“Oh, he’s coming,” replied Raphael.

  “Keep me posted.” Dreemont pushed off the doorway, then glanced back. “By the way, nice job yesterday, Team Leader.”

  Raphael nodded.

  Dreemont turned to the intern. “Is the operation starting to make sense?”

  “I guess,” said the intern as the two strolled away.

  Pretty damn good for a city boy. Until the city boy screwed up, and Raphael had—once.

  Three months ago, Raphael had declared one Jay Engels offline and sent the verification to the contracts department. Contracts had no sooner gotten the final online remains rights from the next of kin and opened Engels’s pre-portal, than the offline showed up at the terminus of the Appalachian Trail in Vermont. With Engels out on the trail for two months of self-imposed incommunicado, his wife and her lover had cooked up a scheme to fake his death, collect his insurance, and take off for the South Pacific. The scam took in everyone, including Raphael. The result had been a shitstorm. The possum screwed the company for six figures. The feds were sniffing for other iniquities, and the press raked up old Geo Maglio scandals.

  Raphael scanned the scant obituary again, stood up, and tacked the notice to the bulletin board above his desk. It fit between his Picasso and Seurat prints bordered by skateboard decals. Despite the eclectic nature of his artistic tastes, the obituary seemed out of place.

  He shifted his gaze to the board’s single photograph: Raphy and his mom.

  They posed before a sculpture at the nearby museum where his mother had curated modern art for twenty years. Her delicate arms accentuated by a sleeveless print dress, she hugged Raphael, his head nestled against her neck. Her gray eyes and delicate lips were identical to Raphael’s. She smiled, as she had even when her disease had turned her limbs to stone. As the Cumulative Clock affirmed, people died all the time, but watching his mother’s ordeal had been fucking tough.

  Nail Klaes. Yes, yes.

  Dropping to his chair, he considered the obituary’s phrase passed unexpectedly. When people passed unexpectedly with no mention of illness, the cause of death was suicide, which was reported. The coroner’s preliminary report came unaccompanied by a Proof of Death letter. A POD was always filed with a potential suicide and would verify the coroner investigated the case. Although Norval had solid contacts within the coroner’s office, they weren’t responding with Klaes.

  Why? It took some clout to cover up standard information.

  Perhaps a bureaucratic error, but it still smelled wrong to Raphael.

  The email discrepancies, which aroused the original suspicions, were still the most baffling aspect of the case. First, there were signs of outward activity on several of Klaes’s accounts after January 10. Someone might have got Klaes’s password or hacked the account. People plundered the dead’s online remains all the time.

  The hackers were mailbox thieves, sticking their hands inside and pulling out the contents, hoping to get lucky. In Klaes’s case, though, they took nothing. Something was added, however: several messages sent from Klaes’s email address with ominous threats to their recipients. Things got interesting right there.

  The first message was sent January 12, the second January 13. Two went out on the fifteenth, at which point Klaes was five days dead. Raphael had determined the messages had not been preset. If Klaes was alive and making threats, why to these people, who had no connection to Klaes, as far as his research could determine? And what possum would use his own email to taunt and threaten?

  Raphael opened up Klaes’s email account and clicked on the sent folder. He let the cursor hover over the last messages.

  Of the four outgoing messages that had prompted the Norval Chaff App to sound an undeclared alert, the earliest, January 12, had been sent two days after Klaes’s death. The recipient was lindieger723@dotmail.com. The subject was, After too few summers dies the swan. It was the only one accompanied by a photo. Raphael opened the email.

  Dear Miranda,

  Was the selfie worth the life of that beautiful creature? Prepare to meet your maker.

  JK

  Inset into the text was a large photo of a dead swan on the bank of a stream. The bird lay on its side, its wings outstretched. Its long white neck, bent midpoint at a right angle, stretched across the ground. The inset was a small close-up photo of a young beaming woman clasping the swan’s neck with her left hand. The swan was motionless, squinting as if in excruciating pain.

