Winter 2007 (19 page)

Vacantly.

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Fiction:
Wandering the Borderlands
by Poppy Z. Brite

I have worked with dead
bodies for most of my life. I’ve been a morgue assistant, a medical student,
and for one terrible summer, a member of a cleanup service that cleaned not
household grime but the results of murders and suicides. Presently I am the
coroner of Orleans Parish. I handle bodies and things that no longer even look
like bodies; I sit alone with them late at night; I look into their faces and
try to see what, if anything, they knew at the end. I do not fear them.

And yet not long ago I had
a dream. In this dream, I knew somehow that my neighbor was in trouble, and I
climbed her porch steps to see if I could help. As I stood at her door, I knew
with the unquestionable logic of dreams that she was in there, violated and
dead. When I touched the door, it swung open, and I could see that the
furniture inside was tumbled and smashed.

“I can’t go in,” I said (to
whom?), “the burglar might still be in there. I’ll go back home and call the
police.” And that was sound reasoning. But truly, I could not enter the house
because I feared seeing the body.

It’s not that I am close to
this neighbor; with the modern passion for privacy, we’ve spoken no more than
twenty words in the years we’ve lived beside each other. It was not
her
specific body I feared in the dream. I can explain it no more clearly than
this:
I feared seeing what her body had become.

When I woke up, I couldn’t
understand exactly what I had been afraid of. But I know that if the dream ever
returns, I will be just as coldly terrified, and just as helpless.

I saw a man die at my gym
recently. I have a bad back from lifting so much inert human weight, and I keep
it at bay by exercising on Nautilus machines. On my way to the locker room one
hot afternoon, I became aware of a commotion in the swimming pool area. A man
had just been found on the bottom of the pool. It seemed likely that he had
gone into cardiac arrest, and no one knew how long he had been underwater. Two
people – another doctor I know and a personal trainer - were giving him
CPR as various gym staffers and members swarmed around. There was nothing I
could do. I knew the man was probably dying, and I realized that while I had
seen thousands of dead people, I had never actually seen anyone die. I didn’t
want to see it now, but I couldn’t make myself turn away. He was barely visible
through the crowd of people trying to help him: a pale pot belly; a pair of
white legs jerking with the motion of artificial respiration but otherwise
dreadfully still; the wrinkled soles of his feet; his swim trunks still wet.
Somehow the wet swim trunks were the worst.
Of course they’re still wet
, I
thought;
he was just pulled out of the pool
. But
they brought home to me the fact that he was never going to go back to the
locker room and pull off the trunks, glad to be rid of their clinging
clamminess. They could cling to him throughout eternity and he wouldn’t care.

Eventually the paramedics
showed up and shocked him with their defibrillator, put a breathing tube down his
throat, gave him a shot of adrenaline. None of it worked. I’m not sure if the
man was dead or alive when they finally took him out to the ambulance. The
saddest thing was that nobody seemed to know his name. Apparently he’d just
joined the gym, another fat New Orleanian determined to finally get in shape,
but unable to pace himself. I saw them on my table all the time. People kept
asking each other who he was, but no one knew. I hated the idea that he might
have died in a place where not only did no one love him, but no one even knew
him.

From the moment I realized
I couldn’t help him to the moment they strapped him to the stretcher and
carried him out, I felt that I shouldn’t be watching. It felt wrong somehow to
be looking at him, even though I was holding my St. Joseph medal and praying
for him. When I performed autopsies, I didn’t feel this way at all. I knew
those people were dead and didn’t give a damn who looked at them, and in many
cases I was performing one of the last kind (if brutal) acts anyone was ever
going to do for them. But this man was not alive, not dead, not yet ready for
my table, no longer a part of the laughing, eating, living world. He was in the
borderlands, and it seemed a very personal moment that all of us strangers
shouldn’t be looking at…but we all did, as if he might give us the answer to
the question we’d been yearning for ever since we were old enough to conceive
of our own deaths.

There is no profession, no
occupation, no state of jadedness that confers immunity from fear of death. The
taboo is too strong; we can lessen it through exposure but never eliminate it
entirely. The horror movies are riveting, but, I think, wrong: we do not
believe the dead will come back to life and hurt us. Rather, we fear them
because they will never come back to life, and because we can never know where
they have gone. In that way, we are the ones wandering the borderlands. We are
lost and they are found. They know a terrible secret, and they will never share
it with us.

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Fiction
:
Surveillance by Joe R. Lansdale

When Johnson arose from bed
he was careful to not scratch himself, and when he went to the bathroom to do
his business, he sat on the toilet with his pajama pants down and a towel
across his lap. Finally, however, modesty had to be discarded. He finished up
on the toilet and undressed quickly and jumped in the shower and pulled the
curtain, knowing full well that he could be seen by the overhead camera, but at
least the one over the door was not directed at him, and sometimes, he felt
that if he could minimize the number of cameras on him, he could count it as
some sort of victory.

He toweled off quickly,
wrapped the towel around his waist, and then he dressed even more quickly, and
went down and had his breakfast. He wanted to have two eggs instead of the one
allotted, but the cameras were there, and if he had two, there would be the
ticket from headquarters, and the fine. He had the one, and the one cup of
coffee allotted, went out to this car and pushed the button that turned it on.
It went along the route it was supposed to go, and he could hear the almost
silent twisting of the little cameras on their cables as they turned in the
ceiling and dash and armrests of the car to get a full view of his face, which
he tried to keep neutral.

When the car parked him in
the company parking lot, he got out and looked at the cameras in the parking
garage, sighed, went to the elevator that took him down to the street. In the
elevator he looked at the red eye of the camera there. He didn’t even feel
comfortable picking his nose, and he needed to.

