QR Codes of the Dead
The world is essentially full of people who have lost things
— Nick Cave
When Alice was a child and upset about something small, her mother would kneel down, take her gently by the shoulders, and speak to her in bursts of Spanish. “What is the problem, Alicia? Mija, está bien. Está bien.” She’d chuckle at what a fuss Alice was making and wipe tears away from her cheeks with her thumb. Mom would hug her tight and whisper into her ear, “Momento mori, mija. Está bien.” Often, her mother would be in the kitchen making sopapillas, buñuelos, and other baked goods that she would sell at the farmer’s market on weekends. During the day, most days throughout Alice’s early childhood, the house smelled of fried dough, cinnamon, and sugar. Real sugar. “Ahora cálmate. Momento mori,” she’d say. “Okay? Now, Alicia, put out your tongue and close your eyes.” Alice would close her eyes and put out her tongue. She knew what was to come and couldn’t help but smile before it came. Her mother would place her gritty finger covered in sugar on Alice’s tongue. Alice would keep her eyes closed and suck the sugar from her mother’s finger. “Verdadera vainilla mexicana y azúcar.” Alice’s eyes popped open. “Real sugar.” Whatever Alice had been crying about, she’d forgotten it. But she never forgot to use real sugar in her kitchen. Not that her burgeoning legal career allowed time to cook baked goods from scratch.
Bong!
“Please return to your seat, returning it to its upright and locked position, fasten your seat belts, and secure your tray tables.” The captain’s voice seems to boom from the inflight PA. Alice gasps awake. Looks around wide-eyed, unsure where she is. Grips the arm rests. “It may get a little bumpy here as we make our descent.” Her heart races. The panic she feels isn’t because of the plane’s situation. It’s that she feels with great intensity that she is late. She’s going to miss it. That she has missed it.
Which she did.
Alice stands at the curb. One hand around the handle of her carry on rolling bag. The other hand raised. She sees her sister Donna’s silver Camry. Before coming to a full stop, Donna’s rolling down the window, popping the trunk. Alice feels the impatience of everyone around her. Including her sister’s. Alice quickly throws her bag in. Slams the trunk. Falls into the passenger seat. Sighs in a burst.
Instead of a greeting and car hug, Donna looks straight ahead. “Let’s just go straight there.”
“Okay,” says Alice. They roll silently through the pickup lane. Slaloming the deplaned, the confused foreigners. “‘Hi, how was your flight, Alice?’ ‘Gee, it was okay, Donna, a little bumpier than I’d prefer.’”
Donna finally turns to look at her. “Sorry. Crap-o morning at work. And Dad’s being a pill.”
“This day. Every year. He tries to be stoic.”
How was your experience?
Choices:
Smiley face emoji.
Sad face emoji.
Neutral, flat-lipped emoji.
Zombie emoji.
Seems benign enough. Alice chooses flat-lipped emoji.
The plot marker: Angello. She and her sister turn from the family plot and head back to the car. They step on wet autumn leaves flattened on the pavement. Rain had started up again, so they fast-walk under one umbrella.
Alice’s phone buzzes the pocket in her black poplin skirt she wears for the gravesite visit.
“Donna. Look at this.” As they walk under the umbrella, Alice shows her sister the text with the emoji choices.
“Weird. Probably a coding error or whatever. The AI messed up.”
“Or it’s a sick joke by an incel hacker summa cum loser watching us right now from the panopticon.”
“Even at our mother’s grave you’re talking conspiracies,” Donna said with the sighing uplilt of the melodramatically exasperated. “You receive one thirst trap pic — one, mind you — from that boy you work with and now you see everything on your phone screen as part of a conspiracy.”
“Far from conspiratorial. It was a dick pic.”
“You should be so lucky. It’s not like he’s not good looking.”
“Nobody’s dick is good looking,” Alice says bluntly. Donna snorts. “I deal in RICO cases all day. So, yeah, I kinda do see conspiracies everywhere.”
“You know what I mean.”
Alice ignores her sister. “At my mother’s gravesite and one of my choices is a zombie emoji?” Alice scans the sky beyond the umbrella for drones, the dripping trees for CCTV.
Donna shrugs. “Who cares?” She stops and pulls out her vape.
