Christopher Moore - Dirty Job

Christopher MoorePDFA Dirty Job

CHRISTOPHER

MOORE

A DIRTY JOB

This book is dedicated to Patricia Moss, who was as generous in sharing her death as she was in

sharing her life.

AND

To hospice workers and volunteers all over the world.

CONTENTS

PART ONE

THE SORRY BUSINESS

PART TWO

SECONDHAND SOULS

PART THREE

BATTLEGROUND

EPILOGUE

Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

About the Author

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Other Books by Christopher Moore

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

THE SORRY BUSINESS

What you seek, you shall never find.

For when the Gods made man,

They kept immortality for themselves.

Fill your belly.

Day and night make merry,

Let Days be full of joy.

Love the child that holds your hand.

Let your wife delight in your embrace.

For these alone are the concerns of man.

—The Epic of Gilgamesh

1

BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH—HE KINDLY STOPPED FOR ME—

Charlie Asher walked the earth like an ant walks on the surface of water, as if the slightest misstep might

send him plummeting through the surface to be sucked to the depths below. Blessed with the Beta Male

imagination, he spent much of his life squinting into the future so he might spot ways in which the world

was conspiring to kill him—him; his wife, Rachel; and now, newborn Sophie. But despite his attention,

his paranoia, his ceaseless fretting from the moment Rachel peed a blue stripe on the pregnancy stick to

the time they wheeled her into recovery at St. Francis Memorial, Death slipped in.

“She’s not breathing,” Charlie said.

“She’s breathing fine,” Rachel said, patting the baby’s back. “Do you want to hold her?”

Charlie had held baby Sophie for a few seconds earlier in the day, and had handed her quickly to a

nurse insisting that someone more qualified than he do some finger and toe counting. He’d done it twice

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and kept coming up with twenty-one.

“They act like that’s all there is to it. Like if the kid has the minimum ten fingers and ten toes it’s all going

to be fine. What if there are extras? Huh? Extra-credit fingers? What if the kid has a tail?” (Charlie was

sure he’d spotted a tail in the six-month sonogram. Umbilical indeed! He’d kept a hard copy.)

“She doesn’t have a tail, Mr. Asher,” the nurse explained. “And it’s ten and ten, we’ve all checked.

Perhaps you should go home and get some rest.”

“I’ll still love her, even with her extra finger.”

“She’s perfectly normal.”

“Or toe.”

“We really do know what we’re doing, Mr. Asher. She’s a beautiful, healthy baby girl.”

“Or a tail.”

The nurse sighed. She was short, wide, and had a tattoo of a snake up her right calf that showed through

her white nurse stockings. She spent four hours of every workday massaging preemie babies, her hands

threaded through ports in a Lucite incubator, like she was handling a radioactive spark in there. She

talked to them, coaxed them, told them how special they were, and felt their hearts fluttering in chests no

bigger than a balled-up pair of sweat socks. She cried over every one, and believed that her tears and

touch poured a bit of her own life into the tiny bodies, which was just fine with her. She could spare it.

She had been a neonatal nurse for twenty years and had never so much as raised her voice to a new

father.

“There’s no goddamn tail, you doofus! Look!” She pulled down the blanket and aimed baby Sophie’s

bottom at him like she might unleash a fusillade of weapons-grade poopage such as the guileless Beta

Male had never seen.

Charlie jumped back—a lean and nimble thirty, he was—then, once he realized that the baby wasn’t

loaded, he straightened the lapels on his tweed jacket in a gesture of righteous indignation. “You could

have removed her tail in the delivery room and we’d never know.” He didn’t know. He’d been asked to

leave the delivery room, first by the ob-gyn and finally by Rachel. (“Him or me,” Rachel said. “One of us

has to go.”)

In Rachel’s room, Charlie said: “If they removed her tail, I want it. She’ll want it when she gets older.”

“Sophie, your Papa isn’t really insane. He just hasn’t slept for a couple of days.”

“She’s looking at me,” Charlie said. “She’s looking at me like I blew her college money at the track and

now she’s going to have to turn tricks to get her MBA.”

Rachel took his hand. “Honey, I don’t think her eyes can even focus this early, and besides, she’s a little

young to start worrying about her turning tricks to get her MFA.”

“MBA,” Charlie corrected. “They start very young these days. By the time I figure out how to get to the

track, she could be old enough. God, your parents are going to hate me.”

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“And that would be different how?”

