“Then the doctors and nurses who’d performed the surgeries started losing the feeling in their hands and arms and shoulders. Whatever it was, the Coldness was contagious. So they closed down the emergency rooms and locked up the hospitals and posted the National Guard at the entrances because doctors were refusing to treat anyone who’d touched one of the dead…those doctors who still had arms and hands, that is.
“The one thing I have to give us credit for as a species is that the looting wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Seems it didn’t take us very long to realize that material possessions and money didn’t mean a whole helluva lot anymore. That surprised me. I didn’t think we had any grace-notes left. Bravo for our side, huh?
“Look, I’ve got to…I’ve got to try and make it to the bathroom. I can at least cut through the production booth, but once out in the hall, I’m wide open for about five yards. The thing is, I’ve been in this booth for five days now, and while the food’s almost held out-thank God for vending machines and baseball bats-I’ve been too scared to leave, so I’ve been using my waste basket for a toilet and…well, folks, it’s getting pretty ripe in here, especially since the air-conditioning conked out two days ago. I gotta empty this thing and wash the stink off myself. If you’re out there, please don’t go away. I’m gonna cue up the CD and play a couple of Beatles songs, ‘In My Life’ and ‘Let It Be.’ I’m feeling heavy-handed and ironic today, so sue me. If I’m not back by the time they’re over, odds are I ain’t gonna be. Light a penny candle for me, folks, and stay tuned…”
“…Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, I made it! It was kind of touch and go there for a minute…or, rather, not touch, if you get me…but here I am, with a gladder bladder and clean hands and face, so we’re not finished yet, folks. There’s still some fight left, after all.
“I need to tell you a little bit about our receptionist here at We-Gab Radio. Her name’s Laura McCoy. She’s one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met, and if it weren’t for her, most days at this station would be bedlam without the sharp choreography. Laura has always been a tad on the large side-she once smiled at me and said she didn’t mind the word ‘fat,’ but I do mind it…anyway, Laura has always been on the large side but, dammit, she’s pretty. She’s tried a couple of times to go on diets and lose weight but they’ve never worked, and I for one am glad they didn’t. I don’t think she’d be half as pretty if she lost the weight.
“Laura’s husband, this prince of all ass-wipes named Gerry, left her about ten months ago after fifteen years of marriage. Seems he’d been having an affair with a much younger co-worker for going on three years. Laura never suspected a thing, that’s how true and trusting a soul she was. The divorce devastated her, we all knew it, but she was never less than professional and pleasant here at the station. Still, whenever there was any down-time-no calls coming in, no papers to be filed, no tour groups coming through, no DJs having nervous breakdowns-a lot of us began to notice this…this stillness about her; it was like if she wasn’t busy, then some memory had its chance to sneak up and break her heart all over again. So we here at the station were worried. I asked her out for coffee one night after my shift. I made sure she knew it wasn’t a date, it was just two friends having coffee and maybe some dessert.
“Laura was always incredibly shy when dealing with anyone outside of her job. The whole time we were having coffee she spent more time looking at her hands folded in her lap than she did at me. When she spoke, her voice was always…always so soft and sad. Even when she and Gerry were together, her voice had that sad quality to it-except at work, of course. At work, she spoke clearly and confidently. Sometimes I thought she was only alive when on the job.
“I said that to her the night we went for coffee. This was, oh…about eight months after the divorce, right? For the first time that night, she looked right at me and said, ‘David, you’re absolutely right. I love working at the station. That job and the people there are the only things I’ve ever been able to depend on. That’s very important to me now.’
“After that, things were a lot better for a while. Laura took her two-week vacation just before everything started. In all the panic and confusion and Martial Law-which didn’t exactly take very well, as you might recall-no one thought to call and check on her. She’d said she was going up to Maine to visit with her sister, so I guess most of us just figured or hoped that she’d made it to her sister’s place before all hell broke loose.
“Two days ago, Laura came back to work. I can look over the console and through the window of the broadcast booth and see her sitting there at her desk. She’s wearing one of her favorite dresses, and she’s gotten a manicure. Maybe the manicure came before the great awakening, but it looks to me like the nail polish was freshly applied before she came in-and, I might add, she drove her car to work. I remember how excited I was to see that car driving up the road. It meant there was someone else still alive, and they’d thought to come here and check on me.
“I can see her very clearly, sitting there at her desk. About one-third of her head is missing. My guess is she used either a shotgun or a pistol with a hollow-point bullet. My guess is that this sweet, pretty woman who was always so shy around other people was a helluva lot more heartbroken than any of us suspected or wanted to imagine. My guess is she came back here because this station, this job, her place at that desk…these things were all she had left to look forward to. I wish I had been kinder to her. I wish I hadn’t been so quick to think that our little chat helped, so I didn’t have to give her or her pain a second thought. I wish…ohgod…I wish that I’d told her that she wouldn’t be as pretty if she lost weight. I wish…shit, sorry…gimme a minute…
“Okay. Sorry about that. Forty-fucking-three years old and crying like a goddamn baby for its bottle. I’m losing ground here, folks. Losing ground. Because when I look out at Laura, there at her desk, and I remember Sarah Grant walking up to her family’s home, and realize how many of the dead have been able to come back, have been able to walk or drive or in some cases take the goddamn bus back home…when I think of how they recognize us, how they remember us…you see, the thing is, Laura used to always bring in home-made chocolate chip cookies once a week. No one made cookies like Laura, I mean nobody! She’d always wrap them individually in wax paper, lay them out on a tray, cover the tray with tin-foil, and put a little Christmas-type bow on top.
“There’s a tray of home-made cookies setting out there on her desk, all wrapped and covered and sporting its bow. Half her fucking brain is gone, splattered over a wall in her house…and she still remembered. Is this getting through to you, folks? The dead remember! Everything. It doesn’t matter if they’ve been in the ground ten years or crawled out of drawer in the morgue before anyone could identify them-they all remember! All of them!
“Is this sinking in? And doesn’t it scare the piss out of you? Look: if they can crawl out of a grave after ten years of being worm-food and volleyball courts for maggots and still remember where they lived and who they loved and…and all of it…then it means those memories, those intangible bits and pieces of consciousness and ether that we’re told are part and parcel of this mythical, mystical thing called a soul…it means it never went anywhere after they died. It didn’t return to humus or dissipate into the air or take possession of bright-eyed little girls like in the movies…it just hung around like a vagrant outside a bus station on a Friday night. Which means there’s nothing after we die. Which means there is no God. Which means this life is it-and ain’t that a pisser? Karma is just the punch-line to a bad stand-up routine, and every spiritual teaching ever drilled into our brain is bullshit. Ha! Mark Twain was right, after all-remember the ending of The Mysterious Stranger?-there is no purpose, no reason, no God, no devil, no angels or ghosts or ultimate meaning; existence is a lie; prayer is an obscene joke. There is just…nothing; life and love are only baubles and trinkets and ornaments and costumes we use to hide this fact from ourselves. The universe was a mistake, and we, dear friends…we were a fucking accident. That’s what it means…and that makes me so…sick. Because I…I was kind of hoping, y’know? But I guess hope is as cruel a joke as prayer, now.