Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

More Soon

The plane landed but his brother wasn’t onboard. The woman at the airline counter pouted her lips (sympathetically?) as Bert tried to explain the situation to her over all the commotion, the reunited families crowing, the baggage carousels whirring, the muscular officer hustling by with his skinny brown drug dog.

The woman behind the counter consulted her computer again and then leaned forward to report that, unfortunately, she had no record for a casket on that flight. She asked if Bert had maybe made a mistake. If it was possible that he’d confused the day or the flight number.

He had the correct information. He unfolded all his paperwork across the counter. He could provide her with confirmation codes and receipts and State Department emails — whatever she wanted. She was a small woman with a tight, pink face. No longer pouting (sympathetically or otherwise), she stared down at the mess he’d created on her counter as if willing it to combust and swirl away in a puff of papery ash.

“My brother, Rob Yaw,” Bert huffed. “He was supposed to be on that flight. Are you telling me you lost a human body?”

“Hold on,” she said, backing away from the counter on ballerina feet. “Let me check with my manager. Stay here.”

From his pants pocket Bert fished loose his wife’s cell phone — he’d lost his phone for the hundredth time — and dialed Mrs. Oliver. Mrs. Oliver worked for the State Department and had been his primary contact throughout the exasperating process of getting his dead brother back into the country. The department wouldn’t be paying for the transit. Apparently that was the family’s burden. But Mrs. Oliver had promised to do everything in her power to help.

“They’re saying he wasn’t on the flight?” she asked. “Interesting. Okay, let me see what I can find out for you. I’ll have to call you back. Stay where you are.”

Bert hadn’t even considered leaving. After all, there was always the chance that his brother’s remains would arrive on the next flight, which would land in…

“Not until tomorrow actually,” the woman behind the counter informed him. She had just returned with her manager in tow, a fat-faced man with small George Bush eyes and a gray soul patch under his lip that he kept licking. The two of them stood shoulder to shoulder in their matching blue and orange airline vests, gazing at the computer, bleary-eyed, somber.

Bert imagined his poor brother’s unclaimed casket on a carousel in some forgotten part of the world. A baggage claim mausoleum: no casket, just a body, his brother’s skin waxing under the lights of the arrival gate cafés and newsstands, all those people watching Rob, famous for nothing but this, as he cycled around and around with all the other lost bags.

The manager, as far as Bert could tell, was doing very little to help locate the casket, instead only nodding his approval at various mouse click maneuvers. This was no way to run a business! Companies were only as strong as the people it hired, top to bottom. Bert was diligent when it came to hiring for his own business. He’d retired from real estate ten years ago to open his first Pop-Yop, the soft-serve franchise. If all went well he’d be cutting the ribbon on his fourth by the end of the year. None of it would have been possible if he had employees like these two.

The phone rang, and the woman snatched it up, cradling it between her shoulder and ear. Someone was talking very fast and high on the other end of the line, a garbled mess of sound that Bert did his best to decipher from his side of the counter.

“This might be a while,” she whispered to Bert after a minute, hand over the receiver. “You can go sit down. We’ll come and find you when we have something.”

But Bert didn’t want to sit down. He refused to sit down. Sitting down was giving up. No matter how much his legs ached, he would stand here, checking his wristwatch, breathing deep. He would hold them accountable.

His wife’s phone rang — a chorus of chirping frogs in his pocket — and Bert was relieved to see Mrs. Oliver’s overseas number blink onto the screen.

“You were right,” she said when he answered. “Rob wasn’t on the plane after all. I’m afraid I have some unfortunate news. They’re telling me now that they can’t release the body. Not yet anyway.”

“Can’t release him?” Bert asked.

(Behind the counter the airline employees glanced at each other, clearly relieved to learn they weren’t at fault and this was no longer their problem to solve.)

Mrs. Oliver was talking in a rush, her voice low but airy, as if they were connected not by a phone but by a paper-towel tube that spanned the ocean. Each phrase landed in his ear with a thump: security issues, protocol, red tape. She said they wanted to be certain before they risked bringing his brother back into the country.

“Hold on,” he said. “Certain of what?”

“Of what it was that killed him.”

“I don’t understand. I thought we already knew that. I thought the autopsy confirmed the aneurysm.”

“It did. Or it almost did, I guess. The bottom line is, they want to do a second one.”

“Is that typical?”

“I don’t think so, no,” Mrs. Oliver said. “None of this is typical. It’s a very unusual situation. I’m afraid I don’t have much more information for you. They’re being a bit cagey about all of it. But you have my word: I’ll stay on it. If I have to take this higher up the chain, I will. I’ll be in touch, Bert. More soon.”

• • •

Bert and his wife were eating dinner at an Italian restaurant near the movie theater that night. It was a muggy May evening, but beside their outdoor table a heatless electric fire flickered in a bowl-shaped pit painted a sooty black.

“God, do they think he was murdered?” his wife asked.