Though she’s the baby of the family turned prosecutor, Alice still bristles at her older sister’s micro aggressions. Donna holds the umbrella. If Donna stops, Alice’s choices are stop or get wet. Aggressive, in a micro way. But she did it so often when they were together that they added up to macro. Hurtful. Alice knows she should let things go, but that’s her problem. She can’t.
(You’re late.)
(Your mother is dying and you’re late.)
Donna nods and mouths, “Let’s go,” blowing vape smoke away out of the side of her mouth. “Our Halloween duty is complete.”
They walk. The car is farther away than it needs to be. Because the huge cemetery had been overhauled in the last year, they’d been disoriented and unsure as to exactly where the plot was. Where Mom was. The smell of sweet new lumber and fresh paint. The fecund scent of just spread mulch. Things are different, including posted signs where the famous are buried. Some of the signs included QR codes. You can look up who was buried there. Find out why they were famous or infamous. Whatever one must do in life to earn a QR code in death.
Her pocket buzzes again. Their father, asking if they were about finished. Well into lunchtime and dad’s getting hangry. She can tell, even by the text.
About done? It’s noon.
As soon as she put it back into her pocket it buzzes again. “Jesus Christ.” Alice is about to lay into her dad.
But it isn’t him.
How was your experience?
Smiley face emoji.
Sad face emoji.
Neutral, flat-lipped emoji.
Zombie emoji.
The text didn’t look phishy. After all, she had absentmindedly aimed her phone’s camera lens at that QR code. Walking to her mother’s gravesite she had noticed one of the signs near a grave. She thought it so odd. It reminded her of the kind of signage one would find at a scenic overlook or in a sculpture garden. Clicking it took her to a bland city parks website related to the cemetery. The blog text was a brief biography reading more like a Wikipedia take on the buried person’s life than a solemn obituary. The one she’d randomly pulled up was of a local businessman born in the 1880s turned local leader whose name she’d already forgotten.
This time Alice was sad and angry and annoyed at the intrusive, demanding text. Irritated at her dad’s lunchtime impatience. That he couldn’t be bothered to even come with them. Insulted by Donna’s micro-aggro bullshit.
So she selected zombie emoji.
A different . . . web(site?) . . . web presence appears. Coalesces and glows. It forces her to stop walking. Donna continues forward. The grey light and mist obscures the screen. She tilts the phone, shields the screen from the light by turning away from Donna. Her eyes adjust. The screen seems brighter. More luminescent. At the top — QRCOTD. In basic script font along a masthead of forest lawn green. Nondenominational church bells flanking the letters. The overall commercial impression mocking and mawkish. It did look phishy, but she was sad, angry, annoyed. Emotion overrode logic.
So she wrote in the comments section, This isn’t funny. My mom dies on Halloween from pancreatic cancer and you have the nerve to offer zombie emoji as a choice option? Fuck. You.
Not until they are back in Donna’s car and she sweeps the wet from her black skirt with her hand does it occur to Alice — choice option for what?
They meet Dad for lunch in a beige strip mall. The anchor dollar store bears a false Palladian façade. The restaurant isn’t one Alice grew up going to. Some new Mexican food spot her dad suggested. The wait staff have costumes on, most begrudgingly. Their waiter, however, his name tag taped over with handwritten MICK, is spritely. He wears baggy white sweat pants and a tight V-neck sleeveless purple t-shirt with thin maroon stripes. The waiter arrives and slaps the plastic menus onto the table. Then he pooches out his lips and declares in thick mockney, “I’ve come to your emotional rescue.” They just look at him. He sighs. “What can I get you, love?”
Dad looks at him and smiles. “Well, Mick, you can start me up with some queso and chips.” Alice and Donna order iced teas.
Mick put his heels together, places his fists on his hips, pooches out his lips again, quickly touches both shoulders with his chin and says, “I’ll ride like the wind, at double speed, I’ll bring you queso that you’ve never, never seen.” Alice notices the manager at the greeting stand shaking her head and rolling her eyes at the display.
At lunch with Dad the conversation is Safe Topics. Basically, asking how everybody else who isn’t here was doing. Have you seen so and so? New things in town and neighborhood since they were here last. The cemetery’s dramatic facelift, to which Dad has no reaction. They don’t talk about Mom directly. And they don’t talk about Dad’s Lady Friend. Alice and Donna don’t care for the Lady Friend. Dad knows it. They don’t even deign to utter her name.
