Very Bad Deaths Read online

  “It’s me, all right, Slim.”

  I stepped back a pace. For the first time I began to wonder whether I was having my own first encounter with a dead person, like Susan’s visit from her father.

  “You didn’t used to be this superstitious, either,” he said.

  My words sounded stupid to me even as they were leaving my mouth, but I couldn’t seem to hold them back. “How do I know that’s you?”

  Silence for five seconds. Then: “You never did the Bunny. But you would have.”

  I gasped, and flipped on the outside light and flung open the door, and gaped like the cartoon character he sounded like, and still faintly resembled.

  “Smelly,” I cried. “Jesus Christ, you are alive.”

  No question it was him. He looked much the same, only balder—but far more significant, he smelled just as unbelievably, unforgettably horrible as ever. My eyes began to water.

  “I wish I could say the same for you,” he said. “My god, you’re at the end of your rope.”

  I felt I should be offended, but couldn’t work up the energy. “How the hell could you possibly know that?” I demanded. “You just fucking got here.”

  He frowned and shook his head. “I’m going to have to fix you, first. And there’s no time. But you’re no use to me like this.”

  “Why would I want to be of use to you? Do I owe you something I’m not remembering? Look—” His name came back. “Look, Zandor, I ain’t broken, and even if I was, I didn’t ask to be fixed.”

  “I don’t care. I need you to help me prevent the torture, rape and butchery of an entire family,” he said, and stepped into my office.

  Flashback:

  1967

  St. William Joseph College

  Olympia, New York

  USA

  1.

  I felt like the Wandering Catholic.

  Wandering Apostate, anyway. Wandering around the campus on the first Sunday of September 1967 and of my sophomore year, looking for my room. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Or rather, it was where it was supposed to be, Dabland Hall, room 220—but there were two other guys’ names on its door. And two guys with those names inside, already unpacked, totally uninterested in my dilemma.

  As I said, it was Sunday. There was no one anywhere on campus to consult. And nothing for it but to wander the whole dorm, squinting at the 3x5 index card on every single damn door, looking for one that read Russell Walker/Sean McSorley. The only consolation was looking forward to seeing Sean, knowing what a meal he would make of this screwup. His sense of humor was almost Krassnerian. I knew he would have me laughing.

  My faith wavered when I finished the whole dorm without finding either of our names.

  Could I have missed a card? Certainly. Did I want to recanvass the building for it? Not a whole lot. Sighing deeply, I checked on my VW—still not broken into, still packed to the consistency of a rubber brick with my stuff—and trudged uphill to the other men’s dorm, Nalligan Hall.

  I never did find a card with my name or Sean’s. But on the third floor, near the front, I found a door with no card. Instead there was an envelope affixed to it with scotch tape, and my name, only, was written in ink on the envelope.

  I pulled the envelope off the door, leaving a scotch tape tail, and tried the knob. Locked. The envelope contained no keys. Just a brief note:

  Dear Russell,

  Please report to me before checking into your room. Your situation has changed.

  Cordially yours,

  Ivan Lefors,

  Resident Advisor

  Room 345

  What the hell did that mean? Nothing pleasant, I suspected. My instincts have always been good.

  “Sean’s been drafted,” Lefors told me.

  “Oh shit.”

  He nodded. “That’s exactly right.” He was way too old to be in college. His bearing, his haircut, his dress, his room, everything screamed that he had, in the immediate past, been in one of the armed forces. I correctly assumed Vietnam. “He failed one too many courses last year, and last week the draft board pulled his deferment.”

  “Oh, the poor bastard—”

  He nodded again.

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I hate to see anybody get shot at. But this is like they drafted Oscar Levant.”

  He looked pained, but said nothing.

  Does it seem strange to you that I heard the news that way, that Sean didn’t phone me? This was a long time ago. You wouldn’t believe what long distance cost, back then. Sean had doubtless written me the news; for all I knew the letter was even now being delivered to my parents’ house back in New Jersey.

