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“Moss” by Francis Walsh
Every time Jimmy blacked out, he left a corpse in his wake.
This was how Jimmy came to be known as Jimmy Corpse-in-His-Wake.
Every time Jimmy blacked out, he left a corpse in his wake.
This was how Jimmy came to be known as Jimmy Corpse-in-His-Wake.
On Tuesday morning, Jimmy awoke on a couch that was not his couch.
Jimmy knew the couch was not his couch, because Jimmy didn’t own a couch. Jimmy lived in a studio apartment and slept on a futon mattress that he kept on the floor, having long ago annihilated the wooden frame in pique of drunken fury over a missing clamshell take-out container of buffalo wings, never recovered.
Amid the splinters of the wooden frame, Jimmy had scowled and muttered: “Who ate my goddamn dirty wings?”
That the frame had yet to be replaced was a separate issue from its destruction.
Jimmy had not felt penitent; Jimmy had felt broke in the pockets.
Now awakening on an unfamiliar couch, Jimmy’s finger wistfully stroked the leather cushions cradling his body.
With a groan, he levered himself upright into the gray, early morning light, and discovered a spacious living room with bookcases built into the walls and a fireplace and a mantle. Fancy.
His ex-wife’s parents had been fancy enough to own a house with a fireplace and mantle.
Scratching his armpit, Jimmy attempted to unravel the knotty memory of the previous evening. He had started drinking at home, in the shower, the hot spray of water stippling his back while the beer cooled his belly. He had dressed—jeans and a hoodie—and walked down the street from his apartment to Rubella’s, whereupon he banged through the door and hollered for a basket of dirty wings and a beer and a shot.
Jimmy was a local.
He settled his bulk onto a bar stool as Joan Armatrading sang through the jukebox.
Love and Understanding.
He drank his beer and his shot, then persuaded himself to order another pair, lest one or the other drinks get lonely, or the pair, like a double date, a process he repeated until his sight blurred and fragmented into the nothingness of a Monday night blackout.
The events that occurred between the barstool and the couch would be a matter for forensics.
Meaning: Jimmy Corpse-In-His-Wake may have to reconstruct timelines, canvass witnesses, and employ his faculty for deduction.
Or else just follow the trail of bodies.
Over recent months, Jimmy had become adept at reconstructing the blacked-out portions of his life by checking his credit card purchases, which created a tidy narrative of his movements. Not that he roamed far, but it was good data for a damaged memory.
Jimmy felt everything was about data and metrics these days. From individual human performance to Uber and Yelp reviews to Draftking parlays, it was as if the nerds of the world had squeezed existence onto an Excel spreadsheet, which was probably how the geniuses at the insurance company had come up with a Corpse Rating, similar to a credit rating, but for all the discarded corpses.
Whenever Jimmy called to complain about his rating plummeting, the insurance company reminded Jimmy that he wasn’t the only one.
“Other people manage these things as well. We have assistance programs. You’re not alone, sir.”
“Yeah, well, it sure goddamn feels like it.”
Other fancy accoutrements adorned the living room in which Jimmy Corpse-in-His-Wake awoke. Jimmy’s shins butted against an antique, plinth coffee table, marble, atop which sat a coaster and an unopened bottle of spring water: a gracious host. Jimmy grabbed, twisted, guzzled. Light crept in from a bay window to Jimmy’s right, lifting the gloam in the room to reveal further furnishings—a second couch, a bar in the far corner, an enormous flatscreen, and paintings that appeared to be real and not prints, although Jimmy didn’t know what that meant from a financial standpoint, aside from excess.
Pictures adorned the mantle above the fireplace, but the light was still too dim to make out any shapes in the images. Gray blobs in the darkness. Jimmy crumpled the water bottle in his fist as he drained the last few drops.
Whose fucking house was he in?
Not that he bought a lot of drugs, but all his drug dealers lived in shithole studio apartments with tiny yappy dogs that dropped turds all over the carpet.
He searched for clues, but upon the coffee table, he saw no bong, and no cigarette burns eyed him from the upholstery.
This was a well-kept room.
In his more charming years, Jimmy had some success with one-night stands, and while he had often bragged about punching above his weight, he had never struck as high as this living room suggested.
Whoever lived in this house probably had a high paying job, like his ex-father-in-law, Coop, who had been a CFO, and who, actually, Jimmy realized, owned the exact same curved floor lamp with the domed, brass shade that just now burst into life and blew out Jimmy’s peepers.
