PROLOGUE
Like any good murder mystery, it starts with a body—quite a lot of them, in fact. Not yet, but soon. At the moment, those who are still alive include a sixteen-year-old girl named Pandora Lynch, seated next to her grandmother Gladys, who is lying in her bed in a nursing home in Fairbanks, Alaska. The two are not talking, but not in any petulant way; it’s because the latter has mostly stopped doing that and the former has her smartphone occupying her attention. Their reason for being together isn’t to talk, but for the companionship, shared personhood, and a certain degree of warmth that bodies in proximity provide.
Pocketing her phone, Pandora looks over and notices how smooth the old woman’s brow is, despite the many reasons it has for furrowing. A classic blessing-curse: the dementia has made her forget she has it. And forgetting one’s troubles is the pro tip dermatologists don’t often share, not with the profits on Botox injections being what they are. What Pandora wouldn’t give to forget that she may well be looking at her own future—to the extent she still has one.
There are plenty of things she can use: pillows, a roommate’s Dixied medications to amp or depress Gladys’s own, even a bare hand placed over the nose and mouth. A few moments of struggling due to muscle memory, and Pandora could give Gladys what she’d asked for before she stopped asking for anything.
Reaching toward the pillow underneath her grandmother’s fan of white hair, the young woman stops, distracted by old-people noises in the hallway. And when she looks back, her grandmother’s lids are fluttering as her own courage flags. The old eyes roll in their sockets, aimlessly at first, before locking, pupils front and center and aimed right at their mysterious visitor.
“Hey,” Pandora says.
“Hey,” Gladys says back, repeating as she does with pretty much whatever the other says, including “f-you.” Pandora knows because she’s checked and still regrets it.
“You feeling okay?” she continues, going through the motions.
“Feeling okay,” Gladys says back.
“Good.”
“Good.”
More old-people noises: the shuffle of tennis-shod feet across waxed linoleum; coughs, some wet; plaintive calls for help they may not need anymore, having fallen into a groove and gotten stuck; the roll of weighted silverware on plastic trays; the squeaky wheel of a cart.
Pandora’s phone starts buzzing, a steady, unbroken hum. She doesn’t answer, payback for the caller having ignored her for nearly twenty-four hours. She’s been keeping careful track of the time because the responsible party has been keeping track too.
Any second now, Pandora thinks, joining the countdown in her head before turning to her grandmother. “I love you,” she says.
“Love you,” Gladys echoes.
Pandora had been coming to the old-people’s storage facility since back when her grandmother had been someone she could talk to without feeling like she was talking to herself. She’d even told the old lady things she didn’t tell her dad, perhaps because even at her best, Gladys would forget whatever Pandora told her by the next time she visited, but also because her grandmother was the only female relative she had left. She’d even told Gladys about a little stalker problem she’d been having. The old lady, who’d been eating grapes at the time, pursed her lips and wrinkled her brow before delivering her verdict: “Tell ’im to buzz off . . .”
Pandora had laughed so hard the words became a catchphrase caught in her grandmother’s otherwise stick-proof memory. At first, it seemed she’d used it just to hear the sweet chime of her granddaughter’s laughter but then kept it up, Pandora suspected, because those particular neural pathways were easier to retrace than the tangled alternatives.
“Hi, Gram.”
“Buzz off.”
“Who brought the flowers?”
“Buzz off.”
“Is buzz on?”
“Buzz off.”
Pandora learned this repetition was called echolalia and that many dementia patients lapsed into it toward the end, before they stopped talking altogether, followed by eating, followed by drinking, followed by living, the lucky ones allowed to slip away, as opposed to being fed through a tube. Pandora’s grandmother had vetoed that and similar interventions by putting it in writing while she still could.
“Are you sure about this?” Pandora had asked, holding the clipboard as Gladys prepared to sign her own DNR order.
The old lady had paused, the pen a spaceship of plastic in the gnarled oak of her hand. “Do me a favor, will you?”
“Anything, Gram.”
“Mind your own business,” followed by her nearly undecipherable but still legal scrawl.
Pandora’s nursing home visits began as punishment before morphing into love. Whether they were doing her grandmother any good now, she had no idea. Being honest, Pandora suspected her continuing pilgrimage was more for her own sake than Gladys’s. It was like when she started a book, no matter how predictable, she felt duty-bound to see it through to the end. And so she kept coming, no matter how painful they became, these visits to a memory without a memory.
“Hi, Gram, remember me?”
Pandora has placed her hand over her buzzing pocket, trying to quiet it. Instead, the hum takes up sympathetically in her bones, traveling up her arm, across her shoulder, up her neck, and into her jaw, where it hooks into the rest of her skull. She can feel the buzz conducting itself through the tiny bones of her inner ear—the hammer, anvil, stirrup—all humming, making her wince and clench her teeth. Haptic feedback on steroids.
“I love you,” she says.
“Love you,” Gladys echoes.
And that’s when Pandora hears the first thud, like a fist pounding the wall in the hallway outside the room, followed almost simultaneously by what sounds like a metal pail banging over, upending its contents in a single, slapping splash. Her head jerks toward the door in time to see the sudsy puddle crawling past the open entry. Bolting up to see if anybody needs help, she finds the first body instead, a janitor in his early thirties on his way to mop up the latest biohazard. He didn’t make it and never will, becoming his own biohazard instead, judging from the pool of bright red spreading around where his head landed after creasing the drywall. Pandora reaches a hand toward his neck but stops. She doesn’t need to check for a pulse; the still puddle his mouth and nose are resting in tells her he’s already dead.
Steeling herself, Pandora lifts her head to look around, which is when she discovers that the janitor’s body is far from being the only fresh corpse in the vicinity. At the nurses’ station, the Ratched twins are both goners, one with her head thrown unnaturally back as her body swivels in its chair, while the other lies next to an overturned cart, surrounded by pill confetti. Farther down the hall, an attendant had been escorting a resident to the shower using what looked like a hammock chair on wheels only to succumb to mortality and gravity. Still dangling in the transport’s trusses, the abandoned resident rocks slowly, his thinly feathered head turning, not sure what to make of any of this, not that that’s anything new. And it’s the same everywhere Pandora looks: all the able-bodied staff are dead while their demented charges remain upright, lost in their eternal now, waiting on meals, pills, and visitors that won’t be coming anytime soon.