“No one’s said anything about murder,” he said. It was a silly idea, he knew, but, strangely, also a somewhat pleasing one to consider. He didn’t wish his brother to have been murdered. Not at all. But it was a new angle for them to discuss. “He wasn’t even forty yet, it’s true. He was healthier than me. I’m the one who had the bypass. If anyone was just going to drop dead in a hotel pool, it’s me, don’t you think?”

Ever since getting the news about Rob, he’d been doing his best to avoid that particular image, his brother’s chlorinated corpse, the swirl of his brown hair on the surface of the water, his swim trunks bubbled out, floating, floating, floating.

They’d almost polished off an entire bottle of wine, and the food hadn’t arrived. Bert was hungry, so hungry that he yelled over to the waitress when she delivered plates to a nearby table whose occupants — Bert couldn’t help but keep an eye on such things — had sat down ten or possibly even fifteen minutes later than them.

“Have you forgotten about us?” he called over to her.

“Of course not, sir. I’ll check with the kitchen again.”

The waitress scurried away, and Delia, Bert’s wife, pretended to need something out of her purse, embarrassed that he’d raised his voice in public. She didn’t like it when he was ornery with people, particularly with waitstaff. As a teenager, she’d worked summers at a fish camp, serving up fried catfish and hush puppies on newspaper in plastic baskets, and despite the fact that she hadn’t worked a single day since marrying Bert, she still professed an allegiance to anyone working in the service industry.

“I’m sorry,” he told her quietly. “It’s just that this has been such a strange week. What did the girls have to say?”

The girls — his daughters — were not really girls anymore. The oldest was working for a tech start-up on the West Coast. The youngest was a senior in college. Delia had talked to them both that afternoon on the phone while he was at the airport.

“Well,” she said. “They hardly knew him.”

Her phone chirped. She glanced at the screen and held it out for Bert. It was Mrs. Oliver again. “What’s the latest?” he asked, rising from his chair. His black napkin slid from his lap and landed in a heap on the concrete. He darted through the tables to a far corner of the patio where he might be able to hear her better.

“They’re telling me now it was some sort of infection. That’s what caused the aneurysm.”

“What sort of infection? Did they say?”

“That’s what they’re trying to figure out. That’s the next step, apparently.”

“Is this something he could have picked up at one of his sites?” he asked. His brother was an exploratory geologist and had worked for a company with mines all over the world. He’d traveled constantly.

“They haven’t ruled anything out yet,” Mrs. Oliver said. “They put him on a plane this morning. He landed in Singapore a few hours ago, and now he’s on his way to Sydney.”

She reported all this as if Rob had boarded the plane himself, as if he’d upgraded his seat and was currently knocking back a few complimentary cocktails in business class. None of this made any sense: instead of bringing Rob home, they were sending him farther away?

“Keep in mind,” Mrs. Oliver said, “his company is Australian. This is all being done through the proper channels. There’s an infectious disease center there that’s offered to look into his case. They might be able to figure this out. Okay, more as I have it.” The line went dead before Bert could ask any more questions. At that very moment, his brother, poor Rob, was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean in the belly of a plane, very likely sealed up in hazmat bags and labeled with all sorts of biohazard warnings and destination stickers.

When Bert sat back down at the table, his food was waiting for him, a giant plate of chicken puttanesca. Delia had already started nibbling at hers. She ate like a mouse. It was no wonder she’d never struggled with her weight like he had. He discovered that he’d lost his appetite but he still somehow managed to finish most of his meal.

• • •

It was a virus. Or at least something very virus-like. That is, the culprit behaved similar to and had the characteristics of a virus but was possibly not an actual one. Bert had trouble keeping it all straight as information trickled in over the next few weeks from the lab, via Mrs. Oliver, but Bert’s personal theory, one that he offered his wife one night in bed, was that his brother had been exposed to some sort of subterranean flu, a dangerous little bug that had been hibernating in the rocks or the ice for millions of years and that had been released by the mining drills. The earth was on the verge of a pandemic against which it had no immunity, and his brother was Patient Zero.

“Yes, maybe,” his wife said. “Or maybe it was the protesters.”

“What protesters?”

“The people against the mines. Surely there were protesters. I was reading recently the new blood diamond is computer parts. Our phones and televisions, everything needs these certain minerals, and it’s a very nasty business. It was a very upsetting article. Maybe someone read about it and spiked your brother’s drink. Maybe he was assassinated. For political reasons.”

Bert wasn’t sure what to say to that. In truth, he knew very little about his brother’s work. They’d never really discussed their careers. They’d never really discussed much of anything over the last few years beyond college football and what to do with their parents when the time came (hospice for their mother; and later, a nursing home for their father). Age was partially to blame for the distance between them. Rob was fifteen years younger, and sometimes Bert felt as though they’d been raised by entirely different families. Their father had already sold his insurance business and retired by the time Rob was out of diapers. Their mother had been forty-nine when she found out she was pregnant again. She’d always treated Rob like some kind of minor miracle. Like something out of the Old Testament. “Just call me Sarah,” she used to joke.

