Page 19

19

Desecration of a Corpse

Jake

“Definitely a pulse,” she says to the side of my face, relaxing her hold. “I was worried for a minute.”

She’s thinking about death now. I’m always thinking about death. I could turn my head slightly and whisper my secret in her ear. But instead she sits up and from this short distance her face is a blur. Everything is a blur. I skim the bedspread for my glasses, but they don’t turn up.

“Why are you wearing your gloves, weirdo? We’re in the middle of a desert.”

I glance down. I have no idea when I put them on. “It’s the air conditioning. It’s freezing.”

“Should be perfect for the Iceman.”

She’s not cold, apparently. In one fluid motion she slides on top of me and peels off her shirt. She’s in soft focus above me.

I feel like we skipped a few steps.

She tugs the tip of each finger, one by one, and removes my gloves for me. I flex my fingers experimentally. I can’t read her face without my glasses. I don’t know where to put my hands, so I keep them on my chest.

“Is this part of your virginal Catholic schoolboy mystique?” she whispers. “Touch me.”

I don’t know where to start, so she starts for me. She takes my hand and places it over her heart, and my fingers twitch to life. I trace the contour of her collarbone, out to her shoulder. I can feel better than I can see. I touch a smudge on her deltoid.

“Colder,” she says, and I reverse the direction of my stroke. “Warmer,” she says, when my fingers collide with her bra strap. I’m holding my breath again. I brush a lock of her hair over her shoulder, and trail my fingers along the strap, down her back…

It’s both predictable and surprising, the way my body reacts to hers. It’s been so long. I keep calling her a vampire, but I feel like the one drawing my energy from her. It’s this feeling of being watered after being left to wilt. I’ve been dried out like a spore for so long, hibernating, waiting for a reason to come to life, and now here’s Dolores. Surprising. Interesting. Vibrantly and unapologetically alive .

I forfeit my battle with her bra clasp before I’ve begun. I bring my hand around her rib cage and touch the blurry blown out candles with twisty ropes of smoke billowing from the wicks—and her breath hitches, like it tickles. Enough of that. She threads her fingers through mine and presses my hands into the coverlet on either side of my head, pinning me in place, then flops down on top of me, heavily, and plants her mouth on mine and kisses me, long and slow. No one’s ever kissed me like this, like a spider sucking the life from its prey.

When she pulls away, she sets to work on the buttons of my shirt, quickly, and it’s too fast for me. My brain hasn’t caught up with the moment. I wrap my hands around her wrists to slow her down, and I spot a tombstone tattoo on her inner forearm just in front of my face where I can see it, inscribed with dates. The dates Aunt Laura pointed out. I touch them with my thumb.

Dodi recoils and shakes my hands off. When I look up at her face inches above my own, her expression’s changed to a frown. The apex predator sniffing disdainfully at the slimy little amphibian.

She slides off the bed and onto her feet, and across the room I hear the rip of a zipper. Her bag clunks loudly when she drops it on top of the dresser.

“Pretty presumptuous of you to book us one room,” she says, rooting around inside. I finally find my glasses on the side table and slide them on.

“I booked us two rooms.”

Her hand stills inside the bag. She plucks the room cards off the dresser top next to her bag, and I can see the moment she spots the different room numbers on the cardboard sleeves.

“You followed me in here last night—this morning. What time is it?” I ask. It was close to dawn when we arrived.

She stomps into the bathroom, and I lie there, wondering what happened and feeling like an idiot, as usual. The shower starts. Unfortunately I don’t have a knife, or Mother’s clothes. The clock next to the bed reads one in the afternoon, which means I slept for seven hours. I haven’t slept that long in years.

We’ve missed the first half of the training session. It doesn’t matter. I get up and toss our conference lanyards onto the bed. Then I notice Dodi’s bag.

The shower is still running. I pick up the bag and weigh it experimentally in my hand. I put it back down on the dresser and it thunks. The zip is open, but the flap conceals the contents. This is different from a retaliatory snoop around someone’s work desk. I leave it there.

When she reemerges and barks at me to vacate so she can dress, I have a shower too. When I come back out dressed in the identical, boring white shirt and gray slacks I wear every day, she’s turned to the window with her phone pressed to her ear.

“Please make sure she actually eats something. Give her a cuddle for me,” she whispers into her phone. A call to her neighbor about her cat. “I’ll be home soon.” She registers my presence and ends her call without looking at me. She chugs the watery black poison spewed out by the hotel room coffee maker. “What’s happening today?”

