to enter. The humble materials of the house-wood, varnish, latex paint, porcelain fixtures, metal hardware, sealants, and caulking still const.i.tuted the structure of a house but exuded an otherworldly wisdom, as though the elements from which they'd been formed contained memories of a purpose far more holy. Light emanated from every surface, causing the air to slightly ripple. A door k.n.o.b could barely stand the awesome fact that it was (Oh my G.o.d, I'm a door k.n.o.b!) and individual beams of wood in the floor trembled at the majesty of being. Woo-jin walked down the hall, pivoted when he came to a door, and waved for Abby to follow.

"The Amba.s.sador is in here," Woo-jin said.

Abby followed as she would in a dream, her senses propelling her to the doorway, through which she observed the elegantly appointed living room. On one upholstered chair sat a man with dreadlocks, colorful garments, and a scepter crafted from a toilet brush and plunger handle, beaming in the presence of three glowing orbs the size of your typical Spalding basketball. These orbs bobbed softly above three chairs and pulsed hues of purple and orange.

"Excuse me, Amba.s.sador? We were wondering if you had any spare women's shoes," Woo-jin said. "And a phone we could use?"

The Amba.s.sador nodded, in deep communication with his guests. He pointed in the direction of the kitchen. Abby's brain seemed to have been marinated in Novocaine. While the scene before her made no sense, the bewilderment was paradoxically a source of comfort, as though her neocortex had thrown its hands up and neglected to even try to process this otherworldly communion or whatever you wanted to call whatever it was that was going down. She followed Woo-jin, barely able to take her eyes off the beautiful spherical energy forms illuminating the residence with positive vibes. They crossed the kitchen to the room where previously Woo-jin had donned the tracksuit. In a closet they found a selection of fashionable shoes and other garments, many in Abby's size. Woo-jin excused himself and went to the kitchen while Abby cleaned up and dressed. When she emerged she wore new pants and a jacket in addition to chunky leather shoes. Around them drifted gentle music written by computers in praise of the gorgeousness of nature. Woo-jin handed her a cordless phone. Leaning against the granite counter, Abby called her apartment, Rocco's cell, the phone numbers of her friends in Vancouver, Rocco's work, and her apartment manager but n.o.body answered and no voice mail picked up. It occurred to her that she expected the world to operate a certain way, expected phone calls to be answered and some semblance of causality to provide lines between dots. She expected her intentions to find outlet in actions, consequences, reasons, purposes. But she was being thwarted, teased it seemed, prevented from making decisions that would lead her back to a system of gratification and contentment. There were other forces working, pushing her into an abstract version of the world she a.s.sumed she belonged to. She could fight it, jabbing digits into a telephone hoping one of them would pull up a recognizable voice while this weird blinky guy rooted through the fridge-which, by the looks of it, contained some pretty delicious food-or she could take her sense of rationality, stretch its figurative chicken neck across a cutting board, and lop off its head.

Woo-jin slapped together some sandwiches. "I guess you're probably hungry," he said.

"I died?" Abby asked.

"At least two times," Woo-jin said. "I saw your bodies."

"Can you take me to them?"

Woo-jin shrugged. "I could try. They're in Dr. Farmer's morgue."

Abby asked, "You said you were a writer?"

"I am going to try to attempt to be like a writer. I'm supposed to write a book about how to love people." It dawned on Woo-jin that this now not-dead girl might have some ideas on how to solve some of his troubles. "Do you think you could help me find my sister? Or help with the writing of How to Love People?"

"Who's your sister?"

"Patsy."

"Where is she?"

"She got lifted up in the trailer by a helicopter. She's a pharmer."

"Oh," Abby said. "Did she get taken to a harvesting center?"

"I have no clue," Woo-jin said, "but she took all my posters with her. And my clothes."

A sentence queued up in Abby's brain before it left her mouth, as though it had been memorized for a play. "I need to see my dead bodies."

Woo-jin still had Dr. Farmer's business card. He pulled it from his pocket and called the number. Abby watched, surprised, as he proceeded to have a conversation. "Dr. Farmer? This is Woo-jin Kan. Right, the writer. I'm with the dead girl. No, she's now living. Number three, yes. Okay. What? I'm at the Emba.s.sy. Okay. Buh-bye." Woo-jin pushed the OFF b.u.t.ton. "He's coming over to pick us up in his car."

"What's that Amba.s.sador guy doing in the other room with the glowing things?"

Woo-jin shrugged. "Communicating with visiting life forms, I guess. He gets directions from his celestial head. Do you like Dijon?"

Abby accepted the sandwich and sat down with Woo-jin at the little table in the nook.

