The Power of the Dead
Orrin Grey

 

 

For this story, pretend you've never heard of me. Pretend you never read any of my pieces in Harper's or Rolling Stone, never saw those photos of me on his arm, wearing dresses I couldn't have afforded to even dream about five years ago.

Pretend that you don't already know the story, that you don't already know how it ends, that you didn't watch it over and over again on all the major news channels. Pretend that you don't know who he was, that he wasn't your golden boy the way he was everyone's golden boy. Pretend he was only mine, as this story is only mine, and just listen.

* * *

There are parts that you probably don't know. In interviews he seldom talked about the early years, the ways in which it began. How the first time it happened he was walking alone down the side of a country road. . .

He was sixteen; he'd driven his little Volkswagen to a party and run out of gas, and rather than be stranded there he decided to walk home. He didn't have a good reason, or at least not one that he remembered. No one stood him up or insulted him, he wasn't dating anyone and so no one told him she thought they should maybe just be friends. It wasn't anger or grief that triggered what happened, just a kind of sullen absentmindedness.

The walk back to his house was maybe four miles. He didn't know, when he told me about this later, how long he'd been walking, or how long since the last car had passed. His head was down, his hands shoved in his pockets, and he was kicking stones.

There was a car passing, coming up from behind him, and it startled him by laying on its horn. He turned, and he remembered later that some circumstance of the lighting let him see the face of the car's passenger - a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen - as she turned in her seat to try to get a look back the way they had come.

He followed the inferred trajectory of her gaze, and saw that he was being trailed by a ghoulish herd that straggled behind him for maybe a quarter of a mile. Here was a deer, one eye glassy and white, the other swarming with maggots. There was a possum dragging its hideously broken hind legs stiff as drumsticks behind it. A friendly-looking mongrel gazed at him with blank eyes while garlands of intestine dangled from its burst stomach.

He said that he remembered running, after that. Running all the way home, though his breath was like septic fire in his mouth and his chest hammered with spikes. And every piece of roadkill between the party and his house got up and followed him home.

* * *

Even in the months we spent together, he never gave me any coherent narrative of his life between that first night and the day when he became famous. One can extrapolate, though. The terror, the guilt, the slow, fumbling, macabre steps toward understanding.

The loneliness.

As we would all learn later, as would appear in every news story and every interview, he couldn't actually return the dead to life. He was more of a puppeteer, galvanizing the dead into movement, lending stolen fire to the decaying cells and making them dance.

In my efforts to give a name to his ability I once called him a remote-control Dr. Frankenstein. His smile was unreadable to me then, as always.

There was a time, as he was learning to control his power, that he put it to the sorts of use that you'd expect from a young man. Making all the frogs in the biology class jump, going to funerals and causing the cadavers to suddenly sit up or thump around in their caskets.

In our third interview, after we had already begun sleeping together, I asked him what it had been like, to be a friend of the dead. I still remember what he said then, and I'll always remember it because I kept the original transcript of the interview, though these words never made it into the November issue of Rolling Stone:

"It's not like that, first of all," he said, growing suddenly serious. "What I do isn't like having friends. The bodies I control aren't like people, or even like pets. They're like rocks. And when I animate them it's most like throwing a rock. Doing what I do isn't like having friends or companions, it's like having remote control limbs. Remote control limbs that rot."

* * *

The day that he became famous was the day Governor Rosen visited the Natural History Museum. He was in the crowd when a would-be assassin pulled a ceramic knife. A hundred and thirty people saw the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton tear itself free of its moorings and snap its dagger teeth around the assassin like a bear trap, scissoring him in half.

By the time he and I met he was already working for the government. They didn't kill him or dissect him or imprison him, not like in the movies. I can't say if they would have, in a different situation, but they couldn't. He was too high profile. He had become a celebrity overnight. He had to stay in the public eye or else people would find out what had happened to him.

They did study him, though, subjecting him to MRIs and CAT scans. And when they realized that they couldn't learn how he did it, or replicate it, they put him to work doing it for them.

Sometimes what he did was obvious, like walking the victims of a plane crash up out of a swamp or using the dead to help rebuild cemeteries washed out by a hurricane. He did other things, too, but they were always classified. He told me stories sometimes, when we were together, always off the record. Stories about marching unkillable soldiers into hot zones, or remote-piloting already-dead bombers on suicide missions.

Eventually, though, the government asked him to do something that he wouldn't. I never learned what it was, I still don't know and probably never will. By then he and I were already living together, in a big loft apartment that the government rented. There were two agents assigned to guard us at all times. When he was out at work, there were still two agents who followed me around.

When he left that morning it wasn't any different than any of a hundred other times he left. We said goodbye at the door to the apartment, and I watched at the window as he got into the car that was waiting for him. He knew I was watching, and he looked up and waved once to let me know, like he always did.

When he refused to do whatever it was they'd told him to do, they took me.

* * *

No one ever referred to it as a kidnapping. They never told me I was a hostage. I was asked to come down to the local office; they sent a car to pick me up. When I asked the driver why I'd been sent for he just shrugged, and when I got to the office they said we were just waiting for him to come back.

For a while that's what I did. I had some coffee, I did a crossword puzzle, I watched what was going on around me. By the time I tried to leave I'd already figured out that they weren't going to let me.

