Reliquary Read online



  Title

  Copyright 2014 Bull Garlington

  Ipull up to a house. It’s more like a shell built around a mobile home. An old guy opens the door before I knock and ushers me into his tight little house through the camper kitchen.

  It’s all pinewood, orange carpet, and dark brown sheet metal inside with lamps to match. This guy’s life stopped moving the day the Brady Bunch went off the air. He’s been fishin’ and bitchin’ ever since.

  His face is long and jowly, silver bristled, thick glasses with black frames fogged over by a collection of grease marks so thick the guy is functionally blind. His breath is ragged and furry and I’m thinking I drove 77 miles for this. He offers me a drink but I flash an image of the inside of the fridge and turn him down flat. We sit down. Before I get the tape recorder out he’s talking. I push record and start taking notes.

  “They sent me my wife’s bones in early 89.”

  I don’t even write it down. I’m supposed to be interviewing this guy about cryogenics, about his impending deep-six being a deep freeze and this is the first thing he says to me.

  I write “freak” in tight loopy cursive.

  “Go ahead.”

  “See, they used to couldn’t do full-body cryogenics. They could only freeze your head.”

  “So the idea is, you freeze yourself at the moment of death and 100 years from now, they figure out how to unfreeze you and cure you and you go on living?”

  “Right. But they couldn’t do full body interment at first. My wife was one of the first people on board.”

  “After Disney.”

  He laughs. “It’s true, you know. He really did it. People will tell you it’s an urban myth. You know, like the microwave poodle; but it’s not. They did a fetal on Disney.”

  “A fetal?”

  “Folded him up and stuffed him in a tank.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “Martha.”

  “When did she die?”

  “1989. Cryo team waited in the lobby cause the hospital is Lutheran and they don’t like this form of interment. Goes against God.”

  “Her bones--“

  “They flew her to California. I got there a week later.”

  On the fridge is a black and white picture in a magnetic frame. She’s pretty, like a French nurse from a World War II movie.

  “We’re in love, you know.”

  I lean back and let the tape spin.

  “We bought the first tickets to Mars.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “A company was selling tickets against a future civilian Martian vacation package.”

  “Isn’t that kind of like--”

  “Like buying a bridge? Maybe we were taken advantage of; we’re what I would call believers. We believe in the future.”

  “You’re speaking in present tense.”

  “Well, she isn’t dead. She’s suspended. I’ll see her again.”

  “The bones.”

  “I pulverized her skeleton into a powder.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you. We’re in love.”

  I stare at him for a minute. He’s got a vaudeville twinkle in his eyes. He stands up and opens a cabinet, brings down a dark brown medicine bottle and I’m thinking it’s time for his B-12. I write dementia under freak. He pours a handful of orange gel caps onto the table.

  “Martha,” he’s looking down at the pills as he puts the bottle back in the cabinet. “Meet the reporter.”

  “Mr. Cannon—“

  He dry swallows a pill.

  We just look at each other.

  His vaudeville front dissolves. He looks like he’s about to cry.

  “I’ve never felt so close to anyone as I do to Martha. I can’t wait until they clone her and we can go to Mars.” He crosses his arms stiffly across his chest. He is deeply tanned, his skin husky and crepe paper thin, but his arms have the shape of former strength. Tool making strength. In his chair, he sits perfectly erect and proud. He enjoys his tears. Somewhere in them, his wife is skinny-dipping.

  I need to hit the head and he sends me down the narrow hallway.

  In the bathroom, I open the medicine chest. Nothing but vitamins and heart medicine. No lithium, no valium. No crazy pills. Only some Q-tips and a dark brown bottle full of orange capsules.

  I pop one in my mouth and swallow.

  I whisper, “Hello, Martha,” and take a leak.

  Six months later, I’m covering a celebrity death in Boca Raton. I bribe myself into the autopsy.

  “No pictures.”

  “No shit.”

  We walk into the room and there she is, laid out under the fluorescent lights.

  “Fuck.”

  “You ain’t kidding.”

  “What was it?”

  “Shellfish allergies.”

  “Jesus H.”

  I lean over the starlet’s torso, her tits blue and flat, and look at her neck. It bulges and sags, like someone had inflated her throat. There’s a circle shaved into her hair with a bright red hole in the middle of it.

  “Why the hell is there a hole in her head?”

  “Standard. I pulled a skull plug for a brain biopsy, fished her stomach, all the stuff.”

  “Skull plug?”

  “In the tray.”

  There’s a pink and white nub on a blue plastic tray. I palm it on the way out.

  I boil it, dry it in the oven, put it in my coffee grinder and hit the button. It disappears into a white whorl. I stir it into a strong cup of coffee.

