The Bath Procession: part one

[The first part of my newest novel, The Bath Procession. This material is copyrighted]

He put a cup of stale coffee in the microwave and checked the fridge again, aware of the envelope on the table in the next room. When he’d run out of things to inspect, he brought his coffee to the table and sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the rain.

Inside the envelope was a form letter that offered condolences and spelled his name “Able,” alongside the remains of his father contained on a black 500TB hard drive. He examined it, unable to determine much without checking the files, but too nervous to do so. It was enclosed in a plastic shell with a tiny green light on its face. Really it was a sort-of crystalline disc, suspended within a framework of compressed metal leaves all concealed by the shell. There was a faint whirring sound coming out the back. Abel decided everything was in place and placed it next to the TV.

But it meant, of course, that their last interaction was now The last interaction. Had Abel understood this at the time, or had he expected to see his father again? He considered the possibility that ambushing loved ones with a fait accompli like this was protocol. It was irrelevant; the last coherent words from his dad had been some months back. There was nothing left to make an imprint of.

The rain died down and he leashed up the dog, all the while assembling a timeline of his father’s disintegration. It was difficult to determine a definite start, and there were many instances of reversal. Abel remembered when, not long ago, they’d seemingly been reminiscing about mom when his father started recalling events that had never happened, were not possible. Names pulled from the fog that he presented as Abel’s cousins or children from secret families. Were any of them even real?

Sadie sensed slack on the other end of the leash and bolted. Abel cursed her a few times and threw his hands over his head but stayed on the sidewalk as she barreled through a muddy soccer green. The rain picked up again. Everything went static. Cate was texting him (he knew it was her without having to check) as the sod melted and leached over the pavement, where it was sucked away by storm drains. Sadie was somewhere in the mist, tearing through the swamp of a once sharp soccer field, heavy with rain and blind with joy. Why fight what couldn’t be stopped?

Later, after a shower and a quick skim through his emails, Abel called his sister.

“Oh good!” she said, “I’m back down to planning one funeral!” Abel could hear the sounds of his nephews attacking one another in the background. “We were going to put you in the same urn as dad–assuming you ever surfaced, alive or–”

“They sent it,” he said.

“And?”

“It’s here, in the next room.”

“And?”

“Well, what should I do with it?”

“Toss it in the ocean, who gives a shit?”

“It was his wish, Cate.”

“Okay, then ask him. I’m taking the boys to the VR clinic this Saturday to spend a few hours with their grampa. As always, you’re welcome to come with.”

It would be pointless, Abel knew. Neural scans on patients with early onset Alzheimer’s had naturally poor integrity. The rendered version of his father available for scheduled online sessions would be no more intelligible than the man who had technically died a few days ago. It was fair to assume the version saved to the hard drive was similarly addled, glitchy, destined to corrupt eventually.

“Did you at least try searching for that thing–”

“Jeff and I want to buy you out of the house.”

“The word we couldn’t recognize–hold on, I’ve got the will–”

“Jeff’s gym buddy is a realtor. He says he can move dad’s house in under a month–”

“What about dad’s doctor?”

“We can offer you two thirds the value if you agree to help Jeff redo the kitchen. We figured a bit of work might be good for you?”

“What was her name? She seemed to recognize the word from somewhere–”

Their conversations diverged, unresolved, until one of Cate’s sons dropped a plate and she hung up abruptly, sending Abel a text five minutes later reading: funeral dates pls!!!!! next wknd?????

There was some confusion at the hospital. Abel went asking rather timidly for the doctor who’d last seen his father; the nurses put him in an examination room, believing him to be a patient with some embarrassing ailment he couldn’t be entirely open about. When he was finally seen–by someone else, a severe-looking woman in a sterile lab coat, already tapping pen to clipboard impatiently upon entering–Abel tried to explain without sounding strange. He just had a few follow-up questions for a doctor whose name he’d forgotten. He offered his best description (dark hair, short and wavy; shiny green eyes; freckles and very soft cheeks) and only ended up giving away that his lasting impression of the doctor was that she was very attractive. He was given no answer with respect to the patient’s privacy, and a week later received a bill for the visit.

