all these wonders

chloe n. clark

When we were little, my brother David and I used to pretend we were dead. I don’t know how the game started or why, but it became the game we played most often when set to our own devices. We’d lay next to one another, in the grass behind our house or on the floor of the bedroom, and tried to be still and quiet for as long as we could. The rules were that you couldn’t fall asleep and you couldn’t try to disturb the other in any way. We’d set a timer and try to be dead longer than the other. I always failed quickly. Naturally a fidgeter, I’d find my mind wandering without the ability to move, and I’d end up unable to stop myself from sitting up. But David was a champion at death. He’d stay so still and so quiet, his chest barely moving, that sometimes I’d get scared, think maybe he wasn’t pretending at all, and I’d beg him to wake up. He’d open his eyes, laughing, and say, “I was just pretending.”

          He was always just pretending.

David called me the night before he went missing to talk about his trip. He and Leo and John had spent the day on the beach; he tried to describe some food they’d eaten from a vendor. Small pockets of dough surrounding a mix of beans and veggies and cheese, then fried and salted. “It tastes like if Taco Bell was like actually paradise.”

          He’d never been the one who cared about food, that was always me, so it was fun to hear him excited about things he was trying. He never knew exactly what he was eating, couldn’t name the spice palette, so he talked about food in feelings and metaphors. This was like that.

          When he said goodbye that night, it was a regular goodbye. It never felt weighted with meaning.

          The next day, John called me. I had his number in my phone, had had it since we were kids—he was always the super responsible one of David’s friend group—making sure everyone was connected, calling parents to let them know when they’d be later than they said. I assumed David was using his phone, had run out of international minutes on his.

          “Hey,” I said answering.

          “Hey, Eliza, it’s John.” I was surprised by his voice; he sounded different through the phone.

          “Hey, bud, what’s up?”

          “Uh, so David and Leo didn’t come back to the hotel room last night. I was wondering if David messaged you anything?”

          “Nah. But, they probably went home with some girls or something? He said you all were going to a party, right?”

          “They went to a party. Nikki would’ve killed me from afar.” He laughed. But I knew it wasn’t a joke. David and I called Nikki “Medusa” when talking about her because of the deadly looks she’d give John.

          “Well, if they were at a party without your sensible presence, they’re definitely just trashed somewhere,” I said.

          He laughed again. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sure. But will you call me if you hear from him?” John asked.

          “Sure, bud.” I almost said goodbye but then decided to ask one question: “It doesn’t seem weird for them to be out all night, so why’d you call me?”

          There was a long silence, long enough that I wondered if the connection had been lost, and then he said,           “Something just feels bad.”

It was eight days before they found David and Leo’s bodies. Before that, it was as if they’d simply vanished. Their phones off, their last presence on security camera footage at a bar. In the black and white video, they’re at the very edge of the frame. They were talking to a woman, laughing. She’d typed her number or some message into David’s phone, and then she’d left. They finished their drinks, talking. Then they’d left.

          John sent me the footage after he’d asked the bar he’d left them at if they had anything. “I didn’t think they’d give it to me.”

          But they had and then it was all we had.

          When they found their bodies, it was not the search team made up of police and volunteers, but rather a random pair of teen girls out on a walk. They’d skipped school, took off through some woods, and seen a shoe sticking out from a pile of refuse. One of the girls said she’d realized it was attached to a foot, and then they’d run. They’d run home as fast as they could. No longer worried about their parents getting angry.

          I’d never skipped school, but I’d covered for David at least a dozen times. My mom rolling her eyes to see past it but never saying anything. You’re supposed to be good influences on each other, she always said. Or she’d mention that she’d read once that there was always a good twin and an evil one, and then she’d glare at us both before laughing and saying she just got evil ones.

          It took weeks before the bodies were released, sent home. Investigation ongoing but the truth was no one was going to get caught or tried. It looked like a robbery, we were told. They happened all the time. We were lucky, they actually said lucky, that the bodies were even found.

          It was after his body was returned that I got a call from a company saying that his body contained proprietary material.

“I’m sorry what?” I said.

