Woo-jin slapped together some sandwiches. “I guess you’re probably hungry,” he said.
“I died?” Abby asked.
“At least two times,” Woo-jin said. “I saw your bodies.”
“Can you take me to them?”
Woo-jin shrugged. “I could try. They’re in Dr. Farmer’s morgue.”
Abby asked, “You said you were a writer?”
“I am going to try to attempt to be like a writer. I’m supposed to write a book about how to love people.” It dawned on Woo-jin that this now not-dead girl might have some ideas on how to solve some of his troubles. “Do you think you could help me find my sister? Or help with the writing of How to Love People?”
“Who’s your sister?”
“Patsy.”
“Where is she?”
“She got lifted up in the trailer by a helicopter. She’s a pharmer.”
“Oh,” Abby said. “Did she get taken to a harvesting center?”
“I have no clue,” Woo-jin said, “but she took all my posters with her. And my clothes.”
A sentence queued up in Abby’s brain before it left her mouth, as though it had been memorized for a play. “I need to see my dead bodies.”
Woo-jin still had Dr. Farmer’s business card. He pulled it from his pocket and called the number. Abby watched, surprised, as he proceeded to have a conversation. “Dr. Farmer? This is Woo-jin Kan. Right, the writer. I’m with the dead girl. No, she’s now living. Number three, yes. Okay. What? I’m at the Embassy. Okay. Buh-bye.” Woo-jin pushed the OFF button. “He’s coming over to pick us up in his car.”
“What’s that Ambassador guy doing in the other room with the glowing things?”
Woo-jin shrugged. “Communicating with visiting life forms, I guess. He gets directions from his celestial head. Do you like Dijon?”
Abby accepted the sandwich and sat down with Woo-jin at the little table in the nook.
“Oh no,” Woo-jin said. He fumbled in his pocket for his mouth guard, slipped it in, then flopped out of his chair onto the hardwood floor. Abby loomed over him as the wave of ennui flowed into his corporeal form. This attack didn’t take him anywhere. The house was like some sort of locked box from which he couldn’t mentally travel. Instead he gazed up in bloodshot panic as Abby held his shoulders, as if that would do any good. His eyes went so wide they didn’t look epicanthic anymore, with his face red and lips quivering, with tears actually squirting from ducts, the droplets catching air, raining into little puddles on either side of his head. Whereas usually the suffering had a source, tonight’s suffering was all residue, traces of pain he couldn’t stick to an actual person, diffuse hurts that bled from the Embassy’s hundred years of grievances. Abby called out lamely for help. The door to the kitchen opened and in floated the three orbs, glowing pink, hovering like concerned bystanders. Abby stepped aside as the orbs settled, humming, on Woo-jin’s body. He trembled once more then settled into a fuzzy drowsiness.
The Ambassador entered regally, with Pierre close behind, and waved his scepter in specific but indiscernibly communicative ways. Woo-jin coughed out his mouth guard and rose up on his elbows as the levitating orbs seemed to check out the pantry. “You should invite these orb guys to your place more often, Ambassador.”
Pierre raced to answer the doorbell. The orbs disappeared up a staircase. The Ambassador set about making himself a pot pie. Soon Pierre returned with Dr. Farmer, who looked tanned and reasonable. Upon seeing Abby he smiled broadly. “How fascinating! What a pleasure to meet you alive!”
Blinding whiteness, walls of slabs. Abby hugged herself as the coroner lifted the sheets covering the bodies. There lay two females identical to Abby, the key difference being they were deceased. She winced in embarrassment at their nakedness, as if it belonged to her own body. Abby couldn’t connect this new experience to the experience of snooping through Kylee Asparagus’s mansion or watching the Federicos cavort in a grand ballroom. She couldn’t connect it to what increasingly appeared to be an illusory domestic life with her Bionet engineer boyfriend. She couldn’t connect it to eating a sandwich in a house dominated by glowing spherical life forms. She yearned for plot but instead absurdity after absurdity had been thrown before her, absurdities that alluded to obscured purposes.
“Like I said before,” Dr. Farmer said, picking his teeth with an umbrella-shaped cocktail pick, “we believe that your selfhood, Abby, has gone into superposition. What does this mean? Well, consider a single electron. An electron can be in one place or in a different place, right? And yet we can sometimes find electrons in two places at the same time. So it is with you, apparently. It’s as if you’re both alive and dead simultaneously, and this simultaneity is a self-replicating system in which there are various ‘snapshots’ of your dead self. Which makes an autopsy pretty dang hard, let me tell you.”
A phone rang. The three living people looked to one another, each patting their pockets in that typical moment before someone recognizes the ring tone as their own. It was Abby’s phone. But there was no phone in her pockets. Dr. Farmer leaned over the closest of the two bodies, the one Woo-jin had discovered first, and opened its mouth. Show me yours, show me yours, oh show me yours, ring-toned the phone from inside the corpse’s mouth. With gloved fingers Dr. Farmer pulled it out and answered. “Hello? Yes, just a moment.” He handed it to Abby. “This telephone call is for you.”
Abby placed the somewhat moist phone close to her ear.
“Abby? Dirk Bickle here. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“I want to go home,” Abby said.
“I want you to go home, too, Abby. You’ve been a real champ.”
“I’m not following any more of your directions until you tell me what’s going on.”
“I understand. What do you want to know?”
“I want to know who you are, who you work for, why you really sent me to the Seaside Love Palace, and where Rocco is.”
“You bet. First, as far as my job goes, you can think of me as a curator. Typically a curator is someone in a museum who arranges the art or exhibits, right? In my case, I curate this world. I initiate contacts between people, ensure that certain parties speak to other parties, put people (aka the content) in new contexts. Second, I work for Mr. Kirkpatrick. You can think of Mr. Kirkpatrick as being the head of the museum. The man with the money to acquire new—I don’t want to call them realities but that’s essentially what they are. See how it works? He finds and categorizes and purchases them, and I move them around into the most pleasing arrangements. We needed you at the Seaside Love Palace because we needed a consciousness to move through the world of Kylee Asparagus and the Federicos. We needed someone to discern and imprint their reality, that’s all. Okay, your last question, about Rocco. It’s true you can’t get in touch with him. This will last a couple more weeks. I’m going to be completely honest with you, Abby, because you’ve been so great. He’s going to suffer a little, but ultimately he’ll be okay.”