His death, when it came, was a relief. As the clean burn of the vodka washed the last of the sleeping pills down his throat, he reached over to the chocolate milk on the nightstand. One more nice drink before The End. He hadn’t had chocolate milk since he was a kid, and now the older memories came back like a... A commercial? A good commercial? Well shit, there was that English major being out to good use again.
That’s why I never made it as a journalist, Dad. Thanks for the typewriter, though.
He’d be taking that typewriter with him into oblivion, along with all the other crap he still cared about. His comic book collection, his laptop, his porn stash, maybe a rug... All of it buried in a nice, secure vault with his mummified body. He’d made the arrangements one night for a laugh, when the book deal was a sure thing. “If I’m gonna go,” he’d told every identical face at every stupid house party, “it might as well be in style, right?”
Right.
To hell with that “you can’t take it with you” garbage. The Egyptians had it right; what was a person, if not the sum total of all the useless crap they accumulated?
There weren’t any saber-toothed tigers to kill or arias to compose or lightbulbs to invent anymore. There wasn’t anything to do but get famous or get laid, and he was shit at both.
And hey, speaking of which, the hooker had left her bra on the floor when she’d stomped out an hour ago. Best twenty bucks he’d ever spent. Was it twenty? He hoped she didn’t come back. What was he thinking about? Oh, right. A bra. Maybe he’d try it on; that’d be something for the police photographer’s Greatest Hits collection.
Oh, man. This was it, wasn’t it? Don’t panic, Eddie. Be a man. Take a swig of that chocolate milk before things start getting blurry. Think about something nice.
He figured if he thought hard enough about his childhood it’d make the-Yes, Edward, might as well call it what it is, the dying-easier. They said whatever thought your brain was on at the moment of death was what your last hallucination-the afterlife-would be. The brain got a nice big surge of dopamine, and the DMT surged, and the light appeared before your eyes and oh, sweet baby Jesus I take it all back, you do care!
If the hallucination was good enough, he’d die believing it.
So think about the chocolate milk, Eddie. Think about how good it tastes, and how cold the AC is, and how comfy these sheets are. And Pokemon. And teddy bear. And Grandma. Remember when you were a kid, and school was closed because of snow, and Mom made pancakes that tasted so fucking good it made you want to pinch yourself and fucking cry because of how good it was. Think about the last time you were good at anything and let go of the twenty year failure since.
You don’t have to worry about keeping any of the promises you made to yourself or the old man about becoming a writer. You don’t have to make it in the cutthroat world of newspaper journalism. You don’t have to worry about paying back those student loans, either.
Mmmm... The chocolate milk was good. Yummy yummy yummy I gots yummy in my tummy. There you go. Lie back and go to sleep. This won’t hurt. Sleep. It’s not death, it’s sleep.
The room was so cold that it didn’t even feel cold anymore. His stomachache was gone, too. Nice and numb. Nice and numb.
He pretended the chocolate milk bottle was his Mom’s tit for a second. Might as well go all the way back if nostalgia’s the idea. Lovely milk. Blankets good. He thought maybe he should turn out the light, but things were getting dark on their own.
Grandma’s hammock. My dog. Goldfish.
He thought for a moment that his cell phone might be ringing, but everything was sort of quiet and cold and numb. Ring? Ring ring ring. Like the telephone game.
Loony Toons. Lemonade. Christmas presents.
Oh, man, everything felt funny and slowed down. So what? He went down and down and down into the bed, and he felt more relaxed than he ever had. Just let it happen. It feels good. And then there was a sun in the window bright like candles that he thought that she the girl he liked back then knew about in Mrs. teacher class in school the day grandma came out of the screen where he watched the moves with the reindeer in them and then...
And then? Nothing.
Fuck me, I forgot the note!
Too late. Dead.