  Though Raphael had immediately sent a message to lindieger723@dotmail.com, as he had also done with the three other recipients, he received no reply, and Thursday’s mass casualty event had interrupted further research. Now, Raphael typed the woman’s email address into search. There were two results, and both were for Miranda’s Mirror, a blog on the Haut Type site. The home page was filled with photos of the woman who had been choking the swan. She posed in various hairstyles, attitudes, and clothes. Beneath all the photos, the text of her blog began. Meet Miranda N. Day.

  Hello! I am Miranda. I live in LA, the most exciting city in the entire universe, and I do what I like doing: making multiple versions of me. Me sexy. Me elegant. Me nasty … I want to be every me I can be.

  There had to be a million similar blogs, yet something struck him as familiar about this one. He scrolled and came to a section of Miranda posing with animals. In each photo, she clutched the animal to her: dogs, cats, rabbits, pigs, cattle, horses, parrots, snakes. They all appeared to be selfies, the camera close to the subject. Miranda glowed with self-absorption; the animals appeared terrified, eyes wide and searching for escape.

  Continuing to scroll through the hapless animals and the merry Miranda, Raphael arrived at the inset photo of Miranda and the swan. She had tried to adorn herself with the swan’s beauty, but the swan was no longer beautiful. Its wings were twisted, and individual feathers had lost their symmetry. The swan would die for Miranda’s selfie. He considered the name Miranda N. Day. Day led to night. Miranda Night Day.

  He’d heard that name before. He scanned a thousand obituaries a week. The names passed by, ants on a trail. Occasionally, though, he paused at an improbable name. He had seen a Miranda Day Night. No, no. Night Day. There would be ten thousand Miranda Days, hundreds of Miranda Heather Days, but Miranda Night Day was unusual: a wit choosing an ironic middle name for their daughter? Alternatively, was it the girl herself who changed it?

  He pulled up last month’s obits file and searched Miranda Night Day. There was one, and she died on January 14, two days after Klaes’s email. The obituary noted her premature death was a tragic accident. Norval had yet to process the lead. Raphael did a general search for and found a half-dozen links to her death. The Orange County Tribune reported Miranda, a resident of Costa Mesa, fell from the fourth-story balcony of an apartment in San Juan Capistrano. During a party, she’d posed on the balcony to take a selfie with her friend’s pet iguana, lost her balance, and fell. She’d died of a broken neck. The iguana had escaped both selfie and death. A photograph showed the lizard safe on the deck, peering through the rails.

  If Klaes was a possum, why was he giving himself away sending intimidating emails to an animal abuser? The email suggested Klaes was alive. Yet the coroner said Klaes was deceased. It had to be someone other than Klaes who emailed the soon-to-be unfortunate Miranda. Perhaps someone with PETA or another animal rights organization? Why would they implicate Klaes? Miranda’s accidental death might be viewed differently, and a living Klaes would be a suspect. That was a pretty farfetched conclusion. The more reasonable explanation? The physicist was still alive, had murdered Miranda himself, and was playing a deep game.

  Raphael’s phone rang. “Hello?”

  “Verena. Gazette Obituaries,” said the caller.

  Jesus. Finally. “Yes, yes. Raphael Lennon at Norval. I left you a message a few days ago about Dr. Jason Klaes, the physicist.”

  “Oh, yes. Sorry about the delay. Damned computer system went down. So how can I help, Mr. Lennon?”

  “I have some questions about the obituary. Like who paid for it?”

  Verena cleared her throat. “The date of the notice?”

  “January 12.”

  “Just a moment,” said Verena, followed by the furious tapping of keys. “Okay, let’s see. Got it. Anonymous.”

  “Anonymous? What do you mean, ‘anonymous’?”

  The phone went silent for a few seconds. “The obituary came in the mail with a cash payment.”

  Raphael pushed his chair back, surprised and irritated that such a transaction should be so casual. “You accepted that? What if it was a prank?”

  “Obits ain’t cheap. Excuse me.” Verena cleared her throat again. “Even the hundred-word ones.”

  “Did Anonymous request a receipt? A copy of the article?”

  Papers rustled. A prolonged sniff. “Eight-fifty in cash and a thank you note. Nothing else.”