  I wanted to cry. Sean in the jungle was as unimaginable as Mr. Rogers buying smack. After a while I said, “So what happens now? Is there, like, a list of guys in the same boat, that I get to select a new roommate from?”

  Now he looked constipated.

  “Actually,” he said reluctantly, “he’s already been selected.”

  “The hell he has.”

  This time he looked nauseous. “Look, Russ, I’m going to ask you to help me out, here.”

  Now I started feeling nauseous. Any time the administration asks your help, it’s time to change your name and move to someplace with no extradition. “Yeah? How?”

  “I’ve looked over your record. You’re an unusually tolerant man, do you know that?”

  “As a matter of fact I do. Right now, I’m tolerating being dicked around when I should be unpacking in my new room…somewhere.”

  “The school needs an unusually tolerant man, just now,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm. “I’m hoping you’re that man.”

  I thought I saw light in the undergrowth. “Oh my God. They actually admitted a sixth Negro?”

  He paled. “Uh, no.”

  I snorted. “Sorry—I got carried away there for a minute.” Out of a student population approaching a thousand, exactly five students were black. All male. That’s another clue how long ago this was.

  “No, this is in regard to a student who’s already enrolled here.”

  “Then what’s this about—”

  I broke off, blinded. The undergrowth had suddenly burst into flame.

  “Jesus Christ. You want me to room with that crazy Serbo-Croatian. With Smelly, That’s it, isn’t it?”

  He had gone from pale to brick red. “With Zandor Zudenigo, yes.”

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. I couldn’t even ask why me. He had already told me.

  Zandor Zudenigo was a campus legend, and deserved to be. Not for his mathematical talent, which was rumored to be better than first rate, nor for his striking ugliness, which was of clock-stopping magnitude, nor even for his habit of wandering around the campus in pajamas, mumbling to himself and writing on an invisible blackboard. These things, by themselves, would have made him a colorful campus character, a figure of fun, a kind of mascot. But what promoted him from risible eccentric to worldclass whackadoo and hopeless outcast was his smell.

  No. “Smell” doesn’t begin to touch it. Even “stench” is inadequate. Another word is needed. Perhaps “reek,” or “miasma,” or possibly “fetor.” You could have planted beans in his body odor. Some said it would show up on radar. Paint discolored as he walked past. Flies dropped from the sky behind him.

  This elicited plenty of reaction, of course. But Smelly did not seem to realize it. If someone asked him why he didn’t bathe, he simply stared, blank-faced, waiting for them to say something. If someone became offended enough to scream at him, he literally failed to notice, didn’t even flinch. If someone got mad and punched him, he didn’t seem to notice that, either: simply waited for the blows to stop, and then walked away as if nothing had happened. Or if necessary crawled.

  Hell, in his way, the guy was as weird as I was.

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s our goddam room number?”

  It was a pleasure, watching Lefors’s jaw drop.

  How can I begin to convey to you just how l
ong ago this was?

  The Beatles were still together. They would always be together. They’d just performed “All You Need is Love” and “Hey Jude,” live for the whole world, that July. Forget Altamont—Woodstock hadn’t happened yet. Brian Epstein was dead, but Brian Jones was still alive. So was Che Guevara.

  There was not a single footprint on the moon, and most adults believed there never would be. All educated people knew that the Cold War would, in our lifetimes, culminate in an apocalyptic nuclear exchange that would sterilize the planet. Some of us railed against it, some fought to prevent it, some accepted it, but none of us doubted it. Nobody, I mean nobody, anywhere, would have thought it conceivable that the Soviet Union might ever simply…stop. It wasn’t possible enough to be the premise of a science fiction story.

  Bobby and Rev. Dr. King were both still alive. Charlie Company had not saved My Lai. LBJ was president, and it was unimaginable that he would not run again. Nobody knew that Chicago cops were vicious thugs and Mayor Daley was a monster except black people who lived in Chicago. Paul Krassner had not yet coined the term “Yippies” for the people who would go there to protest the war.