Rob had never married—“Too predictable,” he’d always said — but he’d cycled through plenty of girlfriends over the years, women he mentioned in passing but rarely brought along to family gatherings. Bert could remember meeting only one or two of them. His brother had dated a red-haired book critic named Monica (that one had really raised their mother’s hopes), and then there’d been that hippie girl with the big wire glasses, the one who made soaps — what was her name? Aspen? Bert wondered if there were people out there who wouldn’t have seen the obituary in the local paper three weeks ago, people who’d want to know Rob had died, suddenly, tragically, and far away.

Pending the investigation, everything that Rob had been carrying with him while abroad was being held in storage, but that still left his apartment in Atlanta, a place he’d used only two or three nights a month. Possibly he’d kept an address book or a computer with an email account Bert could crack.

“And just how will you crack it exactly?” his wife asked him as they drove down to Atlanta on a Saturday morning.

“I could know people who do that sort of thing,” he said.

Rob’s building was ten stories high, a red-brick behemoth, on a block full of newer stucco condominiums. They didn’t have a key to his apartment, so they knocked on the super’s door in the basement, hoping she might help. A skeletal woman emerged in a frayed red cardigan, gray wisps of hair like miniature storm systems over her head.

“Yeah?” she asked, and crossed her arms.

“My brother lives here,” Bert said. “In 8F. He died, and we’d like to—”

“You’re too late,” she said.

“Too late?” Delia asked.

“Some people came a few weeks ago. They took all his stuff and sealed up his apartment. Apparently I’m not even supposed to rent it out. They tell you what was wrong with him? They wouldn’t tell me. I figured it was pretty serious, for all the trouble it caused.”

Bert told her he knew very little. The woman gave them a disappointed look and retreated into her apartment. Outside again, standing next to the car, Bert counted up eight floors, shielding his eyes from the sun, guessing at his brother’s window.

“Well,” Delia said, “we tried.”

“Wait right here. I’ll be back.”

“Where are you going?”

He told his wife he had one more question for the super, but back inside the lobby, with its long wall of bronze mailboxes and marble floors that whistled under his loafers, Bert didn’t take the stairs down to her apartment. Instead he pushed the button for the elevator. It was a creaking box, barely big enough for two people. He imagined a network of frayed ropes and rusted pulleys on the other side of the ceiling. He’d never understood why his brother had picked such an ancient building. “You never did have any taste,” Rob told him once.

When Bert reached the eighth floor, the elevator doors dinged and opened to reveal a long, narrow hallway with beige carpet. Above each door were silver and shiny letters. Finding Rob’s apartment was easy. He tried to remember the last time he’d stood in front of this door. Summer before last? Rob had just returned from another trip, and they’d had dinner plans on the calendar for at least a month.

“Oh, that’s tonight, isn’t it?” his brother had asked coolly, before inviting them inside.

“You need to reschedule?” Bert had asked, not really trying to hide his irritation.

“I guess we should have called to confirm,” Delia said.

“No, please, come in. Sorry, I blame the jet lag. Drinks?”

His apartment had always been a museum of his travels, crammed with strange and potentially dangerous artifacts: shadowboxes that displayed shelled necklaces and stringy bracelets and charms of unknown origin, halfway sheathed swords, tribal spears with little notches carved and painted along the shafts; not to mention a surfeit of photographs — of viny temples and lazy brown rivers, of snowy peaks, of mosquito-thick jungles, of smiling strangers Rob never took the time to name or explain — and then of course his stone Ganesha, the knee-high sculpture of the elephantine Hindu deity that sat resplendent beside the sofa, its many waving arms and majestic trunk.

“So is it art?” Delia asked him once. “Or do you, like — what? Meditate in front of it?”

“He’s supposed to remove the obstacles from your life. Though he’s been known to add them too, in some cases… when needed.”

“How anyone could believe in something that looks like that, I have no idea,” Delia said.

“As opposed to what?” Rob asked. “Besides, he didn’t always look like that. His father chopped his head off and to bring him back from the dead his mother had to give him an elephant’s head. It’s a sweet story, sort of, if you think about it right.”

Bert had nothing against his brother’s travels, generally, and he tried not to let it bother him that the artifacts represented a part of his brother’s life that was, for better or worse, unknowable. But what could be so infuriating was the way Rob seemed to take it all for granted. “Oh, that?” he’d say about the little clay thousand-year-old whatever that Delia or Bert had happened to notice on the mantel, as if it were a trinket he’d picked up in the airport gift shop. It was condescending, wasn’t it? To feign such indifference?

The door to Rob’s apartment wasn’t locked today, but when Bert opened it, he discovered a thick piece of translucent plastic had been stretched across the frame and sealed on all sides with yellow duct tape. He pressed his palm to it. Warm, like skin. Probably the air-conditioning was shut off on the other side. Bert wasn’t sure what he wanted to do now. He jammed his index finger into the plastic, stretching it until the plastic hugged his knuckle like a condom. He had to claw at the plastic with both hands to actually rip a hole, and when he did, he discovered a second piece of plastic on the other side of the doorframe, small divots left there by his fingers.