“So, Belladonna, what’s new?” Dad asks Donna. She reminds him belladonna is a poisonous flower. He says, “You think I don’t know that? I’ve always known that. It’s Halloween. I’m razzing you. Relax. Eat your queso.”
“So, you lovingly called me, even as a little girl, a poisonous flower?”
“Yes. When you were being a bossy stinker, yes. Your mom did too, you just don’t remember.”
To quickly cover up that conversational cat turd, Alice is made to talk about the cases she is co-chairing. The violence, the evidence, the galling answers people give during voir dire to get out of jury duty. Donna and Dad lean in on their elbows to hear. Donna’s unhappy with her job in marketing. She sleepwalks through it, adding air quotes when she says “Associate Director of Digital Strategy”. She’s angling to be an art director somewhere. Dad asks about Donna’s beau du jour. He still insists on always calling his daughters’ boyfriends that. Donna demurs with a flick of the wrist, “That’s over.” They do not talk about Alice’s amorous life. Dad doesn’t want to hear about it. Donna just barely knows better than to discuss at the lunch table.
As they leave, waiter Mick says, “Thank you. Happy Halloween.” He stops to fully take in Alice and Donna, the Angello Sisters. Looks them up and down. Pops his cheek. “You make a grown man cry.”
Instead of clutching at her mother’s pearls she wore to the cemetery, Alice says, “Aw, thank you, Mick. Spare us what we make a dead man do though, okay?”
The queso-heavy lunch and the oddness of the morning has Alice on Dad’s couch dozing:
you see everything on your phone screen as part of a conspiracy.
Her mom’s face in the bed.
Dick pic.
Mom’s sickly Face Time face as Alice rushed back to be with her. In the airport. Her flight’s delayed, again. “Mom, I’m sorry, my damn flight…”
I’m late. I’m late. For a very important date.
Her mother speaking. Alice cannot hear the words. The noise in her head is muted and watery. She can make out that her mother says Alicia . . . .
Her mother mouthing other words besides her name. Distinct words beginning with ‘M’. Over and over. Her lips pressed together tight at the beginning ‘M’s. Mouth more open for the vowel sound endings. But she cannot make out the words. Foreign. Not Spanish.
Go ask Alice. I think she’ll know. Dad saying this when she was little. Echoing, rattling through her mind.
Face Time face — her mother laying on her side, reaching out with an arm unnaturally long, hand opening and closing, beseeching, grasping at air for her daughter, trying to reach her through the screen.
Alice crying, nodding, touching the screen. “I’m coming.”
Hold on. I’m coming.
Their waiter standing far across the restaurant. Arms slack to his sides. Mouthing words. Words she can make out — you, you make a dead man come.
How can we improve your experience at Memorial Park?
Just a text. Not the forest lawn green square portal.
“Jesus, what is it with the marketing harassment from these people,” Alice mutters to herself. They’re sitting in the TV room in different chairs. Donna’s on her laptop. Dad’s reading the newspaper.
Dad asks distractedly, “Huh?”
“Nothing. Just the multiple texts from the cemetery. A bit much.”
Donna says, “I’m in the marketing harassment business. Be nice.”
“I hope you don’t take cues from these people.”
For privacy, Alice walks briskly into her childhood bedroom which Dad converted to an office during the pandemic. Her bed remains. Her stuffed animals — including a blue Cookie Monster her mother gave to her because Alice so loved her Mexican wedding cookies, polvorones. Dad can’t believe she leaves it here now. In college and even law school, she carted Cookie Monster with her. One googly eye’s black pupil is mostly scratched off. When her mom died, she brought Cookie back and laid him to rest on her home bed. She’d said to Cookie in his low, gravelly voice, “You stay here, Cookie. Okay?” She couldn’t look at him every day. But neither could she just box him up, put him away. A forgotten keepsake.
She sits on the bed. Grabs Cookie and clutches it to her chest. Then with neck and shoulders hunched over her phone –
Please stop texting me, she hammer texts with her thumbs.
You contacted us, is the immediate, almost simultaneous reply.
Us?
Please stop
You contacted us
No I did not. Stop. This is spam.
The reply is a Dia de los Muertos skull emoji.
Alice’s breathing stops.
Suddenly, those skulls populate her phone’s screen. One by one, line by line. Then in an instantaneous blur.
Her phone becomes warm in her hand. It throbs, but not in the way a phone should. The jolt in her hand feels electrical.
