Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 5

"He's a toadie. Mr. Kirkpatrick's yes-man. Are you blind? And they expect you of all people to recover the archives. Give me a f.u.c.king break."

"What happened to the archives?"

"So I get to explain the whole can of worms to you. I see. The archives are in the bas.e.m.e.nt. I'm not the first inhabitant of this house, you know. This used to be called the Seaside Love Palace, home of Isaac Pope, the dot-com nerd. It's his artwork you see up all over the place. Artwork he commissioned anyway. Isaac stored all sorts of useless s.h.i.+t, in formats no one knows anything about anymore. DVD-ROMs and stuff. We keep it all in the bas.e.m.e.nt. A couple weeks ago a pipe burst and flooded the dump. The Federicos worked overtime to get it cleaned out but we lost about half the archive. That's why you're here. To tell us what we lost."

"I'll be happy to get started on it right away. When can I see the-"

"We haven't even ordered yet!"

"By the way, I'm a huge fan of your music."

The waiter Federico arrived to take their orders.

"Before you take our orders, Federico, we would like to see a menu," Kylee said. "And if you could bring me a brush and some soapy water so I can scrub this young thing's lip prints off my a.s.s."

"No, I really am a fan. My friends make fun of me for being into old music but-"

"Old music!"

"What I mean is I especially love The Glamorous Life of Kylee Asparagus. It's got some great-"

"I'd give my left t.i.t to get back in the studio with the Satan Brothers. They weren't so much studio sessions as artistic retreats. We rented a castle in Scotland and stayed up till five in the morning on shrooms. We swam naked together in the pool, my band and me, and wrote such beautiful music on that b.i.t.c.hin' Steinway. Those were the alb.u.ms when I started getting close to Federico."

"Federico and you were-"

"Lovers? Oh, no, young thing. Let's just say that it's easy to genetically engineer a Federico to develop a tendency to enjoy gardening, or pottery, or repairing gutters, or cooking, but it's near-impossible to engineer one into craving p.u.s.s.y."

The waiter Federico showed up with the menus, a bucket of soapy water, and a sponge and proceeded to recite the specials. When he left, Abby said, "So that performance today-"

"Your timing. You need to work on it."

"The audience. Those were all the Federicos?"

"What am I supposed to do? I have this huge theater and when I want a show I don't want to be the lone person clapping up there in the balcony. The Federicos like their entertainment and some of them get to dress up in drag, so it's pretty special for them. I'm just disappointed your performance was so pathetic. You've really got to take the time to prepare, young thing. You've got to know your material sideways."

"But I'm not an entertainer."

"You said it, not me. What looks yummy tonight?"

Abby scanned the menu and saw the same thing repeated twelve times. "Looks like the breaded rock cod with a leafy green salad and rice pilaf."

"Oh, I got that the last time I was here and it wasn't very good."

"What else is there?"

"Young thing, they can make you something even if it's not on the menu. Don't worry, I'll order for you."

The waiter Federico reappeared. "Have you decided?"

"I'd like for us to start with an order of Gruyere bruschetta and bring an a.s.sorted sas.h.i.+mi platter as well. For our entrees I'll take the grilled halibut not too dry this time and she'll have the salmon special you featured last night. To drink I'll have a Diet c.o.ke with a lemon wedge and she'll just have water. Cheerio."

The waiter bowed deeply and hustled to the kitchen.

"I don't particularly care for salmon," Abby said.

"You were saying something about how much you loved my alb.u.m The Glamorous Life of Kylee Asparagus? I didn't mean to interrupt."

"No, I was finished talking about that."

"I don't think so. I think you were asking about the number of number-one hit singles off that alb.u.m."

"Right. How many-"

"Five. Count 'em five hit singles. That alb.u.m dominated. But how could I top that? By releasing seven alb.u.ms in the next three and a half years, that's how. Boom, boom, boom, and four booms after that. Each alb.u.m captured the vibe of a different continent. I recorded with the greatest musicians living on each continent at that time."

"The Africa alb.u.m was pretty incredible."

"It was, wasn't it? Africa had a lot of momentum coming off the Glamorous Life alb.u.m. South America was solid too-"

"That alb.u.m was way underrated."

"By who? I want names! We were able to work with such a killer crew on Europe but there were all these distractions. Sound engineers ODing and s.h.i.+t. We thought Asia would be better but then the trade embargo and the Chinese cloning crisis and everything went to s.h.i.+t. It was about the right time to record Oceana. Basically an EP. Hardly anyone bought it. So we brought it all home and recorded the North America double alb.u.m, which was supposed to be the comeback, the biggie. Oh well."