He could see through the plastic, barely, the room bathed in milkiness. There was nothing on the walls. He thought of the various tapestries and wall hangings and lamps that had once made this white box of an apartment seem so intimate and homey. Everything was gone now: the furniture, the rugs, the curtains. Probably they’d taken the silverware, the cereal bowls. It was almost like his brother had never been there at all.

• • •

Back in the car again, his wife was irate. She couldn’t believe Bert had gone upstairs and risked exposure. He’d put them both in danger, and for what? “Truly idiotic,” she called it, and rolled down all the windows in the car, as if a little fresh highway air might forestall any disease he’d contracted. When they got home she ordered him into the shower and dumped cleaning chemicals and powders all over his head and back. She scrubbed him, though from a safe distance, with a long rough brush. He endured this without complaint, though the smell of the bleach made his eyes water and his skin itch. That night he broke out in a splotchy rash that his wife was positive had nothing to do with the chemicals. She was certain it was the first of many future symptoms.

“This is crazy,” he said. “If they were really worried about contamination, they would have done more than put up a sheet of plastic.” Partly, he was saying this to reassure himself. “Trust me. I’m fine.”

“For now,” she said. “For now you are.”

She watched him closely over the next few days, insisting that he sleep on the couch and eat his meals on the back deck. When he still wasn’t dead at the end of the week, she allowed him into their bed again.

“Aren’t you glad to have me back?” he asked, caressing her leg and sneaking his fingers under her slip.

“No, thank you,” she said, and knocked his hand away. “None of that just yet.”

“I never should have told you I went up to that apartment.”

“Poor baby,” she said, and then asked that he please stay on his side of the bed. “For now.”

• • •

Mrs. Oliver called again, finally, to report that Rob was no longer being held in Australia. They’d moved him briefly to a facility in Russia, where his body had been frozen and sealed in some sort of space-age container (the device had an unpronounceable Russian name), and after that, they’d moved him again, this time to an undisclosed location with heavy security. His brother, it seemed, was destined to be a traveler both in life and death.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Oliver said. “I know this must be strange for you. But they had to take precautions. One of the pathologists in Sydney, she died.”

“God. From the same thing as my brother?”

“It’s looking that way, yes,” Mrs. Oliver said. “She didn’t show up to work. They found her at home in front of the television. They’re still not sure how it was transmitted.”

Bert hadn’t told Mrs. Oliver about his visit to Rob’s apartment. The last thing he wanted was to wind up in some sort of quarantine.

“Am I ever going to see my brother again?” he asked.

“The honest answer,” she said, and sighed, “is that it’s looking less and less likely. Basically, at this point, he is the disease, you know?”

So, it had come to that. His baby brother, the disease. His baby brother, the human infection.

Rob hadn’t been the easiest person in the world to get along with, but surely he didn’t deserve this sort of treatment, being frozen and shipped all over the world as a scientific curiosity.

Mrs. Oliver was saying goodbye when Bert asked again about his theory, about the chances that Rob had contracted a long-dormant disease while down in one of the mines (a theory that, if true, would surely implicate the company to some degree). Mrs. Oliver, her voice deep and warbled, said, “Mr. Yaw, please, we just don’t know. You’d be astounded by how little we know. By how many theories there are! It’s a very sensitive case. It’s not for nothing that we want to keep this out of the news.”

All along Bert had understood the need for discretion. According to Mrs. Oliver, her updates were hinged on him not passing information along to anyone. She trusted him, she said, to keep this confidential, though exactly how confidential she never specified. That left him in a difficult position with friends who’d met his brother over the years and who sensed that Bert was withholding crucial details about Rob’s death. He was never quite sure how much to reveal to people. It was a concern, however, that Delia didn’t seem to share.

“They’ve got him on ice,” she told some of their friends over wine one night. “He’s contagious. No one can go anywhere near him.”

“Contagious with what?” their friends asked, impressed by the drama.

“Bert thinks it’s some kind of Jurassic flu,” she said, turning to him. “Right?”

“I have no idea what it is.”

“What will they do with the body next?” the friends asked then.

“What will they do?” Delia asked Bert.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

She looked at him, flustered. “Anyway,” she said, “it makes it hard to get any closure. The least they could do is burn a finger or a toe, and send us some ashes. Then we’d have something to bury and pray over. Wouldn’t that help, Bert?”

Bert wasn’t sure if that would bring him any peace. He thought of his parents’ graves. They were buried near their church in one of the greenest and most immaculate cemeteries Bert had ever seen. “They only keep it like this,” his brother had once noted, “because they really do think all these bodies will get raised from the dead someday. They really think everyone will come popping out of these perfect little graves. To meet Jesus, I guess.” It was an unappealing idea, Bert admitted, your soul like a nice clean hand jammed back into a dirty wet garden glove. It was one thing for Jesus to bring back Lazarus after only a few days in the tomb, but say you’d been dead for a thousand years, say your ashes had been dumped into the sea and swallowed by tuna and served up as sushi. What then? Sure, Bert could imagine a scenario in which all the elements that once constituted a body were instantaneously re-formed into the original body-shape, but what about the fact that atoms got recycled over time? No doubt his own body contained more than a few atoms that had already belonged to previous souls, and so who would have dibs come Judgment Day — the first claimant, or the holiest? It was a silly question, of course, but that was the problem with believing in anything too specific. Bert had long ago dropped his parents’ church for his wife’s uncharismatic Episcopal one, a church whose priest counseled people not to focus too much on the machinery of it all.

