Dead Souls (5 page)

I might have done other things too. Like that one time in Vegas, at the branding conference. Afterward, I promised myself,
never again
.

No, doing nothing has a definite appeal.

But then the ghosts of doing nothing whisper:
AIDS
 . . .
STDs
 . . .
He knows where you live . . . What if he breaks in? What if he comes back?

Goddamnit
. Motherfucker.

I listen to the rain outside, a soothing patter. Once, Justin talked about us moving to Seattle where he has family, but I said I couldn't take all that rain; it'd be too depressing.
Depressing
is my safe word—I try not to use it too much, but it does fold any possible disagreement quickly, and generally in my favor.

Christ. I hate this, hate it,
hate it
, but I simply just can't do nothing.

I mentally begin to prepare myself to go to the hospital. Forms in triplicate, hard plastic chairs in the waiting room, examination rooms filled with the strange antiseptic smell tinged
with urine, which nothing can quite get out. My favorite place. If the doctors find something, they'll call the police, even though the probability is slim to none of anything other than a statement being taken. Tracy's car was stolen right out of her driveway, and even when she tracked it down—the idiots got her phone number from a piece of mail stuck in the visor, left her prank messages, and she was able to *69 them—the police just shrugged. They had real cases. Drive-by shootings, international child-sex trafficking, the Mexican Mafia dissolving the bodies of their victims in acid, sometimes without the grace of killing them first. You know, things like that.

My heart aches with the complete and utter loneliness of this moment, marooned in a city of people who don't give a shit.

I pull my cell phone out of my purse.

No missed calls.

Idly, like I'm just playing with it, like there's no intention, my fingers tap the screen—
Contacts
,
Justin
,
Call
. A small green icon is all that stands between me and his voice, even if it's just to listen to his voice mail message,
Hey, you know the drill, beeeeep
. My finger hovers over his number, just millimeters above the reflective glass surface.

Justin is perfect in emergencies, large and small—he always knows exactly what to say, what to do. When I dropped my ­iPhone in the toilet, he talked the store manager into covering the replacement under the warranty, plus free tech support to get my contacts transferred. When a kitchen grease fire broke out in the apartment next door, he quickly directed me to the exit stairs and then helped put it out. People think I'm with him because of his looks, his job at a tech company with good
dividends, but really I just need that guy on the
Titanic
who knows how to get two spaces on the lifeboat, because I'm never entirely sure how bad my life will get.

I tap the number, then hurriedly tap to hang up. He'll see it on his missed calls though.

Five minutes.
I'll stay here five more minutes and if he doesn't call back, then I'll take the elevator down
.

I lean my head back. I like the grain of the wood in the stall; the colors are a nice contrast. We could do a version of the Istanbul in leather, dark autumn colors with light trim. I wonder what the group would think of that option. Something deep inside of me relaxes. I feel the tug of something else, an invisible current.

And just like that, I'm back in the fishbowl.

IT'S LIKE ONE OF THOSE STRANGE,
waking dreams where you're in it but somehow separate too, dreams that always seem to follow that third glass of wine or an Ambien. I'm standing right behind Tracy in the fishbowl—she isn't at the head of the table, good girl, but is seated at one of the more democratic sides. This close, I can see the tiniest flecks of dandruff on her right shoulder, marring ever so slightly the effect of her lilac J.Jill collared jacket.

All the colors seem brighter somehow, the hue intense, almost luminous. I can hear her laptop hum.

“I just don't know about the zipper.” Ed gives the Istanbul's main zipper a good tug. He's thin, yet perfectly chiseled, like Michelangelo just finished with him.

“Yes, we're in and out of our bags three times a day,” adds
Douglas. Sixteen years older and obviously still infatuated. His hand rests closely next to Ed's. I see a faint, soft glow extending from his fingertips, the inverse of the dark aura I saw around myself in the mirror. The glow drapes over Ed's wrist, curling around it like the vine of a phosphorous plant.

Curious.

Ed says, “That's why we buy the—”

“Warranties,” finishes Doug. “I'm surprised the North Face even lets us buy their gear anymore, especially after—”

“—that time in Taipei.”

“Disaster. All my stuff fell out—”

“—And I'd already gotten off the railway car.”

“My passport landed on the tracks. Wallet. Gone. Money. Gone. So I called them—”

“
I
called them.”

“
We
called them. Paid for the shipping, but they were terrific and replaced it for free.”

“Or was that Chiang Mai?”

Tracy is busy scribbling notes, too busy to observe the subtext—if the design was better, they wouldn't be giving a damn about the zipper; people line up for iPhones even though there always seem to be questions about the battery life. But if this is a dream, the details are strangely consistent, a little too true, accurate. Even the pencil in Tracy's hand is right, a number two cracked open from a new pack I'd bought the day before; I prepped them myself after a lengthy building-wide search for a pencil sharpener. People are more comfortable writing what they really think if it's easy to erase. The possibility for revision allows people to speak the truth.

Is this actually happening?

No, impossible. How many times have I used that word today? I look to the glass wall where my reflection should be, and don't see it. When I look down, yes, my body's there, although I am strangely, and completely, naked.

Okay. That's . . . that's not good
. A lucid dream?

“This pocket, what's it for?” asks Liza. Even though I'm standing right next to Tracy, naked, she doesn't seem to see me. I try a wave, and she doesn't even blink.

Tracy looks up from her note-taking. “That's actually a pocket that you can completely unzip out of the pack and use as a waist belt.”