She stands up quickly. Cookie falls to the floor. Alice shudders and emits a bottled shriek, as if a cockroach skittered along the back of her hand. She tosses the phone onto the bed. Backs away, eyes wide.
The phone lands face up:
You contacted us
You contacted us
You contacted us You contacted us
You contacted us You contacted us
You
Contacted
Us
You contacted us You contacted us
You contacted us You contacted us
You contacted us You contacted us
You contacted us You contacted us
You contacted us You contacted us
Donna wants to go out. Halloween night. The last thing Donna wants to do, she’d said earlier, was hang around here with Dad and watch The Blob with the Lady Friend. “I hope she gets taken by the blob.”
“C’mon. Dad’s happy. She not that bad.”
Donna’s tone is sing-song dreamy. “She goes out to the garage fridge to get herself a twelfth glass of Chablis — a spritzer of course, half diluted with Topo Chico, so twelve’s no big deal, right? — and the blob, it’s hovering, quivering above the fridge, just rolls the fuck out right on to her. She can’t even scream.”
“Good god that’s dark. Yeah, maybe you do need to go out tonight,” says Alice.
“Oh, you’re coming with.”
“Nope. Watching a The Blob/It Follows marathon with Dad. He wants us to. Joe Bob Briggs hosting and all that. You live here. You see him all the time — ”
“ — not all the time — ”
“ — more than me. I see him maybe three times a year now. You see how lonely he is. I’m not leaving him here with her to endure that half-shriek fake laugh of hers that devolves into a snort. She tries too hard.”
“You’re trying too hard,” says Donna. “Don’t you want more than dick pics in your life?”
“I have more than dick pics in my life.”
“You do? You haven’t mentioned anything.”
This is because Alice has been seeing a married man almost as old as her father. Alice cannot stand to take the fallout from Donna right now. But when Donna dares her, like a big sister dare, she almost lets the nuke loose from those bay doors. “I’m seeing someone.”
“Seeing?”
“I’ll simply say it’s more than dick pics.”
Thumbs up from Donna. “Actual dick. Noice.”
Which it is.
Yes, the guy is married. Met him through a colleague at the DA’s office. The wife is involved.
It’s complicated.
The real complication is the wife. Also a lawyer. Pro bono, Legal Aid. Half-assed activist. Alice has been seeing her separately. Not seeing seeing; a few lunch dates. Coffee. Talking. Met up for a friend of a friend’s author’s reading at the one cramped indie bookstore in her city on its death march to receivership. Alice feels the wife wants more from her, wants her to herself. But she doesn’t feel that way, not physically. But emotionally . . . there’s a connection with the wife. From conversation. She’s an intellectual. Alice has no real such people in her life. Not genuine ones. Plenty of poseurs. Most of whom were at that reading and were more concerned with posting that they were there than the reading and, heaven forbid, the book.
An older woman. The wife of her lover. But a connection . . . something she doesn’t want to stop.
(No I did not. Stop. This is spam.)
But the wife is sexually aggressive. She enjoys her husband being with the both of them and as of yet hasn’t overtly touched Alice. But Alice senses that’s close. That’s coming. Alice hasn’t laid down ground rules with them. And how she will react she doesn’t know. Will she lean in? Does she want to? She’s concerned how numbly detached she is about it. Like, if it happens, it happens. If, while Alice is with the husband, the wife circles Alice’s nipple with a pad of her finger. The wife caresses her butt. She knows she won’t like it like it, but she may allow it to keep things copacetic. Some people are worth it.
“Yes, Donna, actual dick.” And because she’s reaching her limit with Donna’s pushiness, Alice being a county prosecutor never impressing Donna enough to force her to ever relent in big sister torments, Alice adds, “And a bit more.”
“More? Do continue.”
Alice was about to, fallout-ready. “Well, I’ve been . . .” Then it hits her. She puts her fingers on her cheek, then drags them across her mouth.
“Been what?” Donna, bated.
Alice wonders — Oh shit. Is it the wife texting her like a needy weirdo?
She’s afraid to even pick up her phone.
It glows orange from the street. The brewpub, housed in a renovated warehouse in what used to be the city’s first industrial park but which is now home to restaurants, bars, and shared working spaces, swarmed with costumed revelers. Donna immediately disappears into the place. Being dressed simply as “a man named Victor”, wearing Dad’s dark suit and slicking her short dark hair back, Alice isn’t worried about losing her. Alice’s face is a painted skull, black and white with fairly ornate florets around the black eyes considering how much she put into it. She’s repurposed the black poplin skirt, shrugged on a black t-shirt, laced up the black Doc Martens boots pulled from her childhood closet.