“All right, Jimmy,” Cooper said, “You gotta get out of here. I didn’t want Lorraine to find you, so I’ve been sitting in the kitchen, waiting; you can exit through there. Use the half-bath if you need. Quietly. There’s cash on the table.”
Jimmy squinted. Coop had always been reasonable. He even looked reasonable, swaddled in a silk robe, his mustache trimmed to a calming straightness, looking like the most efficient push broom in the universe.
Coop reminded Jimmy of a Richard Yates novel. Coop riddled his dialogue with semicolons, colons, and all manner of exotic punctuation. No one spoke with semicolons anymore.
Jimmy rose from the couch to leave, ready to thank Coop for his hospitality and then skedaddle, but hungover and vulnerable, and perhaps still drunk, Jimmy blurted out an apology he had made hundreds of times in the past year, regarding an event he would forever wish had never occurred.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, Coop. It was an accident.”
Jimmy didn’t know how Coop did it, but he could make a stern sigh sound sympathetic, and right then Coop gave a most sympathetic sigh with the sternest of sibilance.
“I know it, Jimmy, more than most;—but the accident wasn’t the only issue: it was the drinking; leaving your soiled corpses all around town; pawning Nana June’s jewelry to buy whatever goofball pills you were ingesting. Heirlooms!”
“I can get the jewelry back if you think it would help.”
Coop laid a heavy hand on Jimmy’s shoulder as Jimmy passed.
“No, Jim, I don’t believe it would,” Coop said. “Take care to help yourself, and you’ll help everyone around you.”
Jimmy shuffled to the end of the hall, glancing over his shoulder once to catch Coop as he dragged Jimmy’s corpse from the couch toward a closet door beneath the stairs.
“Goddamn, heavy sumavbitch,” Coop muttered.
Outside on the stoop, Jimmy spotted another corpse sprawled on the lawn, facedown, ass up. As far as Jimmy could remember, he was living in the first week of September and he hadn’t seen a frost yet. He puffed out a few breaths and saw no vapor.
So at least the corpse probably wasn’t frozen to the ground, like that one time when Jimmy had unsuccessfully attempted to melt his face with a book of matches and a shitty $4 drugstore candle.
He sighed and trudged over. He considered hoofing it down the street and leaving his body, but Coop was too old to be moving around one corpse, let alone two. And it wasn’t like Jimmy didn’t know where Coop kept the trash bins.
Jimmy grabbed his corpse by the ankles and dragged himself toward the side of the house, where two large flip-top wheelie bins rested against the attached garage.
Halfway, Jimmy stopped, heaving for breath and dropped his ankles.
Christ, no wonder I’m dying so often.
The wear and tear was visible on his dead face: the slight bloat from the alcohol, and the minor, incremental advances of time and gravity that pulled at his skin, and he wondered if he might ever return to who he was, but in the meantime he buried his corpse in a garbage bin.
After depositing his corpse, Jimmy began the trek home. The world brightened with the sun and Jimmy listened for the birds.
When he took a left from Caldwell onto Brighton, he was immediately confronted by a car crumpled around a lamppost.
His body had plunged through the windshield and was now sprawled across the hood of the car.
“Hey man, wait a minute. I can move that. I can move that.”
The cop turned. Young and round, a brief look of bewilderment crossed his human face before he squashed it down and gathered the commands of his cop persona.
“Sir, is this your corpse? It is illegal to abandon your corpse within city limits. You need to set your corpse out in city-issued Corpse Containers. I’m sure you’re aware of the recent ordinances and public pressure to reduce the number of corpses on our street. Now, you don’t look like our typical problem, homeless IV drug users. So I’ll cut you a break and won’t cite you for the abandoned vehicle.”
Jimmy nodded, despite not thinking it was much of a break.
Some big person up top was also shitting on some little person down below, and Jimmy was part of that chain and all he knew was he wasn’t anywhere near the top, no sir. He always hoped to be proven wrong.
Jimmy accepted the ticket from the outstretched hand of the cop.
“Now Jimmy, according to our records, you have two other unpaid tickets for corpse abandonment. If you get another, the state will put out a warrant for your arrest. I advise you to pay those fines posthaste. You take care and watch yourself, ok, Jimmy?”
