Helvetica Dropfoot woke up one morning to find that everyone in Little Aleppo was dead. She did not realize this immediately, as she lived alone in an apartment on West Timbale Road and did not see anyone, dead or not, until she had had her coffee, shower, shit, small depressive episode. Sometimes she meditated, and other mornings she mouthed the sweetly terrifying prayers learned during her Catholic childhood, and when it was warm she would go out to the little yard behind her kitchen and do Tai Chi badly.
But then all the people on the sidewalk were dead. Going about their business, not obviously rotting, there was no smell. But dead nonetheless. Mailman fresh onto the route, and the guy trying to steal parcels straight from his roller-sack, and the cop who tackled the package thief (toppling the mailman in the process), and the youthful fuckabouts who now saw an opportunity and yoinked the remaining bundles while the cop and the thief and the mailman were all tangled up in one another, and two grandmas leaning out their windows hooting and betting with each other, and a cadre of cheering schoolchildren, also betting. All dead.
Amazing how graceful the dead were, Helvetica thought. They lurched so much more in the movies. Panic nibbled; she kept walking. Dr. Standish might not be dead, and he despised lateness and several ethnicities, and so Helvetica tried to always be on time and never be Brazilian. She did not run. She thought that might make them notice her, and she instinctively did not want that.
They were having conversations, arguments. She witnessed three distinct pow-wows, and two sets of negotiations, one of which was high-level. Flirting. The dead were all around Helvetica, and they were flirting. The dead boys smirked and lied, and the dead girls pretended to believe them. Cheerleaders draped themselves on tight ends, and middle-aged men pretended not to look. Everyone was dead and everyone was horny. She breathed in through her nose and still did not run but kept a hot clip west towards the Main Drag.
“Rabbi,” said the little shit.
“Yes?”
“I watched you die.”
“I saw you in the crowd.”
It was cool for Nisan, and there was no breeze. The vendors stocked their tables, and women threw open their windows, and the week began after the Sabbath.
The rabbi could see the hill planted with crosses. Roman soldiers. Many goats. The sun.
All the same now.
“How much did you make?”
“Did all right,” the little shit said. Pockets had not been invented yet, but pickpockets had.
“Buy me breakfast. They buried me without a shekel.”
It was a small cafe. Fish, bread, figs. The rabbi ate quickly, and drank two cups of wine despite the early hour. One head poking in the door, withdrawn quickly. Another, another, another, and a swell of noise and racket.
And now Peter.
And now Matthew, Mark, and Luke and John.
And now Thomas with his eyebrow raised.
And now the rest.
Then come the Magdalene, in her curls and her sandals, elbowing the men from her path until she is in front of the rabbi. She kneels. With a lock of her hair, she wipes the dust from the rabbi’s feet. Rising, she whispers into his ear. Her words were unrecorded in any Gospel, even the most apocryphal.
The street outside is swelling. Resurrections did not happen every day. The rabbi was drawing looky-loos.
His friends lead him from the shop, through the city, to a hill that fronts a natural bowl. It fills.
The rabbi looks at the crowd, expectant faces and greedy smiles and most at least a little drunk, and thought about his mother because he was tired of thinking about his father. The rabbi needed to have a long talk with his father. Maybe go out to the lawn and punch it out.
Now he sits before them, cross-legged and straight-backed and playing with his beard.
A minute passes.
Two.
He can hear Roman soldiers, and many goats.
Three.
The rabbi said nothing for almost an hour, and the multitudes did not diminish, and then he rose and walked away. He waved off the Apostles, and the Magdalene, and they found that they could not follow him, no matter how fiercely they struggled.
He walked back into the city, and saw the little shit standing in front of a tavern.
“Buy me wine.”
“Didn’t you pass the hat around at your sermon?”
“I forgot to take any money.”
They drank many cups of wine cut only slightly with water, and the rabbi said nothing, just stared ahead blinking slowly or not at all. The little shit clocked where the other patron kept their coins, and ate pistachios, and finally he asked,
“How does it feel?”
The rabbi did not answer for three days, and when he did, he said,
“What?”
“Being dead. How does it feel?”
And now the rabbi was silent for forty days and forty nights, and when he finally spoke his voice was battered and low.
“It hurts so bad.”
Helvetica had still not panicked, and had she not been so busy not panicking, she would have been a little proud of the fact. A mouse had run through the office she shared with Mrs. Titleframe, who had shrieked for an hour after demanding a helping hand onto her desk. Mrs. Titleframe was not cut out for waking up and finding out everyone was dead.
She crossed the Main Drag and turned right, north, towards the Upside, and shared the wide sidewalk with the dead, who paid no heed. She thought about movies again, the lying piles of shit. The dead are obsessed with the living in movies. They wanna eat ’em or warn ’em about things. This was not, so far, Helvetica’s experience. It was just, you know, Tuesday morning in a grubby neighborhood.
Past Midden Avenue, which separated the Downside from the Upside, and was named by someone who thought “midden” was a fancy way of saying “middle” and whom no one corrected because they thought it was funny. Past Rubirosa Way, where the gigolos all hang out at a barbershop called Mouse’s, and Samperand Street, where the Fifth First Bank of Little Aleppo is located, and past Randy’s Record Barn, which had barbaric and rough-hewn speakers hanging from the rigging that held up the awning; they were blasting Polish wedding songs.
A woman’s shoulder struck hers.
“I’m sorry,” the woman threw behind her as she kept going.
Maybe she should panic, Helvetica thought. A drink first, though. Yes. How could one panic sober? It required a certain looseness.
She passed the hair salon and the movie palace and Rose Street, where all the churches are, but did not turn down it, walking still north until she hit Lamour Street and made a left towards the Salt Wharf. The containers were every color in the world, and all the stevedores were dead. A right onto Widows Way, where a phallic entranceway made from thick layers of black rubber jutted out halfway to the gutter. Three sets of overlapping curtains separated out from in. The sun had been 86’ed from the Morning Tavern a long time ago.
The bartender was tall, with arms full of tattoos, and she was dead. Helvetica sat down, anyway. The Gary twins were at the bar, too. Not too much later, they would begin biting one another, but for now they were still only muttering threats at each other in their made-up twin language. The women ignored them.
“What can I fetch ya?”
“I have no idea,” Helvetica said. She drank wine with her friends, and in her apartment. Wine seemed deeply insufficient.
“When someone comes into my bar and says they don’t know what they wanna drink, I always figure that means tequila.”
Her back was turned before Helvetica could object, and then back with two coasters, two shot glasses, bottle. Place, set; place, set. Pour, pour. The bottle goes on the bar WHAP the cork replaced and the bartender is holding her glass out before her.
“To life,” the dead bartender toasted.
Helvetica did not panic. She repeated the tribute, and the women shot their tequila. The bartender wiped at her chin with the heel of her hand, and poured another two.
“To life,” Helvetica toasted.
She decided not to tell the bartender that she was dead. Or the Gary twins, who were rapidly approaching the toothy portion of their visit, or anyone else in the Morning Tavern, or Dr. Standish and Mrs. Titleframe the next day, or her mother when they spoke on the phone that Sunday, or anyone else at all for the rest of her life, which was seven weeks from the morning the tumor behind her left eye told her that everyone was dead in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.
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