“New reasons, that’s how. Now I’ve made their granddaughter a shiksa.”

“She’s not a shiksa, Charlie. We’ve been through this. She’s my daughter, so she’s as Jewish as I am.”

Charlie went down on one knee next to the bed and took one of Sophie’s tiny hands between his

fingers. “Daddy’s sorry he made you a shiksa.” He put his head down, buried his face in the crook where

the baby met Rachel’s side. Rachel traced his hairline with her fingernail, describing a tight U-turn around

his narrow forehead.

“You need to go home and get some sleep.”

Charlie mumbled something into the covers. When he looked up there were tears in his eyes. “She feels

warm.”

“She is warm. She’s supposed to be. It’s a mammal thing. Goes with the breast-feeding. Why are you

crying?”

“You guys are so beautiful.” He began arranging Rachel’s dark hair across the pillow, brought a long

lock down over Sophie’s head, and started styling it into a baby hairpiece.

“It will be okay if she can’t grow hair. There was that angry Irish singer who didn’t have any hair and she

was attractive. If we had her tail we could transplant plugs from that.”

“Charlie! Go home!”

“Your parents will blame me. Their bald shiksa granddaughter turning tricks and getting a business

degree—it will be all my fault.”

Rachel grabbed the buzzer from the blanket and held it up like it was wired to a bomb. “Charlie, if you

don’t go home and get some sleep right now, I swear I’ll buzz the nurse and have her throw you out.”

She sounded stern, but she was smiling. Charlie liked looking at her smile, always had; it felt like

approval and permission at the same time. Permission to be Charlie Asher.

“Okay, I’ll go.” He reached to feel her forehead. “Do you have a fever? You look tired.”

“I just gave birth, you squirrel!”

“I’m just concerned about you.” He was not a squirrel. She was blaming him for Sophie’s tail, that’s

why she’d said squirrel, and not doofus like everyone else.

“Sweetie, go. Now. So I can get some rest.”

Charlie fluffed her pillows, checked her water pitcher, tucked in the blankets, kissed her forehead,

kissed the baby’s head, fluffed the baby, then started to rearrange the flowers that his mother had sent,

moving the big stargazer lily in the front, accenting it with a spray of baby’s breath—

“Charlie!”

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“I’m going. Jeez.” He checked the room, one last time, then backed toward the door.

“Can I bring you anything from home?”

“I’ll be fine. The ready kit you packed covered everything, I think. In fact, I may not even need the fire

extinguisher.”

“Better to have it and not need it, than to need it—”

“Go! I’ll get some rest, the doctor will check Sophie out, and we’ll take her home in the morning.”

“That seems soon.”

“It’s standard.”

“Should I bring more propane for the camp stove?”

“We’ll try to make it last.”

“But—”

Rachel held up the buzzer, as if her demands were not met, the consequences could be dire. “Love

you,” she said.

“Love you, too,” Charlie said. “Both of you.”

“Bye, Daddy.” Rachel puppeted Sophie’s little hand in a wave.

Charlie felt a lump rising in his throat. No one had ever called him Daddy before, not even a puppet. (He

had once asked Rachel, “Who’s your daddy?” during sex, to which she had replied, “Saul Goldstein,”

thus rendering him impotent for a week and raising all kinds of issues that he didn’t really like to think

about.)

He backed out of the room, palming the door shut as he went, then headed down the hall and past the

desk where the neonatal nurse with the snake tattoo gave him a sideways smile as he went by.

Charlie drove a six-year-old minivan that he’d inherited from his father, along with the thrift store and the

building that housed it. The minivan always smelled faintly of dust, mothballs, and body odor, despite a

forest of smell-good Christmas trees that Charlie had hung from every hook, knob, and protrusion. He

opened the car door and the odor of the unwanted—the wares of the thrift-store owner—washed over

him.

Before he even had the key in the ignition, he noticed the Sarah McLachlan CD lying on the passenger

seat. Well, Rachel was going to miss that. It was her favorite CD and there she was, recovering without

it, and he could not have that. Charlie grabbed the CD, locked the van, and headed back up to Rachel’s

room.

To his relief, the nurse had stepped away from the desk so he didn’t have to endure her frosty stare of

accusation, or what he guessed would be her frosty stare of accusation. He’d mentally prepared a short

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speech about how being a good husband and father included anticipating the wants and needs of his wife

and that included bringing her music—well, he could use the speech on the way out if she gave him the

frosty stare.

