“George!” Irene was saying. He tried to listen to her very carefully, but she had walked all the way across the parking lot and was standing under one of the windows. It was high on the wall, possibly to prevent onlookers from viewing the furnaces being stoked, viewing the corpses being loaded into them, viewing the whole morbid spectacle. When George made it all the way across the parking lot and found he was standing next to her again he felt like crying with relief. Just to be near her, this familiar person, who felt like a warm, satisfying piece in his puzzle, shaped just right. His only disappointment was that he wasn’t kissing her.

“Boost me,” she said. She was holding a long piece of metal and another small device that looked like a battery.

“What are you going to do?”

“Apparently scale this brick wall by myself or go get a ladder,” said Irene impatiently.

He boosted her onto his shoulders. She sat there, fiddling with the piece of metal and the battery. Her thighs pressed against his ears. The back of his head was pressed into her lady bits through the black jeans. He could not resist bouncing her up and down a little bit. No one could have.

“Quit it,” she said, and dug her heel into his ribs. But then she put her hand on the top of his head and ran her fingers down through his hair, curling around his ear in the most pleasing, soothing, maddening way. He knew that if nothing else happened, and he just felt the magic sensation of that hand running its way down through his hair, he would have lived for a reason. He looked up at her, and she was threading the long piece of metal through the bottom of the window frame. It was like a yardstick. Once she’d got it through, she applied the little battery to one end and flipped a switch.

“It’s a shape-memory alloy,” she said. “Nickel titanium, to be exact.”

“You mean Terminator metal?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

“I got it,” she said. “It’s commercially available.”

“For this particular application?”

She didn’t answer, but used the device on the end of the metal stick. When she applied the current to the metal, the part inside the window began to twist and shape itself into the form it had previously known. There was a reason for making metal like this, George knew, and it had to do with heart surgery and engine diagnostics. It did not have to do with robbing crematoriums. When she was satisfied with the shape of the memory metal, she gave a few quick jerks and the latch of the window swung free.

“I’m guessing it’s not armed,” she said. “The ones in the front weren’t, and that was where the money was kept. Back here is just dead people.”

“Great,” said George.

Irene lifted the window and flung herself up and through. For a minute her feet were dangling, and then she was inside. George stood on the green grass around the building, looking at morning bursting onto Toledo, hoping not to be too conspicuous against the brick wall.

“Come in,” he heard her call. “I’ll throw you out something.”

George leaned against the cool bricks. In a few seconds, she said, “Stand clear of the window.” But before his addled brain could figure out what that meant, there was a stool hurtling over the ledge and onto the grass. George picked it up and set it against the wall, using it to climb up on the ledge and through. Then they were both inside.

The crematorium was like an operating room, all brushed metal and shining tile, and in the dim light it had a bluish and sparkling tinge to it, as if it had all been recently wet. There were gurneys draped in white cloth, and there were instruments in racks, overhead lights in trapezoid shades, and two desks near the door. The minute he swept the room with his eyes, he knew that something here was very bad. There was a lurking presence, a gap in the air, a shadow in his vision. This was not a good time for his gods and goddesses to show up. Or, it was a very good time for them to show up, but not this one. This felt terrible. He was afraid. Apart from that fear, he found the crematorium was very much like a lab. It had the same look, but not the same feel.

“Come on,” said Irene.

The only door in the room was operated by one of those “panic bar” pressure handles, and George assumed the door was locked. There was no way out but the window, and he’d fallen six feet down to the floor. In a blaze of forethought that he paused to notice with pride, he grabbed another stool and set it by the window.

“Escape stool,” he said to Irene. “This is very important.”

She nodded. She was walking through the room quietly, her hands touching lightly on the gurneys as she passed each one. There was a clipboard with a few papers clipped to it hanging off the front of each gurney, but none were occupied. Irene examined the clipboards. She did not lift the cloths that were left on top. There were no toe tags lying around, discarded. Maybe the morgue had upgraded to wristbands, or forehead tattoos, or earrings. Left is right, right is dead. George examined a list on the wall, and Irene read over his shoulder.

Things to check for before using the retort:

1. Pacemaker

2. Liquor bottles placed in the coffin by friends of the deceased

Either can cause an EXPLOSION. Please mind the clients are properly prepared for the retort.

“This must be the retort,” she said.

George looked at her, hoping to make a joke. About the word “retort.” And how, in death, there is no retort, or something. However, behind Irene, he saw a dark shape move between a filing cabinet and one of the desks. It was not blurry, but flat and black, in the shape of a human, but possibly made of coal. The worst problem about it was that it had no face. He knew, without knowing quite how he knew, that this thing was disease and death. It was the god of death: Hades, or Satan, or Ereshkigal, or whatever you wanted to say: this was the modern American version of that. The stripped-down version. No horns, no blue skin, no pagoda on its head. No romance. No fire. The thing walked on tiptoe. He couldn’t tell where it was looking. He closed his eyes and opened them again. Irene was looking at a row of machines that looked like front-loading washers. On top of them, in a metal tray, were a number of shining metal balls. George had to watch as this crusty, blank Osiris put its elbows on a gurney and jutted its chin toward Irene. Its face elongated, and it brayed. George jumped, bumping into a tray of instruments and sending a pair of forceps clattering to the ground.