As far as Bert knew, Rob had not belonged to any religion at all when he died. “Quickest way to figure out a church,” he remembered Rob saying once. “Go to their website and Control-F for the words inerrant and infallible.”

Delia took another long sip of wine, eyes flicking back and forth between Bert and their friends. She was still waiting for him to respond. “Would it help if they sent you a toe to burn?” she asked again. “Though I guess it’s not like y’all were especially close.”

“We were close enough,” Bert said.

“News to me,” she said, then, “Sorry.”

Bert stayed quiet and sullen for the rest of the night. Delia had said too much about Rob’s condition, but he didn’t want to let on in front of their friends. She glanced over at him every so often, her eyes half closed and soft, her way of trying to communicate an apology.

“Don’t act like it’s top secret,” she said in the car on the way home. “It’s not. You haven’t signed anything. And frankly I think it’s a little odd how you’re suddenly so insistent that you and Rob were such bosom buddies.”

“Brothers don’t have to talk on the phone twice a week to be close,” he said. Delia was on the phone with her family constantly.

“Listen, there’s no need to play this game with me,” she said. “We both know what your brother was like. He was an asshole, okay? Don’t look at me like that. I’m sorry, but he was. Your parents let him get away with everything. Remember when he wrecked your Jeep and almost killed that stupid girl he was dating, and what did your parents do?”

“I was working by then. I didn’t need their help paying for another car.”

“Sure, of course, but that didn’t mean they needed to buy him a new car that same Christmas! Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean you have to be nice or lie,” she said.

They were almost home now. He was tired of fighting with her and was ready for bed. Plus, she was right.

My baby brother, the contagion, he almost said aloud. No one could say that Rob had ever been boring. No one could possibly say that.

• • •

Rob had been dead for almost four months when Mrs. Oliver started emailing all her updates. Bert didn’t mind this shift, though her written messages did tend to be short and cryptic.

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: SEPTEMBER 29, 2014 08:33:02 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

ANOTHER RESEARCHER DEAD. IN RUSSIA. FROZEN R JUST AS DANGEROUS! — MO

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: OCTOBER 2, 2014 08:16:59 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

R ON CONTAINER SHIP. — MO

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: OCTOBER 4, 2014 08:42:28 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

SHIP ON THE ATLANTIC!!! MUCH DISCUSSION OF WHERE HE GOES NEXT. NATSEC ISSUE, AS YOU CAN IMAGINE, YES? — MO

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: OCTOBER 15, 2014 09:14:22 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

HAVE YOU HAD A MEMORIAL YET? IMPORTANT TO GRIEVE, I THINK. — MO

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: OCTOBER 18, 2014 23:01:13 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

THINKING OF YOU TODAY. NO WORD ON R. SORRY. — MO

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: OCTOBER 20, 2014 12:30:56 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

TIBETANS SAY BODY IS EMPTY AFTER THREE DAYS. (MY AUNT IS A PRACTICING BUDDHIST!) — MO

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: OCTOBER 31, 2014 11:44:08 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

CONTAINER SHIP FOUND!!! MORE SOON. — MO

Bert hadn’t realized that the ship had ever been lost, but he was glad to know that Mrs. Oliver had located it again. When he told Delia this bit of news, she only nodded. They hadn’t been talking about Rob as much lately.

“Is this ever going to end?” she asked him. “I never would have guessed it was possible, but your brother’s turned out to be more of a pain dead than alive.”

“I think that’s going a bit far,” he said.

“I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told you,” she said. “Six years ago, the Christmas after your dad died, your brother walked in on me as I was stepping out of the shower.”

Bert waited for her to continue. “And?”

“And,” she said, “and he didn’t leave right away.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember. It felt too long. Nothing happened, other than that, but he just stood there, looking at me. Like a little reptile. And I could just… tell.”

“Tell?”

“Tell what he wanted.”

“Did you cover up?” Bert asked.

“Of course, yes,” she said. “What kind of a question is that?”

But he couldn’t help but wonder at the speed of that covering-up. Delia was a good-looking woman, and Rob had been an attractive younger man.

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because,” she said, almost pleading, “Rob is not worth… all this energy.”

But Bert wasn’t sure. He’d read once in a magazine that even the Neanderthals, more than a hundred thousand years ago, had buried their dead, arms folded, panther bones and stone points scattered around the body. That this practice had been going on for so long, Bert figured, was significant. It was important to treat the body, no matter how irritating its former occupant, with a little respect.

Maybe, Delia joked once, instead of his having a tombstone as a memorial, the scientists studying him could simply name the disease after Rob. Bert relayed this to Mrs. Oliver, explaining that Delia had never been his brother’s biggest fan, that she’d been troubled by the way Rob treated people, specifically women. (And incidentally, he asked, surely they’d already ruled out the possibility of a sexually transmitted disease? Ha ha ha, Mrs. Oliver wrote back to that.)

