In Extremis Read online

  Perrick’s wearing his long coat over the bulge. Perrick is giggling. Mumbling to himself: “. . . telling me all the secrets . . . so hard to understand what she’s saying sometimes but she knows it all, knows it all . . . she’s a head of her time hee hee . . .”

  Buck brings him to the firelight, pulls back Perrick’s coat, exposing Suzie’s purulent severed head still clamped on his dick and balls, one eye hanging down from the skull, dangling next to his testicles, jigsaws of the scalp rotted off, pig bristles of hair remaining, maggots dripping now and then, squirming . . . halfway to a skull . . .

  “That’s a pig head or somethin’, that ain’t no bitch!” a dudeski protests, but Buck draws him closer, makes him bend and really look. He backs away making phlegm sounds in his throat as Buck says to the others, “Okay, dudeskis, take a good look, you paid for it.” A few other people drift over to check it out. Buck covers the head. “Anybody else want a look? Five bucks!”

  Buck taking more money, murmuring to vacant-eyed Perrick, “This is way cool, the bitch still workin’ for me, tha’s, like, loyalty all the fucking way, you knooooo? I mean, it’s just like Suzie to hang in there, yo . . . Lemme count the money dudeski . . .”

  JUST A SUGGESTION

  This is a for-real story about me and the Holiday family. I figure they’re a good example of what I can do, and what can happen. I’m going to talk all about the shooting, and where the people who got shot went after they died, to the extent I know, and why I’m still ghosting up this house. I’ll tell you that part right now. I’m trying to put it on the tape recording this Ghost Seeker boob is using to get his EVP that he’s hoping will get him on a TV show. That EVP, it’s Electronic Voice Phenomena. They play a tape recorder when no one’s talking and later on, see, they play it back, turn it up loud, and there’s a message on it. Anyway that’s what they think. Really, it’s just some noise, and they interpret the noise any way they want. I know this from watching a show about this stuff, when I was haunting the Costco store in Tustin. They had all those TVs turned on for people to buy, and I watched a show about this EVP business. Think they’re hearing ghosts when the tape goes, “Bzzguhbuzzgukbuzz.” And they tell each other they’re hearing, “Be gone, good bye!” Right.

  People claim to have the dirt, or the grave dirt, on ghosts, spirits, what have you. But they don’t. Ghosts and spirits aren’t even the same thing.

  The chubby dumbass with the male pattern baldness and the dirty glasses, he’s sitting here right now running the tape recorder—hey if he actually hears this, later on, me talking about how he’s a dumbass and chubby, ha, nothing personal buddy! He painted Ghost Seekers across the side of on an old white cargo van, in orange paint, with a stencil. The bottom of the ee in Seekers is runny. Looks stupid. I don’t think this guy is going to get on TV.

  But he had an ad in The Orange County Register, I guess, judging from what I heard Lucille say when she called him on her cell phone. She called him to check out this place because of what little Lindy said about me, and Franklin. Lindy’s the only one who seemed to know I was there. She’s more sensitive than the rest of the family, or something. Not “a Sensitive” like they say on the Psychic Channel—but more sensitive. That’s how it works. I mean, if you’re a live person paying attention, if you’re really with it, you can feel the dead around you. No special talent. But it helps to be sensitive—and just pay attention to the right things.

  I’m sitting here talking right out loud, into the little microphone the ghost seeker’s got set up in the room, but judging from the look on his face and the fact that he’s digging in his nose every so often, when he isn’t scratching his crotch, I don’t think the dumb son of a bitch hears me. No clue I’m here. Maybe the machine’ll pick me up, though. I’m talking as loud as I can. I don’t exactly have lungs or a, what you call it, a voice box, or a tongue, but then again I kind of do, in a fuzzy way. I can move air around a bit, and I can make sounds. When I whisper to people, though, it’s more to their minds. They hear it but then again they don’t. I don’t understand the whole process that much myself.

  We’ll see if anyone can hear this. I think I can see that little needle on the tape recorder moving a tiny, real-tiny bit when I talk. I’ll give a shout out to the world, just in case. Go Lakers! I’m still a Lakers fan. And my name is Murray Samuel Mooradian. Kind of a mouthful. My dad was being cute with the Murray Moora sound. I’m Armenian American. Or I was. I guess I don’t have any DNA anymore. Don’t you need DNA to be some ethnic type?

