Dead Set: A Novel Read online

  “ ’Kay,” said Zoe sleepily.

  “You all right?”

  Zoe nodded. “Yeah. Just weird dreams.”

  “I’m sorry I’m gone so much right now,” said her mother. “It’ll be better soon.”

  “It’s okay,” Zoe said. “I understand.” Soon. Like everything else.

  She smiled, knowing it would reassure her mother just enough to leave her alone.

  “Wish me luck. I have an interview with the art director of a cool new tech and art magazine.”

  “That sounds great. Good luck,” called Zoe as her mother blew her a kiss and disappeared. A moment later she heard the front door close. She waited for a moment longer, listening. When she was sure she was alone, Zoe got her hairbrush from the dresser. As she pulled hair from between the teeth she wondered what Emmett wanted with it. But how could she—or anyone—know what someone would be like if all they did was stack souls in boxes and hook themselves up to a machine so they could live other people’s lives? It’s like something an alien would do, thought Zoe. Maybe that’s how the Martians are going to invade the earth. Through record stores no one ever goes into.

  School was a kind of fever dream. Emmett had told her to come back at the same time, which meant she had to go to all of her morning classes and stay for lunch. If someone was trying to invent a new kind of torture, she thought, this was it.

  Zoe didn’t hear a word anyone, teacher or student, said that day, including Mr. Danvers. All that existed in the world was the record store and getting to it at the right time. It felt like she was in a kind of excited trance, trying to will the hands on the classroom clocks to move faster.

  While she was putting her book in her locker after Mr. Danvers’s class, she saw Absynthe.

  “How are you?” Absynthe asked.

  “Okay.”

  “You took off kind of fast yesterday. I was a little worried.”

  Zoe shook her head. “I was just surprised. It’s all good.”

  Absynthe leaned against the lockers. “If it’s any consolation, one of the teachers smelled the vodka—hell, it stank up the whole lunchroom—and Rexx got suspended.”

  “Damn. I was a little pissed, but I didn’t want that.” Zoe frowned.

  “It’s for the best,” said Absynthe. “Her parents just split up and she’s been tweaking hard about it. She’s lucky that she got snagged at school and didn’t pull a James Dean in her mom’s Honda.”

  Great. Someone else creeping up on death. Was everyone dying these days?

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Shit happens,” said Absynthe. He shrugged. “They’re making her go see a counselor and join a teenybopper AA group.”

  “I hope she’s okay.”

  “She’s a good girl. She’ll be fine.” Absynthe smiled at Zoe. “So, you brave enough to try lunch with us remaining dissolutes?”

  “I can’t,” Zoe said, wishing she’d prepared a good lie in advance. “I’m only here for half the day.”

  Absynthe gave her a nod of deep understanding. “Lucky girl. You legit leaving or ditching?”

  Zoe put the last of her books away and closed her locker. “Ditching, I guess.”

  “Where to?”

  Zoe thought about it for a minute before answering. She still didn’t know Absynthe very well. How much could she tell her?

  “It’s probably not a big deal,” she said finally. “Really, it might all just be a waste of time.” She immediately regretted saying it. For the first time since leaving the record shop, Zoe wondered if what she’d experienced might have been some kind of sick trick Emmett liked to play on girls and that he’d just laugh at her when she showed up, bag of hair in hand.

  “Sounds like a guy,” Absynthe said knowingly. “Most guys are a major waste of time. But they smell nice, so what are you going to do?” She started walking back toward the lunchroom, giving Zoe a little wave. “Let me know if you get lucky.”

  “I will,” said Zoe, heading the other way, toward the exit.

  On the walk to the record shop, Zoe had a couple of moments of panic. Yesterday she hadn’t paid much attention to the route and she’d been so out of it on the walk home that she hadn’t memorized the way. As she walked she nervously gnawed the inside of her check until she bit so hard it started to bleed. She cursed and spit blood in the street.

