The Wrong Goodbye

that scenario played out. And since talking to him wasn’t doing the trick, it was time to move on to plan B.

I tossed the sheet off of my naked legs and swung my feet onto the floor. Pain radiated from my stomach in nauseating waves as I sat up, and my eyes clenched shut as I willed myself not to puke. I’d already thrown up once —the channel that traced the perimeter of the stainless steel table on which I sat ran thick with evidence of that fact. But then, that’s what happens when you snag yourself a fresh meat-suit.

Twenty minutes ago and a continent away, Lily and I were having our little powwow in the park. Now I was bleeding out in the back room of a mortuary in Aurora, Illinois. Most folks would probably call that a pretty unlikely turn of events. I call it an average workday.

See, the assignment Lily gave me was for a job in Illinois. Some kind of bigwig at the local state house. So when she and I parted, I made my way through Bogota’s evening rush to an internet cafe so I could find myself a suitable vessel.

Now I’ll grant you, the hop from Bogota to Illinois sounds impressive, but when it comes to possession, distance ain’t the issue. Once you leave a body, the physical realm sort of drops away, so it makes no difference whether you’re traveling three feet or three thousand miles. No, the issue is having a destination to focus on, which in my case means tracking down a fresh corpse.

Which leads me to this guy. His name was Jonathan Gray. An insurance man, according to his obituary. He’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning the night before last, thanks to a family of chimney swifts who’d taken up residence in his flue. I wondered if his company’d ever handicapped the odds against that one. Anyways, he was perfect for my needs, on account of he was brand spanking dead, and his manner of death meant no obvious physical trauma. You get a body that’s too beat up, or one that’s been embalmed, and you may as well be trying to possess a bean-bag chair for all the good it’ll do you. Of course, what I didn’t count on was his mortician being a night owl.

With one blood-slick hand, I snatched at the spray nozzle that hung over my head. Sluggish as this meat-suit was, the hose was hard to get a hold of. Eventually, though, I grabbed it, and turned it on my sleeping friend. His whole body went rigid when the cold water hit, and his eyelids sprang open like a pair of roll-up shades. Then he spotted me, and took off in a crab-walk away from me across the floor. Or, at least, he tried, but his hands and feet found no traction on the wet tiles, so he just sort of collapsed into a thrashing mound of knees and elbows.

“Good, you’re awake,” I said, marveling at the effort it took to form the words. “Now would you mind maybe stitching me back up?”

“B-b-but —I mean, y-y-you… you’re…”

“Dead?” I offered. His head bobbed up and down.

“Yeah, not so much. Now are you gonna be cool, or am I going to have to hit you with the hose again?”

“N-no!” he shouted, and then he gathered his wits about him and tried again. “That won’t be necessary. Oh, God —your stomach!”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. And what the hell are you doing here, anyway? It’s a Sunday night, for Christ’s sake!”

“I’m sorry, I —well, you see, I live around back, and sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I… oh, what’s it matter what I’m doing here —you’re dead! Or, at least, you were, until you sat up while I was making my incision so I could begin the embalming process. I guess I must have fainted then, because the next thing I know, you’re spraying water on me, and…” He trailed off, blinking hard a couple times as though convinced that with a little willpower, he could rid himself of this whole unpleasant situation. “This is all highly irregular,” he added. I wished I could agree.

“Look, I–” I said, and then I paused, narrowing my eyes appraisingly at the man before me. He was growing paler by the moment, and he appeared a little green as well. I worried he was going to faint again. If that happened, this meat-suit was toast —and if this meat-suit expired, God only knew where I’d end up. Which meant I had to keep this guy calm enough for him to stay conscious —and to do that, I had to keep him talking. “Hey, you got a name?”

“Ethan,” he said. He swallowed hard, took a few gulping breaths. 'Ethan Strickland.”

“Look, Ethan, I understand this is a bit of a shock for you, but I could really use a hand.”

“Yes, of course!” he said, rallying a bit. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital!”

“Not an option,” I replied.

“But you’re hurt!”

“I’ll live. As long as you stitch me up, at least.”

He shook his head emphatically.

“What’s the problem? You’ve got needles, right? You’ve got thread.”

“I can’t. I’m not a doctor —I’m a mortician!”

“I didn’t ask to see your degree.”

“But I don’t have any anesthetic!”

“You got any whiskey?”

He looked down, said nothing.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Get it, and get it quick.”

The pale man clambered to his feet, and disappeared from the room. Said room seemed to swim a little bit, and I wondered if he’d be back before I passed out. Then I wondered if he’d be coming back at all, or if he was off calling for an ambulance. But come back he did, with a pair of reading glasses in one hand and a bottle of Michter’s in the other.

“Hey,” I said, “far be it from me to criticize, but if you need glasses, shouldn’t you have been wearing them already?”

“Most of my, uh, patients, aren’t in a position to complain,” he said, handing me the whiskey. I took a long swig straight from the bottle, and then offered it to him.

“That’s probably not the best idea.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but at this point, it probably ain’t the worst.”

He pursed his lips for a second as he considered what I said, and then he took a pull himself. “All right,” he said, as much to himself as to me. “Let’s get started. I’m going to need you to sit as still as you can. This is probably going to hurt.”

That, it turns out, was an understatement.

I’m not saying it was the worst pain I’ve ever felt, but that’s more a commentary on the sum total of my life experience than it is on the matter at hand. What I can say is that from the moment he disinfected the wound to the tug of the last stitch being pulled into place, sitting still was a task akin to resting your hand atop a hot burner and keeping it there. To his great credit, my mortician friend soldiered on until the wound was sealed. When he finished, I collapsed sweating and exhausted onto the stainless steel mortician’s table, but I’ll be damned if the world didn’t seem a little more solid than it had before.

Then again, I guess I’ll be damned either way.

“Are you all right?” he asked as I lay panting on the table.

“I will be,” I said.

“Yes, I think you will. The bleeding’s slowed considerably, and you’ve got a little more color to your face than you did when you… awoke.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “You, too.” I took another slug of whiskey and passed the bottle on to him. This time, he didn’t protest.

“I’m guessing you’d like some clothes,” he said.

Truth be told, I had forgotten I was naked, what with the more immediate concern of not dying and all. But the air in the mortuary was cold and damp, and the chill of death still lingered in my meat-suit’s bones, so all the sudden, clothes sounded like a fabulous idea. “I wouldn’t turn them down,” I said.

He nodded toward a garment bag hanging from a hook on the wall beside us. I unzipped it and found a black pinstriped suit, a dress shirt, a buff and blue tie. At the bottom of the bag were a pair of boxers and some socks, as well as a set of loafers.

“This stuff gonna fit?”

“It should,” he said, surprised, “it’s yours.”

I dressed in silence. The suit fit well. The tie I skipped.

“So,” he said once I was dressed, “is there someone I should call? If not a doctor, then your wife