Inside the cavernous warehouse she gets in a long line for a beer. It’s too long. She’s impatient but doesn’t know exactly why and not wanting a beer anyway. Her hand grips the phone deep in her skirt pocket. She steps out of the line and wanders. Alice recognizes no one. It doesn’t feel like her hometown anymore. It’s just some homogeneous American city. There’s music coming from the beer garden in the back. She’s not into it. She’s only here for Donna.
Dressed up, fucked up people keep packing into the place. There’s no single door or bouncer. The warehouse’s retractable loading bay door is a dark maw through which people seined. It seems to Alice that the place is hectic and careening out of control. There’s no center. Nothing’s bolted down. People are yelling and laughing. She assumes it’s because she’s sober that everything is turned up — the energy, the volume. When she closes her eyes the human voices combine into an unsettling roar. A din of declarations morphing into vituperation. She feels outside of it. Someone shoulders into her, hard, apologizes, yet she doesn’t open her eyes.
Then all that roaring diminishes. It’s still there but it’s as if cotton has been shoved into her ears. Her sinuses and head pressurized. Pleasant at first. She smells cinnamon and sugar and fried dough. This is what opens her eyes.
The tall man standing before her is dressed in a Victorian suit. Watch chain looping off a vest button. He wears a top hat. It doesn’t come off as a costume.
Being a prosecutor, though young and green, she’s seen some things. Ghastly crime scene photos. Even more gruesome videos, usually security, sometimes from a phone or police body camera, that have turned her stomach enough to make her question if she’s in the right job. Her boss has had her sit in with him and a killer with lifeless eyes across the interrogation table as they struck a plea bargain. The killer had looked at her the whole time. Didn’t speak. That had scared her.
But this man here, he’s worse. He curls his lips into an attempt at a kind smile. Sure, it’s Halloween night, but he frightens her. The core of her dims and grows cold. The place is stuffed with people yet she feels isolated and hunted by his eyes.
He lifts his arm slowly and stiffly from his side. His long, boney hand extends from his shirtsleeve. She can only watch as it takes his hand a short eternity to fully emerge to the wrist. “How do you do?”
His smile widens. In the shadow of his top hat, it glistens. The gums are wet tar.
Not to answer would yield from her a scream. “I’m . . . doing okay.” She gulps. Slides her hand into his. Instead of his grip opening a trap door beneath their feet plummeting her to hell, his hand feels relatively normal. The palm a little chapped, perhaps. Relieved, her mind pivots to rational Halloween night mode. The noise of her surroundings normalizes so quickly that she winces and flutters her eyelashes. “What’s your name, sir?” She forces a chuckle. He still grips her hand.
“Oh, being that it is All Hallows Eve, call me Mandrake Nightshade”. The chapped grip loosens, then releases. His hand retreats into its sleeve and the arm returns to his side at the same speed it had arisen.
“Ah. Mandrake.” She tips her head at him. “Well, quite a get up you’ve got. Best one here I’ve seen so far.”
“And you’ve seen a lot. Haven’t you?”
“What? What do you mean by –”
“Haven’t you, Alicia. In your young life, you’ve seen a lot.”
“How do you know my name?” Her fingers curl around her phone in her pocket.
“But remember that not seeing her one last time changes nothing.”
Alice is speechless. She can only stare into Mandrake’s rheumy eyes.
“You think it does, but it does not. Memento m — ”
“Hey, sis! Word up, girl! Have a drink.” Donna, still very much a shiny man named Victor, bumps into her with a hip and hands her a shot of something translucent red. She’s got a guy in tow who has a friend with him who looks at Alice like one does food. She guesses they’re zombies or victims of a train wreck or something for the big fake rubber scars on their cheeks and foreheads, their impossibly torn clothes. They also hold shots.
“This from you?” Alice half-shouts at Donna and gestures to the shot.
“No,” says the guy with Donna, leaning in. “From us.”
“Rohypnol shots,” says the other guy, light in his eyes now. He seems kind and fun-loving.
Alice lets her shoulders relax. They one-two-three and shoot and make faces and exhale fire. She looks around for the tall man, Mandrake.
“Who are you looking for?” yells the roofie-jokey nice guy.