His exchanges with Mrs. Oliver were an escape from the frozen-yogurt deliveries and the management trainings and the accounting, a little bit of international intrigue delivered right into his otherwise lackluster in-box. Perhaps it would continue this way forever, these reports on his brother’s never-ending itinerary, updates that conjured up an image of Rob standing at the bow of a ship, its prow slicing forward through a sea of churning gray waves on its journey to the end of the earth.

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: NOVEMBER 2, 2014 10:16:12 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

R MOVED ONTO A NEW SHIP. CDC VISIT PLANNED. — MO

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: NOVEMBER 4, 2014 09:52:40 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

CDC ON SHIP WITH R TODAY. HOW YOU HOLDING UP? — MO

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: NOVEMBER 4, 2014 16:16:28 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

R CAN’T BE CREMATED OR LIQUEFIED OR ANYTHING ELSE. TOO DANGEROUS, THEY SAY. NEW OPTIONS BEING DISCUSSED. MORE AS I HAVE IT. — MO

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: NOVEMBER 19, 2014 12:02:14 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

TWO MORE PEOPLE ON SHIP CREW DEAD!!! MUCH REVIVED TALK OF WHAT TO DO WITH R. — MO

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: NOVEMBER 20, 2014 21:40:04 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

MOST RELIGIONS SAY ZERO PERCENT OF SOUL REMAINS IN BODY AFTER DEATH. COMFORTING, YES? R WILL NEVER NEED THIS VESSEL AGAIN, I DON’T THINK. — MO

FROM: MARISSA OLIVER

DATE: NOVEMBER 25, 2014 23:01:21 EST

TO: HUBERTYAW@POP-YOP.COM

SUBJECT: R

R HAS BEEN DECLARED A BIOLOGICAL WEAPON. WILL CALL WITH MORE AFTER THANKSGIVING. — MO

• • •

Bert was checking in on one of his Pop-Yop franchises (his busiest location, at the outlet mall) when he got the call. He took his cup of lemon tart soft-serve outside to an empty stretch of parking lot to walk the white parking space lines like tightropes as he snacked and listened.

“First,” Mrs. Oliver said, “I’d like to retract part of my previous message. The part about your brother being a biological weapon.”

“So he’s not, then?”

“Let’s just pretend I never said it. Can you do that for me?”

“Okay,” Bert said, and raised the little pink spoon to his mouth.

“But here’s the good news. In a few days his ship will come within a hundred miles of Norfolk. Any chance you could get to Norfolk?”

Bert stopped walking. Norfolk was a six-hour drive. “Maybe. Why?”

He could almost hear her smiling as she detailed the bureaucratic magic she’d performed on his behalf. She’d appealed to the right people, she said, and made them see how cruel it was to deny Rob’s family the right to properly grieve. So, when the ship passed close to Norfolk — that is, if Bert was up for it — they were going to put him on a helicopter.

“So I’ll get to see my brother then?”

“See your—” she said. “Oh, no. Bert, you can’t step foot on that ship. But they’re going to fly you over it. It’s the best I could do. Under the circumstances, I thought you’d be happy.”

He was happy, he assured her. She was very kind to have made the arrangements. She’d gone above and beyond what was required of her, he had to acknowledge that, but still, he’d need the night to consider. He drove straight home to talk it over with Delia, who was elated at the prospect. “Of course you’re doing it,” she said. “It’s not even a question. You’ll do this and we’ll be finished. Goodbye, Rob.”

• • •

They left the house a day early, before dawn, with fresh coffee in the thermos and turkey sandwiches in Ziploc bags. They had reservations at an inn in Colonial Williamsburg and arrived before check-in time. While Delia shopped, Bert strolled up and down the cobblestone streets, stopping to watch women in bonnets churn butter and make candles. That night Delia and Bert had dinner at a tavern and talked about their kids, about Pop-Yop — about anything but Rob.

The next morning they were up early again. The radio news station crackled and died in the tunnel under the Chesapeake, and when they emerged again on the bridge, the sky was a dazzling blue pocked with flapping gulls.

Bert switched off the radio so Delia could read the directions to the base. Once there, a man at the front gate checked a clipboard before waving them through, and then, as instructed, they parked in front of a beige brick building not far from the entrance.

“You ready for this?” Delia asked, pulling her purse over her shoulder.

Inside the building was a small waiting room with white plastic chairs and a low table full of magazines with old fashions. The uniformed man at the front desk scanned Bert’s and Delia’s driver’s licenses and passports and then printed them both sticker badges. He pointed them toward the empty chairs, saying it wouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes or so before departure.

“So,” Delia said, “when do we meet the mysterious Mrs. Oliver?”

“I don’t think she’s coming,” Bert said. “At least that was my impression.”

“Shame,” Delia said, digging a book out of her purse.

