Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

“How about on zee ztoop?” Lucy asked. Neither of them spoke to her for the rest of the morning, though the slightly less beautiful one had cracked a window and angrily puffed her smoke outside. “Ça suffit?” she’d said to her friend, who rolled her eyes.

Ryan, the removal service driver, stuck his head in the door. “What goes on, my friend?”

Lucy never heard him coming, but Ryan didn’t inspire her to spring like a maniacal jack-in-the-box from underneath her desk. Ryan was the first adult who had treated Lucy like an equal. He was handsome in a craggy, been-around-the-block kind of way and older than Lucy, older even than the twenty-eight-year-old cross-country lover — a word Lucy liked to say out loud in the bathroom after she practiced her maniacal face. “Lover,” Lucy would say dramatically, pursing her lips and pouting a little. Lucy suspected Ryan might even be in his early forties.

“You’ve still got your scarf on,” Lucy said, touching her own throat. Ryan pulled one end of the flowery scarf he wrapped Audrey Hepburn — like around his head whenever he drove. It swirled around his neck as he pulled; then he stuffed it deep into the pocket of his gray coveralls. Ryan wore women’s clothes when he moved bodies, a hangover from his delinquent days before he found his calling in transporting cadavers. He’d accumulated several DWIs, had his license revoked, and started dressing in drag to evade the cops. He grew to like the way the skirts left room for a breeze, the way the scarves billowed silkily against his face, the way the big movie starlet sunglasses hid his face. He slipped the coveralls on and off easily over his outfits before he entered a home or the medical center.

“That’s a lot of work for a little silk,” Lucy said.

“It’s a ritual,” he said, shrugging. “Something to keep me out of trouble. Back in a minute — I left my smokes in the morgue.”

Lucy could understand a ritual like that. Sometimes she gripped the edges of her desk in an effort to keep herself from vanishing into thin air. Please stop. Lucy felt the slip begin. She felt herself sliding out of normal time. Minutes flying, whizzing, by her. She was nauseated from all the flying and whizzing. She clung to the arms of her chair, waiting for it to pass.

The same thing had happened the morning after she and the cross-country lover spent the night in the van outside a rest stop. After a dinner of potato chips and whiskey, she woke up in the morning to the sounds of a little girl learning to ride a bike in the parking area. Her father ran behind her. “Keep it up! Keep it up!” he cried. “I can’t, I can’t,” she said, but she did. Lucy shook her cross-country lover awake to explain how waking up in the same clothes she’d worn yesterday with whiskey on her breath, smelling of drunken, halfhearted sex on the side of the road to the sounds of her own lost innocence made her feel like something was rotting inside her, like her heart was black and shrinking. She needed him to understand that. Could he understand that?

“You’re young, you’ll get over it,” he said. As he liked to remind her, twenty-one and just out of college was light-years away from twenty-eight. “You’re hungover. You just need a greasy meal,” he said.

Ryan stuck his head back in the door. “Gotta run. I’m late. I stayed to help clean up again. This one was a real mess — a recluse with fifteen cats.” He aspired to one day running his own cleanup company, providing maid services for the families of the recently deceased, cleaning up the area where the person died so the family didn’t have to. Changing sheets, sweeping up. He had the perfect French maid’s outfit at home.

“But before I go — Mrs. Sally Calhoun,” Ryan said, reading the name off a sheet of paper.

“Sally Calhoun,” Lucy repeated, thinking back over the calls she’d taken. “Sally, Sally, Sally. Calhoun, Calhoun, Calhoun.” In an effort to help Lucy feel more connected to her job, Ryan told her the names of the bodies he transported in case they ever matched a person whose intake she’d done. So far, they hadn’t.

“Nope,” Lucy said.

“Hey, you might finally get your earthquake,” Ryan said.

“Don’t tease me, Ryan.” Lucy longed for her first earthquake, the big one, the quake that would come and shake her life, sievelike, until the secrets dislodged from the sedimentary layers of her epidermis, revealing themselves to her.

“Last night on the news, there was an earthquake that stretched from San Diego to Santa Barbara. Six point three. Humboldt started shaking today.” He wagged a scolding finger at her.

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“It’s not something you see,” Ryan said. “It’s like death.”

“Yeah, whatever, you’re not going to give me that lecture again, are you?” Ryan often expounded on his theory of existence: if humans could really see forward to their own deaths, they’d never move forward, a balking mule of a species.

Lucy did her best bray.

“I’m out of here.” Ryan winked and was gone.

Lucy felt the earthquake moving toward her. It would knock a few sizable pictures off the wall and send a quiver so hard up her thigh she would have multiple orgasms. But still, the feeling that her organs were decaying slowly, that she was dying, wouldn’t lift. This morning she’d woken up convinced again that she had AIDS. The cross-country lover had injected heroin years ago. He’d slept with bedloads of women and a handful of men. “Have you been tested?” she asked him one morning, shaking him awake. She was always shaking him awake.

“Several times,” he’d assured her without opening his eyes. So maybe she had cancer. She could feel its slow, deliberate movement through her system. “What does cancer look like?” she asked, putting her hand on his arm. “I don’t believe this,” he said, wrapping the lumpy motel pillow around his head and turning away from her.

“Maybe it’s all the fast food,” he suggested when Lucy burst into tears outside a Jack-in-the-Box. “Too much grease.”

They bought fruit in a grocery store, lingering in the spray that followed a thunderclap in the fruit and vegetable aisle. Lucy looked around at all the other people pushing shopping carts, somehow leading normal lives, deciding between whole milk or 2 %, unperturbed.

“We’re trespassing,” Lucy said. Maybe she had a disease that no one had ever heard of, something so complex and insidious that doctors would only be able to find it after she died. “Will you make sure someone does an autopsy on me when I die?”

“Let’s get the fucking fruit and get out of here,” he said.

“We’re homeless,” she said. “Transients, nomads.” She knew she was being melodramatic. She wanted him to scream at her, give her something to work with.

“You’re a nut,” he said, drawing her to him. She’d wanted to punch him.

Her first day on the job, Lucy had been quick to make excuses. “I got this job through a temp agency,” she told Ryan before he even asked. “You know, it’s the kind of thing you talk about later— that crazy job you had.” The temp counselor had given it the hard sell — a good job, benefits (unheard of!), but Lucy didn’t need convincing. The job was exactly right, the giant question mark at the end of the sentence that was the cross-country death march, an opportunity to look her deepest fear in its cold blue face.

“It’s an experience on the way to something else,” Lucy continued to explain when Ryan didn’t respond. She thought she was being deep in a shallow kind of way. She assumed he’d agree with her, that he felt the same way about working for a corpse removal service.

“An experience on the way to what?” Ryan asked. He wasn’t smiling, and Lucy blushed so deeply her hairline burned with the spreading heat.