She goes back to scribbling. She should be selling it more—it's a focus group but also free PR. I get a small amount of satisfaction that she's not better than me at everything. Yet.

Assuming this is all real
. I pinch my right arm—strange, I can feel the pain. Maybe try reading something, looking away, then reading it again—if the words change, definitely a dream. Over Tracy's shoulder, I see her note:
Should have gone with zipper upgrade
. An obvious stab in my direction—my idea, I was trying to decrease the cost of goods—but that's not the most important issue at hand. I look away, then read her note again—still there. Not a lucid dream then.

Cool air brushes across my nipples, causing them to pucker. Okay, a hallucination. Obviously this is a hallucination.

“A waist belt could work.” Liza rubs the fabric between her fingers. It's a new polyester blend, durable, dries fast, and has a soft, silky feel.
“
I had my purse stolen in Marseille.”

The conversation is so dull though, so typically inane, that I can't shake the feeling this is actually happening.

“Not my fault,” says Sam.

“I didn't say it was.” Liza drops the waist belt, looking hurt.

“Whatever.”

I think of where my body must be right now, slumped in the bathroom stall. I hope I didn't hit my head on the toilet, or that I'm convulsing, choking on vomit, an ignominious rock star death that will eventually be the punch line to a series of dark jokes in the break room—after a respectful passage of time, of course; three months, maybe four. Whatever it is that I'm experiencing, I need to wake up, right now. Something loud, and noisy, might do it.

There's a stray pencil resting on the corner of the conference room table. I try moving it with my mind, because that's actually supposed to work in hallucinations. But staring at it does nothing. So I let my finger hover over it, just like I did with the cell phone moments before. One centimeter . . . half a centimeter more . . . and then my finger touches the pencil, registering waxy paint.

I flick it. The pencil flies off the table, ricochets off the glass wall before tumbling to the floor.

Everyone in the room jumps, startled, like a gun just went off.

“What was—”

“I . . . did you see—”

“How—”

Alex Fujita half gets out of his chair, maybe to bolt—I'd imagine living in Chicago for under twenty dollars a day would give you hair-trigger reflexes. But Tracy takes control.

“Sorry, errant pencil.” She leans over, scoops the pencil up from the floor. “Must have knocked it off with my elbow.”

No one can see me
. I marvel at how resilient this hallucination is. Like it's actively fighting me.

There's a settling, nervous titter, accompanied by a nice bonding energy. It's always a mystery to me how this happens, the osmosis where strangers let their boundaries fall to form a group, how quickly hierarchies are formed, pecking order established. And then it all dissolves again afterward, so that a year from now, or two, they won't be able to remember one another's names, what they said. All that will be left is the flotsam and jetsam of memories that will themselves be further warped by the future, because we don't really remember what happens; our brains just roll back to the last time we thought about that memory. A copy of a copy of a copy.

“Room for a bladder?” Raven Light is methodically going through her Istanbul, jotting down notes.

Internally, we detest that word;
reservoir
is preferred, or even
hydration system
. But among the plebeians, bladder is the one that seems to stick.

“We're thinking it's more for urban settings,” says Tracy. “Is there any reason why you'd want a hydration system?”

“Oh, definitely,” says Melissa, with a hint of a Spanish accent even though she grew up in Tennessee. “I always boil tap water the night before if I have to, then fill up my water bottles. A hydration system would be much easier.”

“Plus you can fill it with beer and no one knows you're drinking,” adds Sam.

Everyone politely ignores him, except for Liza, who folds her arms over her chest, ashamed.

So. What to do next? Can I open a door? Maybe if I was
able to make my way back to my body lying in the bathroom, I could splash some hallucinatory water on it and wake up. But that would likely blow the focus group—if the pencil incident was any indication, a door to the fishbowl opening all by itself would incite panic. Scratch the surface and everyone reverts to the superstitions of their birth religion.

Only this isn't real
.

I wish something else trippy would happen, like a giant cat peering in through the window, the chairs melting into the floor. Just one more thing to confirm where I'm standing in the overall spectrum of reality.

Then I catch something out of the corner of my eye—Sam pretends to pick up another Istanbul but actually slides the waist belt that Liza had been holding off the table onto his lap, as dexterous as a street hustler swapping peas in a shell game.
Bastard!
He quickly crumples it and stuffs it in his back pocket, poker-faced. No one notices.

Some kind of corporate espionage, or is this how Sam contributes to the relationship: the poor bad boy in need of saving by the good rich girl? Even though this entire experience might be the result of something Scratch slipped in my drink, I hope the imaginary Tracy got the imaginary focus group to sign our very real nondisclosure agreement. I'd hate to see the waist belt show up on eBay, and then the North Face gets it into production before we do.

Tracy turns back to Liza, who she's obviously most comfortable with, her age equal. “So would you consider wearing a waist belt?”

A good question, but shit, she should
hello,
look and see where it went
.

“I use one now, but it's too small to hold anything but money and one credit card,” says Liza.

“What if it was bigger?”

“Well,” says Liza, “then it'd be like a fanny pack, right?”

Fanny pack.
Good God, Tracy, jump on that. If people start referring to the waist belt as a fanny pack, we're already dead in the water.

Meanwhile, Raven inspects the shoulder straps of another pack. Alex and Melissa lean over to see what interests her, all of which is lost on Tracy, who is too busy bonding with Liza.