FIRST OF JUNE

In April the CEO and CFO were arrested and the liquidators moved in to recover what they could, which was only a little, here and there, since the huge debts the company had run up were against a theoretical market value plus a little capital, both of which by then had long since soaked into a beautifully complex ecosystem of shell companies and trusts. In May the company's property holdings, laboratory equipment and freezer network were auctioned off, and as the first of June arrived a fixer from the liquidators showed up at my door and asked for 10 minutes of my time. It was as hot as Hades outside. "Sure, sure," I said. He stood in my kitchen with a glass of chilled water and looked uncomfortable. A weird-looking guy with a thick neck and a thin head, a flabby crease running down the centre of his throat and pill-shaped transition lenses, with thin, spiky hair and a hairline that left only an inch-wide band of clammy skin on his forehead before reasserting itself vigorously in a thick monobrow. 

"What can I help you with?" I asked him. He fidgeted with his glass. "You're aware that the company has been liquidated," he coughed. I was. "Right, right," he said. "So you're probably wondering what everyone's been wondering, which is what's going to happen to all the bodies." 

"Not really," I said. "They, uh, all got rehomed. With other cryo companies." 

He squinted at me. "Right," he said. "That didn't happen. That was the statement, yes. Do you know that didn't happen?" I just looked at him. "That was for the announcement. Do you understand what I'm telling you? Are you following me?"

"So what am I supposed to do about it?" I asked. He leaned against my island counter and smiled like a shark. 

"Rent a truck," he said. I wasn't used to renting a truck. My life was not the kind of life that necessitated truck use and I had almost no awareness of the requirements - the logistical hoops that must be jumped through in order to procure a truck. "I can fit everything I need in the back of my car," I whined.

He smiled again. "You'll be fine," he said, and I asked why I’d been chosen to rent the truck.

He wouldn't meet my eyes. "A conversation was had," he told me. "It was determined that you would be the easiest to murder if our discussion took an unconstructive turn, due to your lack of strength, your home life and your comparatively few social connections."

"I have friends," I told him. 

"Right," he said. "But not that many."

I rented the truck on my laptop. He drove me through the backstreets and let me out a block from the rental place. "If you're not at the lot in forty-five minutes I'll come after you," he told me. There was a kindly note in his voice. 

At the lot there were five pallets, each stacked a metre high and tied over with a thick sheet of canvas. They were still cold. We trundled them onto the truck. "Drive here," the fixer told me, taking my phone and handing me a photocopied page from a street directory. "Stay away from cops and don't get lost. They'll stink if they get too hot." I blundered through the laneways, helpless with the grainy, monochrome piece of paper. I hammered my hands on the wheel with frustration at my own inability to read the map. I entered a kind of tunnel vision - I felt as though I was watching myself from just over my head and behind, in a movie about a greying cuckold who uses misfortune and incompetence to drive a rented truck into purgatory itself. I pulled over in an industrial park to stare with bleary eyes at the paper, which dampened in the wet heat of my hands and disintegrated at the edges. With the engine off the cabin heated up and I remembered that the back of the truck was unrefrigerated. I drove on, panicked. A smell of rot seeped in. At some traffic lights a cop car pulled up next to me, the driver's window down, and I prayed to God that the cop couldn't smell, that he had a busted nose, that he was dumb, that he was incurious or mentally ill or concentrating on something else, and then the light turned green and the cop car sped off. As the sun set I left the city, and by moonlight pulled off a country road into an empty field. The fixer was standing there with a shovel. 

"Use the pallet jack to bring them down here," he wheezed, "but throw them into the pit one by one. It's not deep enough for the pallets too."

I knew he could kill me, but because I was exhausted and thirsty and grimy with sweat I said, "Aren't you going to help?" And he shrugged and said "I'm sorry... I had a stroke. I can't," and with an apologetic look pulled a pistol out of a backpack and held it in his hand.

The back of the truck had the clinical carrion stink of a butcher's shop, mixed with the sharp tang of sour milk. I staggered around the hole. I didn’t want to vomit directly onto any bodies. "Watch this," the fixer said, handing me two pieces of gum and chewing up two more of his own, which he then stuck under his nose. The menthol in my nostrils helped. But it was almost dawn before the truck was empty and, arms trembling, I could only shake my head at the fixer as he held the spade out towards me. "I can't do it," I rasped. He pointed the gun at me. 

Forty minutes later I collapsed onto the dirt pile. It was partly strategy, but also partly real, because I was dried out and exhausted, seeing in black and white, my hands covered in blisters, numb in my extremities. But also partly strategic. The fixer hauled me into the shade of the truck and handed me a crumpled plastic bottle half full of dirty water. My hands shook as I sipped it. When he was sure I wasn't faking he sighed and picked up the shovel. For fifteen minutes he scooped tiny portions of soil, kicking at clods with an aging white trainer, then leaned heavily against the shovel a moment and collapsed into the hole. 

I climbed to my feet and staggered to the edge. He was only forty centimetres down, his face red, eyes bulging, hands twitching. Next to his head a bare female leg poked out of a thin layer of soil, smooth and perfectly white. I climbed down into the pit and felt the surface move and pulled my foot out in disgust - what could it be but soft, thawing flesh disguised by a faint layer of dust that I had stepped onto? But I had hoped it would be firm. I grabbed the fixer under his armpits and hauled him weakly out of the pit, across the yellowing grass to the truck door and hoped he would climb in himself, but he just pinched the fabric of the upholstery between his fingertips and whispered hoarse, breathy noises that I tried to understand as words but could not. My strength was all gone. I dragged him to the lift tray and loaded him into the cargo hold, where I lashed one of his arms to the wall and drove him to the hospital. I left the light on in the back so he wouldn’t slip away. Why would I do that? I couldn’t let him die on the second day of summer.