“Oh –” her head on a swivel again, looking for him. “Nobody. Excuse me, sorry.”
Donna/Victor gives her a look like, What the fuck, I bring you a cute one, and you leave?
“Be right back,” Alice says. She holds up a finger to them, emphatically to the nice one.
She’d taken a photo of the QR code at the cemetery because she thought it bizarre, a desecration if it wasn’t so risible and absurd. Now she needed to see it. Because apparently she’s “seen a lot, hasn’t she”?
She wades through the brimming humanity toward the bathroom. Using the restroom mirror she attempts to…what? Access it by taking its picture in the mirror? She’s a little one-crappy-shot-empty-stomach buzzed and a lot weirded out from Mandrake and from the recurring Mom death bed dream on her dad’s couch and her phone doing what it did earlier this afternoon. “No, dumbass. That won’t work,” she mutters to herself in the mirror.
“You good?” asks a woman exiting a stall who absolutely was the Wicked Witch of the West. Green face and hands, aquiline nose. Jet black dress and pointy hat.
“Yeah, thanks. I’m just … confused. Trying to … nothing.” The witch doesn’t seem to want to explore Alice’s problems further. Just then four young adult women burst in, stumbling, cackling can’t-hardly-breathe cackles, one pulling from her clutch bag a compact mirror and a vial of white powder which she held aloft between her thumb and forefinger for her friends to see. Alice stares at them dumbly, blinking. One girl falls to the tiled floor, her naughty nurse skirt’s hem hiking up past her hips so that she’s sprawled in her underwear, and her three friends go into silent laughter.
The Wicked Witch of the West, unmoved by the amateur night sophomorics, touching up her ultra-green lip gloss in the mirror, toggles her eyes to Alice and says, “Oh, what a world, what a world.”
“Indeed,” Alice says.
“Click your heels three times,” the witch says and leaves.
One girl, tall, beautiful, has recovered from hysterics. She taps coke from the vial onto the compact mirror. “You want a bump, muerta?” she asks Alice.
“Nah, thanks though.”
Bumps. Clicks. Click three times, she thinks.
She steps out, walks to the beer garden. A constellation of string lights overhang crisscrossed. The Bavarian oompah band plays minor key spooky music as if from a whacked out merry-go-round you really want to get off of. She pans the garden. Packed with nobody she recognizes. The costumes don’t help.
“Belladonna. Where are you?” Alice whispers.
Belladonna. Where are you? Alice thinks, Alice pleads.
Her older sister is her life’s antagonist but she’s also its savior. When Alice didn’t make it back in time for her mom’s death, it was Donna who comforted her.
Alice turns around completely, scrutinizing the crowd. No accident prone guys with Donna. No top hat with a glistening smile underneath its brim.
It hits her. “I’m a fucking idiot. Duh,” Alice tells herself. She quickly pulls out her phone, no new messages, and opens her phone’s photos (one click). Clicks open the photo of the sign at the cemetery (two clicks). Then presses down on the black squares arranged in a square grid on a white background, the QR code in the photo (three clicks) — and up comes the city website with the dead guy’s brief history.
No photo of him. Him being Blakeman “Blake” D’Ambrosia. DOB — DOD. She quickly searches the name, adding the city. Scans the bio. Unremarkable, businessman blah blah, real estate bequeathed to the city for parks, one of which became Memorial Park Cemetery. Tl;dr as the young clerks in her office say: Too long; didn’t read. Wasn’t a fiend in life, at least. Nothing much until she looks at the images search. Then some grainy photos show a man dressed just like Mandrake is tonight. Waist coat. Watch chain. Spectacles. Top hat. That smile.
Her heart throbs high in her throat. She swallows. She feels him watching. Through the crowd she thinks she sees him. The hat above all. A sentinel locked right on her. The oompahs have broken into a Teutonic rendition of “Thriller” and immediately a band of dancers limp and sway between them doing a polka version of that dance everybody does to that song.
They move on. He’s gone. She’s confused, sighs and turns on her heel to go back in to find Donna and he’s there, in her turn path. Her nose brushes his knotted silk cravat. He smells like deathrot and sweet cinnamon.
“You visited me today.”
“I don’t know who you are.” But she did. His photo is on her phone. He points slowly at her hand holding the phone. Somehow she feels guilty holding it.
“Yes. You were there today. In the rain. With your fuming sister. You looked around for spies.”