  You could smoke a cigarette just about anywhere except church or schoolroom. Nobody realized they minded it yet, and the dread dangers of sidestream smoke had not yet been faked. You could smoke on an airplane. No—here’s how long ago it was: you could buy a plane ticket under any name you liked, with cash, and board without showing ID or passing a metal detector. The term “terrorist” was not yet commonly heard outside Israel.

  That’s how long ago it was for the world. Here’s how long ago it was for me:

  I was entering my sophomore year at St. William Joseph, a Catholic college run by the Marianite order in Olympia, a medium-sized town in northern New York State. Only my third year as a free human being. My parents still believed I was a Catholic. And a virgin.

  I could still count my lovers on the fingers of one hand…and give the peace sign at the same time. I had been drinking alcohol for a little less than a year, smoking pot for six months. I’d never taken any other drug, and didn’t expect to.

  I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be a lawyer, an English teacher, or an anarchist. One of those.

  Long time ago.

  Maybe this will convey something. I basically had only two heroes, at that time. Ed Sodakis, and Paul Krassner.

  You’ve probably heard of Krassner. Youngest violinist ever to play Carnegie Hall, at age 6…Lenny Bruce’s roommate, uncredited editor of his autobiography…took acid with Groucho Marx. Publisher since 1958 of The Realist, an underground satirical journal dedicated to outraging as many people as possible, ideally to apoplexy.

  He had in fact just that summer pulled off what was probably his greatest prank. A writer named Manchester had written a controversial book about the Kennedy clan, and their lawyers had managed to force the deletion of a few chapters before publication. The Realist ran a piece purporting to be some of the suppressed material. A dazed Jackie Kennedy is wandering around the plane, in search of a bathroom where she can wipe her husband’s blood from her, when she opens the wrong door…and finds LBJ having carnal knowledge of the corpse, in an apparent attempt to make an entry wound look like an exit wound…

  It’s probably hard to imagine now, but back then if you merely said—in print—that the president of the United States had sex with the corpses of his enemies, some people got all upset. A shitstorm of rage descended on Krassner. There was some talk of having him nuked. He spent the next year on the lecture circuit, unapologetically reminding audience after outraged audience: “Who are we to judge? It may have been an act of love.”

  Anyway, that was one of my heroes. The other was Ed Sodakis. Him I don’t think you know.

  In the Catholic all-boys high school Ed and I had attended, you were required to receive Holy Communion with the rest of your homeroom at Friday afternoon Mass. That meant that most of us spent Friday morning lined up for Confession. Terminal boredom, with the prospect of humiliation at the end of it, the only consolation being that the humiliation would be about as private as possible.

  One particular Friday, the apprehension level spiked. A new priest, Father Anderson, had recently rejoined the faculty, after several years as a missionary in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Rumor made the place sound worse than the Walled City of Hong Kong. Father Anderson himself looked just terrifying, bald and hatchet-faced, never smiling, with thunderclap eyebrows. Nobody wanted to get on his line for Confession, that morning; a Brother had to assign guys to it. Ed Sodakis was one of them. Until that day he had been, in the judgment of one and all, student and teacher alike, just another asshole. He had no particular rep, one way or another.

  Then he stepped into Father Anderson’s confessional, and became immortal.

  Outside all went on as before; that is, nothing whatsoever went on. Pin-drop silence. Totally bored adolescent males fiddled with their neckties and silently struggled to think of anything interesting besides sexual fantasies, and of course there was nothing. Sound of grate sliding shut. The light above the left-hand side of the confessional went out. A student pushed aside the heavy curtain and exited, trying not to look relieved, and failing. Sound of a noisier grate sliding open on the right side. Silence resumed, for thirty eternal seconds…then was shattered by the voice of Father Anderson. He screamed so loud he required a full chest of air for each word.

  “You…did…WHAT?”

