The Body

[MalReynolds]

Part 1:

The Body

-

“Is that him?”

It was a loaded question. The shape laying under the thin, white, industrial sheet had, at one point, been my little brother. Was it my brother anymore? I stared, thinking hard.

The brother I remembered didn’t really have pale skin or blue chapped lips. His pupils tended to move and dance, and his chest – it would rise and fall regularly as his lungs would inflate with air.

I reached out to touch my not-brother, but was verbally stopped before skin could touch skin.

“Don’t touch him.”

I looked up at the bull in the blue suit. He had a handlebar moustache with a small bit of red on it. He was sweating hard, despite the cool temperature of the room. There was even a freezer door open, and he still had the audacity to sweat. I briefly considered telling him off, calling him a bad word, but I held it in. Instead, I drew my hand back.

“Is that him?” He repeated.

I sighed. “If it is, you’re certainly not giving me a whole lot of time to wrap my brain around what I’m seeing, officer.”

“Not for nothing, son, but I have places I need to be.”

I rolled my eyes. The whole processes of taking down his badge number and filing a complaint didn’t appeal to me very much. I looked back down at the cooling board, and tried to remember the last time I had seen my little brother alive.

He had been talking to me, machine gun style, about some girl and a guy named Alvin that he was going to spend the night with. Alvin, the second grade wonder.

Did you know he skipped first grade? He’s way smarter than I am. I hope we’re in the same class next year.

Way smarter than you’ll ever get to be, kiddo.

I looked back up at the cop, who had begun to impatiently tap his foot.

“What if it is?”

“Then you say it is. You sign a paper. You leave, I leave, your brother gets cut on and put in the ground.”

“Any idea how this happened?”

The bull sighed. “Found him in Lake Cheswick.”

“Someone drown him?”

“Hell if I know. Autopsy should tell us what happened.”

I stared at the cop. “Go. This is him. Enjoy your fried circles in the car.”

“Audacity, son, will get you nowhere.”

“You’ve got powdered sugar on your lapel, not ground in to the fabric yet, which means it hasn’t been on you that long. You’ve got a mark around your finger from where you were twirling your keys on the way into the building – it’s too cold out for your key ring not to leave a mark - and on that goofy mop you call a moustache – there’s a slight bit of jam. Donuts. Car. Go.”

He stared at me for a second, reaching up and cleaning the bit of jam from his face. “You gotta go first. I have to sign you out.”

“Then you’re going to have to stay while I look at my brother.”

-

The day after his funeral, I found myself staring at the mirror.

“This is you, Dabney. These are your sad eyes. This is your thinning hair. You’re 20. Your brother is dead – dead. You have no family. You have nothing anymore.”

My eyes danced electric as I tried to focus. I brought my hands down on the sink to steady myself, and averted my gaze. The white porcelain.

“This is a sink, Dabney. It holds the water that spills from the faucet. This is your watch, Dabney. You’re running late for work.”

I turned and left the bathroom, stepping out of the perfect, clean, sterile world, into my small, cramped apartment. There were boxes stacked up to head height, but as I walked past the futon that doubled as my bed, I paused. I could move into the bedroom that my ex-little brother had used.

He was my ward and he ended up dead.

-

The morning was frigid, the air escaping my lips in a fine vapor. I moved down three flights of stairs, to the bottom of a small walkway where my beat up chariot sat. I moved myself into the driver’s seat and started the car, staring over.

In the shotgun was a first grade reader and a Goosebumps book. On my way out of the complex, I flung both of them out the window. If the school needed them back, they could bill me.

I tried not to think during the drive, to keep myself as neutral as possible. The situation hadn’t numbed me – I had been desensitized to things like this a while ago.

Cold rain. Cold night. Warm blood.

I just kept trying to make myself feel something other than anger. Not any myself – there was nothing I could have done. By the time I knew he wasn’t at Alvin’s, he was at the bottom of Cheswick, hanging loose among the shale and limestone. I know Alvin lived near Cheswick.

I pulled in to my parking space at the medical office, and shut my car off.