He opened the door to Rachel’s room slowly so as not to startle her—anticipating her warm smile of

disapproval, but instead she appeared to be asleep and there was a very tall black man dressed in mint

green standing next to her bed.

“What are you doing here?”

The man in mint green turned, startled. “You can see me?” He gestured to his chocolate-brown tie, and

Charlie was reminded, just for a second, of those thin mints they put on the pillow in nicer hotels.

“Of course I can see you. What are you doing here?”

Charlie moved to Rachel’s bedside, putting himself between the stranger and his family. Baby Sophie

seemed fascinated by the tall black man.

“This is not good,” said Mint Green.

“You’re in the wrong room,” Charlie said. “You get out of here.” Charlie reached behind and patted

Rachel’s hand.

“This is really, really not good.”

“Sir, my wife is trying to sleep and you’re in the wrong room. Now please go before—”

“She’s not sleeping,” said Mint Green. His voice was soft, and a little Southern. “I’m sorry.”

Charlie turned to look down at Rachel, expecting to see her smile, hear her tell him to calm down, but

her eyes were closed and her head had lolled off the pillow.

“Honey?” Charlie dropped the CD he was carrying and shook her gently. “Honey?”

Baby Sophie began to cry. Charlie felt Rachel’s forehead, took her by the shoulders, and shook her.

“Honey, wake up. Rachel.” He put his ear to her heart and heard nothing. “Nurse!”

Charlie scrambled across the bed to grab the buzzer that had slipped from Rachel’s hand and lay on the

blanket. “Nurse!” He pounded the button and turned to look at the man in mint green. “What

happened…”

He was gone.

Charlie ran into the hall, but no one was out there. “Nurse!”

Twenty seconds later the nurse with the snake tattoo arrived, followed in another thirty seconds by a

resuscitation team with a crash cart.

There was nothing they could do.

2

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A FINE EDGE

There’s a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality—there’s mercy in a sharp blade.

Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

So Charlie was barely even aware of his own shrieks in Rachel’s hospital room, of being sedated, of the

filmy electric hysteria that netted everything he did for that first day. After that, it was a memory out of a

sleepwalk, scenes filmed from a zombie’s eye socket, as he ambled undead through explanations,

accusations, preparations, and ceremony.

“It’s called a cerebral thromboembolism,” the doctor had said. “A blood clot forms in the legs or pelvis

during labor, then moves to the brain, cutting off the blood supply. It’s very rare, but it happens. There

was nothing we could do. Even if the crash team had been able to revive her, she’d have had massive

brain damage. There was no pain. She probably just felt sleepy and passed.”

Charlie whispered to keep from screaming, “The man in mint green! He did something to her. He

injected her with something. He was there and he knew that she was dying. I saw him when I brought her

CD back.”

They showed him the security tapes—the nurse, the doctor, the hospital’s administrators and

lawyers—they all watched the black-and-white images of him leaving Rachel’s room, of the empty

hallway, of his returning to her room. No tall black man dressed in mint green. They didn’t even find the

CD.

Sleep deprivation, they said. Hallucination brought on by exhaustion. Trauma. They gave him drugs to

sleep, drugs for anxiety, drugs for depression, and they sent him home with his baby daughter.

Charlie’s older sister, Jane, held baby Sophie as they spoke over Rachel and buried her on the second

day. He didn’t remember picking out a casket or making arrangements. It was more of the

somnambulant dream: his in-laws moving to and fro in black, like tottering specters, spouting the

inadequate clichés of condolence:We’re so sorry. She was so young. What a tragedy. If there’s

anything we can do …

Rachel’s father and mother held him, their heads pressed together in the apex of a tripod. The slate floor

in the funeral-home foyer spotted with their tears. Every time Charlie felt the shoulders of the older man

heave with a sob, he felt his own heart break again. Saul took Charlie’s face in his hands and said, “You

can’t imagine, because I can’t imagine.” But Charlie could imagine, because he was a Beta Male, and

imagination was his curse; and he could imagine because he had lost Rachel and now he had a daughter,

that tiny stranger sleeping in his sister’s arms. He could imagine the man in mint green taking her.

Charlie looked at the tear-spotted floor and said, “That’s why most funeral homes are carpeted.

Someone could slip.”

“Poor boy,” said Rachel’s mother. “We’ll sit shivah with you, of course.”