"I thought Antarctica was pretty good."

"True, that marine biologist played a mean harmonica."

The appetizers arrived. Abby tried to repress her disgust as Kylee's powdery lips curled around raw fish, her mouth a graveyard of teeth the color of coffee with two creamers. The woman made little moaning noises as she ate, as if discovering sas.h.i.+mi for the first time.

Kylee said, "Eventually I sobered up, bought this place from Isaac, and started thinking hard about what I had gone through in twenty years. I had f.u.c.ked some of the most beautiful men on the planet. I had received the love of people who just wanted to touch me, eat my used Kleenex. The paparazzi were never really the source of my problems. They were just the in-between step. I was on one side of them, and on the other were exhausted shoppers in grocery store checkout lines. Ugly housewives and mouth-breathing teenagers. Week after week they'd see me while standing in line to buy their disgusting microwave food. I was beautiful. They wanted to be like me. And the reason they wanted to be like me was that they didn't love themselves. They wanted to be someone like me who never shopped for groceries. And when designer drugs and nipple slips and Twitter rants and pa.s.sing out at Cannes started to do me in, I began to remind them of who they really were and they started to hate me. Because it was easier to hate me, to ridicule my 'bizarre behaviour,' than to look into themselves and realize that they really were a bunch of f.u.c.ked-up ugly b.i.t.c.hes.

"When things got really out of control, when I started throwing goblets through plate-gla.s.s windows, Isaac himself showed up. He wasn't much more than a teenager, seemed to me. A lumpy dork who could have afforded more fas.h.i.+onable gla.s.ses, but for whatever reason chose not to spend a smidgen of his billion-dollar fortune on designer eyewear. Go figure. Stinky hair stuck to his forehead, fidgety, would sort of hop up and down in his chair when he got excited about something. He wore

T-s.h.i.+rts with pictures of dragons on them under his sport coats. I think he spent fifteen hours a day in front of his computers, five hours of that masturbating. Of course I seduced him. In a way I did it to punish myself for going so off the map. I'd f.u.c.ked Jude Law. I'd f.u.c.ked George Clooney. I'd been the guest of honor at numerous exclusive orgies. Now I was f.u.c.king this nerd with his shriveled little p.r.i.c.k. I was doing it because I hated myself as much as those women standing in line at the grocery stores hated themselves.

"But then something really f.u.c.ked-up happened. I started to fall in love with him. He showed me such tenderness. I was like an onion, with all these, like, layers of celebrity and s.h.i.+t. He peeled them back and found the girl within, and when he loved that child I gave myself to him completely. Suddenly I was back on the world stage. I was by his side at the Golden Globes. I completely reinvented myself. I rebuilt everything from the ground up. I made carefully crafted, self-deprecating comments about myself in the press. A new generation discovered my work and it started getting played at clubs. The f.a.gs embraced me anew. And best of all, we went on a shopping spree. We bought all those media companies that owned the tabloids that had dragged me through so much mud, and I personally visited their offices, one by one, and fired the editors and photographers who had so busted my b.a.l.l.s. I decided to get smart. I'd never gone to college, remember. So we hired a private staff of professors to live here and instruct me in art history, philosophy, literature. I started working out again, five hours a day. I was a machine manufacturing my own self-actualization. Around this time we decided to turn the estate into an artists' colony. We invited sculptors, composers, playwrights, poets, and painters to spend time here creating their work. We hosted dinners for Pulitzer winners and n.o.bel laureates. We held fund-raising retreats and charity b.a.l.l.s. Oh, it was such a marvelous time!"

Kylee paused, seeming to revisit the era in the privacy of her thoughts. Abby let the silence last as long as Kylee needed. Outside, the sun settled into its horizon. After a time, Kylee began renegotiating with her meal and continued. "Of course, when you're in those years you don't expect the world to take a turn for the worse, do you? You expect the world to ride along on your own happiness, as if you had any control. But the Age of f.u.c.ked Up s.h.i.+t reminded us that we're just parasites on this planet and, like parasites, we can be easily exterminated. We were lucky. We kept to ourselves on this island, Isaac, Federico, and me. Once all the artists had gone we spent days in the parlour playing Barbie's Shopping Mall Adventure. In those years it was best if you lived on an island, away from major population centers. The horror of it still makes me tremble. And it was during this time that my sweet Isaac, oh . . ."