That night he opened a bottle of rum and scrolled through the entire hospital directory but couldn’t find a picture or a name that sounded familiar. He scoured his inbox for anything Cate may have forwarded him concerning his father’s care but only ended up with the will and the word no one recognized. Internet searches turned up nothing. What was “BE’SAU”? Was the apostrophe intentional? Only the doctor seemed to know…

***

After a dreary eulogy, Abel was accosted by a fleet of somber relatives all waddling towards him in unison with their arms outstretched, faces resurfaced from memory, twisted by age and sorrow. He accepted their condolences and offered some of his own, then departed for the front yard of the church where the younger members of the family were chasing one another and scuffing up their nice clothes. They laughed and enjoyed the sunlight while their parents frowned from the pavement, unsure if it was acceptable to punish them for not being sad enough. It’s impossible to get them to grasp how definite this all is, one of Abel’s uncles lamented, when they can pull out their phones and check on grandpa between speeches. The uncle’s teeth were purple from red wine. Abel couldn’t remember how old this uncle’s children were, only that they were too busy with their own lives to attend the funeral. But just cause they can, the uncle continued after a long sputtering cough, doesn’t mean they’ll ever want to. He took some pleasure in making his point, then drifted away.

Abel got Sadie from the back of his car and let her loose on the kids, whom she proceeded to chase then allow near enough to rub her belly, repeating this again and again in a way the kids never managed to predict or grow bored of.

Abel didn’t mention the hard drive to anyone.

People continued to send their love and sympathy–mostly older, distant family members who recounted their fond fragile memories in lengthy emails and texts. When the messages came from Abel’s contemporaries, the tone was less sentimental. Many of their parents and grandparents had been simulated as well. Many of them had signed on when it had been a fad some decades ago and were now cashing in on what they considered a retirement plan. The next generation was already learning to adapt; it was less of a hassle than one might think, legally speaking. There were ways out of one’s duty to maintain the databanks and pay upkeep fees, Abel’s old friends told him. Benji Kasem, whom Abel hadn’t spoken to since his high school graduation, had started a new business where he could take your deceased relatives’ root files and compress them for long-term storage in sub-zero satellite servers while preserving a remote-access proxy for in-home projections with limited functionality. He offered Abel a discount and asked if Cate was still married.

Benji, whose sister had been good friends with Cate and dated generally above her grade in those days, recommended Abel reach out to her ex, David Tsai.

“The water polo captain?”

“I’m sure he hasn’t played water polo in years. He’s fuckin paraplegic. He’s a motivational speaker. You haven’t seen him on TV?”

Abel put David’s name into a search bar and received pictures of the teenager who’d excelled at putting him into headlocks, his face now buffeted with scars, the hair now thin and dusted with gray.

“Lost everything in a car crash, including his wife. They’re still married, though. Him and the simulation, that is. Can’t believe you haven’t heard this–you gotta get out more–”

Abel dropped the phone and collapsed onto the floor. He pressed his face into the rug and bit his lips until they bled, Sadie standing in the doorway the entire time too scared to approach. Somehow this tragedy-qua-miraculous-rebirth so fully eclipsed the sadness of his father’s death that it felt like an insult. Something had been lost to rigid procedure, and his father–still living after death as a CGI representation of all the boxes he checked in life–would never be able to articulate it, words forever failing as he continued to exist on a server somewhere in outer space, sputtering in fabricated delirium long after the final rotation of the Earth.

***

The blackouts started in one of the cities by the coast. Looking out his window one night, Abel was confused to see a whole row of buildings on the horizon blink out of existence, leaving a pit so dark one could see the stars through it. When the outages reached his complex and lingered for weeks, the food in his fridge spoiled and all his clothes went unwashed. The frequency of the blackouts reached where most hours of the day were spent without power. Those who could, left town. Abel turned nocturnal–it didn’t matter, the stores were never open, day or night, citing municipal disaster. People were making bonfires in the street, taking goods and tossing cash behind the counter, laughing: they better fix this soon! A black market for pre-loaded phone batteries emerged. Prices were outrageous, but some people needed the juice just to have a light after the sun went down. Even those who smugly reached for camping supplies early on were running low on propane by the third week.