  The last word seemed to blow Ed from the confessional like a cannonball. The curtain couldn’t get out of his way fast enough, so he took it with him the first few steps and then tossed it aside. His face was absolutely expressionless, but the color of a ripe plum. In seconds he had left the chapel.

  The kid waiting his turn on the other side of Father Anderson’s closet emerged only seconds later, looked around at us, and got in another line. We looked round at each other in slow motion. Then a beehive buzz sprang up, which the Brothers allowed to go on a little longer than usual. Then everything returned to normal. Except that nobody went into Father Anderson’s confessional, on either side. No Brother made them do so. A few minutes later he emerged, poker-faced, white as a sheet, and left without even glancing at any of us. Five months later he was killed in a car crash.

  Ed, sensibly, never told anyone what it was he’d done. Bribes, threats, and appeals to his compassion all failed. I never saw him again after graduation, doubt I ever will. But to this day I wonder what he confessed that morning. And so, I imagine, does everybody else.

  Anyway, that should give you a rough idea of how young I was, that first day of sophomore year. My two heroes were Paul Krassner and Ed Sodakis. I was as ready as anyone alive to meet and move in with Zandor Zudenigo.

  2.

  The room was about as isolated as a dorm room can be. It was at the far end of a hallway in the north wing of Nalligan, on the third or top floor. Next to it was not another room, but the stairwell. So, no neighbors on either side. And the room across the hall was not just uninhabited but uninhabitable: it had no door, and you could see fire damage inside.

  I was not surprised at the remoteness of the place. By that time I could already smell him, through the closed door. Even though someone had wedged the hallway window open.

  You probably think you have some conception of his smell, but you’re wrong. You’re thinking of very bad body odor with the volume turned all the way up. Smelly smelled way worse than that. Body odor was a component, to be thoroughly sure. Rank armpits, fetid groin, cheesy feet, unwashed undergarments, inadequately wiped ass, all were there. But they struggled to be noticed among so many stinks. Death itself was in there, faintly, coming and going, like when there’s a dead rat inside the wall. So were spoiled milk, meat turned green, and rotting vegetables—in particular, rotten celery. But there was something else, something I couldn’t identify. It was as bad as all the others, but worse, too, because it wasn’t even organic. It was a chem lab, industrial plant kind of bad smel
l. The kind that would make a cat leave the room.

  This was before I even opened the door. Standing in a well-ventilated hallway, outside a room he had inhabited for at most a matter of hours. I braced myself for something five times worse, unlocked the door, and walked in.

  It was at least ten times worse.

  It seemed to take a small effort to walk through, as though the air were Jell-O on the verge of setting. Part of the smell made the eyes water, but another part dried them, so they canceled out. Each breath had to be a conscious act; reflex refused to take in this air without constant confirmation that it was really okay. It is possible to totally isolate the nose and nasal passages from the act of respiration, but it usually takes years of yogic training to learn how. I reinvented the trick on the spot. It didn’t help enough. It is possible, I learned to my dismay, to smell with your tongue. Tastebuds work even on air, and they have no off switch.

  “Hi,” I said, to be exhaling.

  His appearance was less startling than his aroma, but not by much. He stood no taller than five eight or nine, and weighed close to three hundred pounds. He didn’t seem to have shoulders. His skin looked like bread dough that wasn’t going to rise. Facially, he looked like the fetus that would one day be Alfred Hitchcock. With five-o’clock shadow.

  “Hello, Slim,” he said.

  I stopped short, halfway to the obligatory handshake. I didn’t want to; irrationally, I wanted to be a moving target for that smell. But I was struck by what he’d called me.

  Physically I was the backwards of him. As I had since the sixth grade, I stood six two, and weighed maybe one forty-five. Fully dressed, after a long walk in the rain. “Slim” was what I had always secretly wished people would call me. But no one ever had. My actual nickname throughout high school had been “Rail.” The printable one, anyway. Somehow, I’d managed to get through freshman year of college without picking up any nickname at all. But I knew my luck was due to run out.