I thought nothing of her, figured the person she followed had ditched her in a car, and she was catching up in that relentless way that corpses do. I was downtown, sitting outside Jittery Joe's Coffee Shop on a summer afternoon. There were still a few weeks before fall semester, so I was relaxed, in no hurry to get anywhere.
I returned to the manuscript I was reading, and didn't think another thing of the corpse until I noticed her in my peripheral vision, standing right in front of my table. I glanced up at her, turned, looked over my shoulder, then back at her. Then I realized. She was looking at
The woman at the next table, dressed in a green hemp dress, her foot propped on an empty chair, looked at me over the top of her paperback with thinly veiled disdain. When I caught her eye she looked back down at the paperback.
I lurched to my feet, the metal chair screeching on the brick pavement, my barely touched coffee sloshing onto the table, and retreated down the sidewalk.
I ducked into the anonymity of my parked car and lingered there, tracking the corpse in my rear-view mirror as she lurched toward me. Maybe it was a mistake, a misunderstanding—maybe she'd walk right past me. My Volvo Green was a fuel-cell vehicle, dammit, the most efficient I could afford, not an energy pig like most corpse-magnets drove. How could I have hooked a corpse? I cracked my window, waited to see if she would pass.
I heard her little feet scuffing the pebbly pavement as she drew close. She stopped three feet from my door, turned and faced me. Her face was round and babyish, her chin a tiny knot under her slack, open mouth. She was so tiny.
I started the car and pulled out, almost hitting another car. As I drove off I saw my corpse in the side mirror, lurching down the sidewalk, patiently following whatever homing device the dead used to track those they had claimed.
Every few minutes I pulled back the curtain to see if she was coming. And then there she was, walking along the side of the road with her head down. She turned up my driveway, stubbed her toe on the thin lip of asphalt, stumbled, regained her tenuous balance. She struggled stiffly up the three steps to my front door and stopped. I dropped the curtain, got up and locked the dead bolt.
I phoned Jenna.
'I have a corpse,' I said as soon as she answered.
'Oh my God, Peter,' Jenna said. There was a long pause. 'Are you sure?'
'Well Christ,' I wailed, 'she's standing on my fucking doorstep. I'm pretty sure she's mine.'
'I don't understand. You don't deserve a corpse.'
'I know. Jesus, I can't believe it. I just can't believe it.'
Jenna consoled me by ticking off the evidence, all the ways I was not like other corpse-owners. Then she changed the subject. I wasn't in the mood to talk about university politics or how-was-your-day minutiae, so I got off the phone after making plans to have dinner with her.
I tried to distract myself by turning on the TV. I checked the stock market. The Dow was up almost three percent, the NASDAQ two. I switched to the news. The president was conducting a press conference in a field of newly constructed windmills, on her decision to pull out of the Kyoto III accord. 'We're doing everything we can to curb global warming,' she said to the cameras, 'but we will not bow to foreign pressure. The American way of life is not negotiable.' Blah, blah, blah. Even with the news cameras picking the best angles a few hundred of her corpses were visible, cordoned from her by a phalanx of blue-suited secret service agents. The corpse of an emaciated four- or five-year-old black boy, his distended belly bulging as if a kickball was hidden under his skin, wandered through a breach and headed toward the president. He was swept up by an agent and returned to the crowd. But gently—the administration didn't want to give Amnesty International any more ammunition.
I tried to take solace in the president's corpses. She had eighty or ninety thousand, piled twenty deep around the White House gates, more arriving daily. I only had one.
I flipped through the channels. Strange how most TV shows depicted the world as corpseless. Nary a corpse to be seen on the sitcoms, cop shows, interactives—all those people, walking the streets, working, cutting up with friends, and not one of them followed by a corpse. Had there really been a time when there were no corpses? I could hardly imagine it anymore.
I pulled back the curtain, looked at her standing motionless in front of my door. I couldn't help myself. I wondered if there were clues on her to tell me who she was, or how she died. Some sort of evidence that the cosmic actuarial table that sent her to me had made an error.
I went to the door and opened it. She came in, her bare feet tracking dirt onto the hardwood floor.
'Look around,' I said with a sweep of my hand, 'I don't have that much stuff.' I gave her a tour. 'Solar power, fluorescent bulbs.' I pointed out that all my furniture was used. She didn't look, only stared up at me. 'I try to buy locally grown food. I voted for the One World party.' Nothing. I scanned the room for more evidence.
'What did I do?' I asked her empty face. 'Tell me what I did!'
She'd been a cute kid. I pictured her laughing, running, playing hop-scotch on the sidewalk like my sister used to. I pictured her drinking brown water out of a dirty metal cup, lying in bed, dying of typhoid or dysentery. Maybe her family couldn't afford a bed—maybe she'd died on a straw mat on the floor in the corner of a dirt hut. I let a familiar indignant anger rise in me at the injustice of it.
She was so completely silent standing there. Unmoving, not breathing. She's going to be with me for the rest of my life, I thought. How could I possibly stand that?
I sat in my recliner in the living room. She stood in front of me, at arm's length, and stared. I took a good look at her. Skinny legs with bony knees. Very brown feet. Long black hair littered with leaves and twigs. Her red, mud- caked shorts had a single front pocket. I reached over and, flinching at the stiff, cold feel of her flesh, felt around in her pocket with two fingers. There was something in it—I fished it out. It was a button, a shiny new button. Gunmetal grey with veins of teal snaking through it. I turned it over; it was cool and smooth, unmarked—the kind of thing a little girl might carry around if she didn't have any Barbies to play with.
I lifted her dirty hand by the wrist, turned it palm-up, put the button in her hand, closed her cold fingers over it, and gently lowered her hand back to her side. The button clattered to the hardwood floor.
'Is she there?' Jenna asked. I nodded. My corpse stood outside the restaurant door, staring in at me through the plate glass. I should have picked a restaurant farther from my house so I could eat before she reached me. 'Just ignore her,' Jenna whispered.
An elderly couple opened the door to leave, and my corpse came in, ignored. As much unseen as ignored— not like a lost dog but like a block of wood, or a wisp of autumn wind. She came and stood in front of me, staring, a pretty button tucked in her pocket. Jenna kept eating as if nothing had changed, though she examined my corpse out of the corner of her eye. I forked a half-spear of asparagus in lemon butter into my mouth, chewed and swallowed, felt it lodge in my throat.
Mine was not the only corpse in the establishment. There were about ten, actually. Two stood by the bar, their eyes in shadow under the dim light of stained-glass lamps, their filthy rags out of place among pressed pants, white shirts, polished wood and chrome. An attractive, well-dressed thirty-something couple had three of them hovering around their table, like their own personal wait-staff. One was an old, stooped Asian man, another a twelve-year-old black girl, the third a five-year-old who could have been my corpse's long-lost sister. Jesus, they must be living like complete pigs to rack up so many corpses.
The door opened as another couple left. An infant corpse crawled in, her back foot just clearing the door as it closed. She was nude; her jerky crawl reminded me of a turtle's. She made a grunting sound as she labored across the floor, stopped in front of the already well-attended couple, plopped onto her butt, stared up at the woman. The woman kept eating her paella, one of the restaurant's specialties. The man said something and she laughed, covering her mouth.
Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw my corpse glance down at my plate. I jerked my head around and looked at her intently. Her eyes were glazed and fixed on my face.
'What's the matter?' Jenna said. 'Don't stare at her,' she hissed, as if I had picked my nose. 'What? What is it?'
'I'd swear she just looked down at my plate,' I said.
