This Must Be the Place: A Novel Read Free Page B

nightmare: Max driving him to the hospital, to the morgue. Standing there while Stantz, red-faced, explained that Amy had blown a fuse while working on an armature and went back to the breaker and there was a wire—that was old or stripped—Arthur couldn’t understand, didn’t want to—wires were crossed. Electrons flew. Into the tip of her finger (her left index, he had kissed it a thousand times) and up her forearm (pale underside, purple veins) and through her bicep, her shoulder. Straight down into her heart.
Fibrillated
, they said.
    Fibrillated.
    Stantz kept talking—about the sound and the blowback and the smell—and Max told him to shut
the hell
up, and the morgue was cold, and Amy was blue and dull and not-Amy. Her left hand was angry and swollen. Burned.
    Did she have a will?
    I don’t know, Arthur said. She liked grapefruit and coffee together for breakfast.
    Did she want to be buried or cremated?
    I don’t know, he said.
    She wore his old concert T-shirts to bed and sang him lullabies as Axl Rose (
Good night to the jungle, baby!
) and Mick Jagger (
Hey! You! Get into my bed!
).
    Any family?
    All gone, he said. Just me. Just her and me.
    What would you like to do with the body?
    Max took him home—Max took him home and got him into bedand Arthur was pretty sure Max held his hand for a while and kissed him on the forehead—and then Max left.
    Harryhausen made the horrible noise again. Arthur had never heard him cry before. Complain and hiss, sure, but this was completely different. This was deep and wild; it sounded like he was scraping it from the bottom of his tiny cat lungs. Like it was tearing his throat open.
    Arthur sat on the carpet and stretched his legs out in front of him, in the hall, in the dark, and dripped cold water out of his hair and down his bare chest and tried to swallow but he didn’t have any spit. He ached.
    He lurched forward and his body tried to vomit but there was nothing in his stomach. Harryhausen jumped to his feet, hissing, and padded away, enormous fuzzy gut swaying from side to side.
    Arthur didn’t know anything. He didn’t know if Amy wanted to rest in the ground or flame out into a million tiny particles. He didn’t know if she’d made a will, or if there was an object, a memory, she wanted carried on by someone else in her name.
    He didn’t know and he was never
going
to.
    He had to be dreaming. None of this was even remotely possible. He was thirty-two. Amy was thirty-one. They were young and full of blood. Their bodies and their minds were still their own to control. He couldn’t imagine Amy—her body, Amy’s body—lit with electricity. Had she flown? Had she fallen? Had she looked like she was dancing?
    She liked to dance.
    Of course
Amy hadn’t made out a will, it was too soon—but he didn’t know that, not for certain. And just because she might not have officially left a will didn’t mean Amy didn’t want certain things done or said or given after her death. Just because Arthur didn’t know what Amy wanted him to do with her body didn’t mean
Amy
didn’t know.
    Why hadn’t she told him?
    Why hadn’t he asked?
    What else didn’t he know?
    What else hadn’t he—the Noticer, the Watcher, the Good Seer of so many strangers—not known about his wife? What had he missed? What could he still see, if he looked hard enough?
    He pressed his back against the wall for leverage and slowly, gently, pressed himself up from the floor. He blinked back stars. He could do this—if he, Arthur Rook, could see anything, he could see his wife. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t here. He could see.
    He started in the bedroom. He looked through her dresser and saw her yellow-and-black striped socks, her grandfather’s enormous green sweater, the blue lace bra she wore on their third anniversary that made her pale skin glow. He smelled Amy all around, but he didn’t see anything he didn’t know. He looked under the bed and saw her purple bowling shoes, also