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And that’s that, my darlings. The two hours’ traffick upon our stage, complete with fatal loins! Not bad, really. Maybe I’ll make it into a one-woman show. And you know, I am glad that we know each other now, really know each other, companion bosoms, from the heart of my bottom. Delilah Daredevil Does Deadtown. I love you. My dear departed, I love you so.
I’ll take the first caller on line one.
THE HELL HATH CLUB VS. THE GIRL IN THE REFRIGERATOR
The moon strikes the dinner hour and the Lethe Café house band shuffles in, jangling and shattering the shinbone bell over the door. No loss—it’ll grow back in the morning.
The whole time I was alive, I never loved a rock star like I love these four onyx-winged gargoyles with Christmas lights wrapped around their horns and pen-nib piercings running up and down their brimstone ears. Quarter Inch Bleed. Deadtown’s putrefying punk sensation.
I’m so excited that somewhere up above me, somewhere up in the dirt, the heart I used to have gives one last thrilling, dusty thump.
We don’t have much use for money down here except as interior decor. I’ve got a beaded curtain that’s all old-as-fuck Greek drachmas. You know, the kind they used to put on corpses’ eyes so they could cross the Styx. But the Styx isn’t a river anymore. The underworld’s come a long way since Helen and Medea and Iphigenia and Clytemnestra painted the town black—the original Hell Hath Club. Deadtown’s like a dear old grandfather trying to use the Internet. Slow as snails on quaaludes, but he does his best to get with the times. You can find the Styx in the pipes nowadays. Deadtown Municipal Waterworks. We drink it out of our faucets, we bathe in it, it shoots out of fire hydrants on warm nights and all the neighborhood children come out to jump and dance in the spray. And all those coins come spurting up out of the drains, float down the gutters, fire like bullets out of the hydrants into the sky. So, we do have money, but money isn’t currency. It doesn’t matter. Not here.
What matters is entertainment. Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit. The dead fear boredom the way mortals fear death. And it’s not like you can kill yourself to escape. Deadtown will do anything for the delight of distraction. When you don’t need anything anymore, the only thing you need is stories, and songs, and beauty, and spectacle. That’s the good stuff. The stuff that reminds us who we are. Remember that bit in The Odyssey where Odysseus (my upstairs neighbor and a total dick, by the way) brings the dead back to life for about half a second by feeding them blood? No. That’s disgusting. He brought them back to life by telling them his story. The blood was his own weird fetish. The dead don’t turn out for gore; they come for the show.
We get them all when they die, all the nightclubs that ever shut, every theater that burned to the ground, every museum that lost funding and got remodeled into condominiums, every amusement park sold for scrap or left to be slowly claimed by weeds and sun. Just like our triceratops pies and great auk eggs over easy. The minute a TV show gets canceled, a book goes out of print, a play closes, some soldier blows up a statue, a dance goes out of style, a song gets forgotten, that’s the minute we get them. (I swear to god, we are never going to get Harry Potter and I am not okay about it.) The Alexandrian Library has a line around it like Studio 54, you wouldn’t believe it—and Studio 54’s waiting list goes all the way back to the Paleolithic era. The gang’s all here, the artists too, writers, musicians, painters, actors. I know you don’t want to die and it probably keeps you awake some nights, the idea of everything that is you ceasing to be and all your works turning to dust, but down here you can see most of the Beatles playing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Oscar Wilde sings Paul’s parts, Sappho hits the drums, Sojourner Truth and Basquiat do spoken word while Joan of Arc and Judy Garland perform an interpretive dance, and Laurence Olivier reads the phonebook during the set break. It’s not all bad.