  She wished she could talk to Julie and Laura. Julie always seemed so grounded and Laura was flat out the smartest person she knew. Zoe suddenly felt very alone and off balance without them, without anyone to talk to but Valentine. And Valentine just lived in her dreams. According to the doctor her mother sent her to, Valentine was her imaginary friend, a result of an acute emotional crisis. When Zoe told the doctor that she’d known Valentine all her life, since long before her father died, he’d talked about invented memories and how Zoe must have been suppressing abandonment issues since childhood. She decided the doctor was an idiot and she’d stopped listening to him. But now she wondered if he might not have been at least a little right.

  If Valentine isn’t real, then I’m just talking to myself and there’s no one anywhere, she thought. And that’s exactly how it feels sometimes, like I’m alone and trying to make friends with the echoes of my own voice. The full weight of that possibility, that Valentine might be nothing but her own bad wiring, made her feel worse. More alone than ever and possibly crazy. Zoe pushed the thought out of her head and looked around for something familiar.

  And saw, with a shock, that she was standing at the front door of Ammut Records. She still couldn’t remember the route she’d walked to get there. Maybe I’m not supposed to? she wondered. Maybe not knowing is the way. It didn’t make much sense but it’s what got her here and back home again.

  Zoe reached for the door and stopped. She felt in her pocket and found the compass Valentine had given her. Or had she had it all along and convinced herself that he’d given it to her? The compass pointed due west. Zoe shut her eyes and closed her hand around the toy.

  I don’t know if you’re real or just me talking to me. Either way, wish me luck because I really need it right now.

  She opened her eyes and entered the store.

  Just like yesterday, it was cool and pleasant inside. The pine smell of burning incense hung thick in the air.

  “Right on time,” came Emmett’s low voice.

  She looked around, and through the dimness she saw him standing back by the beaded curtain.

  “Did you bring me what I wanted?” he asked. In the strange light she couldn’t see him step forward, just his shadow.

  Zoe reached into her pocket and pulled out the plastic bag that contained strands of her hair. He accepted the bag, held it up to the light, and weighed it in his hand like they were doing a drug deal.

  “Good girl,” he said. “But next time when you bring me something, please bring it in a paper bag or wrap it in a tissue. Plastic is so”—he paused for a moment as if groping for a word—“unnatural.”

  “Okay,” said Zoe, thinking, Next time? Right now I’m not a hundred percent sure I want a this time.

  “Well,” said Emmett conspiratorially, “I suppose you’d like to see dear old dad?”

  “Yes,” she said, and followed him through the curtain into the back room, feeling a dizzy mix of excitement and fear.

  Emmett already had her father’s record out. It was leaning against the wall near the incense burner. While he put it on the Animagraph and adjusted the legs, Zoe looked at the bins. There must be hundreds of lives in there, she thought. It’s like a cemetery for ghosts.

  “Ready?” asked Emmett. He stood beside the Animagraph, holding up the elaborate headphones.

  “Why did my dad end up here?” Zoe asked.

  “His spirit got lost on its way to somewhere else.”

  Zoe ran her fingers over the coarse paper cover of one of the special records, tracing the outline of the symbols. “Then why isn’t he a ghost like in the movies? How did he end up her
e like this?” she asked, spreading her fingers across the record cover.

  Emmett did an exaggerated shrug. “God? Gods? The universe? I don’t know who makes decisions like that,” he said. “I’m just a small businessman.”

  “Yesterday you didn’t ask my name or anything about me, but you knew who I was. You knew that my dad was here. How?”

  “You found the back room. That meant there was something for you back here,” Emmett said.

  “How did my dad get lost? Did he do something wrong?” Zoe nervously chewed the inside of her cheek again. It hurt and the broken skin felt gross, so she stopped.

  “Some spirits are too weak to go. Some can’t let go of their previous lives.” Emmett held up the headphones again. “Maybe you can ask him when you see him.”

  “I don’t understand any of this,” said Zoe. “And I don’t believe in magic.”

  “And yet, here you are.”