"Oh no," Woo-jin said. He fumbled in his pocket for his mouth guard, slipped it in, then flopped out of his chair onto the hardwood floor. Abby loomed over him as the wave of ennui flowed into his corporeal form. This attack didn't take him anywhere. The house was like some sort of locked box from which he couldn't mentally travel. Instead he gazed up in bloodshot panic as Abby held his shoulders, as if that would do any good. His eyes went so wide they didn't look epicanthic anymore, with his face red and lips quivering, with tears actually squirting from ducts, the droplets catching air, raining into little puddles on either side of his head. Whereas usually the suffering had a source, tonight's suffering was all residue, traces of pain he couldn't stick to an actual person, diffuse hurts that bled from the Emba.s.sy's hundred years of grievances. Abby called out lamely for help. The door to the kitchen opened and in floated the three orbs, glowing pink, hovering like concerned bystanders. Abby stepped aside as the orbs settled, humming, on Woo-jin's body. He trembled once more then settled into a fuzzy drowsiness.

The Amba.s.sador entered regally, with Pierre close behind, and waved his scepter in specific but indiscernibly communicative ways. Woo-jin coughed out his mouth guard and rose up on his elbows as the levitating orbs seemed to check out the pantry. "You should invite these orb guys to your place more often, Amba.s.sador."

Pierre raced to answer the doorbell. The orbs disappeared up a staircase. The Amba.s.sador set about making himself a pot pie. Soon Pierre returned with Dr. Farmer, who looked tanned and reasonable. Upon seeing Abby he smiled broadly. "How fascinating! What a pleasure to meet you alive!"

Blinding whiteness, walls of slabs. Abby hugged herself as the coroner lifted the sheets covering the bodies. There lay two females identical to Abby, the key difference being they were deceased. She winced in embarra.s.sment at their nakedness, as if it belonged to her own body. Abby couldn't connect this new experience to the experience of snooping through Kylee Asparagus's mansion or watching the Federicos cavort in a grand ballroom. She couldn't connect it to what increasingly appeared to be an illusory domestic life with her Bionet engineer boyfriend. She couldn't connect it to eating a sandwich in a house dominated by glowing spherical life forms. She yearned for plot but instead absurdity after absurdity had been thrown before her, absurdities that alluded to obscured purposes.

"Like I said before," Dr. Farmer said, picking his teeth with an umbrella-shaped c.o.c.ktail pick, "we believe that your selfhood, Abby, has gone into superposition. What does this mean? Well, consider a single electron. An electron can be in one place or in a different place, right? And yet we can sometimes find electrons in two places at the same time. So it is with you, apparently. It's as if you're both alive and dead simultaneously, and this simultaneity is a self-replicating system in which there are various 'snapshots' of your dead self. Which makes an autopsy pretty dang hard, let me tell you."

A phone rang. The three living people looked to one another, each patting their pockets in that typical moment before someone recognizes the ring tone as their own. It was Abby's phone. But there was no phone in her pockets. Dr. Farmer leaned over the closest of the two bodies, the one Woo-jin had discovered first, and opened its mouth. Show me yours, show me yours, oh show me yours, ring-toned the phone from inside the corpse's mouth. With gloved fingers Dr. Farmer pulled it out and answered. "h.e.l.lo? Yes, just a moment." He handed it to Abby. "This telephone call is for you."

Abby placed the somewhat moist phone close to her ear.

"Abby? Dirk Bickle here. I've been trying to reach you."

"I want to go home," Abby said.

"I want you to go home, too, Abby. You've been a real champ."

"I'm not following any more of your directions until you tell me what's going on."

"I understand. What do you want to know?"

"I want to know who you are, who you work for, why you really sent me to the Seaside Love Palace, and where Rocco is."

"You bet. First, as far as my job goes, you can think of me as a curator. Typically a curator is someone in a museum who arranges the art or exhibits, right? In my case, I curate this world. I initiate contacts between people, ensure that certain parties speak to other parties, put people (aka the content) in new contexts. Second, I work for Mr. Kirkpatrick. You can think of Mr. Kirkpatrick as being the head of the museum. The man with the money to acquire new-I don't want to call them realities but that's essentially what they are. See how it works? He finds and categorizes and purchases them, and I move them around into the most pleasing arrangements. We needed you at the Seaside Love Palace because we needed a consciousness to move through the world of Kylee Asparagus and the Federicos. We needed someone to discern and imprint their reality, that's all. Okay, your last question, about Rocco. It's true you can't get in touch with him. This will last a couple more weeks. I'm going to be completely honest with you, Abby, because you've been so great. He's going to suffer a little, but ultimately he'll be okay."

"What do you mean, suffer? What are you doing to him?"

"We are doing nothing to him. We simply introduced a particular reality he was occupying to a different reality. He will experience some physical pain but, again, I promise you, he'll end up okay."

"Why are you doing this to me? What did I do to you people?"

"It feels like some kind of revenge thing, doesn't it? It's confusing, and it's supposed to be. By the way, we paid off your student loans."