I slammed my hands against the steering wheel three times, my fists balled tight.

Three was all I could afford. I was, after all, running late.

-

My boss, Sharon, told me that if I needed some time off, that I could have some time off, and I told her that I needed money more than I needed sanity, because I would much rather be indoors and insane than freezing and insane.

I pushed the cart of medical charts through the file room, stopping ever foot or so to pull a chart from the cart and put it back on the shelf or pull a chart from the shelf an put it on the cart.

I flipped through some of them, reading what each patient had, what was making them ill, or in a rare case, what was killing them slowly. Every patient had the same kind of cancer – life. There was no cure. In the end, it would kill you. As much as the doctors tried to prolong it, it would ebb away at your spirit, your mind, your body, until you were nothing but a pile of ashes.

It was a charade. People would come in sick and leave sick and the doctors would pat themselves on the back like they had done a good job, like they had turned water into wine. The medical field was a joke, and the doctors were the jesters telling it, pleasing all the kings and queens that walked through. It’s hospice care.

The end result is the same. The only thing they do is take the pain away as long as they can.

Sharon rounded the corner into the file room. I pretended not to hear her come in. I liked it when she called my name.

“Dabney?”

I turned my head, casting a glance behind me. “Hey.”

“You can go. HR told me I could go ahead and take whatever time you needed out of your emergency time off. They said this qualified.”

“I guess that’s good news for me, then.”

Sharon nodded. She was a short drink, about fifty pounds overweight. She had long blonde hair that fell around her shoulders like anvils. No matter what she tried to do with it, it stayed static, stuck to her head like a terrible wig. When she nodded, it was like someone was holding her scalp in place while her face moved.

“Stop by and tell Beth your leaving. She didn’t know you were even here.”

I could feel myself smile, but I made myself stop.

“Oh, yeah?”

Sharon nodded again, scalp held by the firm hand of gravity.

-

Dr. Beth Berkley. We hired her on after we hired on Dr. Schulz, because he wasn’t bringing in any patients. Dr. Schulz was a devout man of faith and spent one out of every four years in the US practicing medicine. He spent three out of every four in another country, underprivileged, spreading the word of God and helping converts toss away their symptoms.

Dr. Schulz was nice enough. He pushed 50, but looked so much younger – and he had a shy streak that only added to the youthful illusion, making him more like a schoolboy than a grown man. As far as I can remember, he’s always had all kinds of problems working the computers. Technology ages so much.

“It’s like I was in a coma,” he told me one time, when he was first hired on. “A strange thing to go away for three years, come back and then... Then there’s this. You know? And it’s like I’ve gone backwards, really. Because the stuff we use out there – out in the underdeveloped world – is second hand stuff from ten years ago, maybe more. I’m at such a handicap,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder.

“I’ll bet.”

He was a peculiar man and his introverted nature did little to draw patients in.

Dr. Beth, on the other hand, was a firecracker. She was a young doctor, only six years my senior, and what I heard from Sharon was that we were getting her cheap. Dirt cheap. She was cheerful enough that when she started seeing the sick ones, they talked about how nice she was. How open she was. And, if her patient was a man, how often she wore skirts.

I lumbered into her office, not bothering to knock because the door was open. She wasn’t in her chair, so I moved and sat down, kicking my feet back and resting my hands behind my head. This is what it would be like if I were a doctor, if I weren’t a file boy.

I saw the shadow of Brad walk by the door. He was our transcriptionist – send the tapes out with him, they would come back blank, but he would have the contents spilled over on to paper. One day turn around. Highly efficient. Chiseled jaw, too. Made me sad that I didn’t have one, a little jealous.

I pulled the hood up on my sweatshirt, and looked into the dark shield I had created. I saw my ex-little brother’s face. He was staring at me, cold, clammy.

His eyes shot open, and I looked right at him. My gaze did not falter.

His mouth opened and water rushed out.

It was so real. I felt like I was about to be hit with a deluge. I kicked off the desk, ripping the hood from my face, panting.