  Here I am, she thought. She looked over at the bins. She couldn’t stand the idea of her father lying there, forgotten and dusty, slotted between other lost souls. She went to Emmett and stood in front of him. “I’m ready,” she said.

  He slid the elaborate headphones over her head. As he wrapped the last cord around her neck, she felt a little jolt of claustrophobic fear again. She slipped a hand into her pocket and felt around for Valentine’s compass. She closed her hand tight around it.

  A moment later, Emmett patted her shoulder. Zoe readied herself, not sure what she was expecting or even hoping for. She knew in the still, small center of herself that didn’t always hurt, that wasn’t always on the verge of tears, that her father couldn’t possibly be here, couldn’t be anyplace where she could actually talk to him. But the rest of her wanted anything that would, for even a moment, bring back some sense of him from his shattering absence.

  Zoe heard the scratch of a needle dropping into a record groove.

  And she was in a club, sweating, pumping her legs to the thrashing beat of a band. They were playing impossibly fast and at an impossible volume. The sound was like being punched in the chest.

  The club was crowded, the air thick with the familiar smell of cigarette smoke and sweating bodies jammed together in too small a space. People kept bumping into her, but instead of knocking her back, the way crowds always did at shows, they just sort of bounced off her and kept moving. She was much taller and heavier than she was used to being. She could see over people’s heads all the way to the stage, where Black Flag was raging through “Rise Above.” She moved her arms and they felt huge. It took a few minutes but then Zoe understood that she was inside her father’s life, looking out through his eyes, feeling his excitement and a sense of such utter well-being that she knew he had to be drunk or high, maybe both. And she was caught up in that, too, a part of him, smiling through the chemical euphoria that had buoyed him through some random night when he was just a few years older than she was now.

  Through the noise and smoke her gaze—his gaze—fell on a girl. She was almost as tall as he was, with a dark Mohawk, lurid purple eye shadow, and a sleeveless denim jacket with FUCK YOU VERY MUCH stenciled across the back. The girl was idly, but methodically, peeling the label off a bottle of Bud with her thumbnail. When she noticed Zoe’s father checking her out, she smiled and stood her ground. It was the smile of someone who knew exactly how hot she was and was utterly at ease with being stared at. It took a few seconds to sink in before she recognized the girl as her mother. The girl who would become her mother in a few years. She felt her father’s heart beat faster at the sight of her. She—he—took a step toward her.

  Then Zoe was somewhere else, tumbling through a cascading slipstream of memories, experiences, and sensory details, all colliding and piling up on top of each other. She was adrift, moving from her father’s childhood to random moments of his life and back and forth across time. She called out to her father from inside him. It was like she was caught in a storm of sights and sounds, smells and textures, all hitting her at once. All the sensations and snapshots of his life. It was too strange even to be scared.

  She was her father later that night kissing her mother (talk about weird) as a bouncer tried to steer them outside after the show. She was her father in a hospital sitting by his own mother’s bedside waiting for her to die. He wanted to reach out and tell her that she’d been a lousy mother, that he’d been a rotten son, and how he loved her anyway. But he’d bottled up everything for so long that he couldn’t get at the words. So he just sat beside her bed, waiting.

  She was her father sitting at his desk in a software company wondering what he’d done with his life. How did I get here? Is this it? I hack code and drive home for dinner until I die? he, she, wondered. She was her father looking at her as a baby crawling to him across the dirty warehouse floor. When he picked her up and held her infant self in his arms, she felt his deep mix of love and fear, the pure animal devotion he felt for his daughter and the stark fear that was a mantra running through his head. What do I know about anything? How can I take care of her? Can’t I just run away and pretend it never happened? Zoe didn’t feel hurt by the thought or his fear because she felt it all coming from the deep, desperate love he felt for her and her mother.