Kylee began to cry, her leathery lips quivering into the shape of an hourgla.s.s tipped on its side. The waiter Federico brought a box of tissues. Kylee dabbed one beneath her gla.s.ses, pulling away gobs of teary mascara. Abby touched the woman's hand. Kylee grabbed her wrist and dug acrylic fingernails into the soft flesh. She leaned closer and hissed, "He was murdered. I'm convinced of it. They said it was a heart attack brought on by too much Red Bull and Mountain Dew but I know it was murder! My poor sweet Isaac!"

"I had no idea," Abby said. "Who did it?"

"We don't know!" Kylee cried. "A hundred and fifty-five years I've stuck around and still we don't know who did it! Why do you think I've kept this body alive? Why do you think I've cloned Federico hundreds of times? I need protection. I need someone to take care of me while I find out who killed my husband!"

The waiter Federico leaned over the table, clearing their plates. "Did you guys save any room for dessert?"

"I'll have the triple chocolate decadence," Kylee said. "Give our guest the rhubarb pie a la mode."

Abby said, "So the police were never able to-"

"Police? You think there were freaking police involved? During the Age of f.u.c.ked Up s.h.i.+t? You are young, young thing. The authorities fried bigger fish. Oh, I don't know. Solve a homicide or deal with widespread rioting and looting. No, it was entirely up to us. We read up on forensic science, watched a lot of police procedurals. But we kept coming up cold. We combed the archives as best we could for clues as to who might have a motive for killing my husband. We barely made a dent in all those files. Then a burst pipe, oh h.e.l.l. Now you, young thing, supposedly you are the one who is supposed to help us get to the bottom of this abomination. Why Mr. Kirkpatrick thinks you'll be of any help is beyond me. You might as well hop on that boat and head back to wherever you came from. Everything worth knowing about this rotten place disappeared a long time ago."

An almost-full moon hung close to the water and a feathery breeze skittered across the waves. Abby's dreams were chopped-up pieces of grade school, trees, beaches, pink fur. She woke around three in the morning convinced she was being watched. Keeping her eyes closed, she reached across the bed for Rocco then remembered she wasn't in Vancouver. She opened her eyes. The ghost hovered just beyond the window, bobbing a bit, as one would imagine ghosts to do. His form consisted of roiling wisps of translucence in the shape of a man. He appeared balding, with a bad comb-over, and he wore a T-s.h.i.+rt with the barely legible logo for a Comi-Con convention from over a century ago. He rubbed his eyes beneath spectral bifocals.

"Say something," Abby said.

"Oh, sorry. Yeah, so, I guess you're here to solve my 'murder.'"

"Isaac Pope?"

"So they say."

"Who killed you?"

"I actually buy the Red Bull and Mountain Dew theory, myself. You're kind of hot, you know that? What do you say about flas.h.i.+ng me a b.o.o.b?"

"No thanks. What do you know about the archives?"

"You waste no time," the ghost of Isaac Pope said. "What is it about the archives you want to know?"

"Can they be salvaged?"

"Come on, just one b.o.o.by."

"I'm looking for a transcript of an interview with someone named Luke Piper."

"Oh, that," Isaac said. "All I'm saying is just a t.i.t. What harm can come of it? I'm a dead dude."

"Will you tell me about the transcript?"

"I'll tell you everything I know about the transcript."

Abby considered this a moment, then pulled aside her nightgown to reveal her left breast.

"Oooooh . . ." Isaac moaned, sounding like a real ghost for the first time. "That's what I'm talking about. Touch the nipple, make it hard."

Outside the window the ghost rose and fell as if mounted on a spring, slowly, then faster, his right hand pumping what Abby a.s.sumed was his small, ghostly p.r.i.c.k. Isaac grabbed the sill with his other hand, moaned, grunted, and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed some phosph.o.r.escent ghost s.e.m.e.n onto the foot of the bed. Revolted, Abby tucked her breast back in and crawled away from the ectoplasmic splooge.

"Gross! Why'd you have to do that?"

"Don't tell me you weren't at least a little bit turned on, baby," Isaac said. "Seriously-how many times did you come?"

"Jesus! Now you can at least tell me about the transcript."

"As promised, here's everything I know about the transcript. I know absolutely nothing about the transcript. You'll need to talk to the archivist. Besides, rubbing one off isn't the real reason for this supernatural visit or whatever you want to call it. I'm supposed to get all Hamlet's dad on you. You've got to get out of here, Abby, before you get trapped in the play. You're getting sucked into a loop. Your selfhood, it's in superposition."

"But the archives."

