JOHN 15:23
HE SAID: ON THE FIRST DAY A— BELIEVED. On the second day so did M— and G—。 By the third day everyone believed, because of my eyes.
He coughed wetly and, once he had recovered, said: A girl in my high school once told me I had pretty eyes. I was puffed up over that until I was like thirty. You wouldn’t believe how stupid guys get over compliments on our looks, I was vain as. But my eyes weren’t anything special—light brown, not even hazel, yellow on a sunny day. The morning after the lights went out they lightened to dark amber, then they went the colour of new lager, and on the third day they were gold.
P— said I looked like a Māori TV Pink Panther. C— said I looked like Edward Cullen from that old Twilight movie, if Edward Cullen had the body of a history teacher. A— said I looked cool. He was the only one.
He said, And all around us, those corpses refused to rot.
In the dream, they were hiking up a big hill of brown, sun-blasted grass, crunching like paper beneath their feet. Below them the waters were rising, but they ascended without hurry, unpanicked by that bubbling, churning, brown morass: those stupefying eddies frilled around the edges with trash of all kinds—broken trees and big sheets of steel; bobbing, groaning constructions of tires and frames that he had pointed out as cars. He had spent some time pointing at things that were being claimed by the water, though she felt less that she was being taught their names and more that he was naming them for himself. Someone’s Honda. Someone’s Mazda. Someone’s four-wheel drive. Someone’s shed. A Macca’s sign. The rain would turn on and off. The clouds were strange, and in the far distance, a twister danced on the neon surface of the sea.
They found a bench to sit on, though they didn’t need to catch their breath. It was warm despite the rain, and the air around them was moist and prickly. It made the skin on her ribs sweat. And he said, “There it all goes again. I can’t stand it,” and for a long time he cried, unashamed.
Once that squall had passed, he said: In the beginning we moved those corpses all over the place … M— was so frantic to prove something in the science had gone wrong, or right. I think she thought if we’d achieved some scientific breakthrough, I’d get a job again and everything would go back to normal and we’d keep doing cappuccino Tuesdays. We picked two of them—two people, different sexes, different deaths, one got their neck snapped in a car accident and the other was smoke inhalation. Same age though, for control; they were born twenty days apart. Then we played dolls with those two kids for a week.
He said, They wanted to see if we could make them rot. We left them in the boiler room. Left them in the morgue. Left them outside overnight, exposed, all over dew in the morning. Nothing changed. Their internal temperature stayed regular the whole time. It wouldn’t change even with A— and C— holding hair dryers over their damn bodies or us wrapping them in solar blankets and putting them in the sun. Poor C—。 You should’ve seen her heave every time we unwrapped the blanket. She was a good sport about it, but it wasn’t in her remit. Contract law doesn’t set you up for rolling a couple bodies into a pond.
He said, But she didn’t need to worry about it. They didn’t change. Not one thing about them changed. They were perfect. All those corpses were perfect.
He said: I’d been sleeping in the facility already. I refused to go home. A— and M— moved in with me, and G— set up outside; he was sleeping in his ute. C— was staying with N—， long days. She left us early in the morning and came back the next day with sausage rolls for breakfast. I didn’t realise it at the time but she’d already gone AWOL from the stakeholders. She was doing freelance for us: so translated, she was unemployed. But she was the reason we could even stay in the building. She’d massaged all the contracts and told the cops we needed to be in there to make sure disposal and records were handled properly, which gave us a grace period of a whole month. How we got through that I’ll never know. I don’t know if we would’ve got away with it if we hadn’t had our pet cop. And if the whole world hadn’t been freaking out every time you did something unexpected and people thought you were going to kick the bucket early. Nobody was looking at us back then, and we got lucky. It worked.
He said, more to himself: Fuck, it was a weird time. I wasn’t eating much. I only wanted to be with my bodies, like if I took my eyes off them the magic’d stop. I started knowing what room they’d been stashed in even if no one told me. C— said it was psychological clues in their body language, but I wasn’t convinced. I could feel them—I could feel everyone in the building—it was like having the lights turned off. You hear all the sounds outside. You hear all the cicadas in the grass, you hear the dogs in the next town over barking. You hear the moreporks in the trees and the possums skittering over shed roofs. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been able to hear them before, but I couldn’t separate the noises. Like hearing a chord without knowing what notes go into it.