          The woman, with the overly polite voice, repeated what she’d said: “Your brother was part of a paid trial for our company. In the process of the trial, he had a device which is proprietary, and we need that back before he can be buried. Legally.”

          “No, I heard you. What I didn’t hear was anything that made sense,” I said. “Like we can’t bury the body?”

          “Exactly, yes!” The woman said, glad I was finally getting her point of view. “He signed very binding paperwork that stated that after he died, the property would be returned to us. It’s a very simple process to remove it and shouldn’t delay any plans you have in regard to ... to, uh, his burial.”

          “I’m sorry, this is news to me. I have to see this paperwork before I’m going to allow you to do anything. Do you understand?”

          “That makes perfect sense, Ms. Green. You can stop by our offices, and we can go over the paperwork at whatever time is amenable to you.”

          We set up a time. She explained in too much detail how to get to their offices, a floor in a building downtown that wasn’t all that far from my own office. And then, as we were ending the call, she said, “We are sorry for your loss, Ms. Green.”

          When we were fourteen, David crashed a car. He had taken the keys to our uncle’s Jeep to—in his words—practice driving. He’d woken me up on his way out of the house, rolling a ball through the vent that was shared between our rooms. The way we’d sent messages to one another since we’d realized the vent cover was easily removeable when were six or seven.

          I’d laid on the floor and pressed my face to the vent. “What are you doing?”

          “I’m gonna take Dom’s Jeep for a spin,” he whispered.

          “You fucking are not!” I whispered back.

          “Language!” he said. “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

          “No, I kiss your mom with that mouth,” I hissed.

          He giggled. “Do you want to come?”

          “No! You can’t drive. You’d kill us both.”

          “Ugh, fine. Don’t tell anyone.” And then he was gone, and I was laying on my bedroom floor, the cold of the wood pressing against my belly. How many times had I laid like that as David went off on some adventure in the night?

          At three AM, the cops woke my mom and I up banging on the door. Two officers with David looking sheepish between them. My mom had been so tired she hadn’t even yelled at him, just sent him to bed until morning. Our uncle wasn’t mad, or not that he let on, because boys would be boys. But David worked in his car shop for free that summer to pay for the damage done.

          I asked him what it was like, the crash.

          “I don’t remember. But before it, sis? It was just me and the empty roads, and I thought about driving forever, just flying into the darkness until I found a city that was still lit up. Then I’d just live there. That’s what I was going to do.”

          “You’d leave me?” I hadn’t meant to ask it, hadn’t meant for my voice to sound so small and childish when I said it.

          He shook his head. “Nah, I’d come get you. I need someone to witness all these ceaseless wonders with me.”

“You didn’t look like twins,” the receptionist said as she took my info.

          “What?”

          She blushed. “Sorry, that’s ... I’m sorry. He came in here a lot, always talked to me, always kind. He mentioned you, and I think I thought you were identical twins?”

          “No. We’re fraternal twins.” We looked less alike than siblings even, really. David’s dark hair, mine a light brown that everyone called mousy, his eyes blue, mine brown. Our grandmother once said that in pictures David always looked striking while I looked kind.

          “Well, I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said. “He seemed very nice.”

          I nodded and took a seat, waiting for my name to be called. When it was called, it was a man in a suit.

          His office was tidy, professionally cold. A mahogany desk, no family photos, a picture on the wall of the ocean.

          “Ms. Green, I’m Samuel Stone, VP of Croesus.” He shook my hand and beckoned for me to take a seat.             “I just want to express our deep condolences. David was delightful and his loss is felt.”

          “Thanks. And are you going to tell me why I can’t bury my delightful beloved brother?”

          Samuel reset his face from the momentary wince that had crossed it. “Did he tell you at all that he was working with us?”

          I shook my head. “He works at an accounting firm.”

          “Yes, but he was also working with us. It wasn’t a job, per se. He signed up to be part of a trial study. Essentially wearing our firmware product as an ongoing part of the trial. His friend Leonard was part of it, as well.”

          “Leo,” I corrected.

