These were some of the things Dennis picked up as he wandered through the crowd:
1) Death had its own time frame in which connected events bent around mortal time to touch each other. In dead time, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand had coincided with the deaths of millions of World War Two soldiers. For reasons widely subject to speculation, so had the sinking of the RMS Titanic and the deaths of several big game huntsmen touring French colonies in Africa.
2) The dead also had their own vocabulary. Recently dead people were called rotters or wormies. People who’d been dead a long time were called dusties. Dusties tended to stay in their own enclaves, secluded from the modern ideas and inventions that scared them. Famous dead people were called celebs and they:
3) were considered by popular opinion to be fakes. This allegation caused Blackbeard to roar with anger and threaten to march the speaker off a plank. It was pointed out to him that this was the sort of behavior that had created the theory that celebs were fakes in the first place. Celebrities conformed too closely to their legends. Cleopatra was always seductive and never bored or put-upon. Lincoln declaimed non-stop poetic speeches. And hadn’t someone spotted Lady MacBeth earlier that evening when she wasn’t even real?
4) Reality, it seemed, was a contentious issue. Mortality shaped the living world by imposing limits. In the limitless afterlife, the shape of things deformed. That was one reason dead people came to parties. Rotters still carried an impression of the living world. It was like going home again for a little while. Besides, there was good food, and who didn’t like watching General Sherman march up and down the linoleum, threatening to burn Atlanta?
While Dennis pondered these new pieces of information, he also picked up a number of more personal things. He had an intuitive sense of where these latter were leading, though, and it wasn’t somewhere he wanted to go. Consequently, he performed the time-tested mental contortions he’d developed as a third grader who ate too much sugar while pretending he hadn’t done anything wrong. Dennis was a master of self-denial; he didn’t even let himself realize there was something he wouldn’t let himself realize.
For instance:
1) Whenever Dennis passed a group of strangers, they interrupted their conversations to peer as he passed, and then returned to their huddles to whisper even more urgently.
2) Their renewed whispers were punctuated with phrases like “Do you think he deserved it?” and “Poor son of a bitch.”
3) At a certain point, they also started saying, “At least the wife got what’s coming to her.”
4) These last remarks started occurring at approximately the same time as people began disappearing to attend another party.
As the crowd thinned, Dennis finally located someone standing alone, a very drunk flight attendant staring blankly at a tangle of streamers. On being pressed, she identified herself as Wilda. She was unbelievably hot, like a stewardess from a fifties movie, in her mid-to-late twenties with long, straight blonde hair, and a figure that filled out all the tailored curves of her uniform.
The hint of an exotic perfume was all but drowned out by the stench of alcohol. She wasn’t currently crying, but tears had streaked her mascara.
Dennis decided to pick her up.
“Melancholy stage?” he asked.
She spoke as if her lips were numb. “What’s the point? On this side?”
“Of being melancholy? I didn’t know there was ever a point.”
“Mortality,” she said gravely.
Her expression altered ever so slightly. Dennis tried to echo back an appropriate seriousness.
“I knew a man once,” she went on. “Died in the same crash as me. An actor. Very famous. I was so nervous when I poured his in-flight drink I thought I’d spill. He asked for orange juice.”
Dennis gestured back toward the buffet tables. “Do you want a drink?”
She ignored him. “After we died, he never spoke a word. Not a word. He… his mouth would open and this sound would come out… eeeeeeeeeee… like a dying refrigerator…”
She looked at Dennis urgently. Her eyes focused briefly. They were weird, electric blue, like a sky lit up by lightning.
“He was grieving for himself, I think. Or maybe he just used up all his words in the world? And when he died, he was just so happy to be quiet that he never wanted to talk again?” She blinked, slowly, her wet mascara smudging more black beneath her eyes. “It’s like the celebs. You know?”
“Would you like to kiss me?” Dennis asked.
“I bet the real dead celebrities are nothing special. They probably blend in. Like my friend. But the fake ones, I think they’re made from a kind of collective pressure. None of us lived our lives the way we wanted to. It gets mixed up, all our needs, our unsatisfied desires, the things we wanted to be back when we were alive. Beautiful. Famous. The best of our potential. We make the celebs to be like that for us. Since we can’t.”
Wilda gestured vaguely toward the crowd. Dennis turned to see Benjamin Franklin demonstrating his kite, which rapidly became tangled with the multi-colored balloons. Marilyn Monroe struggled with her skirt while standing over an air-conditioning vent tucked next to some bleachers. Gandhi sat in the middle of a group positioned near the buffet tables, pointedly not eating.
“You should stay away from them,” said Wilda softly. “They’re bright and crazy. They suck you down.”
Dennis turned back to look at her beautiful, tear-stained face. “I’d rather be with you anyway.”
She blinked at him, too lost in her own drunkenness to hear. Or maybe she just didn’t believe him? Dennis glanced over his shoulder at Marilyn, ripe and coy, dark-outlined eyes sparkling. Something dark and furious clenched in his stomach.
He was only thirty-five! Marilyn made him so choked up with jealousy he couldn’t breathe.
He turned back toward Wilda and leaned in to dab some of the liner from beneath her eyes. She started toward his embrace but got tangled up with her own feet and started to fall. Dennis caught her before she could hit the floor.
She looked up at him, smiling vaguely. “I wanted to be a gymnast. You know? I was good,” she said, and then, “Do you think it’s cheating?”
“What?” murmured Dennis.
“My husband’s still alive.”
“So’s my wife.”
“What if she weren’t? Would it be cheating then?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t that faithful when we were both alive.”
“Neither was I.”
Wilda’s voice cracked like ice. Tears filled her eyes, colorless like vodka. Dennis looked down at her left hand where she wore a tan line but no ring.
“I don’t like being dead,” said Wilda.
“I’m sorry,” said Dennis.
He held her, silently, until she recovered enough to stand on her own. “I’m sorry, too,” she said at last. “I should go to the other party.”
Dennis tried to fake a smile. “Don’t drink too much while you’re there.”
Wilda reached out to touch his shoulder. Her fingertips were frozen.
“When you figure it out,” she said, “try not to be too sad.”
She faded away.
A few of the times Dennis cheated on Karen:
1) The coed who got stuck in the Dallas airport after her flight was canceled who he wooed with four margaritas, his best dozen dirty jokes, and a rendition of Sting’s “Desert Rose.”
2) The bartender in Phoenix who’d just been dumped by her fiancé and said she needed to know what it was like with a guy who could commit.
3) The drunk divorcée from the Internet ad who got on the hotel bed and dropped her pants without even a word to acknowledge he was there.