24

15/50: DEAD BODIES

JONAH HAD messaged Esther on Thanksgiving to let her know he was okay, but that he couldn’t hang out again until Sunday. Now it was Sunday morning, and Jonah had been at her house since sunrise, lying on her bedroom floor and helping himself to all the books on her walls like he owned the place.

Esther hadn’t asked him why he was there so early. Why he crawled in her window, thinking she was asleep, and cried for a little while on the floor until she’d sidled out from under her covers and laid down next to him, her palm pressed gently to the bruise swelling darkly along his cheekbone. Jonah was a talented makeup artist, but he wasn’t this talented. His skin bulged out beneath her touch. His eye had been consumed by his face, too vicious to be fake.

“I’ve figured out another way we could meet Death,” he whispered to her as she traced her fingertips along the fresh bruise. “We could cut out the middle man. Bring Death right to us.”

“Oh?”

“I could kill my dad.” Only half joking.

Esther shook her head. “Don’t throw your life away. Not for him. You’re so close to finishing school and going away to college.”

Jonah pulled away from her touch and looked at her like she might be an idiot and laughed this kind of bitter laugh. “You think I’m going to leave Remy in that house with him? You think Holland’s going to let me leave? Don’t you get it? There’s no way out for me. Until Remy’s grown up, this town . . . it’s all there is for me.”

“But . . . you’re so talented. You told my mom you wanted to go to Hollywood.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t exactly tell someone’s parents that you have no career options except working full-time at a fast-food joint until your baby sister is old enough for college. This is all I’ve got, Esther. This”—he motioned to the film equipment he’d brought with him—“is probably the closest I’ll ever get to working in movies, at least until Remy is old enough to get out.”

“That’s a long time.”

“Shorter than a prison sentence for murder, though. Those are my only two options at this point.” Esther could tell he was trying to make her laugh. She didn’t. “Would you leave Eugene?” he asked eventually.

They both knew the answer.

No. No, she wouldn’t.

Esther told Jonah to ice his swollen face and then she went back to sleep, thinking about how, for the past few months, she’d believed this boy thought he was saving her, which she hated, because she was not a damsel in distress. All along she thought he thought he was saving her, but she could see it now; they had both, each of them, been saving little bits of each other.

At 10:00 a.m., after Jonah had poked and prodded her for half an hour and draped Fleayoncé over her face, Esther finally got out of bed and they made their way to the kitchen and she cooked them breakfast (which was difficult, because the Solars still had very little food). They didn’t talk about what they’d discussed earlier in the morning, or the bruise on Jonah’s cheekbone, or anything that would only make them sadder. Instead he asked her, for the fortieth time, how exactly they were going to see dead bodies.

Esther had decided to plan 15/50, partly because she had a good idea and partly because she thought Jonah might dig up a grave and drag a fresh corpse into her house if she left him to his own devices.

“Never you mind,” she said as she made a smiley face on a plate out of the last of the oatmeal.

“I don’t want to see, like, dead puppies or anything,” he said, sitting on the kitchen floor because all the chairs were gone by then. Esther thought that the rabbits were doing a very poor job of being lucky. “I’ll be very upset if you take me to see dead puppies.”

“There’ll be no dead puppies.” She paused. “At least I’m pretty sure. There might be dead babies though.”

“You take me on some really weird dates.”

Esther tried to suppress a smile; you had to admire his perseverance. “We are not dating.”

Jonah chuckled. “Why do all my girlfriends keep saying that?”

Esther dressed as Rosie the Riveter and then gave Jonah directions to the School of Medical Sciences, a small research university that had somehow ended up in their town. The campus was quiet on a Sunday morning after Thanksgiving. The odd student or two bustled about, but for the most part, the place was deserted.

“Oh, I know what we’re going to see,” Jonah said as they walked toward the college library. “Med students don’t actually count as dead people Esther. They may look like zombies but they still have a pulse. Shocking, I know.”

Tucked behind the library was the small, squat building they’d actually come for. The sign above the entrance read THE MUSEUM OF HUMAN DISEASE.

“What’s this?” Jonah asked.

“It’s a museum,” Esther explained, “of—wait for it—human disease.”

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

The Museum of Human Disease, as it turns out, was also not a happening place on Sundays. Or maybe ever. The caretaker was asleep in her chair and Esther had to ding the bell to bring her lurching back to consciousness.

Jonah paid for their tickets. They were warned by the woman to show respect to the specimens. Each of the three thousand bits and pieces inside came from real people, real humans with lives as rich and complex as their own, and to mistreat them would be disrespectful to their memory and the generous donation they’d made upon their death.

Inside, the place felt more like the cold, stark halls of a hospital than a museum. It wasn’t a particularly upmarket affair. Esther had been expecting wooden floors and dark walls and bloodred hearts suspended in glass jars. The reality was much more clinical: green linoleum floor, white walls, plastic shelving, and monochromatic tissue specimens, all turned an unappealing shade of pus-yellow thanks to the preservation process. Each sample was preserved in formalin, encased in clear glass rectangles, and stacked on the shelves like morbid figurines.

Esther and Jonah walked quietly around the place, stopping every now and then at the more disturbing displays: an arthritic hand, curled in on itself like a dead spider; a lung as black as pitch, taken from a coal miner in the early twentieth century; a gangrenous leg, the flesh rotten and buckling from ankle to kneecap; a uterus with a tumor growing its own teeth and hair.

And everywhere, everywhere, signs of Death. His handiwork on every muscle fiber, every shard of bone, every cell born and grown only to die by his hand in the end. The shadow of him was on everything in the building. Esther shook her head at the destruction of it all, at the incomprehensible scale of it.

Each one of them had once been a human being. The aggregate of all their happiness and sadness had been immense. The memories they’d held in their collective heads could have overloaded all the servers in the world. That severed foot used to be a living, breathing, walking, real human with thoughts and memories and emotions. That slice of brain had once stored the cumulative thoughts acquired over decades that had made the donor the person they’d been.

So much work for nothing. That a living thing should be there and then gone just seemed so impossible. So impractical. So . . . wasteful, somehow.

Because where did it all go, in the end? Esther understood the first law of thermodynamics, that nothing was created or destroyed and all the little bits and pieces that made up a human would be redistributed elsewhere when they died, but where did the memory go? The joy? The talent? The suffering? The love?

If the answer was “nowhere,” then why the hell did we even bother? What was the point of these fleshy globs of consciousness that ate and drank and loved and rose from cobbled-together bits of the universe?

“I think I’m gonna puke,” Jonah said, gagging at the aforementioned uterus when they were about halfway through the collection.

“Why don’t we get out of here and get something to eat? How about Taco the Town?” she said, pointing to a severed foot with a huge plantar wart growing like a cauliflower out of the sole, which looked strangely reminiscent of the quality of food available at the taco truck.

Jonah looked at it, then vomited on the floor in the middle of the hall, bits of his budget oat breakfast splattering on the formalin-encased remains of the diseased dead people. Esther sat him down and ran to fetch him water, like he’d done for her when she’d been sick. And that’s how, on a Sunday afternoon in early December, they were banned forever from the Museum of Human Disease.