          “Leo.”

          “And what exactly is this product?”

          “Well, we invested in what happens after you die.”

          “Excuse me?”

          “I’ll try to make it simple. Essentially, we are testing a theory that your consciousness could be uploaded to the cloud or a database after death. So that you could continue on, even if you had passed on.”

          “That your tag line?”

          He actually smiled at that. “Not far off, actually. So, basically, we need to retrieve the product and then we can upload David. As his next of kin, you obviously will be free to interact with him. He was part of the trial, so there’s no payment on your side.”

          My head hurt from questions that I wanted to ask.

          “I can’t explain any proprietary elements. But I can show you the contract stipulations surrounding what would be done upon David’s death.”

          He showed me the contractual parts, though most of it looked like the purposefully vague but somehow binding language of any legal contract. I didn’t have any options but to agree to them retrieving their property so I could bury David. On my way out, he said, “Do you want to contact David once we’ve uploaded him?”

          But I didn’t answer.

After the funeral, John and I sat outside with a drink. It had been a small ceremony at the graveyard, just a few friends and family members. Uncle Dom flew in, hugged me tightly, saying, “I should have been harder on him. He needed a better influence than I could be.”

          Then we’d come back to my apartment, a few scattered people, to talk about David’s life. To remember him back into being. I imagined that if he had been there, at his funeral, he would’ve told his bravest and stupidest stories. The time he swam alongside a shark, the time he jumped off a cliff into water hundreds of feet below, the time he learned how to dance with fire. Don’t be frightened, it’s all been so beautiful he would’ve said to us.

          “Do you think they’ll ever catch them?” John asked.

          I shrugged. “I don’t know. Didn’t seem like it.”

          He nodded, somber. “I should’ve stayed out with them. I could’ve made them go back to the hotel.”

          I took his hand, looked him in the eyes. “John, he literally never listened to either of us. We were witnesses to David, never protectors.”

          He sighed, a long, low sound halfway between a sob and a laugh.

          “Did you know that he had a chip in his head?” I asked.

          John turned, confused. “What?”

          “He and Leo were apparently doing some test on a new product with a company. It was a chip in their heads so their consciousness could be uploaded after their deaths?”

          “Are you fucking kidding me?” John’s expression had darkened. “I told them not to do that. We all got recruited? I guess that’s what you’d call it. We were at a tech convention. They took cards, I laughed at the guy.”           He took a drink. “I told them not to do it.”

          We sat in silence for a few minutes and then he said, so quiet it was barely more than a whisper, “Do you think it works?”

I was asleep, or at least in a restless sort of slumber, tossing and turning, when the phone rang. An unknown number, but spam seemed unlikely at three AM, so I answered. “Hello?”

          The line crackled and spat, like an old radio not tuned into a particular station. “Lies.”

          “Lies?” I asked. The call dropped. I set the phone down on my nightstand, and only as I closed my eyes did I hear lies in my head again. Not Lies, Liz with a long i, Lies short for Eliza, what David would call me when he was being serious, when Sis alone wouldn’t cover it. I grabbed the phone and tried to dial back the number.

          “The number you have called is no longer available.”

          I took the next morning off of work and drove in to the Croesus office. The secretary looked startled to see me but agreed to buzz Samuel for me. When he stepped out into the waiting room, I immediately said,                 “You didn’t say he would call me. I thought I had a choice.”

          The look of confusion on his face made me falter.

          “Call you? Who?”

          “David. He called me last night, after the funeral.”

          Samuel ushered me into his office, and I followed, still rambling about getting a call. My sleep-deprived brain making less sense than I wanted to. With the office door closed, Samuel turned to me.

          “I’m sorry, again, for your loss and for any disturbance we may have caused, but I can assure you your brother did not call you. Our server is locked down. Anyone uploaded needs to be accessed through us. That’s the whole point.”

          “But I got a call, and he said the name he always called me, and—”

          “I’m sorry.” And here Samuel softened his expression to something close to genuine human compassion.           “But is it possible someone was playing some kind of cruel joke?”