Abel’s batteries were all dead. He was helping himself to Sadie’s kibble. During the night the other people would congregate, making fires and keeping close tabs on one another. Abel could sense their heat from blocks away and diverted, seeking out the cold, barren edges of the neighborhood where there was nothing to loot and all the people who could afford to leave the darkness had placed bars over their windows and solar-powered security cameras above the doors. He let Sadie run around their empty culdesacs and shit on their front porches. He said fuck you to their shitty cameras and poured himself rum as the sun came up over the shitty artificial pond they’d built for themselves, while the geese that guarded its shores flew off in a v formation.

***

Jeff was a beer man: when Jeff arrived, beer arrived with him. Occasionally, if open spaces were to be involved, his two boys arrived as well. A conflict zone would be designated in which the boys were allowed to lavish violence upon one another, and Jeff would find a comfortable seat thirty feet away to enjoy his beer and complain about his children. If the boys were not present, this last part could still easily be accomplished.

“Cate’s hurting,” Jeff told his brother-in-law after a restrained belch. “It’s finally starting to hit her. We still see the old man weekly, but only from across the room–this room where the walls just don’t feel there, nothing’s there, you can’t touch shit…”

Abel’s oldest nephew retrieved a large, thorny stick from the brush and advanced on his brother, swinging it gaily while their father continued sipping, zen-like, set on enjoying a calm he felt he deserved. The other young families in the park pushed their strollers around the two boys automatically. Abel was unused to this early onset of bloodlust in children, having only his sister above him. But Jeff was the middle of seven brothers. His childhood was a two-front war. All he saw in his boys’ attempts to destroy one another was inexperience, and it bored him.

“She’s worried about you,” Jeff continued, gracing Abel with a rare moment of eye contact. “We both are. Me and her. But she’s…”

“Scared?”

The younger nephew had wrested the stick from his brother and tossed it into a stream. He pounced with all the deftness of an eight-year-old and landed on his brother’s chest, soon with both hands wrapped around his throat.

“Where’d you get the shiner?”

Abel sat upright. He’d forgotten about the black eye and the sunglasses he’d been sporting to cover it.

“Fell. Into a door. Can’t see shit these days.” The blackouts were still rolling at this time.

The older nephew, with the clear size advantage, stood upright with his kid brother in his arms and heaved him face-first into a brown puddle. The child sat up, soaked and bleeding from the lip, and began to laugh. Some wave of insanity overcame them both, and they ran off hand in hand to a tree tall enough to climb.

Jeff, content with Abel’s answer, scoffed at his boys.

“The little one’s got hands,” he explained to Abel. “He’ll be trouble. But, right now, he doesn’t really get it. He thinks it’s all just fun.”

Abel and his dog were hungry, so they took the stairs down to the street where there were stalls selling skewers of grilled meat and vegetables brought in from out of town. There was no light but the orange flicker of open grills, and all the people who hung around waiting for their food looked eyeless and unsteady. Abel paid and took his food away to the neighborhoods the rich people had abandoned, leading Sadie with pieces of charred steak he’d throw out into the darkness ahead. She would chase after the pieces, panting and flashing teeth, disappearing into silence and dark and after a pause she would bounce back to Abel’s side. He plucked off the final chunk and wound back his arm while Sadie shot off to meet it on the other side. He threw. She was gone, and the food was gone, and Abel waited for the click of Sadie’s nails on the pavement to break the fuzz of soundlessness.

The black roared like an eight-cylinder engine. Some ancient dread shot up from Abel’s gut and he assumed the position of prey. A truck barreled toward him, clipping his knee and shin and sending him flailing toward the gutter. Blood seeped down his pants leg and into his sock. The truck was gone before pain started to nest in his skull, his left knuckles, his ear–which may have been dangling from a single thread of flesh and slapping raw up against his neck.