  A nerve in his neck twitched. Nothing added up with this case, as if it might remain always out of his grasp. He stretched out a leg and set his foot under the skateboard living beneath his desk during work hours. He flipped the board on its back and brushed a wheel with his toe. The whirr of the spinning wheel calmed him, the purr of a stroked kitten, his magic aural amulet. He sent a second wheel in motion. “Did you verify—”

  The PA system screeched. What the hell?

  The mindfulness screens lit with a hideous image. On each screen, sheets of flame and coils of smoke engulfed a high-rise, studded by the remains of a plane’s wings and fuselage.

  The department’s speakers blared, “Stage One Event. Repeat. Stage One Event. Commercial airliner strikes hotel. Location: Atlanta, Georgia. Estimated deaths: six hundred. Override status: all Necrology Department Employees return to their desks.”

  Raphael pressed his hand to his belly. “Sorry, Verena, I’ll have to get back to you,” he said. “Something’s come up.”

  His potential possum would have to wait.

  Akira assumed team leadership on Stage One Events, in which estimated casualties numbered over five hundred, though Raphael would have his hands full compiling. A Stage One and Stage Three on successive days. Blue moon stuff.

  It was 7:00 p.m. before the intense labor demanded for a Stage One Event—a Big Death in Norval parlance—subsided. Dreemont told the End Men to call it a night.

  Sighs of relief rose from the cubicles.

  “You’ve had a busy Friday,” said Dreemont, as the department’s employees gathered their belongings. “A lot of dead to input. I’ll see if I can’t get you a short Friday next week. Who reports for duty if a mass death occurs over the weekend?”

  “Team B,” responded a dozen End Men dutifully.

  The floor emptied of exhausted workers until only Raphael remained. Dreemont appeared at the cubicle entrance. “Burning the midnight oil?”

  “Yeah. Klaes.”

  “Good. Mr. Maglio will be pleased to hear that.”

  One more possum in the database is one terminated End Man. Fucking Maglio. If the salary wasn’t so good or if he could find a cheaper apartment that could accommodate his painting—he’d be saying sayonara. Though that was really just a pipe dream. He still wondered why it was so damn important to get the undeclared into the database at all. Norval had enough dead, and it would seem just ignoring questionable candidates would be the sensible policy. But Norval, meaning Geovanni Maglio, didn’t see it that way. “Keep the database pure. No goddamn possums.” Well, a lot of things made no sense in this world. Go along, get along.

  “Have a wonderful weekend then,” said Dreemont, stepping away.

  “Absolutely. You too.”

  Waiting until the main-entrance door had locked—a gnashing of parts that maintenance had yet to remedy—Raphael returned to Miranda’s demise. The newspaper article provided few details on the ill-fated party.

  Shifting to Miranda’s Facebook page, he clicked on notifications. The party had been on January 14. Scrolling through several thousand notifications, he reached the ones sent in early January. An invitation to Alicia Fallow’s birthday party came on January 8. Alicia lived in San Juan Capistrano.

  He messaged Alicia.

  Hi, Alicia. My name is Raphael Lennon, I work for the Norval Department of Marketing Necrology in Los Angeles. My company is trying to tie up some loose ends regarding your deceased friend Miranda Night Day. I’ve attached a photograph of a man who may have attended your party on the night Miranda had her tragic accident. Is it possible that he was present at your affair?

  He added a couple more condolences—never hurts—and his phone number. After attaching a photo of Klaes, he sent the message.

  Raphael glanced at the time on the monitor: 10:06 p.m.

  A yawn crept up on him. He would not resolve the Klaes enigma tonight. He needed a few hours of sleep to clear his brain and restore his energy. Before sleep, would he find it in him to complete the image he’d started painting earlier that morning?

  Raphael shut down his computer and looked once more at the obituary notice. On Monday, he’d pester the Harvey Hotel until the event manager got back to him.

  He grabbed his skateboard from under the desk, wedged it under his left arm, and turned off the lights. Below the wall screens, the Cumulative Clock, which showed the day’s death toll, flashed as all the numbers changed when the thousands digit turned from seven to eight. Another old, upbeat song from Maglio’s youth played. This one was about making new friends in new places with a background of internal combustion engines—long illegal—revving.