Beth was staring at me from the open door. She ****ed her head to the side like a curious pug, and closed the door behind her.

“You okay, Dabney?”

I shook my head. “No. Not really.”

Beth pulled her hand up to her face, pushing her fair hair behind her ear. She sat on the edge of her desk, crossing her legs, looking at me. Her blue eyes seemed to cut into me like diamonds. It hurt when she looked at me like that.

“Anything you want to talk about?”

I shook my head. “Not especially, no. Just, I won’t be coming in to work for a while. I have to sort some things out.”

“Oh. Is this about...”

“Yeah. Word spreads fast, doesn’t it?”

She stood, and walked over to the chair. “It’s not your fault, what happened.”

“I know,” I said, looking up at her. “I don’t blame myself.”

“Good.”

“I mean, I know I’m not responsible.”

“If you stay in your apartment all the time, you’re just going to drive yourself crazy, Dabney.”

“Yeah. I don’t plan on spending too much time there.”

“Where are you going to be?”

“Finding out what happened to him.”

“Your brother?”

I nodded. “I had the coroner’s report sent over. They said, blunt force trauma to the ribs, neck, and head, but he drowned. That was the official cause of death. They said he fell while he was walking past Cheswick and sank.”

“And you don’t think that’s what happened?”

“I’m a city urchin,” I said. “The bulls, they don’t care what happens to me or people like me. I’m not saying that’s not what happened. But if it isn’t, I’ll find out.”

“And then what?”

I shrugged. “I’ll figure it out as I go, I guess.”

I pushed the chair back, and stood. “Thanks for listening,” I said, patting her on the shoulder.

“Anytime. I like what goes on up there.”

I didn’t smile, but I could have.

“Oh, and before you go, Dr. Schulz wants to talk to you.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” I said quietly, zipping up my red sweatshirt and heading out the door.

[ShastaTwist]

I looooooooooove it.

Write more.

Now.

[Dimitri13]

How the hell are you so goddamned good at writing, Mal?

[Chromer]

Because Mal has a gift for writing.

[Dimitri13]

Rhetorical question Chromer -.- I was remarking at how good he is at writing.

[MalReynolds]

Part 2: The Lake

There wasn’t much I could do over the following days but try and put the situation behind me, and check out the area where my brother fell in.

I made my way to Cheswick, via my heap, and drove through the area slowly. The police tape, if there had even been any put up, was long gone. The drive was pleasant enough. Cheswick was a thickly wooded area where the upper crust lived in houses set back in the forest, atop half mile driveways and winding hills.

Every mile or so there was a break in the trees, and a driveway on the left. On my right, the trees were much more thin, revealing Lake Cheswick, glinting in the morning light. There was a steep hill that led to the lake, as if it were sunk in a crater, all the way around. I looked out for stairs that would lead down to the beach, and could only find rickety sets, the kind that kids would dare each other to go down.

I stepped out of the car and pulled my hood up over my face, shielding myself from the bitter winds that came up and off the water. My car was parked haphazardly on the side of the road, tilted at an angle so far that it looked like it would tumble down. I reached out and touched the wooden railing, my fingers tracing the petrified wood.

The stairs supported my weight, but they groaned as I made my way down. There were twenty steps in all, and each was uneven, warped. My feet hit the sand, and I walked over to the lake, where the water was rolling up in small waves. A thin fog moved across the lake, taking me inside, leaving me a small red dot on the snow white horizon.

I turned and looked at the embankment, estimating how fast my brother would have had to be going to fall, roll, and make it all the way into the lake. A single misstep would have taken him the entire way, and there were certainly enough branches and rocks that could have done him harm.

I skirted along the edge of the lake, staring into the water as it would come up and turn away, like a lover scorned, going in for the kiss but getting rejected at the last second. I hunkered down and touched the water.

If the bulls were right, this is what took him.

If they were wrong, then this was his makeshift grave.

“Hey,” a voice called out behind me, disembodied in the mist.

“Hey yourself,” I responded. I kept moving.

“Who is that?”