“The seminar reconvenes in fifteen minutes.”

“Reconvenes?”

“We missed the morning.”

She doesn’t seem to care too much about this. “And then what?”

“And then we go out.”

She leans a shoulder against the floor-to-ceiling glass window and peers out. If the glass broke, she’d fall right through.

“Maybe I’ll stay in. Get room service. In my room.” There’s the slightest emphasis on the final two words.

“That would be rude. After I bought you a ticket?”

Her head twitches, as if she catches herself from turning to look at me.

“A ticket?” She says it contemptuously. A ticket. Ludicrous.

“It was just something I thought you’d like. An event I thought you’d be interested in.”

“Right.” She’s silent again, still leaning against the glass. I fold yesterday’s clothes; zip my bag; put on one shoe; and then the other…

“An event,” she says spitefully. She slurps her coffee with disdain.

Her curiosity is killing her.

“ Murderers at Work ’s Dead in Las Vegas event.” I use a special tone to let her know she’s an idiot.

She swivels around and sloshes black dishwater on the carpet. “ Murderers at Work ?”

“Yes. The live event.”

She stares at me, uncomprehending. “You listen to Murderers at Work ?”

“I started.”

“Which episodes?”

It’s a bizarre question. Am I supposed to list off the numbers of each episode I’ve listened to? Her harsh angles soften, the line between her eyebrows disappears, and she regards me with an unreadable expression. “Well, this is unexpected. How are we going to incorporate body disposal into our itinerary if you’re booking it up with surprises like this?”

But she doesn’t seem upset. She’s not upset at all. She’s a mercurial little monster, and for this split second in time she’s on an upswing. I did right. She pushes off from the glass and marches briskly past me in her red-soled shoes. She opens the door and I follow her out, and in the hallway outside we collide with— Cynthia .

She blinks owlishly at us. She looks at my damp hair. She takes in the key card in Dodi’s hand. She raises one wrist to inspect the time.

Las Vegas hosts thousands of conferences and trade shows each year. So of course Cynthia is here taking her HR conference at the same time we are, in the same hotel that makes its money by stuffing warm bodies into suites and conference rooms to maximum fire-safe capacity. Nature abhors a vacuum. I wonder if she’s learning any good tricks. I wonder what the speakers have to say about rooting out and quashing workplace affairs, or handling unprofessional behavior between employees on business trips.

If she’s picked up any tips, she doesn’t implement them just now. She just stares at me with the same ice-cube eyes as that day in the annex. Jacob Ripper? I still can’t recollect how we crossed paths before.

Cynthia turns into her room across the hall from ours and the door clicks shut behind her.

Dodi bolts down the hallway and I race to catch up. She smashes the elevator button with one hand.

“What the fuck ,” she hisses.

The doors open and we enter, and I press the button for the second floor.

“She’s in the room across from you,” Dodi huffs under her breath. “Are you fucking kidding me.”

On the second floor there’s a crowd—several crowds—all spilling out from different conference rooms, mingling and getting tangled up in one another. A big panel says Las Vegas 2023 HR Expo . We’re swimming with sharks now. I grab Dodi’s hand and tug her across the room. A big menu of lectures on the far wall reads things like Demystifying the Millennial Employee: Lazy or Under-motivated? And Why Work-from-Home Doesn’t Work . We wind down a tortuous hallway, leaving the noise behind, and come to a smaller sign taped to a door:

PIVOT Synergistic Systems Certification

A woman at the door smacks gum and hands us a pamphlet.

WELCOME! This lightweight, custom-tailored and solution-driven course will equip you with the practical strategies and problem-solving mindset to confidently implement transformational change in your organization within a holistic framework…

“What does this mean?” Dodi demands.

“I just hand out the pamphlets,” the woman says with the emotionless eyes of livestock on a transport truck.

Dodi and I take a pair of seats in the back of the room, the lights dim, and the afternoon session begins. Dodi crosses, uncrosses, recrosses her legs. She adjusts her purse in her lap. And then her little elbow presses against mine. She doesn’t jerk away. Slowly, her hand slides from her lap until it rests on the edge of her chair, pressed close to mine in this packed room, and a second later, the back of her hand rests against mine where I’ve tucked my fingers under my thigh to keep warm. She keeps her hand there, and I don’t register a single thing said by the speaker for the rest of the afternoon.