“Aren’t you one?”
“A spy? No. Hah –” his laugh is somehow both grotesque and mirthful — “I’m just here for the party.” He looks around wistful and bemused at the party of the living designed to entreat the dead. The hanging lights reflect in his spectacles. He deep sighs. His eyes seem to suddenly moisten in the light.
The sound around her recedes away again in his presence. Intoxicating quiet. “Aren’t you . . . way dead?” Alice asks. She’s a scared little girl behind that skull face makeup and prosecutor’s worldly veneer.
Mandrake Nightshade takes forever to retrieve and peer at his watch on the chain. It’s as if he’s learning gross motor skills again. Rebuilding those neuropathways through the desiccated worms and dust in his head. Alice manages to snap a photo of him as he does this. He has to notice her doing it, but doesn’t react. Rather, he seems to pose for it: Victorian man looking at timepiece.
“Almost midnight,” is his answer to the question she’s forgotten she’d asked.
The oompah band gets real loud again, a rolling musical pratfall. She turns her head to it. People are laughing. People are Thrillering. A girl is vomiting in a trash bin by the stage.
She looks back and he’s gone.
Alice walks briskly over to the outdoor bar area, away from the noise. The bartender asks her if she needs anything. She shakes her head.
“You good?” he asks. Second time she’s been asked this by a stranger tonight.
She nods. “Yeah, thanks.”
Are you good? Are you a good witch or a bad witch? Does a good daughter miss her mother’s death because she’s too busy? Because her flights are delayed? Because there’s traffic?
She scrolls her photos. Can’t find the one she just took of him. The dick pic keeps popping into view. Does she have more than one? Oh, God, that’s right, she’d sent it to Donna who edited a rude doodle onto it. Googley eyes (like Cookie’s), somehow desperate and needy. A snappy bowtie. She’s almost in a panic as she can’t find it and isn’t it time to panic a little when you question your own sanity? Scrolling up and back in time. Frozen squares of her life whipping before her eyes. Her finger finally falls on it, where it should be, the most recent, tonight’s photos of which there is only the one.
But he isn’t in the frame. She’s taken a stealthy photo of the wooden fence. A loop of hanging lights in the top corner.
“Actually, yeah, give me a beer please.”
She sips. Scans for Donna. The band plays a dirge. She checks her phone for the time. Indeed, it is almost midnight. Almost the dead’s day.
Phone buzzes. A text.
Come see.
Only the gray and white ID glyph. There is no phone number below it. Just: QRCOTD.
Who is this? She replies with one hand. Beer in the other.
It is all set up. Come see.
Who is this?
Green velvet chair set out just for you.
At the funeral. It’s never left her, the awfulness of the green velvet chairs. The ones the funeral home puts out for the graveside service. The interment. The committal to burial. Those temporary, perfunctory chairs. The industrial scale of death, the cottage industry — weddings and funerals; same chairs, different coverings. She loathed those green velvet chairs. Green? Verdant green? Here it was autumn and she’s dead and she died so young and you have green chairs? The mockery in it. It sickened her and brought quick stinging tears to her eyes. More than the sermon given by a stranger, more than the handshakes and hugs with those gathered. It was those chairs.
She had stood in front of her chair, her back to the raised casket resting on a metal mechanism designed to lower. She couldn’t sit. It was too final. To turn and sit and look at the lowering mechanism.
Her father patted the seat with his palm. Sit.
With that same funereal bile in her throat, that disgust with the world, she replies:
Can’t you leave me alone???
Alice blocks the texts. Reports as spam. Nothing for a few moments. She sips her beer, leans against the bar. Regards the still accreting dancing throngs of ghouls and movie serial killers and naughty nurses with their cartoon-sized plastic phallic hypodermics. She notices on the bar next to her shoulder the ornate sugar skull surrounded by a semicircle of plastic flickering votive candles. She stands up straight and turns to look at it. Though the votives are fake, the skull looks to be made of real sugar. She reaches out to touch —
The text from QRCOTD comes through the block:
We are sorry you did not make it back in time.
Alice’s shoulders shudder and jump and she begins to cry.
It Follows is still on when she walks in. It’s warm in the house.
Donna found friends and said she’d get a ride home. She gave Alice her keys. “You good?” Donna asked, touching Alice’s hand. Donna could tell Alice was freaked and had been crying. Once again, the question was begged — was she good? Crying on Halloween night while driving home alone in her sister’s car. No, probably not so good.