It was probably a good thing that Eddie’s body was found so soon after he died. The thing about mummifying a corpse is that it’s gotta stay dry; it’s no good if the body’s been sitting around rotting all day, filling up with blood and shit and other assorted juices. The AC had been a good move, the cold having staved off the worst of the decomposition. Even before the pronouncement came and the calls were made and the service was held, the contract was i effect.
From the town morgue, Eddie’s mortal remains were thrown in a freezer and shipped by plane to California, where the real work could begin.
The university’s Egyptology budget needed some cash-flow, and the medical students needed something to do. The administration had decided to kill two birds with one stone by offering mummification for those willing to pay for it. A final absurd gesture for the idle rich, or at least that was the intention. A drunk who’d only sold one book hadn’t been in the cards, but money was money, and corpses are corpses.
Eddie’s stomach was pumped of it’s contents, his internal organs were removed, and his body was dehydrated and dipped in preservative fluid for several days. Eddie didn’t have the money for the more elaborate jobs, so his corpse was wrapped in only one layer of linen bandages.
“Universal Monster-style,” he’d joked. They took that remark more seriously then he’d intended. By the time it was lowered into the casket, the body looked like a prop from a carnival haunted house. He might’ve written about the experience, but he was dead.
The tomb was a simple concrete-and-metal job. Geothermal power meant the facility would keep running for hundreds, potentially thousands of years. There were motion-sensitive lights, but it didn’t matter, because nothing in the tomb moved.
In a moment of hilarity Eddie would have appreciated, the people in charge saw fit to include an outlet in the wall into which would be plugged the freezer unit needed to keep the sarcophagus cold. It was very, very cold for a very, very long time, but Eddie didn’t feel it because he was dead.
He didn’t hear when the camera crews passed the massive concrete door to his tomb, he didn’t notice when the facility was expanded, and didn’t feel it when the earthquake hit. He didn’t do any of those things because he couldn’t do any of those things. He was dead.
How, then, was he aware of being dead? He couldn’t place a finger on when exactly he’d started existing again; it had been a gradual process. His annihilation had seemed a pretty sure thing at the time, but now death was getting to be like trying to sleep on a train. Your eyes are closed and your head is down, but all you can dream about is the noise on the bus. You’re not awake, but you’re not asleep, but you’re not aware, but you can’t give up.
It sucked then and it sucked now. Eddie laid there for as long as he could, but sooner or later there was no use trying anymore, and suddenly he was back in college trying to sleep in the middle of an Adderall haze that had seemed like a good idea a few hours ago, but now revealed itself as a numbing, stupefying masturbation aid that got him no closer to meeting the deadline than when he’d started.
But doing anything about it took energy, and he had none-then or now.
So he laid there like an idiot, begging and begging and begging for sleep that would never come. This went on for what could have been years or hours or decades. He laid there, pretending to be asleep, keeping still out of sheer obligation, until he noticed that he was going to bash his fucking head through this useless piece of shit metal fucking thing until there was blood GODDAMN EVERYWHERE HE WAS SO TIRED OF ALL THIS SHIT-
What followed might be described as a temper tantrum, but that doesn’t really cover a corpse ripping the lid of its casket off the hinges like a hyperactive 3rd grader off his meds. There’s a moment where anger overcomes reason and this thing that you’ve paid a lot of money for isn’t worth two squirts of shit and must be destroyed.
Fucking.
Worthless.
Junk.
Eddie felt a pulse in the room as he sat up. He thought maybe it was the blood rocketing through his veins with every pissed-off heartbeat, but then he remembered he didn’t have a heart anymore. It was the automatic lights blinking into existence for the first time in quite a while.
“Unfair” didn’t begin to cover it. This was grade-A, USDA-approved bullshit, and just as soon as he found out who to bitch at, they were going to pay. Dead guys don’t move. That’s not the way it works.
He looked around. He looked around, and got more annoyed with every second of sight that passed. He shouldn’t be able to see. Or breathe, or feel, or smell, or anything.