Charlie made his way across the room to his sister, Jane, who wore a man’s double-breasted suit in

charcoal pinstripe gabardine, that along with her severe eighties pop-star hairstyle and the infant in the

pink blanket that she held, made her appear not so much androgynous as confused. Charlie thought the

suit actually looked better on her than it did on him, but she should have asked him for permission to

wear it nonetheless.

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“I can’t do this,” he said. He let himself fall forward until the receded peninsula of dark hair touched her

gelled Flock of Seagulls platinum flip. It seemed like the best posture for sharing grief, this forehead lean,

and it reminded him of standing drunkenly at a urinal and falling forward until his head hit the wall.

Despair.

“You’re doing fine,” Jane said. “Nobody’s good at this.”

“What the fuck’s a shivah?”

“I think it’s that Hindu god with all the arms.”

“That can’t be right. The Goldsteins are going to sit on it with me.”

“Didn’t Rachel teach you anything about being Jewish?”

“I wasn’t paying attention. I thought we had time.”

Jane adjusted baby Sophie into a half-back, one-armed carry and put her free hand on the back of

Charlie’s neck. “You’ll be okay, kid.”

Seven,” said Mrs. Goldstein. “Shivahmeans ‘seven.’ We used to sit for seven days, grieving for the

dead, praying. That’s Orthodox, now most people just sit for three.”

They sat shivah in Charlie and Rachel’s apartment that overlooked the cable-car line at the corner of

Mason and Vallejo Streets. The building was a four-story brick Edwardian (architecturally, not quite the

grand courtesan couture of the Victorians, but enough tarty trim and trash to toss off a sailor down a side

street) built after the earthquake and fire of 1906 had leveled the whole area of what was now North

Beach, Russian Hill, and Chinatown. Charlie and Jane had inherited the building, along with the thrift shop

that occupied the ground floor, when their father died four years before. Charlie got the business, the

large, double apartment they’d grown up in, and the upkeep on the old building, while Jane got half the

rental income and one of the apartments on the top floor with a Bay Bridge view.

At the instruction of Mrs. Goldstein, all the mirrors in the house were draped with black fabric and a

large candle was placed on the coffee table in the center of the living room. They were supposed to sit on

low benches or cushions, neither of which Charlie had in the house, so, for the first time since Rachel’s

death, he went downstairs into the thrift shop looking for something they could use. The back stairs

descended from a pantry behind the kitchen into the stockroom, where Charlie kept his office among

boxes of merchandise waiting to be sorted, priced, and placed in the store.

The shop was dark except for the light that filtered in the front window from the streetlights out on

Mason Street. Charlie stood there at the foot of the stairs, his hand on the light switch, just staring. Amid

the shelves of knickknacks and books, the piles of old radios, the racks of clothes, all of them dark, just

lumpy shapes in the dark, he could see objects glowing a dull red, nearly pulsing, like beating hearts. A

sweater in the racks, a porcelain figure of a frog in a curio case, out by the front window an old

Coca-Cola tray, a pair of shoes—all glowing red.

Charlie flipped the switch, fluorescent tubes fired to life across the ceiling, flickering at first, and the shop

lit up. The red glow disappeared. “Okaaaaaaay,” he said to himself, calmly, like everything was just fine

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now. He flipped off the lights. Glowing red stuff. On the counter, close to where he stood, there was a

brass business-card holder cast in the shape of a whooping crane, glowing dull red. He took a second to

study it, just to make sure there wasn’t some red light source from outside refracting around the room

and making him uneasy for no reason. He stepped into the dark shop, took a closer look, got an angle on

the brass cranes. Nope, the brass was definitely pulsing red. He turned and ran back up the steps as fast

as he could.

He nearly ran over Jane, who stood in the kitchen, rocking Sophie gently in her arms, talking baby talk

under her breath.

“What?” Jane said. “I know you have some big cushions down in the shop somewhere.”

“I can’t,” Charlie said. “I’m on drugs.” He backed against the refrigerator, like he was holding it hostage.

“I’ll go get them. Here, hold the baby.”

“I can’t, I’m on drugs. I’m hallucinating.”

Jane cradled the baby in the crook of her right arm and put a free arm around her younger brother.

“Charlie, you are on antidepressants and antianxiety drugs, not acid. Look around this apartment, there’s

not a person here that’s not on something.” Charlie looked through the kitchen pass-through: women in

black, most of them middle-aged or older, shaking their heads, men looking stoic, standing around the

perimeter of the living room, each holding a stout tumbler of liquor and staring into space.

