First published in Phoebe, Vol. 37 No. 1, Spring 2008
PHOEBE
It was supposed to be a corpse not a copse, and I was supposed to be the little wisp of soul in that corpse, though I prefer to be called Frank, and I’m not that little or that wispy. People think souls are all white and floaty and we go around saying ooooooh and shit, but that’s just Hollywood. Yeah there are some souls that are a little on the “milky” side, if you know what I mean, but they’re the exceptions. Real souls have muscle, some attitude. Me, I’ve got muscle and attitude to spare. I’m as tough as they come.
So I never got why the higher-ups didn’t notice. I don’t have hard feelings or nothing, but I’ve been passed over for promotions a few times that went to souls half as good as me. Hell, a third as good. I’m good and I’d be fucking great if they’d just give me the assignment to prove it, but those middle management types can’t see a good thing when they pick it out of their nose. So when my union rep tells me that they’ve been talking, that they’re finally gonna start utilizing me to my full potential—that touchy-feely HR crap—I tell him I’m pleasantly surprised while what I’m really thinking is it’s about fucking time. Then I get a look at my profile in that fancy new computer system of theirs, and I’m not trying to brag or nothing, but there were a lot of words like “tough” and “up to the challenge” and “experienced.” I figured I had it made. Slam dunk.
So imagine how I feel when they hand me this copse assignment. I can’t believe it. I didn’t even know it was possible. What am I supposed to do with four trees and a shrub? I can’t piss on them. I’ll be surrounded by squirrels and birds and cows. My muscle will be completely wasted and my attitude lost on Bambi extras. My biggest challenge will be keeping the bird shit down to a minimum. Fuck me. I’d kill myself but of course I can’t die.
I go to scaly Betty in Assignments—who’s never liked me since I dated her cousin—to straighten it out and she gives me that little fuck-you smile and tells me there’s nothing to fix. Assignment made, date set: no sympathy, no apology, no explanation, just “Have a nice day, Frank.” Bitch. Next I go to Robert, who’s above Betty. But Robert hasn’t grown any balls since the last time I saw him, so while he’s stuttering and kissing scaly Betty’s ass—Buddy, she’s not even in the room—I tell him I’ll just go see Inez.
Now, Inez can be a hard-ass, and I may have pissed her off once or twice so I wasn’t expecting her to hug me or nothing, but I always thought she was fair. And when I go in there I’ve got my shit-eating grin on and I’m sweet as a peach, which usually does it. “Inez,” I say, “You gotta fix this. You know it’s a boner.”
But Inez, she won’t even look at my assignment sheet. Not a fucking glance. “The computer makes the assignments now, Frank. There are no mistakes.” At first I can’t believe I’m hearing her right and I wonder if scaly Betty got to her. “Inez,” I say, and though I’m starting to get pissed off, I’m still smiling, “what soul gets put into a copse, for chrissakes? It’s one goddamn r. Just type it back in.” But she won’t budge. She puts me in front of one of those embroidered signs, which I bet she did herself because it’s ugly as hell. It says “No typos, only lessons.”
Bull Shit.
“Inez,” I tell her, and now I’m livid. “Don’t make me go sit in a pasture for the next sixty years just to prove the computer’s right. You know they need me down there.”
“Consider it a well-deserved vacation, Frank. Some souls would kill for that assignment.”
“Some souls,” I say. “New souls, fuck-up souls, ass-souls, but not this soul. Not me.”
“Sorry, Frank.”
I’m speechless. On my way out I slam the door hard enough to knock that bullshit sign off Inez’s wall. She doesn’t get it. She doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s probably been centuries since frigid Inez was in a corpse and she could really give a fuck about the state of the human population. I just got back from down there and I know how much they need a soul like me—experienced, tough, up to the challenge. The big boom of souls that came out of the ninth century a.d. are all retiring, so it’s just a lot of young punks running things, and they’re idiots, every last one of them. Not one of them could find his ass with both hands and a detailed map. And the real icing on the cake is that even when they do get a little experience, they come down with a morbid corpse attachment, and they’re fucking useless.
I need a drink and a smoke and I can’t have either.
It used to be that you never heard about morbid corpse. Now it’s a goddamn epidemic. When an old soul gets it, that’s one thing. I mean, everybody knows the job can start to wear on you after a millennium. Hell, any job would wear on you after a millennium. But these new souls, what’s their excuse? Most have been in two, three corpses, tops. Some of them are getting it after their first corpse. Their first fucking corpse. Being a soul can be tough, no question, but that’s just pathetic.
Eight years we spend training them, so they can go down there and forget everything they just learned. And when they get down there the first thing they do, the first fucking thing, is they break the cardinal rule: they start calling their corpse a body. They start acting like it belongs to them, like they own it, like it’s not just the cheap rental that it is. Hello—Epictetus, vessel on its way to dying: ringing any bells? Whether it’s ten years or ninety, at the end, that corpse is still dead. And when it’s dead, you get over it. You move on, you get a new assignment, you get a new life. Call it a corpse and you remember that. Call it a body and you don’t.