“Dabney Parker,” I said, under my breath. “Who are you?”

“Jesse David. I own most of the lake front property.”

I still couldn’t see where the voice was coming from, exactly. It called out ethereal behind me, but that was the extent of what I could see.

“Hold still, Dabney,” the voice called. “The morning fog can get dangerous. You could wander off onto a jette, and I don’t want another tragedy happening out here.”

I looked up as a blue polo shirt made its way over the sand. It was attached to a man with thin, cropped hair. He wore khakis with a hemp belt, and no shoes.

“A little cold for no shoes,” I said.

“You get used to it. What brings you out here, Mr. Parker?”

“That little boy that drowned. Paying my respects.”

“Oh. Did you know him?”

I shrugged. “No.”

“The police say he fell from that ledge, and tumbled down. The ice on the lake helped pull him under, the best I can figure it.”

“Many people fall into the lake, Mr. David?”

“No. Not especially. Most people around here know better than to go walking by the lake at night. Anything could have scared the boy over the ledge. A car driving too fast, a bird calling too loud. Especially because he wasn’t from around here. Most people tend to walk on the other side of the road.”

“It’s a shame he didn’t know.”

“Like I said, Mr. Parker, it’s a tragedy.”

“What about Alvin Diamond?”

Mr. David ****ed his head sideways, like a curious pug. “You didn’t hear about the Diamonds?”

I shook my head.

“Alvin was hit by a car and killed. The Diamonds packed their things up and moved on.”

My breath caught in my throat. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah. Right on the heels of that other kid dying… it’s no good. No good at all. I mean, the kid drowning, that’s a tragedy, but Alvin was hit by a drunk driver. That just seems so senseless.”

“It does. You’re hiding something.”

“What?” Mr. David took a step back.

“Change in tone, closed body language, and you touched your nose. Either you have a lot of ticks, or there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at, Mr. Parker – “

“Getting defensive. Another sign of lying.”

“Well, you can just read me like a book,” he said, sarcastically.

“Hiding behind humor. Keep them coming, I’ll keep listing them.”

“I think you should go.”

“I think you should tell me the truth.”

“You’re a stranger, Mr. Parker. Why would I tell you anything I didn’t have to?”

I shrugged. “I might be faster than you. And I’m wearing shoes. I’m not threatening you, but it is cold out, you’re losing the feeling in your feet, and all I want is for you to tell me what you’re hiding. I don’t care if you plowed Alvin over with your car, if that’s what it is,” I took a step towards him, “But I need to know what you know.”

He sighed. “I didn’t hit Alvin. It was my car, though. My brother did. He was driving drunk.”

“Where is he now?”

“Where do you think? Prison.” Mr. David relaxed his shoulders. “It’s not something I like telling. These things, they just happen, though.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. Mr. David had turned and began to walk away. I saw his blue shirt floating through the fog.

I looked down towards the water, staring at my reflection. The sun began to break through the fog. I pulled the hood from my face, and stared into my own eyes.

-

I called Nicole after I left Lake Cheswick.

Nicole had always been an idea girl, which is what drew me to her in the first place. She had a keen sense of humor, a kind smile. But she was too kind, too open. I couldn’t be around someone like that very long, even though she fit my archetype for beauty. She saw the good in the world that I didn’t want to, that I couldn’t. It was a wedge between us.

“Happy birthday, Nicole,” I said into the handset of my phone. “The big 1-8. Legal now.”

“Hey, Dabney,” she said. I could hear the smile in her voice. “I wasn’t expecting a call from you.”

I leaned against my car. “I’m full of surprises, I guess. I haven’t talked to you in a while, have I?”

“Four months, but I’m not counting. Thanks for the birthday wish.”

“No problem.”

“Is that why you called? To wish me a happy birthday?”

I sighed into the mouth piece. “No. I just needed someone to talk to. I can’t talk to Beth without them putting me back on the clock, and I can’t go to work yet. I’m just not ready.”

Nicole’s tone fell to what I called, ‘the serious level.’ No witticisms, no humorous observations. It was flat and earnest.

