Dead Set

Zoe heard the scratch of a needle dropping into a record groove.

And she was in a club, sweating, pumping her legs to the thrashing beat of a band. They were playing impossibly fast and at an impossible volume. The sound was like being punched in the chest.

The club was crowded, the air thick with the familiar smell of cigarette smoke and sweating bodies jammed together in too small a space. People kept bumping into her, but instead of knocking her back, the way crowds always did at shows, they just sort of bounced off her and kept moving. She was much taller and heavier than she was used to being. She could see over people’s heads all the way to the stage, where Black Flag was raging through “Rise Above.” She moved her arms and they felt huge. It took a few minutes but then Zoe understood that she was inside her father’s life, looking out through his eyes, feeling his excitement and a sense of such utter well-being that she knew he had to be drunk or high, maybe both. And she was caught up in that, too, a part of him, smiling through the chemical euphoria that had buoyed him through some random night when he was just a few years older than she was now.

Through the noise and smoke her gaze-his gaze-fell on a girl. She was almost as tall as he was, with a dark Mohawk, lurid purple eye shadow, and a sleeveless denim jacket with FUCK YOU VERY MUCH stenciled across the back. The girl was idly, but methodically, peeling the label off a bottle of Bud with her thumbnail. When she noticed Zoe’s father checking her out, she smiled and stood her ground. It was the smile of someone who knew exactly how hot she was and was utterly at ease with being stared at. It took a few seconds to sink in before she recognized the girl as her mother. The girl who would become her mother in a few years. She felt her father’s heart beat faster at the sight of her. She-he-took a step toward her.

Then Zoe was somewhere else, tumbling through a cascading slipstream of memories, experiences, and sensory details, all colliding and piling up on top of each other. She was adrift, moving from her father’s childhood to random moments of his life and back and forth across time. She called out to her father from inside him. It was like she was caught in a storm of sights and sounds, smells and textures, all hitting her at once. All the sensations and snapshots of his life. It was too strange even to be scared.

She was her father later that night kissing her mother (talk about weird) as a bouncer tried to steer them outside after the show. She was her father in a hospital sitting by his own mother’s bedside waiting for her to die. He wanted to reach out and tell her that she’d been a lousy mother, that he’d been a rotten son, and how he loved her anyway. But he’d bottled up everything for so long that he couldn’t get at the words. So he just sat beside her bed, waiting.

She was her father sitting at his desk in a software company wondering what he’d done with his life. How did I get here? Is this it? I hack code and drive home for dinner until I die? he, she, wondered. She was her father looking at her as a baby crawling to him across the dirty warehouse floor. When he picked her up and held her infant self in his arms, she felt his deep mix of love and fear, the pure animal devotion he felt for his daughter and the stark fear that was a mantra running through his head. What do I know about anything? How can I take care of her? Can’t I just run away and pretend it never happened? Zoe didn’t feel hurt by the thought or his fear because she felt it all coming from the deep, desperate love he felt for her and her mother.

She was her father in the parking lot, at the end of another twelve-hour day spent punching code, trying to get the new release out the door, knowing that the company’s next round of financing depended on it. She felt a pain start in his chest, like a hand reaching through his skin and bones, squeezing his heart until the whole world collapsed into a crushing knot of agony that cut off his air and pushed away every thought or sensation but the pain. Zoe had never felt anything like it, and just when she thought the pain had gone as far as it could go, a new wave hit. She felt him fall, felt the sun-scorched asphalt dig into his knees and sear his face where he, she, lay.

Zoe felt her father dying. And in the small, fragile space she held around herself that separated herself from him, she screamed.

She was still screaming when Emmett pulled the headphones off. For a moment the shock and the strange light combined to make him look weirdly out of focus, like a ghost of himself. It was over in an instant, though, and he was just Emmett again. Zoe sagged to the floor, and at last, barely breathing in the adrenaline rush that had left her cold and shaking, her head still spinning with the shock and fear of feeling her father die, she put her head down and began to cry.

She didn’t let the tears go on too long. Emmett brought her toilet paper from the restroom so she could wipe off the makeup that had run down her face. Zoe’s hands still shook when she said, “I was him. I was inside him but I couldn’t talk to him.”

Emmett nodded. “Yes. But I didn’t cheat you. I said I could let you see your father, and that’s what you did.”

“I saw him die.”

He nodded matter-of-factly. “It was an important moment for him. I’m not surprised you ended up there.”

Zoe sat on the floor, drew up her legs, and rubbed the place on her chest where she felt her father’s heart stop.

“It wasn’t what I was expecting at all.”

“Most people, even the ones we hold dear, are seldom what we think.”

“I didn’t want to just see him. I wanted to talk to him.”

“Ah,” Emmett said. “Seeing is easy. Talking, that’s a harder job.” He took the record from the Animagraph and slid it back into its cover. There was a symbol that looked like a bird in one corner, a snake biting its own tail in another, and then a line of Xs made of bones. “But it can be done.”

“It can?” asked Zoe, feeling her despair lift a little.

“Almost anything can be done. If the customer can pay the price.”

“What do you want?”

“Don’t you mean how much?”

“You didn’t want money before, why would you want it now?”

“You learn fast,” Emmett said. He winked at her and closed the Animagraph.

“So, what do you want for me to talk to my dad?”

“Hardly anything at all.”

“Tell me.”

“A tooth,” he said.

“A what?”

“A tooth. A baby tooth will do, or a recent one. It doesn’t matter really.”

“Why would you want my tooth?” asked Zoe. Leaning against the wall, she pushed herself to her feet.

Emmett walked to the counter in the front of the store and she trailed after him. The regular, normal LPs in their labeled bins looked strange and crude, like props in a movie. On the counter lay old 45s with torn covers stained by coffee and cigarette butts. Zoe picked one up. The cover was a picture of a costumed man in brilliant red ostrich feathers and a headdress that looked like something from an old western. The man didn’t look like an Indian, she thought. More like a voodoo witch doctor. The 45 was called “I Walk on Gilded Splinters” by Dr. John. She didn’t think he looked much like a doctor either.

“Why would you want my tooth?” Zoe asked again.

“Curiosity killed the cat. Don’t you know that?” asked Emmett, a gentle chiding in his voice, but he smiled as he said it. He opened the cash register, took a cigarette and a white plastic disposable lighter from one of the wooden cubbyholes. “It’s an unusual business, you know, minding the dead, running the Animagraph. It shouldn’t be a shock that the payment for those services would also be unusual.”

“I guess,” Zoe said. This thing, whatever it is, is getting stranger by the minute. But I can’t stop now.

Emmett lit up an unfiltered Camel, inhaled deeply, and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. “It’s your choice, of course,” he said. “You’ve seen your father, with those pretty cat eyes. What you have to ask yourself is ‘How much do I really want to talk to him?’ ”

Zoe didn’t say anything. Emmett put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and busied himself stacking the 45s and clearing clutter off the counter. She wondered where the records and papers could have come from.