“Sadie!” he cried repeatedly.

Abel tried to stand but fell back against a nearby wall. He continued to cry out Sadie’s name, his eyes and cheeks hot. He could hear no clicking and no whining. He hobbled forward, two blocks to the left, then to the right, his right foot askew. When he had no more energy, he sat on a grassy median and took stock of his injuries. There was a lot of blood.

With painkillers, everything that took place in the emergency room seemed to be happening fifty feet away. Abel watched them set a broken leg, apply sutures, and bandage up someone else’s limp body with a face he recognized from somewhere…

He woke up the next morning under clean white sheets, feeling mostly embarrassed, then increasingly worried as he tried to recount (without luck) where he’d last seen his dog. Some nurses brought him food and removed the stiff black gauze from his wounds, leaving fresh white squares in their place. One of them said, without looking up, Dr. Pela would be in to see him in a minute. When they left him, he wormed his hand up out of the sheets and held it up to the light coming from his window. One of his scars crept up the arm to his elbow. Pink, swollen edges of skin fused at ersatz borders, the wiry stubs of sutures springing out like whiskers. Squinting with one eye, it looked distorted, grasping to the right of where he was actually trying to reach. It was all fucked up, permanently.

He thought of Sadie’s legs: ornate, weird-jointed and fragile like orchids, designed like a house of cards. With these legs she could run so fast her eyelids started to peel back, until the entire world was dead.

He thought of the truck: black on black. No outline, only sharp edges and speed. Killing incidentally in the mindless thrust forward, no driver at the wheel.

“Are we awake?” Dr. Pela asked.

Abel propped up on his elbows and nearly floated away when he saw her face. It was her, indeed; the doctor who had seen his father and discerned the word in his will. Abel tried to make himself somewhat presentable, but the doctor had already recognized him while he drooled and bled all over the ER floor. She approached the bed and put his arm before her, lifting it on her fingertips, guiding it through slow, fluid movements. What brought him from point A (when she saw him last, fleetingly) to point B (here; emaciated, unshaven, ruined)?

“We’ve met before,” she said.

“You treated my father,” Abel confirmed.

“I remember,” she smirked. “He was my last patient at Schweig, before they let me go.”

“They fired you?”

Dr. Pela took Abel by the biceps and raised him off the bed, looking sideways at his wrapped ankle while they hobbled across the room.

“Something like that. They didn’t give me severance, but they secured the position here.”

“Because of my father.”

They stopped hobbling.

“Why would you assume that?” Dr. Pela asked.

“I have to ask you something…” Abel didn’t elaborate.

Dr. Pela prescribed Abel some crutches and more painkillers, then told him to wait on the bed for her to return. When she did, she brought a frail fold of paper–a brochure, with brittle edges and sun-faded images of people on a grassy hillside. The people were not his father. They were wearing white robes, smiling, embracing.

On the third page, beneath an illegible infographic that seemed to be arranged in a dharmic wheel above the food pyramid, was the word which appeared in Abel’s father’s will:

BE’SAU.

“What is it?”

“A place.” She shrugged, though her tone was certain.

Then one day, the power came back.

The people and the stores returned, and the few who’d lived through the darkness went back to their jobs and their mundane routines. Elephant-sized trucks came through to sweep the streets, all the stalls and rudimentary structures the survivors had built were folded up and placed in the trash. The electricity coming through the powerlines felt stronger than before the dark, making lightbulbs burn clearer and the circulated air in the town’s a/c systems taste crisper.

“A buddy in city water told me it was a body–a human body–trapped in the heavy circuitry that runs underground. Blocked the power from getting through,” Jeff said with humble authority. “Some homeless women found the access to these underground tunnels and, probably all fucked up on opiates, got herself caught in the wires. Immediately toast, the second she put her hand out to touch ‘em. Problem was, they couldn’t find her. These tunnels, buddy says, run for miles, all across the county with no preplanned or readable layout. You have to navigate your way out from the access points. Underneath one neighborhood, they may lay out like a nice grid, but next door the tunnels switch up into a spiderweb formation, or some other shit. The woman wasn’t the problem. The city having to get through its own fucking maze, that’s another story.”