“See, they’re all fucked up.”

“What about Mom?” Charlie nodded to their mother, who stood out among the other gray-haired

women in black because she was draped in silver Navaho jewelry and was so darkly tanned that she

appeared to be melting into her old-fashioned when she took a sip.

“Especially Mom,” Jane said. “I’ll go look for something to sit shivah on. I don’t know why you can’t

just use the couches. Now take your daughter.”

“I can’t. I can’t be trusted with her.”

“Take her, bitch!” Jane barked in Charlie’s ear—sort of a whisper bark. It had long ago been

determined who was the Alpha Male between them and it was not Charlie. She handed off the baby and

cut to the stairs.

“Jane,” Charlie called after her. “Look around before you turn on the lights. See if you see anything

weird, okay?”

“Right. Weird.”

She left him standing there in the kitchen, studying his daughter, thinking that her head might be a little

oblong, but despite that, she looked a little like Rachel. “Your mommy loved Aunt Jane,” he said. “They

used to gang up on me in Risk—and Monopoly—and arguments—and cooking.” He slid down the

fridge door, sat splayed-legged on the floor, and buried his face in Sophie’s blanket.

In the dark, Jane barked her shin on a wooden box full of old telephones. “Well, this is just stupid,” she

said to herself, and flipped on the lights. Nothing weird. Then, because Charlie was many things, but one

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of them was not crazy, she turned off the lights again, just to be sure that she hadn’t missed something.

“Right. Weird.”

There was nothing weird about the store except that she was standing there in the dark rubbing her shin.

But then, right before she turned on the light again, she saw someone peering in the front window, making

a cup around his eyes to see through the reflection of the streetlights. A homeless guy or drunken tourist,

she thought. She moved through the dark shop, between columns of comic books stacked on the floor,

to a spot behind a rack of jackets where she could get a clear view of the window, which was filled with

cheap cameras, vases, belt buckles, and all manner of objects that Charlie had judged worthy of interest,

but obviously not worthy of a smash-and-grab.

The guy looked tall, and not homeless, nicely dressed, but all in a single light color, she thought it might

be yellow, but it was hard to tell under the streetlights. Could be light green.

“We’re closed,” Jane said, loud enough to be heard through the glass.

The man outside peered around the shop, but couldn’t spot her. He stepped back from the window and

she could see that he was, indeed, tall. Very tall. The streetlight caught the line of his cheek as he turned.

He was also very thin and very black.

“I was looking for the owner,” the tall man said. “I have something I need to show him.”

“There’s been a death in the family,” Jane said. “We’ll be closed for the week. Can you come back in a

week?”

The tall man nodded, looking up and down the street as he did. He rocked on one foot like he was

about to bolt, but kept stopping himself, like a sprinter straining against the starting blocks. Jane didn’t

move. There were always people out on the street, and it wasn’t even late yet, but this guy was too

anxious for the situation. “Look, if you need to get something appraised—”

“No,” he cut her off. “No. Just tell him she’s, no—tell him to look for a package in the mail. I’m not sure

when.”

Jane smiled to herself. This guy had something—a brooch, a coin, a book—something that he thought

was worth some money, maybe something he’d found in his grandmother’s closet. She’d seen it a dozen

times. They acted like they’ve found the lost city of Eldorado—they’d come in with it tucked in their

coats, or wrapped in a thousand layers of tissue paper and tape. (The more tape, generally, the more

worthless the item would turn out to be—there was an equation there somewhere.) Nine times out of ten

it was crap. She’d watched her father try to finesse their ego and gently lower the owners into

disappointment, convince them that the sentimental value made it priceless, and that he, a lowly

secondhand-store owner, couldn’t presume to put a value on it. Charlie, on the other hand, would just

tell them that he didn’t know about brooches, or coins, or whatever they had and let someone else bear

the bad news.

“Okay, I’ll tell him,” Jane said from her cover behind the coats.

With that, the tall man was away, taking great praying-mantis strides up the street and out of view. Jane

shrugged, went back and turned on the lights, then proceeded to search for cushions among the piles.

It was a big store, taking up nearly the whole bottom floor of the building, and not particularly well

organized, as each system that Charlie adopted seemed to collapse after a few weeks under its own

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Christopher Moore - Dirty Job

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