Yeah, I’ll be watching for assholes like you, Jimmy thought, then headed toward Rubella’s for breakfast and a beverage, something to bolster his spirits now that the world had seemed so fit to crush them.
Jimmy’s mouth watered with thoughts of washing down some fried eggs with a beer-and-tomato-juice cocktail. A slight bounce emerged in his step.
Take the edge off with that beer. Maybe two beers. Then head home, rest up. Get this sorted tomorrow.
He shoved his hands into his pockets.
Just one to smooth out the rough edges, he told himself.
Just one.
Jimmy hadn’t expected to be released from jail so quickly, but that was only because he hadn’t expected Coop to answer the phone.
After accepting the ticket for abandoning his corpse, Jimmy Corpse-In-His-Wake went to drink his beer. Hours later, he awoke in restraints, with no memory of the intervening hours, so he was alarmed when Coop asked:
“Why on God’s green earth would you throw a cinder block through a fire truck windshield at 1 AM on Wednesday night?”
Wednesday? Hadn’t he just seen Coop a few hours ago on Tuesday morning?
Still, Coop didn’t seem angry when he spoke, more perplexed and disbelieving, as if throwing a cinder block through a fire truck windshield was akin to some generational or cultural divide, like septum piercings or a desire for universal health care.
Coop sat opposite Jimmy in a booth at the Friendly Toast, a regional chain of breakfast diners. The color and spray of rock and roll paraphernalia was so bright Jimmy wore his sunglasses at the breakfast table.
A Joan Armatrading song burbled in the background.
You say there's peace in sleep, but you'll dream of love instead.
Stephanie Espisito, esq., sat beside Coop.
“All right Jimmy,” Steph said, “here’s the skinny. Any threats carried out against agents of the state carry hefty penalties, particularly against firefighters. The public loves firefighters. They save cats and lives, don’t carry sidearms, and have a reputation for sex appeal.”
Coop pursed his lips, pushing his little gray mustache up and down.
“Hard to argue with the ferocity of public opinion.”
Jimmy looked up from his milky coffee and into the expectant faces across the table.
“I don’t understand. I mean, I can’t remember. Why would I do that? Was there a fire?”
Coop and Esposito glanced at each other.
“That’s the good news,” Coop said. “There was a fire and you called the fire department.”
Jimmy nodded his head at the mention of possible heroics.
Not all heroics required redemption, but redemption required a heroics, so reasoned Jimmy.
He was quite tired, that morning and forever.
“Judges love a good Samaritan,” Esposito added. “Neighbors helping neighbors. And in the video footage, it’s clear that you threw the cinder block to get the attention of the responders, not to hurt them, because they were nowhere near the truck.”
“Except the engineer. But the water panel is near the rear of the truck. Same argument. Plus, you yelled, ‘The fire is over here you’ blankety-blanks before you threw the brick.”
Brick? “I thought you said I threw a cinder block.”
Steph shrugged.
“We’re going to see if we can get away with calling it a brick in court. It’s about perception. We’re going to frame this as a wake-up call. You were drunk and overreacted, but only because you were concerned for the safety of the public. The fireman had exited the fire truck but then headed in the wrong direction, unable to locate the fire.”
“On account of the miniscule smoke,” Coop added.
“So it’s arguably clear you didn’t intend to hurt anyone.”
Intend to hurt.
Jimmy had heard that before.
Jimmy clenched his eyes shut. His lids throbbed. He wasn’t sure if he had dozed off. His palms were clammy and damp against his cheeks as he held his face in his hands. He sobbed.
“I miss him so much, Coop.”
“We know,” Coop said. “I know. Listen to me, Jim. I know you didn’t mean to hurt him. I know it was an accident.”
“But that was only a part of the problem. The corpses, Jim. You tripped over the corpses. You hadn’t been taking responsibility. The drinking, that’s a disease. We all have plenty of reason to be upset with you, but the addiction isn’t the reason.”
Esposito said: “To paraphrase David Lee Roth, it’s not the cocaine that will make you go broke, it’s the checks you sign when you’re high that will.”
Coop shook his head. “He doesn’t know what a check is.”
“Do you think Lorraine will talk to me?”
Coop shook his head.
“Jim, you gotta leave Lorraine alone. She’s not responsible for you. You’re responsible for you. Lorraine knows what happened. If she blames you, you can’t control that; if she hates you, you can’t control that. She probably doesn’t want to relive the moment.”
