The Living Dead

felt instead was a bottomless sense of relief. I was perfectly content to be alone.

Burton was doing an event in St. Louis when the nursing home called to say that Gran had fallen again. Eighty-one-year-old bones are fragile, and the last time I had been out there—just after the convention—Gran's case manager had privately informed me that another fall would probably do it.

'Do what?' I had asked.

The case manager looked away. She shuffled papers on her desk while her meaning bore in on me: another fall would kill her.

I suppose I must have known this at some level, but to hear it articulated so baldly shook me. From the time I was four, Gran had been the single stable institution in my life. I had been visiting in Long Beach, half a continent from home, when my family—my parents and sister—died in the car crash. It took the state police back in Pennsylvania nearly a day to track me down. I still remember the moment: Gran's mask-like expression as she hung up the phone, her hands cold against my face as she knelt before me.

She made no sound as she wept. Tears spilled down her cheeks, leaving muddy tracks in her make-up, but she made no sound at all. 'I love you, Robert,' she said. She said, 'You must be strong.'

That's my first true memory.

Of my parents, my sister, I remember nothing at all. I have a snapshot of them at a beach somewhere, maybe six months before I was born: my father lean and smoking, my mother smiling, her abdomen just beginning to swell. In the picture, Alice—she would have been four then—stands just in front of them, a happy blonde child cradling a plastic shovel. When I was a kid I used to stare at that photo, wondering how you can miss people you never even knew. I did though, an almost physical ache way down inside me, the kind of phantom pain amputees must feel.

A ghost of that old pain squeezed my heart as the case manager told me about Gran's fall. 'We got lucky,' she said. 'She's going to be in a wheelchair a month or two, but she's going to be okay.'

Afterwards, I talked to Gran herself, her voice thin and querulous, addled with pain killers. 'Robert,' she said, 'I want you to come out here. I want to see you.'

'I want to see you, too,' I said, 'but I can't get away right now. As soon as the election's over—'

'I'm an old woman,' she told me crossly. 'I may not be here after the election.'

I managed a laugh at that, but the laugh sounded hollow even in my own ears. The words had started a grim little movie unreeling in my head—a snippet of Gran's cold body staggering to its feet, that somehow inhuman tomb light shining out from behind its eyes. I suppose most of us must have imagined something like that during those weeks, but it unnerved me all the same. It reminded me too much of the dreams. It felt like I was there again, gazing out into the faces of the implacable dead, that enormous clock banging out the hours.

'Robert—' Gran was saying, and I could hear the Demerol singing in her voice. 'Are you there, Ro—'

And for no reason at all, I said:

'Did my parents have a clock, Gran?'

'A clock?'

'A grandfather clock.'

She was silent so long I thought maybe she had hung up.

'That was your uncle's clock,' she said finally, her voice thick and distant.

'My uncle?'

'Don,' she said. 'On your father's side.'

'What happened to the clock?'

'Robert, I want you to come out he—'

'What happened to the clock, Gran?'

'Well, how would I know?' she said. 'He couldn't keep it, could he? I suppose he must have sold it.'

'What do you mean?'

But she didn't answer.

I listened to the swell and fall of Demerol sleep for a moment, and then the voice of the case manager filled my ear. 'She's drifted off. If you want, I can call back later—'

I looked up as a shadow fell across me. Lewis stood in the doorway.

'No, that's okay. I'll call her in the morning.'

I hung up the phone and stared over the desk at him. He had a strange expression on his face.

'What?' I said.

'It's Dana Maguire.'

'What about her?'

'They've found her.'

Eight hours later, I touched down at Logan under a cloudy midnight sky. We had hired a private security firm to find her, and one of their agents—an expressionless man with the build of an ex-athlete—met me at the gate.

'You hook up with the ad people all right?' I asked in the car, and from the way he answered, a monosyllabic 'Fine,' you could tell what he thought of ad people.

'The crew's in place?'

'They're already rigging the lights.'

'How'd you find her?'

He glanced at me, streetlight shadow rippling across his face like water. 'Dead people ain't got much imagination. Soon's we get the fresh ones in the ground, they're out there digging.' He laughed humorlessly. 'You'd think people'd stop burying 'em.'

'It's the ritual, I guess.'

'Maybe.' He paused. Then: 'Finding her, we put some guys on the cemeteries and kept our eyes open, that's all.'

'Why'd it take so long?'

For a moment there was no sound in the car but the hum of tires on pavement and somewhere far away a siren railing against the night. The agent rolled down his window and spat emphatically into the slipstream. 'City the size of Boston,' he said, 'it has a lot of fucking cemeteries.'

The cemetery in question turned out to be everything I could have hoped for: remote and unkempt, with weathered gothic tombstones right off a Hollywood back lot. And wouldn't it be comforting to think so, I remember thinking as I got out of the car—the ring of lights atop the hill nothing more than stage dressing, the old world as it had been always. But it wasn't, of course, and the ragged figures digging at the grave weren't actors, either. You could smell them for one, the stomach-wrenching stench of decay. A light rain had begun to fall, too, and it had the feel of a genuine Boston drizzle, cold and steady toward the bleak fag end of December.

Andy, the director, turned when he heard me.

'Any trouble?' I asked.

'No. They don't care much what we're about, long as we don't interfere.'

'Good.'

Andy pointed. 'There she is, see?'

'Yeah, I see her.'

She was on her knees in the grass, still wearing the dress she had been buried in. She dug with single- minded intensity, her arms caked with mud to the elbow, her face empty of anything remotely human. I stood and stared at her for a while, trying to decide what it was I was feeling.

'You all right?' Andy said.

'What?'

'I said, are you all right? For a second there, I thought you were crying.'

'No,' I said. 'I'm fine. It's the rain, that's all.'

'Right.'

So I stood there and half-listened while he filled me in. He had several cameras running, multiple filters and angles, he was playing with the lights. He told me all this and none of it meant anything at all to me. None of it mattered as long as I got the footage I wanted. Until then, there was nothing for me here.