"Who cares about my loans? Tell me where Rocco is!"

"Something's been nagging me as I've been talking to you. Again, I keep referring to 'realities' but that strikes me as an overly simplistic way to describe what we're working with. When I speak of a reality I am really describing the way a particular consciousness or group of consciousnesses encounters matter. Further, how these consciousnesses choose to imagine new configurations of this matter. That's really the state at which a metaphor of a history museum turns into an art museum. See?"

"I'm coming to Vancouver and I'm going to find Rocco. And after I find Rocco I'm going to find you."

Usually there's some sort of explanation for how two people get from one place to another but in this case there really isn't. One moment Woo-jin and Abby were standing in the morgue with Dr. Farmer, talking to Dirk Bickle on a mobile phone fished from the mouth of one of the dead Abbys. Next they were under a new city's rain, Woo-jin shivering beneath a plastic tarp in an alley off Robson Street, Abby back at her apartment watching a show.

The pa.s.sing of garbage trucks and the roaring of clouds for a time comprised the entirety of Woo-jin's world. A pizza joint's garbage fed him and discarded pizza boxes provided him with blank pages onto which he wrote his book. He slept in the loading bay of a furniture store on shipping blankets, rose with the sun, and wrote until dusk under a fire escape. In the way that only small, forgotten places can, this smelly and wet alley came to represent the entirety of the universe. At night, through the gauze of light pollution, stars billions of years dead reminded the writer of the futility of his pursuit. He suspected he was an insect in the scheme of things, something to be sc.r.a.ped off the sole of a shoe. But the course of action his meaninglessness implied, to do absolutely nothing, would have caused great offense to the dude at the end of the world and his mystical refrigerator. The dude needed reading material. So Woo-jin wrote.

How are we supposed to love people? To get a handle on the question Woo-jin broke the book into chapters: "How to Love People Who Yell at You," "How to Love People Who Can't Wash Dishes," "How to Love People Who Throw Things at You in the Street." Was there anyone else he was supposed to love? Oh, right: "How to Love Dead People Who Suddenly Appear Back to Life."

Woo-jin had yet to return to the mesa at the end of the world or wherever the heck it was. The ennui attacks arrived less frequently now, triggered mostly by weeping faces in magazines, but when they struck they struck more suddenly. These skull-rattling brain f.u.c.ks tended to show up without a warm-up act. One morning he crumpled on the trash-strewn concrete, vibrating with hideous sadness over a lost-cat poster, thrashing and spitting and eating his own teeth. Somebody wheeled up on a tricycle. When the worst of the tremors had pa.s.sed Woo-jin was able to open an eye and stare at the spokes, the tire, the rubber-bulbed horn. On the tricycle sat a child with an oversized head and fluffy gray eyebrows. Really the only childlike thing about him was his pudgy body stuffed into red OshKosh B'gosh overalls. In his plump little hand he held a kid-sized Jamba Juice. At the drink's noisy conclusion he tossed the cup into an open garbage bin. Woo-jin asked this person what he wanted.

"I'm Pangolin," the person said inside Woo-jin's mind, the reception a bit scratchy. "I came to show you something."

Woo-jin coughed snot.

Pangolin climbed off his tricycle and as best he could helped Woo-jin stand, then hopped back on the trike and asked him to follow. They exited the alley, one pedaling, the other limping, tracing a spidery route through the city to the industrial outskirts, past long-ago billboards proclaiming extinct pleasures, to factories dilapidated and overgrown with trees. A creek trickled from the warehouse where Pangolin parked next to other miniature-sized vehicles-bikes, scooters, toy SUVs. He ushered Woo-jin through a doorway. Inside, in vast acreage where stacks of consumer goods had once risen to the rafters, artificial hills speckled with wildflowers undulated. As they traversed this landscape contained within a building, other wee folk emerged from underground burrows through little doors.

"What do you people do here?" Woo-jin asked.

"We're software engineers," Pangolin replied. "Some people call us monks. We provide solutions."

They climbed a hill where a tree grew high enough to brush the ceiling. It was an ancient apple tree, its arthritically twisted trunk creaking and groaning, bark scabbed and scarred. Over the course of a minute the tree blossomed, grew, dropped its fruit, shed its leaves, then blossomed once again as the fallen apples and leaves decomposed to dust. Over and over before Woo-jin's eyes it repeated this cycle.

"This is our qputer," Pangolin said. "To install the software patch you have to eat a piece of fruit after it has ripened but before it rots. Go, eat."

Woo-jin held out his hand and caught an apple. He hesitated, then brought it to his lips. By the time he bit into it the fruit had turned to mush.

"Spit it out," commanded Pangolin. "That data's corrupted. You have to eat it faster."

The next apple Woo-jin quickly bit, chewed, and swallowed. It tasted like any apple. "What is this apple supposed to do?"