  After my old man died of that blood clot thing, I went into his convenience store business. One of those stores attached to a gas station on Culver Avenue. Never was interested in the convenience store business as a career—I wanted to spend as little time in the store as I could. Because he was there morning to night—and I didn’t want to be around him. He always seemed disgusted with me, no matter what I did. I got a B plus, he was disgusted it wasn’t an A. “You always got to fall short, huh? Push harder next time.” Disgust came rolling off him like a bad smell.

  I wonder where his ghost went. I’ve never seen it, not my mom’s ghost either, or the ghost of anyone I knew in life, unless you want to count someone like BlondBoy and I don’t. All the ghosts I know are strangers. Most dead people don’t seem to stay around—just some of them. Where are all the ghosts of all the millions and billions who’ve died? Climbed some golden ladder to Heaven? No one’s offered me a golden ladder.

  Fact is, I haven’t seen anything about God or Heaven or Hell or angels, since I’ve been dead these last ten years. But I picked up on some pretty mean spirits that you might call devils. Sometimes I hear them and I almost see them.

  About my death, I was two days short of my forty-sixth birthday and walking the two blocks home from work about midnight, crossing the street with the light, and some tweaker ran a red light, smacked me like a two-ton baseball bat, his car spun out, and stopped—and he sat there babbling in his car the way they do. And then the son of a bitch drove off. I saw that much because I was already dead. Just like that, bam. Floating a few feet over my body—which was twisted all kinds of wrong ways.

  Didn’t yet have it together to follow the hit-and-run tweaker. So I never got the chance to take revenge on that asshole. But pretty soon I was watching a couple paramedics, a cholo and some surfer-looking dude, loading my mashed body into the back of an ambulance. They were laughing about it, “You go ahead and do some CPR on him, he’s got one lip left there, BlondBoy.” Like they’d even do CPR that way. They just had a good time laughing at the dead guy. I saw one of those blown glass pot pipes sticking out of “BlondBoy’s” pocket, too—I knew exactly what it was, we sold them at the convenience store. That pissed me off more than the hit and run. I don’t know why—just him treating me like that, making the whole thing part of his pot high. Wrinkling up his nose with disgust while he’s talking about my body, too. They drove off and now I wish I’d gotten in the ambulance, taken care of them right then. Only, I didn’t know how to do it, back then. I was new to being dead.

  So I started walking. I walked for miles till finally I was in Tustin, and there were those old blimp hangars, historical somethings, and down a little farther was the big old Costco store, just recently opened. I waited till a security guard unlocked the door, and I went in with him . . . and just stayed. The store was big enough to wander in but also it was shelter from the sky. Now that I’m dead, the open sky always makes me feel like something’s going to reach down and grab me and take me somewhere. Maybe somewhere bad. So I stayed put, puttering around in Costco for years. You lose track of time when you’re dead. But I knew about how many years because of the seasonal products; Halloween stuff in bulk would come, Christmas decorations in bulk, Easter junk in bulk, July 4th decorations, Halloween crap again, Thanksgiving turkeys, and there you have one year.

  I should tell you how I picked the Holiday family. I was getting sick of haunting Costco. Sick of the other ghosts in there, especially. T
his Mexican landscaper who used to work around there, who’d died right outside of a heart attack, his ghost was always wandering around asking where his family was; asking me had I seen them. He would ask where are they, what’s going on, over and over in a pitiful way. “Que pasa, que pasa?” You pasa, dude, I told him, you pasa away. Most ghosts are confused, see. Me, I got clarity, though. I can think. I’m clear on what I want to do—given, you know, the choices I’ve got. Which aren’t that many. I don’t have much freedom, as a ghost. I mean—it’s all bull crap that a ghost can walk through walls. No sir. You have to wait till someone opens a door and then you follow them through before it closes. You can ride along, on their shoulders, piggy-back like as they go through the door. They don’t usually feel it. Ghosts do that a lot, and people never know.