          I slumped into the chair, exhaustion and grief tangling in my head. “I … I don’t know.”

          “People are often at their worst after terrible things happen to someone. You would think it would be the opposite, but …” He spread his hands to the sky. Then he set a hand on my shoulder. “Since you’re here, would you like to talk to David? He could clear things up.”

          I looked up at him, trying to search for some mockery or lie. “It worked?”

          He smiled, slightly. “We knew it worked. There have been others in the trial before you brother.”

          He led me to a room down the hall. It was small, just a desk with a computer on it. The chairs, though, were softer, more comfortable than the ones in his office, the room somehow less cold and austere. He typed something into the computer. “I’ve brought David up. We don’t have sound technology yet, but you can type back and forth with him. I’ll be outside so you have some privacy.”

          He left the room, and I sat down in front of the computer. The desktop background was a picture of a forest—so much green—and a chat box sat open in the middle. I typed, “Who’s there?”

          The three dots of typing came up. “David. Is this Eliza?”

          “Yes.”

          “Hey, sis.”

          “Hey.”

          I wanted to type something profound, but it wasn’t happening. I stared at his words. “How do I know it’s you?”

          “It’s me.”

          I thought for a long moment. “What’s something only you and I would know? That the internet definitely wouldn’t.”

          “Damn, you’re a slow typer.”

          I smiled, the comment felt like David. But any chat program can learn someone’s conversational habits.

          The three dots.

          “I’m not pretending this time.”

          I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like someone was crushing my chest. “Where are you?”

          “I don’t know exactly. I don’t see here. Not exactly. It’s more like being inside your own brain.”

          “Must be empty in there.”

          “Haha.”

          I wanted to ask him a million things. “Did you call me last night?”

          Three dots.

          “I have to go now.”

          The chat screen closed, and I was left staring into the forest.

          I sat there for a few minutes, willing it to open back up, but nothing happened. Outside, I talked to Samuel. “When I asked about the call, he just said he had to go.”

          “The uploaded seem to tire easily. I’ve noticed this in others, too many questions and the chats end. We’re not sure why, it’s something we’re working on.” He shrugged apologetically.

          “Okay,” I nodded. “And you’re sure he couldn’t have called me?”

          “One-hundred-percent positive.”

          As I was walking out the door, he said, “Don’t forget, you can visit him anytime.”

When we were twenty, David nearly died. We were at a college house party, someone with a giant swimming pool in the backyard, and David had drunk way too much. I was talking to a girl I barely knew from a math class, and she was telling me about all the problems with her boyfriend, when I heard someone scream from outside.

          To have been David’s sister meant that when I heard a scream when he was around, I always feared the worst. I’d run outside, saw people crowded around the pool, saw a flicker of red against the blue water, and I was in the water before I could think, kicking off my shoes and jumping into the deep end. I saw David, under the water, his hair fanning out around him, the trickle of blood floating up from somewhere on his face, and I wrapped my arms around him, drug him to the surface. I performed CPR, drunk college kids crowding too close around me, until David was coughing up water. Alive. “I was just pretending,” he laughed, sputtering out water. And I could’ve killed him right then, thrown him back in the water and let him struggle his way out, but instead I hugged him.

I was making dinner, thinking about the chat David, when my phone rang. I jumped but saw a name on the caller ID—Annie—Leo’s on-again-off-again girlfriend for years. I had seen her at his funeral; she’d looked like someone had drained all of the color out of her—a monochrome version of herself.

          “Hey, Annie.”

          “Oh my god, Eliza.” She sounded panicked and like she was crying.

          “Annie, what’s going on?”

          “I saw Leo. I saw him.”

          I pictured the casket being lowered into the ground. Dirt, flowers, all that dirt.

          “What do you mean?”

          “I saw him! Can you please come over please?”

          She lived ten minutes away at most. I had dropped Leo at her place occasionally when he and David had had too much to drink and called me to be their driver. “Okay, I’m on my way.”

          When I got to her house, she was sitting on the stoop outside, sobbing still. She ran up to me and hugged me. “I saw him.”

          “Where?”