  By the end of summer, I’ve drunk a tiny vial of Pavarotti’s sweat; I hammer a fragment of Larry Hagman’s gallstone in a white linen cloth till it turns into powder and mix it into a strawberry smoothie; I paid $500 for a test tube of Bill Burroughs’ blood work. Dropped it into a dirty martini where it blossomed slow and thick like a black rose.

  I keep a diary with pictures. The obituaries are my snack bar.

  I impersonate doctors and nurses. I volunteer to learn to take blood. I fake a resume as a medical records filer and get a job in a hospital. I comb the oncology report. I make contact with the doomed. I tell them I can offer a kind of life extension. Sometimes I just pay them. I’m voracious.

  By accident, it becomes art. I visit Jane Camden, a gospel singer from the 50s. Jane’s the kind of singer only musicians know about. I’d filed her lab work and realized her primary physician hadn’t told her she had cancer. He’d gone on vacation. I steal a coat and visit her at home. I tell her I’m a grief counselor and when she breaks down, I help her to her couch and talk to her.

  I read Psalms 56:8 when David prays to God asking, Thou tellest my wanderings, put thou my tears in Thy bottle; are they not in Thy Book? It works like a charm. I gently scoop a pipette under her tear duct and her copious crying fills it to the brim, leaving a tiny quivering meniscus of grief.

  The night she dies, I put on one of her records and set the table with white linen and a crystal champagne flute. That was her stage name: Jane Champagne. I pour the flute full of Veuve Cliquot, pour in Jane’s tears, and sip through “Can’t Buy My Heart,” and “Rain,” her greatest hits.

  Finally, I get caught. A mob witness gets in an accident with an industrial food processor. I know the autopsy physician and pay him three grand for a seranoid metatarsal from the body of Ricardo Bartolucci. That night I drop it whole into a jigger of vodka and watch the Godfather. I’d planned to drink it during the toast but I’m really into the scene where Michael shoots the cop and the mob boss in that little Italian place. I let it sit for almost an hour. The bone absorbs the Stoly, expands from the smooth little marble I’m expecting into a spongy lozenge and I choke. I stagger to the phone and pound in 911 but I can’t say anything.

  I wake up in recov
ery with a couple of cops reading magazines by the bed. I’m handcuffed to the metal frame: arrested for cannibalism.

  They find my diary and it gets public fast and of course they try to peg the witness’ death on me but it doesn’t stick.

  I publish my diary and go on tour. People hang around. Goths. Gravers. They offer me fingers, toes, genitals. I haunt the celebrity scene in Hollywood and New York, deliberately sticking to my unfashionable dark gray European suit so TMZ calls me “the Count”. I invite celebrities to elaborate feasts with thirty dishes, offal stews, goat’s eye pie, sweet breads. I tell them gruesome stories. More often than not, I’m gifted with a covert shot of vodka, a tiny crimson flower blooming in its bottom.

  My diary becomes a Hollywood who’s who.

  One day, I get sick and die from an allergic reaction to infected blood. Someone just popped a shot glass of fresh cherry fluid on the counter and I was drunk and hanging out with my hot 20-year-old publicist and tossed it back.

  She was no idiot. Had me cremated. She divided the ashes into gel caps and included them in a special edition of the diary. Made a killing.

  ###

  About the Author

  Bull Garlington is an author and syndicated humor columnist whose work appears in various literary magazines, including Slab, Bathhouse, and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. He was the humor columnist for Chicago Parenting, New York Parenting, Michiana Parent, Tulsa Parent, Birmingham Parent, and Carolina Parent. He is co-author of the popular foodie compendium, The Beat Cop’s Guide to Chicago Eats. Garlington’s features have appeared in newspapers and magazines across the nation since 1989; he won the Parenting Media Association’s Silver Award for best humor article in 2012. His book, Death by Children, was a 2013 book of the year finalist for the Midwest Publishers Association, and was named 2013 Humor Book of the Year by the prestigious Industry standard, ForeWord Reviews.

  Other books and stories by this author

  Bullfighter

  Largemouth Bass

  Many Boats on the Night Ocean

  Reliquary

  Gone

  Jenny’s Parents Are Cool

  Out

  Birdhouse

  Lucky Jim

  Chaste

  The Beat Cop’s Guide to Chicago Eats (with Sgt. David Haynes)

  Death by Children–I Had Kids so You Don’t Have To!

  Connect with Bull Garlington

  I really appreciate you reading my book. I would be especially honored if you’d consider writing a review.

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  Visit my website: https://bullgarlington.creativewriter.pro