“The regulations,” I echoed. “What was that, like the Alabama Accord or something?”
“The Atlanta Convention—a big meeting between industry and government to set the ground rules. When you buy a reanimate from one of the Big Three, they’ll warn you never to remove the mask, that it messes up the preservative process, and I think just about everyone obeys. No one wants their reanimate to fall apart on them. And then there are the quarterly servicings. If you miss even one of them, your reanimate becomes unlicensed and can be confiscated by the cops.” Ryan was also very interested in where the reanimates come from.
“They pay you, like, what? Seven or eight thousand to sign up, but not a whole lot of people in this country are willing to sell their bodies for eternal slavery, so most of the reanimates come from Africa or Asia. I always thought that was one of the reasons for the masks and the uniforms. I think a lot of white Americans might be more uncomfortable if they had to stare into a black reanimate face. More zombie-ish, I guess.”
“So where do these come from?” I asked. Most of the strippers at the club were young white women.
Ryan shrugged. “Some are from Eastern Europe, though those are hard to get because you need ones that spoke English when they were alive. Still, you have any idea how many poor assholes in Latvia are trying to learn English just so they can sell their bodies? But the Americans? They’re drug addicts, people with terminal diseases who want something for their families, whatever. A lot of them sell their bodies on the black market. They get less, but there are no taxes. Some young hottie gets pregnant and can’t afford an abortion? Maybe she hocks her body, hoping to buy it back. That’s the teaser, you know.
“You can always buy it back. How many reanimates out there do you think were convinced they could get their bodies out of hock before they died? Even the black-market dealers let you do it, because they know people can convince themselves that they’ll be able to redeem their bodies. Almost no one ever does.”
I wondered if that was what happened to Maisie Harper—some crisis she couldn’t tell her parents about, so she pawned her body, sure she would have time to buy it back.
“Bunch of morons,” Ryan said. “Convince yourself of anything. It’s crazy to think that because some chick believed she would always have more time, you can walk in here and just fucking buy her like you would buy a loaf of bread.”
Until that moment, I’d had no idea you could buy a reanimate from the Pine Box. This changed everything. “You mean I could—a person could—buy one of these girls?”
“You thinking about it? Be hard to explain to your wife, but yeah. I mean, it’s not like a showroom. You can’t just point and say, ‘I’ll take that one,’ but they are sometimes willing to sell if they have extra or if one of them isn’t working out.” He now waved his fingers at Maisie. “Like that one. I guess you’ve thought about it.”
I turned to him. “What do you mean?”
He grinned. “Oh, I don’t know. It seems to have a particular interest in you, and you in it. I’ve fucked it, you know.” He grinned at me again. “It’s good stuff. I bet you they would let it go cheap. I mean, if you wanted a messed-up reanimate, that is.”
I felt as though I were floating outside my body. Was Ryan hinting that he knew about me and Maisie? How was such a thing possible? But if he did, so what? We were brothers in sick, fucked-up, reanimate enthusiasm, weren’t we? And even more importantly, he raised this new thought: They sold reanimates here.
Buying Maisie. It seemed too good to be true. It seemed like all the stars were lining up to make my life easy, or at least to give me an out from unbearable complications. They sold the reanimates, and they might be willing to sell Maisie in particular.
Ryan must have noticed how thoughtful I looked. He laughed.
“Before you do something rash like buy, you might want to sample the goods.”
“Sample the goods?”
He nodded. “It’s only a hundred dollars. They have rooms in the back, and you get a full hour. You can pick any girl you want. If she’s on the stage, she’s available, but if you are thinking of buying that one, you should check her out first.”
I looked over at Maisie. She was dancing around a pole very slowly, and she was looking at me. The idea of having sex with her, with any of them, was utterly repulsive to me. “No way,” I said.
“Don’t knock it. If you’ve never had sex with a reanimate, you have no idea what you are missing. They love it, man. You wouldn’t believe how into it they are. It’s like they feel alive when they’re doing it. They talk, almost like normal people. Sex and pain do that.” “How do you know about pain?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Different guys have different interests. You meet all sorts of reanimate enthusiasts here. Some are into sex, some are into . . . crazy things.”
I was already dismissing this. If people wanted to torture the dead, that was their own business. I was thinking about Maisie and sex. I was thinking about what Ryan had said, that they seemed more human during sex, and they spoke. That meant that Maisie could be telling anyone anything. I really didn’t want to try it myself, but I had to know.
I paid my hundred dollars to Yiorgio, one of the Pine Box’s owners.
He was a good-looking Greek guy with long hair in a ponytail and a linebacker’s physique. He looked like someone who would be curt and dismissive, but he was actually very friendly. He spoke with a heavy accent, but he was very gregarious and casual, like paying to have sex with a reanimate was no big deal. He made his customers feel at home, which I supposed made him a good businessman.
The thing with Maisie was awkward. Wearing nothing but a G-string, she came over to stand in front of us. “You want to go with Mr. Walter Molson?” Yiorgio asked her. “He is true gentleman.” I winced when he spoke my name. I didn’t want her to know it.
She recognized my face, but until that moment, I don’t see how she could have known my name. She did not react, and I hoped that maybe the information was lost on her dead brain.
She followed me to the room Yiorgio had given us. I was expecting something unspeakably seedy—a dusty room with cinder-block walls and a stained mattress on the floor—but the space was actually very neat and pleasant, with a bed and some chairs. The room was well lit, the walls newly wallpapered and with paintings of landscapes and fruit and the kind of bland things you see in hotel rooms. The bed looked freshly made. Yiorgio was clearly a class act.
I closed the door, and Maisie stood there looking at me, not blinking. Yiorgio had told me that whenever I spoke to her, I needed to begin the command with her name or she might not listen. I said, “Maisie, sit down on the bed.”
She sat.
There I was in that small room with Maisie. She sat on the side of the bed, her face empty and her eyes as unblinking as a doll’s. She was all but naked, but totally oblivious. She’d been beautiful when she was alive, I knew, and she was still beautiful in death if you liked that sort of thing. But even though I felt the surprising heat of her proximity, I had no intention of having sex with her—with it. She was a dead thing, a corpse made active by some mysterious mad science, and that did not get me all worked up. Plus there was the guilt, I didn’t want to be the sort of person who would both kill a woman and then fuck her dead body. That wasn’t how I saw myself.