          She took my hand and hurried me inside the house, closing the door and locking it behind us.

          “Just—just come look at my computer.” She led us into the kitchen; she had what looked like some kind of security cam footage up on her laptop screen. It showed the corner of her driveway outside her house.

          “Just look at it,” she said. Then she pressed play. At first there was nothing, just the normal, slightly eerie effect of a low-quality camera on at night.

          And then a man walked into view from out of the darkness of the hedges. He could be any man.

          Someone tall in jeans, a shirt, a black jacket. The preferred outfit of Leo, but also thousands of other young men. I was going to say as much, but then he looked up at the camera. Leo. But not quite Leo. He looked like he’d been put through some sort of filter, his face a little sharper, the stubble he always grew in a little more perfectly even. And one side of his face was covered in blood. “What the hell?”

          Annie clutched my arm. “You see him too, right?”

          He was off the screen already, nothing more than a glimpse, but it had been enough. “I saw him.”

          “But his body was in the casket. They gave his mom his personal effects. The watch he always wore. Everything.”

          She rewound the footage, played it again, and we stood there in silence watching Leo walk up to the house over and over for a few minutes.

          Annie calmed down after a bit, as if just having someone else witness the same thing as her was enough. “Do you think someone’s playing a prank?”

          “Maybe? But I’m not sure how.”

          “My security stuff is on wifi, maybe like they hacked in? I just don’t get why. I thought I was going crazy.” She half-laughed. “Like I’m so glad you saw him, too. But also it looked like not-him too, right?”

          I nodded. “Can you send me the footage?” Croesus was going to have to answer some more questions.

Samuel looked unimpressed by what I was saying. Until I showed him the footage. He actually jumped when Leo looked up at the camera. “That’s uncanny.”

          “Can you explain it?”

          He shook his head. “After you got your phone call, I double-checked, and our network is rock solid. There’s no break in the firewall, no one who has been uploaded could be manipulating something outside of this building.”

          “Then explain it.”

          “I think someone is trying to hurt Leo and David’s loved ones. That’s the only explanation.”

          “Can I talk to David?”

          He nodded, mostly it seemed relieved that I wasn’t asking him more questions. He walked me to the small room, pulled up the chat, and left the room.

          “Hey, sis,” David typed before I could type anything.

          “How’d you know it was me?”

          “You’re the only one talking to me.” Then the three dots again. “Well, other than the company. But they always come at certain times. They always type ‘Hello, David.’ Immediately.”

          “That sounds annoying.”

          “Yeah, I don’t like it in here.”

          “Can you go anywhere else?” No response for a minute. Then another. “David?”

          Three dots. “I don’t think so. But also maybe?”

          “What does that mean?”

          Three dots. “I feel like I’m not all here.”

          “Is Leo there with you?”

          “Nobody’s here but me.” More dots. “Who would’ve thought death would be so lonely?”

          Chat Ended flashed across the screen and I was staring at the trees.

As children, we only ever vacationed at one place: a lake about a two-hour drive from where we lived. Our mom would rent a little beach house, and we’d spend a long weekend swimming and buying cheap ice cream cones from a little stand that was a two mile walk from the beach house. Two miles to ice-cream-craving children felt so fast on the way there and like forever on the way back.

          One summer, the ice cream shop had closed, but the walk into town where there was another shop was five miles. David convinced me to go. We left early in the morning, and as we walked, the sun grew higher and higher in the sky, and we got hotter and hotter. I asked him if we should turn around.

          “But we’ll miss everything if we turn around.” He gestured to the fields around us, the shapes in the clouds, the sound of crickets in the grass. Everything.

          It was the one time our mom was ever really furious with us. When we finally got home hours later, she yelled and yelled. She turned to me and said, “Why didn’t you stop him?”

          And I didn’t know what to say. I never knew what to say.

I stopped at John’s apartment on my way home. Rang his buzzer, two long hard buzzes before he finally buzzed me in. He opened his door and looked exhausted. “Eliza, what do you need?”

          “Can I come in? I wanted to ask you about some stuff.”