“What’s going on, Dabney?”

I told her about my brother. All she could do was gasp, “Jesus,” and offer a slew of apologies.

“And now I found out the kid my brother was supposed to be spending the night with got clobbered by a car, by a drunk driver, and I just can’t make sense of it. It seems too random to not make any sense.”

“Don’t look too deep, because there might not be anything there at all,” she said. “You could just end up making things worse for yourself, if you go bother that kid’s family. It would be pouring salt into everyone’s wounds, and things don’t heal up right when you keep picking at them.”

“I know,” I said. “I know. But I can’t accept what happened. I tried, and I just – I simply cannot. And I know this is hard to understand, and I know that it doesn’t make sense to you, but it makes sense to me. There’s something else going on here.”

I honestly had no clue if I was deluding myself, chasing phantoms. It was possible that I was creating my own mystery, that I was piecing together parts of a case that didn’t exist. I was prolonging my torment. If that was the case, if I was only driving myself insane, then that’s where the road would end. And I was fine with that.

“And if there’s not?”

“Then there’s not. Do you want to meet up somewhere, Nicole?”

There was a long pause. “I don’t think that’s a great idea.”

“I didn’t think so, either, but I’m still asking. Why not?”

“Because as much as you need someone right now, you won’t admit that to yourself.”

“What about asking to meet up?”

“Going through the motions. You’ll throw ideas against me, I’ll reject them, you’ll still use them. I’m just cutting out the middle man.”

“You’re right, maybe I don’t need anyone.”

I heard her laugh on the other end. “That’s not what I said.”

I chuckled. “But it’s what I heard.”

“Did you just laugh?”

“It was a chuckle. Not the same.”

“Oh, whatever, Dabney.”

I smiled, and hung up the phone. It was a momentary thing, the smile, and I felt it melt from my face as I pulled myself into the car. I started it, the headlights cutting through the fog, and turned my car around using a three point instruction.

I pulled onto the road, and headed back to my part of town. The city.

Maybe she was right. Maybe I was making it up.

But my brother deserved as much.

[Chrissi]

This is good. Real good. Mal, ilu. But now there's a problem. I really want to read more.

[09876]

I'm loving this so far. I've read through Parts 1 and 2 without stopping. Your story enthralls me - please write more!

[DrugstoreCowboy]

wow. you're really talented. i want more!

[Crashfan3]

This is awesome. Can't wait for part 3. ^x^

[DrugstoreCowboy]

come on mal. im dying here. i had a dream about this last night.. i almost felt like writing part 3 myself after what happened in my dreams.

[MalReynolds]

I'm going to be a chump and blame it on the holiday and how little free time I've had. I've got more to the story, just not a whole lot of time to sit down and write it.

Worry not, worry not. More will come.

[ShastaTwist]

What about that one story that everyone liked and then you totally DGAF'D ALL OVER IT AND SAID THAT THE GUY HAD A CHICKEN HEAD AND

I HATE YOU MAL

[MalReynolds]

Sure, everyone liked that story. Except me. It just kept getting more and more absurd, with the amount that Kevin, a pickpocket, could do. In the first section, he killed a bunch of mercenaries. He was super human. It only made sense to pit him against a creature that was superhuman. And an 8 foot tall body-building russian man with the head of a chicken seemed appropriate.

[NFD]

It's sort of like present Poe. Great first part!

[DrugstoreCowboy]

Originally Posted by MalReynolds

I'm going to be a chump and blame it on the holiday and how little free time I've had. I've got more to the story, just not a whole lot of time to sit down and write it.

Worry not, worry not. More will come.

thank god. im kinda interested to see if what you come up with is kinda like what happened in my dream.

or maybe, with your permission, I'll write an alternate ending? Sort of like the Choose Your Fate Goosebumps books.

[sleeplessdragn]

I haven't read this yet, but I thought I'd note that I had forgotten how pleasurable a story by the amazing MalReynolds was. I plan on being reminded of this amazement. ^_^

[DrugstoreCowboy]

bump ;D