  Raphael sang a line of the lyrics to the dark department, then shook his head. As if he were going anywhere. “Vroom, vroom. Yeah.”

  As was his habit late at night, he walked to the floor’s plate-glass window and gazed down at the lights of Wilshire Boulevard. On the far side of the street, two hooded figures spray-painted the front of a cell phone store. They drew back to view their work. The large letters read fuck data. The vandals were doubtless Intentional Blanks, Digital Luddites, Ludds—whatever. Assholes.

  A third figure stood nearby. Half in shadow, much taller than the two vandals, the man in a brimmed hat looked up at Raphael’s window. Light glinted off metal-framed glasses, and one side of his jaw had a reddish sheen. Pivoting, the man appeared to address the Blanks, who stepped toward him but then halted. With his palm raised, the man strode to the vandals and huddled with them for a moment. The three walked off like friends, leaving the sidewalk empty, though the street remained an unending stream of vehicles brightening the night.

  Raphael considered the grand boulevard and tried to imagine crossing it. A cold draft slipped through the window’s sealed frame. The draft increased in force until it shoved him like a giant’s hand, slamming him to the floor, pinning him.

  Stuck.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Five minutes after Raphael shut off the lights in Necrology, he pushed through Norval’s massive front door, stood at the top of the steps, and drew out his beanie. He pulled it on and adjusted its cuff. He went nowhere in the outer world without the beanie.

  During his first months at Norval, Raphael would exit the building as if the dead were trying to pull him inside. The passing years had left him less fanciful, harder—though not as free from the tug of pity and sadness portrayed for Jensy. Not Dreemont yet. He glanced back through the glass into the expansive lobby, met the security guard’s eyes, and nodded. The guard nodded back, a daily ritual that affirmed his exit from Norval.

  He gazed down the great boulevard, still packed with vehicles standing bumper-to-bumper, all similar in their contents: a single driver, eyes closed or laced with sleep, secure in their bubble, computers in charge. The great expectations of the urban planners had been reduced to chimera by the public’s fear of mass transit, inescapable after a string of pandemics: the fear of the nearby other, the stranger’s cough, the seatmate’s sniffle. Bullet trains and hyper-loops gathered dust and graffiti. Armadillidiidae, those subcompacts designed on the mechanics of the potato bug and so marketed as Roly-Polies, abounded.

  He considered the drivers, some chatting or texting on their phones, others nodding to the latest synthetic beat or a convincing podcast, and still others reuniting with a loved one on their Norval Portal. No, not quite reuniting, for the Portal was a one-way street. You could explore the most minute details of a loved one’s life, but they could know nothing of you. Raphael could not make up his mind whether his company’s products were a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe they were neither.

  Although the boulevard was packed, he discerned a snaky path between the vehicles, but if he even approached the curb, the wind would stir on this windless night, and then rise against him, a wall of air pushing him back as easily as it would a leaf. Wilshire was his southern boundary of wind.

  He dropped his skateboard, pushed off hard, and sailed over the seven wide steps leading from the entryway to the sidewalk. Lowering his butt to the board, a habit from pubescent days of wipe-outs and sprained ankles, he stuck the landing like an expert gymnast coming off a pommel horse, and happy chemicals rushed through him. Though he may not have learned new tricks, the old ones held fast. Fifty feet above, a fleet of delivery-drones swooped by, their night-lights reflected dazzlingly as they passed the Norval building’s gleaming cylindrical façade.

  The structure was built in the 1930s, a hundred years ago, modeled on Streamline Moderne architecture, which had been fashionable at the time. As a child, he had walked by it with his mother a thousand times. “Bold and beautiful,” she declared. Inspired by aerodynamics, with an emphasis on long horizontal lines and sweeping curves, the building resembled nothing so much as an ocean liner thrusting its golden bow into the Wilshire-Fairfax intersection. Originally a Yam’s Department Store, the building had gone through multiple owners. Maglio bought it decades ago, gutting much of its interior to create the Norval Headquarters, but the building, designated a historic cultural monument, could not have its exterior altered.