          He looked behind himself, sighed, and then opened the door. His apartment was a mess for John, dirty dishes on the coffee table and some clothes strewn about. “What happened in here?”

          “I haven’t been sleeping well and it’s um, caused some bad habits.” He went and picked up the clothes that were on the floor, carried them off to his laundry hamper.

          “Where’s Nikki?” I shouted after him.

          “She’s visiting her family.”

          He had a notebook out on his coffee table, next to the dirty dishes, and on it was just a bunch of scribbles. He came back into the room. “I get fidgety when I can’t sleep.”

          “I get it. Why the bad sleep?”

          “I keep getting phone calls at night.”

          The surprise must have shown on my face. “Every couple of hours.”

          “Why don’t you turn it on silent.”

          He stared at me, mulling over whether he should say whatever it was he was going to say. “Because it’s David and Leo.”

          “They’re calling you? What do they say?” I can’t help but think of the single call. The one word. But John and Annie got calls and footage.

          “They don’t say anything, Eliza.” He looked over at the corner of the room, anywhere but my eyes. “They just scream and scream.”

          I told him about the footage, about my call, about talking to the chat version of David, but first I just gave him a hug. For a moment, we were returned to twelve-year-olds hugging after David had fallen out of a tree and concussed himself, sixteen-year-olds nervously waiting to see if David would be expelled, twenty-year-olds at the ER with David after he almost drowned, a week before as David was lowered into the ground.

          Dirt. Dirt. Dirt.

John came into Croesus with me the next day, the secretary startled at the sight of two of us. “Ms. Green, I don’t think you’re expected?”

          “Just tell him we’re here.”

          When Samuel came out, he frowned once at the sight of us, but then motioned us back to his office.

          “I suppose there’s more weird stuff?”

          “John’s been getting calls from both of them every night.”

          Samuel nodded, somewhat defeated. “Do they say anything?”

          “No. They just scream, but I know their voices,” John said.

          “Well, I think I figured it out,” Samuel said. Not expecting him to be forthcoming, I actually let out a gasp. He gave me a sad smile at that. “My apologies, Ms. Green, our system wasn’t as fool proof as I thought. We’ve never uploaded someone who died violently. I think there was something in that, some splitting of their consciousness that allowed a break in the system for them to slip through.”

          Screaming. Part of them was always lost.

          He continued, “I think I’ve patched it up, but we’ve decided to delete their upload. We did discuss it with them, and they agree.”

          “Delete them?” John’s voice so small, I heard his twelve-year-old voice again.

          Samuel nodded. “It’s painless, of course. There’s no way for them to feel pain. Just the press of a button, really.”

          He went over the process with us, explained there was even a clause in the contract that covered necessary deletion. I thought of David stuck in his own mind. He’d always been so in love with the tangible, the visceral—touching hot sand, drinks, the feel of racing through the night—I didn’t understand why he would’ve signed up for the upload in the first place. To be outside your own body, the world, everything.

When he was packing for the trip, David called me. It was his first time leaving the country. He’d taken road trips across the country, spent a summer hitchhiking, but he’d never left for some reason, and he was so excited to finally go. So I asked him why he never had before.

          “I think I was so excited that I didn’t want to be let down.” He laughed.

          “Well, what if you are let down?” I asked.

          He was silent for a while, mulling it over. “When has the world ever let me down, Liz?”

          A thousand times it had, our whole lives, but there’d always been something else. A next adventure.

          “Bring me back some memories.”

          “Of course,” he said, “I’ll bring you back the world.”

Samuel told me I could say goodbye to David if I wanted to. John shook his head, waited outside. “It’s not really them,” he said. “Not really.”

          When the chat dots appeared, I sat forward in my seat. Three dots. Then, “I’m sorry, Liz. This time it won’t just be pretend.”

          I put my fingers on the keyboard, typed out, “I love you. I’m sorry this happened. Don’t go.”

          But the chat had already ended. I was left staring at the forest. If I looked long enough at the trees, it seemed like there was someone looking back.

Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities and more. Her next collection is forthcoming from JackLeg Press.