  I stayed in the Costco for a long time because it was big, and there are a lot of people to look at. A lot of housewives. You can have fun checking them out in ways they never figured on. But after a while, the muzak, the lights, the other ghosts who lived there—dud conversationalists, all of them—it was Hell. I was thinking, “Maybe there is a Hell. And maybe it’s Costco,” when I saw the Holiday bunch.

  They were walking around the store in a kind of family conga line, up and down the aisles, Dad leading the way, pushing that giant basket. “Dad”, that’s Boyd Holiday, chunky guy with a space between his front teeth, his eyes a little too far apart, nose flattened like the tip of a hammer; he was about the same age I was when I died. Then comes his wife, Rema Holiday, almost small enough to be a midget, wears short dresses maybe to make her tiny legs look longer, her dun hair bobbed, bruised-looking eyes but no one had hit her; then Boyd’s goopy sister Lucille, same space in the teeth and wide apart eyes, dyed-black hair looked to me like a mop, but she calls it dreads because she’s got some Jamaican boyfriend. Lucille was staying with them while she studied to get her chiropractor license, like that’s ever going to happen. Then, trailing after Aunt Lucille, the Holiday kids: Lindy, the eleven year old girl, and Franklin the teen boy. Franklin could’ve been the poster boy for snotty teens. Mouth stayed open, always texting—took me a while to figure out what texting was, it wasn’t big till after I died. And he’s got those droopy-ass pants like his hip-hop heroes. Makes me glad I never had any kids—‘course I never had any women to knock up, hardly, no women at all except if I paid, to be honest, so how would I . . . Wait, do I want to say that about paying? Okay, shit, so what, it’s on there now. I can’t make the rewind button work. And it’s nothing compared to some of the stuff I’m going to tell you about. Stuff . . . that I suggested.

  I followed them, the Holiday family, not sure why I was doing it, just thinking that there was potential of some kind. Maybe I could really get involved with a family, besides just whispering this and that to the people in Costco. Wait–I know what it was! It was that “I’m mad but I’m not going to admit it” look on Boyd’s face. Charging along like he was trying to challenge his family to keep up. Looking, hurt, mad—disgusted. I just thought, “There he is, Mr. Powder Keg! It’s playtime!”

  And that’s what I wanted. Playtime. Because I felt trapped in myself—like I was locked in a car I had to drive around and around, and the doors wouldn’t unlock and let me out. I was stuck in there with the stink of disgust and the burning smell of being really mad and I knew there was one thing that could get me out of it, at least for a while . . .

  So I slipped into their slipstream, you might say, followed them around as they bought groceries and the boy hassled them into buying a game about Grand Theft, the little girl got some concert DVD to do with somebody named Hannah Montana, the mother picked out food and a big bag of socks, and then out the door of Costco, and out into that endless sunny parking lot, and up to their SUV. Passed a fading old ghost I know who presents himself in an Army Air Force uniform from around World War One. One of those blimp-hangar guys, died in an accident, likes to natter about preparedness.

  When they opened the back of the Chevy SUV to cram in the big containers of taco beans and dip and Mountain Dew and jars of barbecue sauce big as buckets and huge Styrofoam trays of frozen pork chops and chicken legs—that’s when I climbed in, and crowded myself into the back, curling up on top of some groceries, kind of chortling, loving the novelty of this.

  “Let’s go on a family drive!” I yelled, as they got in the big car. They couldn’t hear me, of course, not talking that way. Come to think of it, though, I think Lindy did glance around a bit.

  So we drove out of the lot, and out of Tustin, to Southeast Irvine. This was in the more affordable Irvine, east of the 405. West, now, you got your rich people, some movie stars, some grandsons of movie stars: your Turtle Rock, your Shady Canyon, your tony beach houses. East Irvine, you got a lot of people working for the high tech outfits, chipmakers, all that stuff. That’s where old Boyd worked, assistant supervisor in some department of the microchip plant.

  They got a pretty okay split-level four-bedroom house. There’s a pool but it’s dried out and covered over.

  Lucille spent most of her time in a bedroom that Boyd called his “den” but there was nothing left of him in it but a locked rack of guns—mostly rifles, one shotgun. Boyd belonged to a gun club. Went out there to shoot skeet and drink.