Esposito waved the waiter down.
“Kids, never wanted them, never will. Amen.”
Coop turned to Esposito.
“Kids? We’re talking about a cat. Fur baby.”
The best part of the sober house was the yogurt.
Years of drinking had annihilated Jimmy’s interior.
The yogurt cooled the red raw lining of his gullet. He wondered if the appearance of the yogurt had a psychological effect: the yogurt looked like a salve.
The house manager didn’t keep a large stock, so Jimmy felt bad when he used his forearm to sweep the collection of yogurt from the refrigerator shelf and into a shitty black backpack with a broken strap. The yogurts tumbled together as he ran out the door.
But the shame of his next theft overshadowed the shame of his yogurt transgression: Jimmy crept back into Coop’s house and stole a binder full of baseball cards.
Coop had a collection of sports memorabilia for every New England sports, including a scrap book of clippings from regional newspapers reporting on high school games.
Coop caught, Jimmy, obviously.
Coop displayed his favorite collectibles in his office, a bastion of leather and wood. He stood in the doorway, his finger on the light switch, the shadow in the hall creeping at his back.
“Life is a game, Jim, but not in the way one might expect; coaches advise players to play to the whistle, but the game never ends with the whistle. There’s always the season to consider. Conferences. Championships. Next season. You see, Jim. It’s about playing the game. Not winning. Playing. You’re playing to the whistle right now. What are you going to do next game? Next year?”
Jimmy knew fuck-all about sports. He paused with his hand on a binder while he listened to Coop. Jimmy had left the halfway-house sober, and in the haze of his memory he recalled feeling justified, as if he were making the right decision, but now, confronted with Coop’s words, the reason for his leaving felt remote and unclear: what was he moving toward?
Could he ever escape himself?
Jimmy had his doubts, along with a history of doubt others had gifted him, words and looks of doom that had cast Jimmy as a lost cause.
Jimmy opened his mouth to apologize to Coop, but he paused.
“I always loved you, Coop.”
“This is about goddamn human compassion; this is about being a good citizen and a good neighbor: you don’t need to love me, damn it, you need to get better and know that you are loved.”
The tears Coop shed rolled along the upper ridge of his mustache before dribbling down his chin, and he sobbed as Jimmy ran away, again.
Jimmy sold the binder of cards to a stranger for a few hundred dollars. They met outside a shuttered Joann Fabrics in a Scarborough strip mall. The O was missing from the store sign. Jimmy had taken the Metro and arrived early. He paced beneath the covered walkway as a light rain fell.
Wet blacktop glistened.
The stranger pulled up in a cargo van, but not close enough to the curb, so Jimmy had to step into the rain while the stranger leaned outside the window.
The stranger whistled.
“I really feel like I’m ripping you off.”
Jimmy shrugged and held out his hand for the money.
As Jimmy walked away, the stranger yelled: “Hey, man, you forgot something. It’s leaning against the wall. Doesn’t look good, dude.”
Jimmy kept walking.
After a few days in the woods, Jimmy had enough corpses to build a shelter.
With the money from the baseball cards, Jimmy had filled his backpack with cans of baked beans and a sack of potatoes. He followed the Penobscot River into the remote interior of Maine.
In his arms, he cradled a case of Poland Spring Vodka.
Wet leaves clung to his shoes. He ached.
He was unsure of how long he walked, but he stopped when silence crept between the murmurs of the trees and the movement of the birds and the animals.
He drank.
As the corpses accumulated, Jimmy experimented with different arrangements (face-to-face, back-to-back, side-by-side) and eventually constructed three sturdy walls to form a triangle.
“Isosceles,” Jimmy said, hands on his hips.
The two walls of corpses meeting at the vertex angle had been arranged so that their hands clasped. Jimmy arranged some brush and fir tree limbs to create a roof for the shelter, then unclasped the hands and crawled inside.
Back in society, the required disposal of corpses meant Jimmy often didn’t spend much time with himself. Now, alone in the woods, he could witness the various stages of his rot and decrepitude as light filtered through the canopy and into the tomb he had created.
Surrounded by himself, he dreamt he was moss.
Francis Walsh is a writer from Portland, Maine. Their work appears in the Chicago Quarterly Review, PRISM International, Split Lip, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. They are the editor of SCRAPS.