But these young punks, they don’t remember. They lose it—fucking nervous-breakdown city. They take a leave. They take “some time off.” They get so attached to their old corpses that they go back down there and hang around their old lives, feeling sorry for themselves. Some of them get into that whole moaning, rattling chains, creaking staircase, drama queen act. It makes the rest of us look bad. Sure, when you spend seventy or eighty years in a corpse you start to get attached, even when you’ve carried as many corpses as I have. Even calling it a corpse. But you suck it up. You pull yourself together. You remember it’s just a job.
I’ve been here since the twelfth century a.d. and I’ve never had to take a leave. They should give me a perfect attendance medal. They should build me a goddamn statue. Nine centuries and not one sick day. Until now. Until this copse thing. And I know there’s talk: Frank’s gone soft, Frank’s lost it, Frank’s on “holiday.” The other souls, they think I’m washed up. They think I’m done. I can’t fucking stand it. My buddy Lionel tells me to just relax and enjoy the time off. He says that I should take up a hobby, like poetry or the study of clouds; it’ll be good practice for retirement. Lionel’s a crack-up. He knows I’m only a few assignments away from having the points, and he also knows it doesn’t matter. “Fuck retirement,” I tell him. “I’m going to work till I’m stretched out.”
Lionel and I go way back, all the way back to basic training. He got made a blue blood and I got made a blue collar, but we’ve kept in touch over the centuries whenever we could. Lionel retired from active duty last year. He got himself this cush job, nine to five, at headquarters, working with a bunch of ass-souls, and he’s going insane. When you’ve had the lives he’s had, no way can you be happy with a desk job. Lionel’s a legend. He’s been in all the best. Sometimes I think about the things he’s seen and done, and it blows my mind. Talk about utilizing your potential. Some souls would be jealous of that, but not me. The table manners, the diplomatic bullshit, the affecting world order—not interested. I’m a simple sort. I like to get in with the masses, the ordinary guy. Not that they aren’t just as much a pain in the ass as those bigwigs, but at least they’re honest about it.
My new assignment—I can’t even say the fucking word—isn’t far from headquarters. Lionel says he’ll check in on me during his lunch breaks, just to make sure I don’t do anything stupid. What am I going to do? Burn the place down? He’s been telling me stories about the souls at headquarters, trying to cheer me up. He keeps me rolling. I always knew those souls were stupid, but I didn’t know they were that stupid. In meetings, now, they start by asking if anyone wants to share anything—it’s the new diplomatic business model. So he answers with things like “I want to share my filing with Bill” or “Can I share that seat with Jan? This chair’s broken.” Lionel says back in the day, when he was an emperor, he would have cut their heads off. Except Jan’s.
When I bring up the new souls and the morbid corpse epidemic and the whole goddamn state of affairs, he says that I shouldn’t worry. Headquarters thinks humans are on their way out anyway. I laugh like it’s a joke. “You’re kidding, right? Lionel?” But he’s not smiling. I can’t believe it. I knew it was bad, but not that bad. He says it’s like that book, Who Moved My Cheese? But instead of one cheese pile that’s disappearing, it’s all of them. And the humans don’t notice. Lionel says headquarters is giving them six maybe seven hundred years if they can’t turn it around. They’ve got a whole room full of studies that are pointing to the end. They’ve got a whole team of ass-souls working on it.
Lionel’s as calm as can be. Like it’s just a business merger. Like they’re closing a plant down. I’m fucking pissed. First I blame it on the new souls, and I want to go kick some new-soul ass. Then I blame it on those ass-souls at headquarters, who let all the old souls retire at once, and I want to go kick some ass-soul ass. And then I blame it on scaly Betty and milky Robert and frigid Inez and that goddamn computer, because I know if I were down there, fighting the good fight, things might turn out different. Lionel says I can do as much ass-kicking as I want, but it’s not gonna change anything, and if I have any hope of getting reassigned, now’s not the time to be making enemies. He’s right and I know it, but the fact that I’m gonna be stuck in pastoral land while the human civilization goes to shit doesn’t sit well with me. I’ll spend fifteen years in that copse before my union rep even gets a hearing. Things take a little longer up here—we’ve got eternity after all—but suddenly every year, every minute, counts and I don’t want to waste even one.
The souls, we’ll survive of course. We always do. So it really shouldn’t matter if the humans die sooner or later, but somehow it does. Six hundred years isn’t much time: to us souls it’s just a drop in the bucket—blink and it’s gone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those frou-frou souls that gets all sentimental and shit. It’s not the humans I’m attached to, it’s the job. When you’ve worked a job as long as I have, you can’t help it. Anyone who says different is lying.