They had been in a helicopter once before together, many years ago on their honeymoon in Hawaii. The helicopter ride was an expensive excursion that had taken them over an active volcano. Rob had been thirteen years old at the time of the wedding, but, at the insistence of their mother, he’d acted as Bert’s best man, his cummerbund so loose that it smiled below his waist. “Please tell me you already tested the goods,” Rob had said before the ceremony with a dumb teenager’s grin, braces shiny and sharp. (His brother, the biological weapon.)

Armed men arrived to escort them to the landing pad. Together they hustled outside and crouched low to pass beneath the giant whooshing blades of the aircraft. Delia struggled to contain the swirling mess of her hair. The pilot, an older expressionless man with aviator sunglasses over his eyes, twisted around in his seat and gave them a thumbs-up. Bert helped Delia with her buckle before working on his own. They were both given headphones that clapped over their ears and muffled the noise. The helicopter was about to lift off when another woman came galloping toward the craft. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and flat yellow shoes. Her hair was slick, short, and red.

“Sorry,” she shouted to no one in particular, then tried to smile at Bert and Delia. She was pretty but pretty like a model: flat-chested and vaguely androgynous. She strapped into a seat across from them. Soon they were in the air and headed for the coast, the city sliding away beneath them.

Their headphones crackled. “This won’t take too long,” a gravelly voice said. It was the pilot. Bert realized that they could talk to each other, thanks to the headset intercom system. The new passenger stared down at her cell phone and a wad of mascara-stained tissue. Presumably she was out here for the same reason, to say goodbye to someone, to another one of the infected victims. She looked up and caught Bert studying her.

“Kind of an odd way to meet, isn’t it?” she asked him.

Bert nodded.

“You don’t look much like him,” she said. “Just a little bit, around the mouth maybe. Chin, too.”

Bert didn’t say anything.

“I’m Cecilia,” she said.

“Have we met?” Delia asked.

“No, but I just assumed—” She looked at her hands, then back at Delia. “I guess it makes sense. You weren’t that close, were you?”

“Did he tell you that?” Bert asked. “That we weren’t close?”

Cecilia made a face like she might cry. She fidgeted in her seat. “No, sorry,” she said. “It was just my impression. What do I know, you know? I didn’t mean to—”

The helicopter banked left, and Bert felt his stomach drop. The sky was cloudless. Below he could see whitecaps spitting and foaming.

“Almost there,” the pilot said.

A long gray metal ship was coming into view. It was a tremendous boat, the size of a football field and stacked high with containers of all colors: blue, red, purple, orange. As the helicopter descended and spun around the ship, Bert spotted another, smaller boat, tethered to the container ship by bulky cables that dropped beneath the water. The big ship was towing the smaller one.

“That’s it,” the pilot said. “The little boat. That’s where the bodies are.”

“Bodies?” Cecilia asked. “As in, plural? As in, more than one?”

“That’s correct. I think we’re at five now.”

“Shit,” she said, appealing to Delia and Bert. “Fuck, can you believe any of this? It’s unreal.” She dabbed the corners of her eyes with the tissue. “I’m not sure if this trip was a good idea or not.”

“I’m sorry,” Delia said, “but I have to ask. Were you… with Rob?”

She nodded. “Off and on. Mostly on. Before he left for his last trip, on.”

The helicopter circled the smaller boat a few times.

“I don’t see any people on deck,” Delia said.

“They’re keeping the bodies isolated,” the pilot said. “No one living is allowed on board.”

Bert had a clear view down to the boat. He could see a metal ladder leading up to a small, empty captain’s deck. He could see a metal door with a crusty porthole. The sunlight glinted off the metal and the water with the same blinding sparkle that made it difficult to look down for very long without his eyes watering. The pilot advised them to say their goodbyes if they hadn’t already because they were about to head back to the base. In truth, Bert felt no closer to his brother’s death out here than he had back on land. But he needed to let go. His brother’s story would have to end here at sea in the belly of an unmanned boat. The helicopter pulled away from the ship and the water, and Cecilia craned her neck to keep sight of it. “That’s it?” she asked, frustrated. “What happens next?”

“Nothing,” the pilot said. “Nothing happens next.”

“I thought we’d get a little closer,” she said. “I don’t understand. It’s not like they can keep him out here forever.”

The pilot nodded. “This is only a temporary solution. Until they figure out a better one.”

Cecilia closed her eyes. “It’s almost like I can feel him,” she said. “It’s, like, this terrible feeling that he’s trapped out here.”

Delia reached for the woman’s hand, but the straps constrained her to the chair. Bert wondered if Cecilia really did feel Rob’s presence, if there was something closed inside of him that prevented him from feeling it too. He twisted for a final view of the two ships, memorizing all the details he could, the rust and corrosion and salt stains, the antennas, the arrangement of the containers. He was constructing a reliable image that he could refer to months from now, when this helicopter ride would no doubt begin to seem more like a dream than a memory.

“Goodbye, Rob,” Cecilia said, and tossed a piece of paper out the window.

“What was that?” Bert asked her.

Cecilia was looking out the window, watching the paper twirl and disappear. “I’ve met someone else.” She turned to them and grimaced. “Is that awful of me?”