  When we came into the house, everyone went their separate ways, Lucille scurried off to hole up in her room and talk to her boyfriend “Droppy” on a cell phone; Franklin, he holed up in his room to play the Grand Theft thing. Lindy went to her room to watch the DVD on her little television. Boyd threw himself into a big chair in the living room to watch Encore’s The Western Channel on cable. He was watching an old George Montgomery picture, a real stinker. Drinking a Tequila Sunrise. Little wifey was in the same room, flipping through Sunset Magazine, but as far as Boyd was concerned, she was somewhere else. I was sitting between them on the sofa, looking back and forth and kind of grinning to myself, that first day.

  Rema wasn’t going to let him just stay in his Western Channel Tequila Sunrise world though. “It’s kind of early to start with the Sunrises,” she said.

  “That’s funny, Rema,” I said. “How can a sunrise be too early? Get it?” They couldn’t hear it, of course. But I appreciated my own wit. “Hey and you know what else, you’re reading Sunset Magazine while he’s drinking a Sunrise. Hey lady, you guys are in different time zones!” I started singing, “’Sunrise, sunset, swiftly flow the yearrrrrrs!’”

  “It’s my day off, Rema,” Boyd said. “And it’s almost four.”

  “Are you going to that gun club tomorrow?”

  “You bet your sweet patootie I am. Not that your patootie has been sweet to me, any time lately.”

  “You see, Boyd? You drink and say unfortunate things. And what if Lindy heard you?”

  “She’s up to her neck in that Hannah Montana. Let me watch my show now.”

  “We don’t have that much chance to talk, with you on that shift now. It’s unfortunate.” That was one of her favorite words, unfortunate.

  “I can’t argue with them about the shifts, I haven’t got enough seniority, I told you this.”

  “I’m just saying that we don’t have much time to talk, Boyd, and I’m worried about Franklin.”

  “What else is new? The kid’s a loser. Straight Ds. Does no work of any kind, anywhere. Listens to criminals singing about how they killed cops and sold crack. Great! Lucky enough to be white, wants to be black.”

  “Don’t be racist. Your own sister has an interest in black culture.”

  “She’s got an interest in a black something.”

  “Ha, Boyd,” I said, “Good one.”

  “That’s definitely one Tequila Sunrise too many, Boyd,” Rema said, “when you talk like that.”

  “One too many,” I said, and this time I leaned close to him and whispered it with my mind as much as my mouth. “More like one too few—she should have one with you. Then you might have something to talk about. You might get lucky there, Boyd.”
r />   He heard me, in a way. When I do that kind of special whisper, they don’t seem to hear every word, but they get some part of it, or the sense of it.

  “You ought to have one, and loosen up,” Boyd said, as if it were his idea.

  “I think Franklin is depressed,” she said, flipping moodily through her magazine. “He doesn’t go out much. Just stays in his room. Internet, videogames. Texting. That’s all. He’s got that friend Justin—but apart from that . . .”

  “That kid that lives in Tustin?”

  “Justin in Tustin!” I crowed, slapping my knee. If I visualize slapping my knee while I do it, I can almost feel it. “Ha, Justin over in Tustin!” Boyd wasn’t hearing me anymore—I wasn’t doing it the special way.

  “I don’t like that Justin around here,” Boyd said, frowning, clinking the ice in his glass. “I always feel like he’s laughing at me. The two of them, I hear them rapping together for some MySpace site—it’s disgusting. You get disgusted with your own son, something’s wrong. And I think Franklin was trying to pick the lock on my gun cabinet. Kid’s not honest.”

  “If you would take him to the gun club . . .”

  “I asked him if he wanted to go—insisted he had to take his friend along too! Why? I’m so boring he’s got to bring entertainment?”

  “That’s just being a teenager. You forget what you were like.”

  “Not like this, isolating in that room with his internet . . .”

  “You didn’t have the internet when you were a kid, Boyd,” I said.

  But I wasn’t really focused on Boyd now. He got me thinking about the boy. Depressed, isolated. Maybe I’d picked the wrong powder keg.

  “If we could just put some water in the pool,” Rema said, “Franklin thinks that if he could have a pool party . . .”

  “Costs way too much. I’m having to support Lucille . . .”

  “Maybe she really ought to . . .” She lowered her voice. “Move in with her boyfriend.”