He was supposed to be dead. This was against the rules, and the second he found out who-
He looked down at his hands, then, and that was his worst mistake yet. Bandaged. Shrink-wrapped. Smaller and skinnier then they’d been the last time he saw them. He moved, and there was no muscle. He could feel bones clack against bones.
“Fuck me,” is what he would have said if his vocal cords still worked, but instead he got a dry hiss and pop as his throat heaved. The noise was the kind of thing that would have made him retch once upon a time, but whatever gag reflex he’d once had had gone the way of his voice.
The realization that he was missing organs hit him, and so he stupidly braced for his stomach to drop, and then realized that there was nothing there to drop. He shoved himself backwards in the casket, gripping the edges as if it were traveling at escape velocity. No panic came, though, and when he made the mistake of thinking on that he remembered: No heart, chief. That means no throbbing in the chest, no blood flow, and no hard-ons. Oh, Christ. No more hard-ons.
No more hyperventilating, either, as he learned the second he tried to take a deep breath and found there was nowhere for it to go; no lungs. There was nothing to acknowledge this horror with. He could panic, couldn’t scream, couldn’t even vomit.
The next thing he knew, he was tumbling head-over-ass onto the floor. It probably should have felt cold, but it didn’t, just like the crash hadn’t been painful and the bandages weren’t itchy. Each new missing part hit him like a freight train, and then he made the worst mistake he’d made since waking up: He grabbed his head. There was a sound like drum as his withered palms slapped against a hollow skull. He didn’t have a-
Don’t say it. Don’t even think about it. Don’t acknowledge thinking without a brain, or moving without nerves, or seeing with shriveled eyes or that really will be it, you’ll go bugshit crazy once and for all.
But then he did, and he didn’t. No crazy. Living people got to go crazy. He was dead.
And that settled it: He was dead. He was as dead now as the night he’d committed suicide. So how was any of this happening? Bandages. Bandages everywhere.
There it was. Mummy. The mummy’s goddamn curse.
He picked himself up and looked around his beautiful little cell.
His desk from his childhood bedroom was up against the wall, still vandalized with little penises and vaginas, just as he’d left it when he’d moved out after high school. His laptop was on top. Whoever moved it here had taken the time to wipe off the cigarette stains. How nice. The typewriter sat next to it, fresh pages still stuck in it even after all these years.
He turned, and there was his blanky, and his favorite stuffed animals, and his favorite college hoodie, and a bunch of other reminders of everything pre-fuck up.
Not one copy of his book, though. Typical.
Great. So he was trapped inside a metal tomb with cheap Officemax lighting, surrounded by old memories. And he was a mummy. Mustn't forget that part. The Mummy walked, and all he could find was a bunch of crap from his parents’ attic.
He had to admit he was impressed; those people hadn’t been lying about a proper Egyptian-style tomb. They had just about everything. Christ, they had the copy of the high school paper with his story on the front page.
Something was missing, though. He went through the inventory in his-
Oh, god. In whatever was allowing him to think and feel, he began taking inventory: Desk, assorted photos, lucky pen, college diploma, teddy bear, school paper, hoodie, comics, laptop, typewriter, lamp, blanky, Persian rug, Grateful Dead poster, globe from Uncle Ralph’s study, hubcap, Rodney Dangerfield bobble-head...
The porn. Jesus Christ on a crutch, someone had stolen the porn. And the word was “stolen,” there could be no doubt of that; the contract had been very clear. Which meant that someone had disturbed his tomb to steal the porn, which meant that he had risen from the grave to bring his unholy wrath upon a porn thief. This was almost too stupid to comprehend.
The laptop still worked, amazingly. Oh, that was good. 2002. He had died in 2014, but really, who was keeping track at this point? The only way the computer’s clock could read “2002” was if it had run out of numerals and had to start over, which would put the year at something like...
Oh, hell. As if there hadn’t yet been enough nonsense, here was the latest bit of insanity to fuck up his day. Porn-seeking mummy in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It sounded like a bad indie comic.
No matter. Time to leave.