“Well, it’s been half a year,” Delia said but didn’t say whether she thought that a long or short amount of time.

“This is it for me,” Cecilia said. “This has to be it. It’s not healthy to dwell on this for too long.”

Bert nodded and Delia said, “For us too. Absolutely. This is goodbye. That’s what I keep telling Bert. We have to move on. Right, Bert?”

“Right,” he said. “Yes.”

The helicopter banked left, and they fell forward into their seat belts. For a moment Bert feared the pilot was trying to toss them, but then the craft evened out, and they were on their way home.

• • •

His oldest daughter was visiting from out West the day three large cardboard boxes showed up on the doorstep. They contained some of his brother’s belongings, the tapestries and photographs from his apartment, the stone Ganesha. He paraded it into the kitchen, where his wife and daughter were boiling water for tea.

“No,” Delia said. “Absolutely not. Not in this house.”

“Oh, he’s not so bad,” his daughter said, holding it under its lowest arms like a toddler. “He’d make a pretty good doorstop, I’ll bet.”

“I’m taking him to work,” Bert said to Delia. “You won’t have to ever look at him again, I promise.”

“You’ll scare off all the customers,” Delia said, pouring water into mugs. “People will lose their appetites. The business will go under.”

It had been almost a year since their helicopter ride, and in that time he’d scrapped plans for a fourth Pop-Yop franchise and sold his third location to its manager, a nice young girl who, he had to admit, deserved most of the credit for its recent success. Bert wasn’t ready for retirement, not yet, but he could feel himself losing steam. He had plenty of savings. He and Delia had even talked about traveling more, possibly on a cruise, in the Caribbean or in the Baltic or, eventually, both. He imagined himself standing on the lido deck with a cigar and seeing, in the gray distance, his brother’s ship. Wouldn’t that be something, brothers on tandem ships.

Rob was out there, somewhere. Mrs. Oliver, who’d been emailing him less and less frequently, sometimes wrote Bert notes that included only GPS coordinates. To keep track of his brother’s movements, he bought a small world map that he could fold and keep in his wallet. He recorded Rob’s route as a series of dots across the latitudinal and longitudinal lines. His brother traveled south across the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, and then east across the Indian Ocean, where he was transferred to a military plane and flown to an undisclosed location off the Australian coast. He was there for a full six months before details surfaced that he was on the move again, this time north to a research facility off the coast of Japan.

There, they dipped and froze Rob’s body in a mixture of gelatin and water and then cut the entirety of him into wafer-thin sheets. Each slice, only a millimeter thick, was scanned and digitized. Scanning one layer meant obliterating the previous one, and by the end of the process, Mrs. Oliver explained, there was nothing left of him, as he’d been ground up into a fine and invisible dust, neutralized and vacuumed into nonexistence.

God forbid Rob should ever rise from the dead: Bert wrote this to Mrs. Oliver with a glint in his eye, as a joke, but after pushing Send, he realized it was no joke at all. Some part of him really did wonder if there was something to it, to the idea of a physical resurrection, of the roaming spirit’s future need for its body.

Mrs. Oliver never addressed that particular concern, not explicitly, but she did say that she didn’t want Bert to worry. In fact, she saw no reason why Bert shouldn’t get his own copy of the slides. His brother was computerized now and, as a digital entity stored on a number of servers, he would quite possibly outlast them all.

And so she began transmitting his brother electronically as a tremendous file that contained over two thousand high-resolution images. The software that assembled them did so in real-time, and over the course of an afternoon Bert watched his brother load onto his computer, the layers stacking into a familiar shape — toes, feet, ankles, legs, knees, all of it adding up to…

… to what, exactly? Entire parts, he realized, were missing: an arm, a section of shoulder, his mouth, an eye. Though Bert could flip through his brother’s body like the pages of a book, could click down through the pale skin, could rotate each bone and navigate the world of his organs, Rob remained an incomplete specimen, a redacted document. When he let Mrs. Oliver know this, she was embarrassed to admit that she hadn’t yet secured the rights to certain slices, the scans of which were currently on lockdown for reasons she couldn’t disclose.

To Bert, this latest — and possibly final — hiccup was so absurd he considered breaking off communication with Mrs. Oliver altogether. He printed out his brother’s incomplete naked body on his office printer and called up Mrs. Oliver. “You’ve done all you can,” he told her. “And I’m grateful for that.”

“We’ll get the clearance,” she said. “Eventually. I promise you that.”

The stone Ganesha was on the shelf above Bert’s desk, and he stood up from his roller chair so that he was eye-level with it. “And I don’t doubt you,” he said to Mrs. Oliver, cradling the hot phone between his ear and shoulder so that he could fold up the printout of his brother and stick it under the statue. It was off-balance now and seemed to lean forward. Bert stepped back and bounced the floor to make sure the statue wouldn’t come tumbling off the shelf. It seemed sturdy enough.

Mrs. Oliver was still on the line, reiterating how committed she was to securing the rest of the files and completing the process. She would be there for him, she said, almost pleasantly. She would continue to work on his behalf with the powers-that-be. “More as I have it,” she said, and hung up.