Isaac sighed. "Well, don't say I didn't warn you. And thanks for the flash."

"Get out of here," Abby said.

"Suit yourself, baby," Isaac said, "You know you liked it."

The spirit dispersed in the wind.

The next morning Abby pa.s.sed through halls decorated with eye-violating phantasy art. In each one a muscled warrior defended a barely dressed maiden from some sort of dragon or monster or many-tentacled s.p.a.ce-being. On closer look Abby recognized the maidens as Kylee, and the buff heroes as Isaac, whose bespectacled and combed-over head topped each rippling, sweaty torso.

A Federico stopped alongside her. "They were commissioned," he said. "Isaac hired some of the most acclaimed science-fiction-and-fantasy cover artists of his day and presented these great works of art as gifts to Kylee."

"I think the period-appropriate word to describe these paintings is 'rad,'" Abby said.

"You'd be one to know. I know very little about those times." The Federico stiffened and gazed into the middle distance as if he'd heard something alarming. "Oh dear. In the billiard room? Oh dear, oh dear." He scurried up a spiral staircase with Abby trailing behind. "You don't need to see this," Federico called over his shoulder. "Really. You'd best be enjoying complimentary refreshments in the dining room."

Abby kept on his heels, coming to a room where a crowd of Federicos had gathered. Kneeling on the floor, Kylee jaggedly wailed and lamented. Abby pushed her way to the front of the scrum. On a billiard table with b.a.l.l.s frozen midgame lay the p.r.o.ne body of a Federico, his head ringed with sleeping pills.

"He's dead," a Federico whispered beside her, and several other Federicos, mostly the younger ones, began softly to weep. Kylee clawed the floor, blubbering and writhing. An older Federico came to the lady's side and carefully lifted her, directing her to an overstuffed chair.

Kylee blubbered, "Did he leave a note? Did he at least say why he did it?"

The suicide note was conveniently located in the body's left hand. One of the Federicos retrieved it and read it aloud. "My dear Kylee and brothers Federico. It is time for me to pa.s.s from this world to the next. I found it too hard to be myself in a place where so many other people were me. Is it too much to ask that I be treated as an individual for once? Is it? I mean, come on. Well, anyway, I leave all my personal effects to Federico #270, whose kindness I will cherish into the grave. See you on the other side, b.i.t.c.hes!"

Shoulders heaved, palms rubbed backs in consolation, and a nearby box of tissues was quickly depleted. To be polite, Abby pretended to sniffle. It all felt disingenuously theatrical. Kylee fainted and was borne away by six sobbing Federicos. When they were gone the remaining Federicos cleared their throats and started discussing various household tasks and funeral arrangements. Abby tapped an older Federico on the shoulder.

"I'm really sorry for your loss," she said.

The older Federico shrugged. "We'll miss him, I guess, but there's always another Federico to take his place."

"I need to talk to the Federico who was supposed to show me to the archives."

"I'm afraid you're out of luck. That was the Federico who just offed himself."

"Is there another Federico who can-"

The older Federico scowled. "We've got a family tragedy on our hands here, miss. The archives are the least of our problems. If you want to make yourself useful, you'll join the funeral party at noon. We'll drop a dress and a veil off at your room and convene in the great hall."

The Federicos, dressed in black suits and ties, gathered in hushed clumps of conversation. Kylee sat in a creaking wheelchair, clad in a black dress and superwide hat with a veil. In the center of the room, on a couple of collapsible luggage stands, sat a varnished cedar coffin. Six older, pallbearing Federicos hoisted it on their shoulders and solemnly bore it out the front doors. Kylee followed immediately behind, pushed by a young Federico. The Federico children trailed, holding the hands of their older brothers. Abby merged into the procession, which heaved along a path through the posturban woods. Two Federicos who'd been bred with a special gene for bagpipe prowess played a mournful dirge. The music was elegiac, the sky overcast, the wind a union of pine and sea salt. The party progressed about a mile up the path, hemmed in on either side by swirling conifers, then turned onto a path carpeted with rust-colored fir needles. Winding around the stumps and nurse logs of the cool forest they entered a patch of salmonberry and huckleberry bushes, still wet with morning dew. They proceeded single file now, a black, melancholy swath through the greenery. At last they came to a clearing of sorts. Abby crept through the gaggle to glimpse the proceedings.

They were in a vast cemetery, maybe forty or fifty acres square. Hundreds of headstones marked the graves that dotted the a.n.a.lly maintained gra.s.sy expanse. Abby looked to her feet and read the one nearest.