David Ohle: The Old Reactor

As the diners looked on, some in shock, some amused, the fry cook opened the woman’s suitcase and the bag and said, “We’ve got six heads here. Personally speaking, I’ve never seen a jelly bring in more than three at once. Don’t ask me why they sever them like that or why they always drop them off at Saposcat’s. I don’t have a clue. They don’t seem to know what they’re doing.”

The beheadings of loved ones was something new to the native jellies of Altobello, who were formerly devoted to family, to the home, to community values, until they set up an encampment out near the Old Reactor about a hundred years ago and began drinking heavy water from the Reactor’s storage vessels in the belief that it was an all-around tonic for general health. After that custom became a part of their culture, there was no predicting how a given jellyhead might behave. They sometimes went critical.

Moldenke looked over the obits every day in the City Moon , always a little displeased after reading down the list of hundreds of dead that his aunt’s name wasn’t there. He only had two weeks before he would have to make other arrangements, to find her a plot, to have a ceremony, to arrange at least a few words by someone in some kind of vestment. And the house on Esplanade — who would live there and watch the place while he was gone? And could they be trusted to spend his aunt’s maintenance money wisely?

More pressing now was to find her a decent resting place without spending any more of the ten mill than necessary.

On days when his aunt’s name wasn’t in the paper, Moldenke wasted a good portion of his time drinking bitters at the Come On Inn and thinking of ways to put her to rest with dignity, but inexpensively. What money was left could be stashed in the house on Esplanade, where there were plenty of hiding places. The fund would help get him started again when he returned from Altobello.

On the next Sunday, a chilly, blustery day, Moldenke’s aunt’s obituary finally appeared in the paper. He hurried into his clothes, ate a stale bear claw, hid the shoebox with the remainder of the ten mill under a paint-spattered drop cloth in the attic, and rushed to the car stop. It would all have to be brought off quickly, the ceremony and the burial. He would be leaving for Altobello in three days.

When it comes to the recent spate of impulse suicides among Bunkerville jellyheads, explanations vary. Some blame it on a localized effect of the “Voice of Bunkerville” radio broadcasts over station KUNK, which often make serious demands on listeners. Take Eliard Mozarti, a metals fabricator, who said friends bought him a wind-up radio last Coward’s Day and each night since then he dialed in the Voice of Bunkerville from five to nine and when the order went out to kill himself he tried. Fortunately for him the hot bullet sizzled through his optic nerve, leaving him half blind but otherwise uninjured. He was up and about that very afternoon, chatting with close friends. KUNK put the idea in his head, so he claims.

The question is, can this kind of radio go on killing the weak of will for a lark? Can it take all jellyhead life from earth, one tortured soul at a time? Bunkervillians seem helpless under its spell, unable even to take their radios by the knobs and turn them off. Why couldn’t they jerk the plug and silence the thing for good? Why do they let the broadcasts play on in their heads until they feel the heat of the bullet themselves?

Moldenke had to lean forward at a striking angle when he got off the streetcar to make headway in the blasts of polar wind and the wild whirls of dry snow in the streets. He was looking for the cold-storage unit, a shabby gray adjunct of the Charnel itself where the aunt’s body was being kept under refrigeration. The building had once been a gymnasium and dormitory for young Christian men.

Moldenke stood outside in the cold, looking impatiently through the glass doors until someone saw him and opened one of them a crack. “Yes?”

“I’m here to pick up that older lady who was in the paper this morning. She died in the Charnel. Name of Moldenke.”

The attendant opened the door fully. “Come in. You’d be…?”

“She’s my aunt, a wonderful old gal. I loved her a lot.”

“There is a storage fee to pay. Twenty-six hours. That’s a half mil.”

Moldenke peeled off two twenty-fives and gave it to the attendant. “That’s a damned steep charge. I hope you pay your people well.”

“Did you want her to rot?”

“Never mind. I’ll take the body.”

“How did you get here?”

Moldenke hadn’t given a moment’s thought to how he would move his aunt from Charnel Storage to wherever he would eventually bury her. There was no sense wasting money on a costly plot at Eternity Meadows. But he could afford a shovel and there were empty lots all over town. Would the ground be frozen and the digging impossible? He would have to think of an alternative.

“I came by streetcar.”

“What will you do then, carry her?”

“I suppose so.”

“She is very light, practically a skeleton. What you can do is let us cremate her. I’ll make you a special offer. I’ll do it myself on my lunch hour.”

“How much?”

“Another quarter mil.”

“No, I’ll take her.”

“She’ll be cold and stiff for a while, you know.”

“I figured as much.”

“Come into the back, then. We’ll get her.”

The attendant led Moldenke down a cinder-block hallway into the “cool room,” where the dead were stacked five or six high with I.D. tags wired to their toes. Snow drifted through the wide open windows, settling into little hills atop the frozen bodies. The males were stored on one side of the aisle, females on the other. Some of the protruding feet were blue and bruised, others as white as the snow itself.

“Where are the children?” Moldenke asked. “There must be dead children somewhere.”

“We keep them separately. If we threw them on the pile, they’d slide off and we’d have a big mess. We keep them in bins, standing up, little shoulder to little shoulder.”

“I understand,” Moldenke said.

“This weather arrived just in time,” the attendant said. “The lines at the ice distributing stations were growing rapidly longer morning to morning until the cold came. These bodies would smell to holy hell if they thawed.”

The attendant stopped and held one of the tags close to his eyes. “Here we go. This is her.” Being a recent death, she was very near the top, one layer deep. “You lift that top body up and I’ll slide her out.”

The attendant had no difficulty in pulling the aunt’s body out from the stack and standing her on her feet in the aisle and holding her up by the neck. “See,” he said. “It’s easy when they’re frozen, hardly any friction.”

Moldenke was unsure just how to carry her. In his arms, like a stiffened child? She was no heavier or larger than a golf bag. He tried to pick her up, but he couldn’t get a good grip. She slipped and fell to the floor. The attendant kept standing her up. “Why don’t we strap her to your back?” he said. “I’ll get some rope.”

The attendant went off to a supply room, leaving Moldenke alone in the icy quiet with his frozen, naked aunt and the hundreds of bodies. He looked for the gold eye appliances that had kept her eyelids open. They might have had some value at a pawn. They were gone. He would ask the attendant about that.

He put his gloved hands around her frozen throat to keep her upright and closed his eyes in thought. How will I dig a hole in the hard ground? Where will I get a shovel? Will they even let me on the streetcar with a frozen corpse strapped to my back?