“Hi, hon.” Dad sits up quickly and pauses the movie. Alice notices his hair and Katherine’s hair, the Lady Friend, their hair is mussed. Dad’s t-shirt is twisted. “Have fun?”
“Yeah it was okay I guess.” Frozen on screen are teenagers playing Old Maid on a porch.
“We’re only halfway through It Follows if you want to join. Popcorn’s here.”
“I think I’ll pass. ‘Night.” Alice heads for the hallway. Dad restarts the movie. The ominous score fills the house.
The doorbell rings. Through the frosted door glass panes Alice sees two figures standing closer to the door than trick or treaters normally would. They are big kids. One wears a tall hat. They stand very still.
“Can you get that one, please, Allie?” her dad calls out.
Alice spies the candy bowl on the entryway table. When she turns to take it to the door, the figures aren’t there. She opens the door to an empty porch. Alice steps out and quietly shuts the door behind her.
“Hello?” She can make out silhouettes walking across the lawn. The silhouettes stop. She hears them muttering to themselves.
“You have candy?”
Alice shakes the plastic bowl. “Right here. It’s late.” She knows it’s after midnight. “Technically not Halloween anymore.”
“It’s the Day of the Dead,” says one them. A young woman’s voice.
“Right. Well, it’s yours if you want it.” Alice puts the bowl down on the porch.
She’s on her bed but she’s still dressed. Holding Cookie, staring at the ceiling. She’d slept a little but she’d awakened when she heard Donna come home and not been able to fall back to sleep. She thought about the two late night trick or treaters. Did they take the candy? It was left as an offering and now she was curious. She sits up. Purple dawn breaking out her window and she knows what she’s got to do.
The 24-hour convenience store is open. Near the front counter she sees a display of them. “These real sugar?” she asks the clerk.
He yawns and shrugs and says he guessed so. She picks one up. Wrapped in plastic, the sticker on the bottom says cráneo del azúcar hecho en mexico.
It’s too early but now’s the time. If she waits until proper hours she may think differently about it, have second thoughts. The dawn of the day of the dead feels right. That’s when she’d died and she’d missed it, finally arriving later in the midmorning.
She finds a place behind a tall juniper to jump the fence, landing on her feet inside Memorial Park. She walks briskly until she sees Angello.
As she approaches she notices a new sign. There next to the plot. It’s like the others, with a large QR code block in the middle. The post and sign are brand new and the earth into which the post is set is fresh. She glances up to see a top hat slip behind a tree. Her fear thuds in her chest but she’s here now.
She takes her phone from her pocket. Aims at the weird black and white maze of pixels. Clicks.
The phone screen glows as before. Opalescent. Grows warm in her palm. The electrical shock courses up her arm. It is not painful. She doesn’t drop the phone or try to turn it off.
What resolves on to the screen is a simple text —
Memento mori, mija
Alice doesn’t have feelings of conspiracy afoot. After seeing and not seeing Mandrake, she believes; at least she does for today, for now, this moment.
So she replies, her fingers numb —
Mom?
A long pause. A whir in the phone, warmth on her palm.
Yes! Hi honey! Don’t be scared!
Alice takes in a huge breath. She hyperventilates and cries out and weeps.
Oh, now, what is the problem, Alicia? Mija, está bien. Está bien.
But how?
No questions. It just is. It’s okay if later you don’t believe it. We have right NOW! — memento mori.
I love you I miss you
It is okay you weren’t there. I know you tried.
I did. And I am so sorry.
Another pause. The sun. The whirring and throbbing in her palm. She clutches the phone.
Happy Halloween!
Alice closes her eyes, smiles, tilts her face up, and puts out her tongue. She stands that way until the tears have rolled to her jaw line. Then she rubs them away with her thumb and opens her eyes.
The phone is cool, its screen blank, black. She tries to turn it on but its battery is dead. Alice unwraps the cellophane from the sugar skull and places it atop the headstone.
On the Day of the Dead, Cookie on her lap at 30,000 feet on the flight home, in Alice’s Mom Dream there is no inscrutable muttering, no extended beseeching hand. Just her Mom’s smile and the taste of sweetness on her tongue with all the world’s love contained in it.
Mark Falkin is author of the novels The Late Bloomer, Contract City, and Days of Grace. Skull QR code by Stella Falkin.