  She was her father in the parking lot, at the end of another twelve-hour day spent punching code, trying to get the new release out the door, knowing that the company’s next round of financing depended on it. She felt a pain start in his chest, like a hand reaching through his skin and bones, squeezing his heart until the whole world collapsed into a crushing knot of agony that cut off his air and pushed away every thought or sensation but the pain. Zoe had never felt anything like it, and just when she thought the pain had gone as far as it could go, a new wave hit. She felt him fall, felt the sun-scorched asphalt dig into his knees and sear his face where he, she, lay.

  Zoe felt her father dying. And in the small, fragile space she held around herself that separated herself from him, she screamed.

  She was still screaming when Emmett pulled the headphones off. For a moment the shock and the strange light combined to make him look weirdly out of focus, like a ghost of himself. It was over in an instant, though, and he was just Emmett again. Zoe sagged to the floor, and at last, barely breathing in the adrenaline rush that had left her cold and shaking, her head still spinning with the shock and fear of feeling her father die, she put her head down and began to cry.

  She didn’t let the tears go on too long. Emmett brought her toilet paper from the restroom so she could wipe off the makeup that had run down her face. Zoe’s hands still shook when she said, “I was him. I was inside him but I couldn’t talk to him.”

  Emmett nodded. “Yes. But I didn’t cheat you. I said I could let you see your father, and that’s what you did.”

  “I saw him die.”

  He nodded matter-of-factly. “It was an important moment for him. I’m not surprised you ended up there.”

  Zoe sat on the floor, drew up her legs, and rubbed the place on her chest where she felt her father’s heart stop.

  “It wasn’t what I was expecting at all.”

  “Most people, even the ones we hold dear, are seldom what we think.”

  “I didn’t want to just see him. I wanted to talk to him.”

  “Ah,” Emmett said. “Seeing is easy. Talking, that’s a harder job.” He took the record from the Animagraph and slid it back into its cover. There was a symbol that looked like a bird in one corner, a snake biting its own tail in another, and then a line of Xs made of bones. “But it can be done.”

  “It can?” asked Zoe, feeling her despair lift a little.

  “Almost anything can be done. If the customer can pay the price.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Don’t you mean how much?”

  “You didn’t want money before, why would you want it now?”

  “You learn fast,” Emmett said. He winked at her and closed the Animagraph.

  “So, what do you want for m
e to talk to my dad?”

  “Hardly anything at all.”

  “Tell me.”

  “A tooth,” he said.

  “A what?”

  “A tooth. A baby tooth will do, or a recent one. It doesn’t matter really.”

  “Why would you want my tooth?” asked Zoe. Leaning against the wall, she pushed herself to her feet.

  Emmett walked to the counter in the front of the store and she trailed after him. The regular, normal LPs in their labeled bins looked strange and crude, like props in a movie. On the counter lay old 45s with torn covers stained by coffee and cigarette butts. Zoe picked one up. The cover was a picture of a costumed man in brilliant red ostrich feathers and a headdress that looked like something from an old western. The man didn’t look like an Indian, she thought. More like a voodoo witch doctor. The 45 was called “I Walk on Gilded Splinters” by Dr. John. She didn’t think he looked much like a doctor either.

  “Why would you want my tooth?” Zoe asked again.

  “Curiosity killed the cat. Don’t you know that?” asked Emmett, a gentle chiding in his voice, but he smiled as he said it. He opened the cash register, took a cigarette and a white plastic disposable lighter from one of the wooden cubbyholes. “It’s an unusual business, you know, minding the dead, running the Animagraph. It shouldn’t be a shock that the payment for those services would also be unusual.”

  “I guess,” Zoe said. This thing, whatever it is, is getting stranger by the minute. But I can’t stop now.

  Emmett lit up an unfiltered Camel, inhaled deeply, and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. “It’s your choice, of course,” he said. “You’ve seen your father, with those pretty cat eyes. What you have to ask yourself is ‘How much do I really want to talk to him?’ ”

  Zoe didn’t say anything. Emmett put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and busied himself stacking the 45s and clearing clutter off the counter. She wondered where the records and papers could have come from. There hadn’t been anyone but Emmett in the shop either time she’d found it. As she looked around it didn’t look like anyone else had ever come inside.