Everyone was very polite about it all. I was never hit or bound or threatened. They brought me just about anything I asked for, they just wouldn't let me leave. The doors were all locked, my cell phone wouldn't work, and there wasn't any other phone to be found.

My attempts to leave were, at first, just as polite as their imprisonment. I asked to go, they asked me to be patient "just a little while longer." I asked for a phone, they said they'd "see what they could do." But while their politeness remained consistent, mine crumbled. Shouting followed demands and was followed, in turn, by tears and then resignation.

They brought in a television, when I requested one, and a stack of DVDs, but the TV wouldn't get any channels and so I didn't hear about what was happening until later. I saw it on their faces, though, and I could guess.

I picture him coming home from God-knows-where, a Styrofoam coffee cup in each hand. When he knocks on the door and I don't answer he transfers both cups to one hand to unlock the door, expecting to find me asleep or in the shower. In my imagination the cups fall from nerveless fingers when he finds that I'm gone and he can locate no note, but knowing him as I do I know that he probably sat them down on the hall table before he even started looking, if he ever had them at all.

When he couldn't find me, his first call would've been to Sanderson, the day agent in charge of our comfort and safety from Monday through Thursday. I don't know how many people he had to talk to before he figured out what happened, but I doubt it was many. Maybe they just told him.

If they ever reconstructed how the first three agents were killed, it never made it into the news and I never heard about it. All I know is what everyone knows; that he slipped his handlers and disappeared, though not for long.

The random string of letters that employed him had several offices all over the city. I wasn't being held in the main one. If I had been, I would've been able to see what happened next by looking out the window.

The main office overlooked the veteran's cemetery, with its identical rows of white markers. Two-hundred and seventy-seven actual bodies were interred there, and that afternoon every last one of them got up.

No one knew he could do it. Previously, the largest number of human remains I'd ever heard of him animating at once was around twenty, though maybe he'd done more on some of the secret missions they sent him on.

The powers-that-be must've been impressed enough to negotiate a ceasefire with him. I learned later that the negotiations were handled with him speaking remotely through the lips of a recently dead agent, another trick that I don't think anyone knew he was capable of. The pretense, I guess, was that the whole thing had been some sort of epic misunderstanding.

A black sedan picked me up and took me to a crypt guarded by the walking dead.

I remember stepping into the crypt, and I remember very clearly those first few blind, blinking seconds as my eyes adjusted to the dark and saw the thing that was waiting for me there.

It was dressed like him, and for a second it even looked like him in the bad light, but it wasn't. It was just a corpse that he'd given his coat to.

It said my name with a voice that was close to his, if his voice had come from down a long metal tube, but also weirdly overlapped by another voice. "Whatever happens," he said, "don't be scared."

The corpse reached out and took my hand, and I tried not to flinch away. The flesh felt strange; not clammy, exactly, but not the right temperature or moisture for a living hand, either. It squeezed my hand just the way he always had, though, so I followed it as it walked outside.

Hand-in-hand, like lovers, we stepped out of the crypt and back into the sunlight. The first sniper's bullet caught the corpse in the shoulder, jerking it to the side. The second entered the bridge of the nose and the skull collapsed like a rotten melon. The corpse staggered twice and I felt the terrible sensation of its fingers slipping out of mine as it fell.

* * *

The rest is the ending, the part you already know. You saw it on the news, read it in the papers, watched the clips on YouTube. You know what happened next, that for three hours all the dead in the city went to war against the living.

No one knows where he got the power; if he had had it all along and kept it hidden, or if his rage gave it to him. The corpses in dozens of cemeteries all over town clawed their way to the surface all at once. The antique bits of crushed bone that made up the petroleum in gasoline formed rippling golems that tore their way free from cars and the underground storage tanks at convenience stores. For three long hours, the dead ripped the city apart.

The real ending was a mocking reflection of the false one that I had witnessed. The only footage ever captured just shows a distant black blot that jerks and then crumples to the ground as the sniper's bullet finds its target.

I wasn't there with him when he really died. That black blot was the last time I got to see him alive, even on film. In my imagination, being there would have been like it was when I saw the bullet take the zombie that was wearing his coat, but I know that in reality it would've been a hundred times worse.

No one was with him when he died, no one but the sniper and that lone and distant cameraman, but we all knew exactly when it happened. It was the moment when everything else in the city went back to being dead, too.

* * *

I don't know what would have happened to me in a movie. Movies never go past the ending, never tell what happens next. In real life the government let me go, cut me loose. Whenever I tried to contact someone from the old offices, I was handed through a never-ending chain of polite secretaries and underlings who never knew anything. They continued to pay for my housing and a stipend just as they always had, though. I don't know if it was their way of saying they were sorry, or their way of keeping me placated so I wouldn't talk.

A lot of people expected me to talk, to write a memoir or return to journalism, but I didn't have anything left to say. Nothing until this, and even this isn't enough.

Though I loved him - and I did love him - I don't think I ever understood him when we were together as well as I do now that he's gone.

Sometimes I imagine that he'll come back, claw his way up through the ground like the corpses he gave life to, but I know that he won't. And even if he did, it wouldn't really be him. I know that for certain, because he taught it to me. Whatever powers the living can assert over the dead, their power over us lies in their absence, and in our inability to bring them back.