He could remember before
everything was so secure and so safe, when you could do that and not end up as
an electrical charge on billions of little chips funneled through billions of
little wires, or for that matter, thrown wireless across the voids, to have the
impulses collected like puzzle pieces and thrown together in your image,
showing all that you did from morning to night.

The only place he had found
any privacy was under the covers. He could pick his nose there. He could
masturbate there, but he knew the cameras would pick up his moves beneath the
covers, and certainly plenty of people had no problem picking their nose or
showing their dicks or grunting at stool, knowing full well that eventually
some human eye would look at it all and smack its lips over certain things, or
laugh at this or that, but he was not amongst them.

He arrived at the street
level and stepped off the elevator. All along the street the cameras on the
wire snakes moved and twisted every which way. He walked along until he was a
block from his office, and he noticed an old building off to the side. He
passed it every day, but today he looked at it, and saw there was a doorway set
back deep. When he came to it he looked in and saw that it had a little squeeze
space inside, a place that had been made to get out of the rain or to place
your umbrella.

He looked at the cameras on
the street, and they looked at him. He stepped into the alcove and turned so
that he was in the little nook and cranny. He stood there for a while, and then
he sat down in the space, and knew for the first time in a long time, no camera
could see him. The camera knew he had gone there, but it couldn’t see him, and
that gave him a great moment of peace, and soon he found he didn’t want to
leave, and he watched as the sunlight changed and moved and people walked by,
not noticing. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them and he could see
their shadows. He picked his nose and flicked the boogers, and took deep
breaths and enjoyed the coolness of the stone on his back.

Come nightfall he was still
there, and he felt content. He was hungry, but still he didn’t leave. He sat
there and enjoyed it. When the lights of the city came on, he still sat there,
and wouldn’t move, and finally two police officers came. They had seen the
cameras, the film, and they had seen where he had gone and that he had not come
out. They arrested him and took him downtown and put him in the jail where the
cameras worked night and day from every angle in the cell, and when they put
him there, he began to scream, and he screamed all night, and into the morning,
when they finally came for him and gave him a sedative and put him in a ward
with others who had tried to hide from the cameras. The shots they gave him
made him sleep, and in his sleep the cameras whirled and twisted on cables
throughout the place and took his image and shot it across wireless space and
tucked it away on little cells smaller than atoms.

In the next week, the old building
was torn down and a new one was put up and the cameras were installed.
Everything worked nicely. No one could hide from the cameras. Everyone’s mail
was read before they read it, and their phone calls were monitored, and to be
safe they made sure no one had the chance to use lawyers or complain, and the
world was nice and easy and oh so safe, now that there was nothing left to
fear.

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Interview:
David Morrell

A name familiar to both
horror and thriller fans, David Morrell, author of such classic suspense novels
as
First Blood, Testament, The Brotherhood of the Rose, The Covenant of the
Flame,
and
Assumed Identity,
to name a few, continues to push the
envelope with his latest, Scavenger, a thrill-a-minute pulse-pounding adventure
story about time capsules, “letterboxing”, video games, and egomaniacal
psychopaths.

SP:
Creepers
has a lot in common with
Scavenger.
Aside from the presence
of two of the main characters from the first novel, and a narrative that plays
out in real-time, Scavenger also expands on the theme of the first book, that
of obsession with the past. In this novel, our heroes discover a man not only obsessed
with the past, but with the present and future as well. What for you is the
appeal of this theme, and do you think it’s an inescapable preoccupation as we
get older?

DM: The theme of an
obsession with the past lurked in earlier books, also.
Double Image
comes to mind. It’s about photography and how a man falls in love with the
image of a woman in a photograph taken in 1933. At one point, the main
character decides to replicate a series of famous photographs that depict Los
Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s. He goes to the original sites and uses the same
camera that the original photographer used, trying to take new photographs from
the exact same angle that the original photographer used, so that the new
images can be positioned over the old ones in the manner of a double exposure.
Photographs, in general, are eerie. They stop time. Meanwhile, the world moves
forward, but particular moments are frozen. Many of the people we look at in
photographs are dead, and yet they still seem alive on film. Obviously, there’s
some psychological factor that drives me to write about this theme. Perhaps
it’s inevitable as someone gets older, or perhaps it has something to do with
my son’s death from cancer in 1987. I spend a lot of my time thinking about him
and going into the past.

SP:
Would
you agree that another link between both books is that while Scavenger involves
people hunting for time-capsules, The Paragon Hotel, (from
Creepers) was
itself
a time capsule, in essence making the practice of “creeping” and
“scavenging” very similar? And of course, books themselves are time capsules of
a sort.

DM: Exactly. The Paragon
Hotel was sealed and abandoned since 1971. It still has its original furniture,
the old phones, the old TV sets, the business documents. Exploring it is like
going into a time warp, or if you like, a time capsule. In SCAVENGER, the
characters get drawn back into the past—the ghost town and the Sepulcher
of Worldly Desires. In each case, the characters learn that the past is buried
for a reason. But at the same time, Balenger is drawn to the past because of
his post-traumatic stress disorder. He was in the First Gulf War as an Army
Ranger. In the Second Gulf War, the current one, he was a civilian security
contractor who got captured by insurgents and nearly had his head chopped off.
His nightmares drove him to a psychiatrist, who fashioned a therapy for him in
which the only books he reads are from a hundred years ago and more. The only
television programs he watches are on the History Channel. He avoids the
present by retreating into the past. The only “modern” novels he has read are
Jack Finney’s
Time and Again
and Richard Matheson’s
Bid Time Return,
which was filmed as
Somewhere in Time.
The main characters of those
books concentrate on the past with so much intensity that they transport
themselves to an earlier time. That is Balenger’s goal.