Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

“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 anally maintained grassy expanse. Abby looked to her feet and read the one nearest.

Nearby, a couple of Federicos in mud-spattered overalls began lowering the coffin into a freshly dug grave. Kylee sat graveside in her chair, honking into a lacy black handkerchief. Another Federico had taken the role of minister, reading the ashes-to-ashes stuff. In groups of twos and threes the surviving Federicos clutched each other, wiping tears, pressing their foreheads together in the solidarity of grief. Abby glanced at other headstones. Federico #301, Federico #425, Federico #16, Federico #27, Federico #153. Each of them a beloved friend. After the coffin came to rest the survivors took turns tossing in shovels full of dirt until the cavity in the earth was filled. A light mist began to coalesce. A Federico unfolded a black and Gothic umbrella over Kylee’s head as they made their way from the cemetery to the path. As they proceeded a Federico sidled up to Abby and explained how the numbering system worked.

“We’ve all got a number, sure, but the number changes based on deaths. So if Federico #1 dies, all the other Federicos move up a number. So #2 becomes the new #1, #3 becomes the new #2, and so on. That way there are no gaps in our numbers. Now it looks like I’m going to be Federico #178.”

“What about the little Federicos?” Abby asked. “How often do they arrive?”

“Every couple months or so. We’ll put in an order for a new Federico now that we’ve lost one. When the boat shows up with a new Federico, it’s quite a big deal. Maybe you’ll be here to see the arrival of a new little one.”

The Seaside Love Palace popped and groaned as it settled in the cold night. Abby flipped through a stack of celebrity biographies until after midnight, when she rose and slipped into the hallway. There was a whole wing of the manse she hadn’t seen yet; now would be a good time to check it out. Every ten feet or so along the hall hung one of Isaac’s garish phantasy paintings, each lit by a single halogen bulb. Here was Isaac in a fishbowl helmet and space suit, firing a laser gun, Kylee in a gold bikini clutching his thigh, fending off what appeared to be a bad seafood experience. In another he raised a sword to deliver the coup de grâce to a kind of furry, maybe-dragon sorta thing that had Kylee in its talons. Abby imagined the couple posing for these portraits, frozen in war-gaming gear while a bearded and kilted graphic designer sketched them onto canvas. After studying five or six of these paintings she got the crazy idea that they’d actually loved each other.

Abby descended a flight of stairs and heard music. Sort of a disco/house beat, a track off one of Kylee’s old albums. She maneuvered around shadows of furniture, past a dormant kitchen and a reading room where taxidermy animal heads gawked from the walls. At the end of a short side hall she came to a black door through which she could feel the pulse of the bass. She pushed it open a crack and peeked into a ballroom that smelled like a mashup between a gymnasium and a health clinic. From speakers thumped a hit single about promiscuity and shopping for luxury goods. Abby’s eyes widened. From a chintzy-looking throne atop a dais Kylee barked through a megaphone, directing the Federicos in a mammoth, gay clone orgy!

From her hiding place, for over an hour, Abby observed the carnal ritual like an anthropologist, finding the grunting contortions much like the underground Bionet parties she had attended in college. News of those parties had spread by word of mouth, directions changing and conflicting, secret passwords whispered into ears. One rainy night Abby had piled into a car with three of her friends—Jadie, Megan, and Heather—and headed across the Lions Gate Bridge into a zone of murky abandoned industry. Out here the streets eventually gave up and ended in tangles of debris and broken concrete. They parked in an alley and followed the directions to a metal door marked with a crop-circle glyph. The four friends looked at one another, questioning whether they were really up for this, a quartet of graduate students in a downpour, willingly giving someone else—a stranger—complete control over their bodies. Abby opened the door.

They called these kinds of places pleasure centers. This particular pleasure center was down a musty-smelling flight of stairs that opened into a subterranean space lit with purples and reds, forms gathered around pillars checking out the newcomers, the periphery fuzzed-out visually with hushed conversations and lips occasionally sipping glasses of energy drink. A dance floor, if one wanted to call it that, framed by spotlights. No music, just a low rumble of whispers and body noises. On the dance floor was a human pyramid—three men on the bottom, two in the middle, and a single man standing on his hands, which were planted on the two men beneath him. The pyramid remained stationary for several minutes. The man standing on his hands pulled in one of his arms to balance on one hand. Abby watched the man’s forearm tremble. Was he going to fall? No, actually, he was extending his index finger so that it was the only part of his body touching the man beneath him. He balanced a full minute as a ripple of applause went through the spectators and a patch of blood spread on the leotard of the man beneath him. Carefully, the human pyramid disassembled itself and a couple women carrying towels rushed to the one who’d been the pyramid’s apex. He looked exhausted, slumping into their arms as they wiped his face. A violent shudder racked his body like an epileptic seizure, but short, a jolt.

Over a PA system a calm and reedy voice intoned, “He’s going to be just fine. His nervous system is confused and it will take about an hour before he’s back to feeling like himself. And tomorrow his arms will be a little sore. Don’t worry. We’ll take loving care of him.”