He sipped the last dribble of beer from his can, inverted it, and crunched it against the lid of the cooler. He shoved his hand into the ice and leaned over to Abel.

“Ready for another?”

Though he had hoped to cushion his sister’s response to all the new scars with a fresh haircut and a six-pack for Jeff, Abel found himself, in the end, banned from Cate’s home. He had disturbed the boys–hobbling across their front lawn, blood-stained bandages falling from his body like feathers while he waved the mysterious brochure he had brought to show them. Jeff confronted him outside, man to man, the sounds of wailing coming from the upstairs bedrooms. Some of the sobs were Cate’s.

Jeff spoke to him like an employer, insisting he take a month off, recuperate, focus on something productive. Jeff accepted the beer and locked the door behind him.

Fortunately, the internet provided information. Though scant, it was more helpful than it had been in explaining the meaning of “BE’SAU.” He was unable to find a complete version of the brochure as a .pdf, but there enough stray pieces to start assembling a picture:

“Olamehd” (a word that struck nothing in his memory, falling out of his mouth and disappearing silently, as if down a deep cave tunnel with no bottom) was embossed across the top-front panel, plated with peeling copper leaf. The text descended from a misty sky, where a loose crowd had congregated. They showed their nice teeth to the camera, their variable skin tones which sufficiently represented all the races of the world. They were leaving little trails of happiness in their frolic across the pages of the brochure, which was otherwise filled with boring, new age platitudes and strange diagrams, wispy-tipped swastikas and cross-sections of the heart. At the eye of the centerfold was a vitruvianoid figure with a tree growing down into his own body from above, the roots splaying out into threads where his divinely sculpted head might have been placed.

Someone had highlighted “Be’sau.”

There were several blogs, all inactive for decades, which extolled the virtues of Olamite lifestyle in vague, spiritually charged terms. More helpful was an Orbitt thread with a few hundred posts, mostly exchanging rumors. From these, Abel learned that Olamehd was essentially what it appeared to be: a non-denominational cult. Naturally, the most popular posts described various scandals purported within the group, but nothing really confirmed and not much left to memory to be tarnished by rumor. There was no official Olamehd presence on the web. It appeared to have faded out of existence some time before Abel was born. Its origins were unclear. Not a single post mentioned his father by first or last name and, as far as Abel could tell, none of the coded language for those in-the-know referred to anybody like him.

Abel went to his balcony with a rubber hand-crank the hospital had given him to help keep his muscles active and healing, and the rest of his rum. He worked the crank, wringing lactic acid and thick ropes of blood out into his veins. Something unfamiliar was clicking with every churn of his wrist. It felt like squishing a roach again and again and again, trapped somewhere within the inner cables of his arm. His leg seized up, and he collapsed.

A current of cold air snaked through the distant, empty neighborhood–now refilled and enclosing itself in high block walls topped by sharp wire–over streets formerly filled with ramshackle stalls and the hot greasy clouds that brought people out of the dark. The current stretched all the way to Abel’s complex and with its very tip connected the vacant outskirts of the city to the corner of Abel’s balcony where a tumbleweed of Sadie’s stray fur had been accumulating and was pulled away silently into the night.

There were no conclusions to draw from the facts; Abel’s father had asked in his will to be simulated, preserved on hard drive and then apparently brought to Be’sau, wherever that was. But what did that mean? How had something so clearly significant left no traces in his own upbringing? He began to doubt the man he understood his father to be. Behavior going years back was now suspect. But, of course, the suspicion was moot. There was no one left to whom answers might mean anything. Any facts he might uncover were devoid of context. His arm and legs began locking into place, healing the best they could, if unevenly. At the same time memories and sensations taken for granted began to resurface, assembled themselves. From the uncertain mess, Abel assumed a narrative. The truth, as history would accept it, began to take shape in his mind:

[This is the first part of four of my newest novel, The Bath Procession. Physical copies available here]