Abby followed as she would in a dream, her senses propelling her to the doorway, through which she observed the elegantly appointed living room. On one upholstered chair sat a man with dreadlocks, colorful garments, and a scepter crafted from a toilet brush and plunger handle, beaming in the presence of three glowing orbs the size of your typical Spalding basketball. These orbs bobbed softly above three chairs and pulsed hues of purple and orange.
“Excuse me, Ambassador? We were wondering if you had any spare women’s shoes,” Woo-jin said. “And a phone we could use?”
The Ambassador nodded, in deep communication with his guests. He pointed in the direction of the kitchen. Abby’s brain seemed to have been marinated in Novocaine. While the scene before her made no sense, the bewilderment was paradoxically a source of comfort, as though her neocortex had thrown its hands up and neglected to even try to process this otherworldly communion or whatever you wanted to call whatever it was that was going down. She followed Woo-jin, barely able to take her eyes off the beautiful spherical energy forms illuminating the residence with positive vibes. They crossed the kitchen to the room where previously Woo-jin had donned the tracksuit. In a closet they found a selection of fashionable shoes and other garments, many in Abby’s size. Woo-jin excused himself and went to the kitchen while Abby cleaned up and dressed. When she emerged she wore new pants and a jacket in addition to chunky leather shoes. Around them drifted gentle music written by computers in praise of the gorgeousness of nature. Woo-jin handed her a cordless phone. Leaning against the granite counter, Abby called her apartment, Rocco’s cell, the phone numbers of her friends in Vancouver, Rocco’s work, and her apartment manager but nobody answered and no voice mail picked up. It occurred to her that she expected the world to operate a certain way, expected phone calls to be answered and some semblance of causality to provide lines between dots. She expected her intentions to find outlet in actions, consequences, reasons, purposes. But she was being thwarted, teased it seemed, prevented from making decisions that would lead her back to a system of gratification and contentment. There were other forces working, pushing her into an abstract version of the world she assumed she belonged to. She could fight it, jabbing digits into a telephone hoping one of them would pull up a recognizable voice while this weird blinky guy rooted through the fridge—which, by the looks of it, contained some pretty delicious food—or she could take her sense of rationality, stretch its figurative chicken neck across a cutting board, and lop off its head.
Woo-jin slapped together some sandwiches. “I guess you’re probably hungry,” he said.
“I died?” Abby asked.
“At least two times,” Woo-jin said. “I saw your bodies.”
“Can you take me to them?”
Woo-jin shrugged. “I could try. They’re in Dr. Farmer’s morgue.”
Abby asked, “You said you were a writer?”
“I am going to try to attempt to be like a writer. I’m supposed to write a book about how to love people.” It dawned on Woo-jin that this now not-dead girl might have some ideas on how to solve some of his troubles. “Do you think you could help me find my sister? Or help with the writing of
“Who’s your sister?”
“Patsy.”
“Where is she?”
“She got lifted up in the trailer by a helicopter. She’s a pharmer.”
“Oh,” Abby said. “Did she get taken to a harvesting center?”
“I have no clue,” Woo-jin said, “but she took all my posters with her. And my clothes.”
A sentence queued up in Abby’s brain before it left her mouth, as though it had been memorized for a play. “I need to see my dead bodies.”
Woo-jin still had Dr. Farmer’s business card. He pulled it from his pocket and called the number. Abby watched, surprised, as he proceeded to have a conversation. “Dr. Farmer? This is Woo-jin Kan. Right, the writer. I’m with the dead girl. No, she’s now living. Number three, yes. Okay. What? I’m at the Embassy. Okay. Buh-bye.” Woo-jin pushed the OFF button. “He’s coming over to pick us up in his car.”
“What’s that Ambassador guy doing in the other room with the glowing things?”
Woo-jin shrugged. “Communicating with visiting life forms, I guess. He gets directions from his celestial head. Do you like Dijon?”
Abby accepted the sandwich and sat down with Woo-jin at the little table in the nook.
“Oh no,” Woo-jin said. He fumbled in his pocket for his mouth guard, slipped it in, then flopped out of his chair onto the hardwood floor. Abby loomed over him as the wave of ennui flowed into his corporeal form. This attack didn’t take him anywhere. The house was like some sort of locked box from which he couldn’t mentally travel. Instead he gazed up in bloodshot panic as Abby held his shoulders, as if that would do any good. His eyes went so wide they didn’t look epicanthic anymore, with his face red and lips quivering, with tears actually squirting from ducts, the droplets catching air, raining into little puddles on either side of his head. Whereas usually the suffering had a source, tonight’s suffering was all residue, traces of pain he couldn’t stick to an actual person, diffuse hurts that bled from the Embassy’s hundred years of grievances. Abby called out lamely for help. The door to the kitchen opened and in floated the three orbs, glowing pink, hovering like concerned bystanders. Abby stepped aside as the orbs settled, humming, on Woo-jin’s body. He trembled once more then settled into a fuzzy drowsiness.
The Ambassador entered regally, with Pierre close behind, and waved his scepter in specific but indiscernibly communicative ways. Woo-jin coughed out his mouth guard and rose up on his elbows as the levitating orbs seemed to check out the pantry. “You should invite these orb guys to your place more often, Ambassador.”
Pierre raced to answer the doorbell. The orbs disappeared up a staircase. The Ambassador set about making himself a pot pie. Soon Pierre returned with Dr. Farmer, who looked tanned and reasonable. Upon seeing Abby he smiled broadly. “How fascinating! What a pleasure to meet you alive!”
Blinding whiteness, walls of slabs. Abby hugged herself as the coroner lifted the sheets covering the bodies. There lay two females identical to Abby, the key difference being they were deceased. She winced in embarrassment at their nakedness, as if it belonged to her own body. Abby couldn’t connect this new experience to the experience of snooping through Kylee Asparagus’s mansion or watching the Federicos cavort in a grand ballroom. She couldn’t connect it to what increasingly appeared to be an illusory domestic life with her Bionet engineer boyfriend. She couldn’t connect it to eating a sandwich in a house dominated by glowing spherical life forms. She yearned for plot but instead absurdity after absurdity had been thrown before her, absurdities that alluded to obscured purposes.
“Like I said before,” Dr. Farmer said, picking his teeth with an umbrella-shaped cocktail pick, “we believe that your selfhood, Abby, has gone into superposition. What does this mean? Well, consider a single electron. An electron can be in one place or in a different place, right? And yet we can sometimes find electrons in two places at the same time. So it is with you, apparently. It’s as if you’re both alive and dead simultaneously, and this simultaneity is a self-replicating system in which there are various ‘snapshots’ of your dead self. Which makes an autopsy pretty dang hard, let me tell you.”
A phone rang. The three living people looked to one another, each patting their pockets in that typical moment before someone recognizes the ring tone as their own. It was Abby’s phone. But there was no phone in her pockets. Dr. Farmer leaned over the closest of the two bodies, the one Woo-jin had discovered first, and opened its mouth.
Abby placed the somewhat moist phone close to her ear.
“Abby? Dirk Bickle here. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“I want to go home,” Abby said.
“I want you to go home, too, Abby. You’ve been a real champ.”
“I’m not following any more of your directions until you tell me what’s going on.”
“I understand. What do you want to know?”
“I want to know who you are, who you work for, why you really sent me to the Seaside Love Palace, and where Rocco is.”
“You bet. First, as far as my job goes, you can think of me as a curator. Typically a curator is someone in a