But Quarter Inch Bleed is homegrown. Local gargoyles made good. When they play, I feel like they’re playing my life. Everyone feels that way. They’re kind of . . . post-punk post-pop hipster rock sludgemetal folk-industrial techno-blues alt-grunge cabaret torch singers. You know, soul music. They start setting up on the little Lethe stage, playing my secret favorite song: the rustling of sheet music and set lists, the coughing and quiet warm-up, the tuning of instruments, the squeak of speakers and amps, the last drags on cigarettes and popping of knuckles. The four of them arch their long black wings, run through a couple of tongue twisters to loosen up their muzzles, pluck a few strings, tap a few keys with their claws. They’re all there, Stan and Jack and Alan and Gail, their brilliant fur shining in the moonlight, their horns glittering with festive electric lights.
The Hell Hath Club holds down a booth like a fortress. No one can budge us from our prime seats. The Lethe Café is crowded now, with more pushing in all the time. Daisy snuggles in closer to me. Pauline rolls her eyes and fishes a cigar out of her cleavage. Under the table, she and Bayou are holding hands. Julia flickers in and out in time to the noise and bustle of the café.
And then we hear it. A soft, awful sound sawing back and forth under the honkings of Jack running through a D scale on his accordion. It’s coming from behind the bar, behind the swinging kitchen doors. Crying. Wheezing. Teeth chattering. Neil’s horned head snaps up, his canine ears twitching. His boiling red eyes fill with concern. But it’s not his business, it’s ours. We know that sound. The Hell Hath Club abandons their front-row-center seats without a word. The bartender holds the doors open for us with an onyx-scaled hand. We listen in the kitchen, surrounded by knives.
It’s coming from the refrigerator.
Bayou heaves the door open with her muscled Atlantean arms. The frosted air clears. A woman sits on the floor of the industrial fridge, naked, her dark skin blue and white, her hair frozen, ice clotted around her shoulders, her thighs, her neck. Two huge bruises shaped like hands blacken her throat.
“Fuck,” Polly breathes. Even she feels bad for the popsicle. “She’s brand-new. How long you been dead, kitten?”
“Hello, broccoli,” the girl whispers. “Hello, grape juice.” She coughs. “Not f
rom concentrate.”
Death really knocks you sideways. When I died, I woke up in a pile of garbage under the Phlegethon Bridge. It’s the roughest Monday morning you’ll ever pull. I crouch down next to the woman. Tug her long, tightly curled, slowly melting hair away from her face. The ends shine bright blue. She keeps shaking and shivering, but the sobbing slows down.
“I’m Paige Embry,” I say gently. “Whatever happened to you, you’re perfectly safe now. What’s your name?”
She looks up at me with wild golden eyes, her lip trembling, her eyelashes clumped together with frost like white mascara.
“Samantha,” she croaks.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SAMANTHA DANE
Hello, broccoli.
Hello, grape juice, not from concentrate.
Hello, farm-fresh butter.
Hello, nonfat milk.
Hello, individually wrapped cheese slices that I hate but Jason won’t stop buying. Hello, eggs from Nina’s chickens. Hello, boysenberry yogurt I should have thrown out weeks ago. Hello, bell peppers I was going to use to make sesame beef stir-fry tonight. Hello, half-defrosted beef. Hello, peaches and rhubarb I bought to bake a pie I’ll never bake now.
I wonder if Jason will shudder whenever he sees peaches once he finds me like this. Maybe he’ll stop buying that crappy cheese. I wonder if he’ll ever find me. If he comes soon, maybe I’ll still make it. In the meantime, it’s just you and me, extra chunky peanut butter. Just you and me.
There’s something about getting strangled by a minotaur and stuffed into a refrigerator that really makes you consider your choices in life. I was gonna be famous, you know. Diane Arbus, Julia Margaret Cameron, Annie Leibovitz, fucking Ansel Adams, they’d have had nothing on Samantha Dane. That’s what I chose. I chose art. I chose work. I chose a viewfinder and a darkroom and a shutter speed like a butterfly’s blink. And I chose Jason Remarque. If you snip one of those choices out, would I be spending this quiet Thursday night making sesame beef and watching cartoons instead of feeling my heartbeat slowly give up with a half-eaten rotisserie chicken scraping against my back? Life is just full of funny questions, isn’t it?
Let’s try this one: what if I’d found that stupid button instead of Jason?