“What’s wrong with you,” Irene barked.

She had found the ovens. Each had a metal clasp and was the height of one of the gurneys. There were three in all. Irene moved from one to the next, touching her hand to each one as if checking the temperature. The dry black thing came behind her, touching each one, too, mimicking her movements. George frowned. “Stop that,” he said.

“I want to know which one she was in,” said Irene.

“There’s no way to know that,” said George. “It was cool, or they wouldn’t have taken her out.”

Irene opened one of the doors. It opened with a hiss, and they saw inside the oven. It was very clean, a brick tube with a trench in the far end to collect the ashes. There were no bits of tooth and bone, no piles of dust in the corner. It all looked very sanitary. She shut the door again. Outside the door, there was a small peephole. She looked through it.

“Of course,” she said. “They wouldn’t want to mix up the people.”

Her voice sounded strangled. He thought he should get her out of there, but she was moving again, around the wall. She had found a wire shelving unit that had small black boxes lined up on it in rows.

“Here,” said Irene. “See here?”

George went to stand next to her and face the boxes on the shelves, shuddering to be so close to the death thing that kept walking around after her, but wanting to keep it away. He saw it go so close to her, but he didn’t know what to do.

“Haven’t you ever sat on a garden hose and said, hey, this is what it’s like to get fucked by Poseidon?” it hissed into Irene’s ear. George heard it clearly, but Irene seemed not to notice.

George put his arm around her. The dead thing put its arm around her on the other side. George couldn’t feel where their arms brushed together but he could feel Irene being pulled away, being pulled toward that black dryness. “She’s got to be here,” said Irene. “Look at the names. The dates.”

Each black box had a plain white rectangle on the end and the name of a person printed there. Irene ran her finger down over the names.

“Haven’t you ever sat on a vacuum cleaner and said, hey, this is what it’s like to get eaten out by Aeolus?” it hissed again.

“We have to go,” said George.

“I know,” said Irene. “I know.”

George pulled her sharply toward him. She looked up at him and smiled, so bravely, so sweetly, and behind her head he could see the black shape of the dead thing’s head, trying to tilt at the same angle.

“I’m sorry,” said Irene. “We’ll go. Here she is.”

Irene reached out both hands, hesitated, and then pulled one of the boxes off the shelf. “Heavy,” she said. “I didn’t expect that.”

The death thing was climbing on the shelf now, rattling it, shaking it like an agitated monkey.

“Popped her cherry, did you George?” it said. There was no mouth to move, no ears to hear an answer.

“Come on,” said George. “Climb through the window. I’ll hand the box out to you.”

“You can’t drop it, though.” She laughed nervously. “That would be too horrific.”

“Naturally,” said George, trying very hard to pretend to be amused. “I’m allergic to dusty clouds of dead mothers-in-law.”

“She’s not your mother-in-law,” said Irene quietly. She climbed up on the stool and heaved herself out, sat on the ledge, and then swung her legs out, dropped away.

Now George was alone with the thing and its black breath. The thing is this: there had never been anything all that bad in his life. No one had died. No one had even been very sick. His mother had laid waste to every problem in his path. She spread out the world, easy for his taking, tuned to his key, ripe for his harvest. No grandmother to wither, no teacher at school, no college chum, no one would have come to end up here or anywhere else where death could find them. His mother had kept that all from happening, from the sheer force of her human will. And now George stood, one foot on the stool, one hand on the window ledge, the black box of ashes tucked under his arm, and the bad ugly god said one more thing to him.

“I’m coming for you,” it said. “Believe it.”

18

Irene had no memory of the time before the fire. No memory of the fire itself. Irene’s first memory of her mother was an incorrect outline of the mother’s face against the white ceiling in the dark. It was bedtime and Irene was getting rocked to sleep. As she lay in her mother’s arms, she would look up at her mother’s face now and again and then close her eyes. She could remember looking up once, and instead of seeing the flatness of a face with a small nose poking out and glasses shining in the light from the hallway, she saw a sharp point jutting out of the forehead and a smooth recess where the face should be. She lay there for a minute, staring. In her memory, she couldn’t place what she thought about it. But she remembered relief at realizing the sharp point was a chin, the smooth recess a neck. Her mother’s head had fallen back against the chair because she was asleep, and Irene was seeing the bottom side of it. Then she felt like laughing. On subsequent nights, when she observed this shape against the ceiling, she was not disturbed. Because she knew it was just a chin. Mommy, she would say, Wake up, please. And feel a quiet smugness that her mother was looking undignified in the rocker.

She was always two years younger than her classmates. And always seemed to be a foot smaller. For this she was tortured on the elementary school playground, and later came the impossibility of dating in high school. None of the showio-boobio that was going on in other girls’ lives. Irene could remember a little boy in her third grade class who chased her around the sandbox in the playground, trying to sit next to her and touch her legs. That was the last time she was pursued sexually until she was in graduate school.