Famous Men Who Never Lived

by K. Chess

  She asked herself: What did she really want? Sympathy? She had that. The old man’s enthusiasm, his encouragement? Those couldn’t be bought for a bunch of corner-store carnations. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “In this life, each of us must find a single thing that we think is worthwhile and do it faithfully,” Oliveira said. “For you, I think that could be practicing medicine again. You and I are fortunate. Like the method of finding proximate and distal causes of disease in a population, the basic laws of the human body will never change. You can work, just as you used to.”

  She thought of her years of training. The beautiful complex structures of the head and neck, presented on tissue-thin paper in the texts. And the impossible-to-anticipate variations. The actual flesh under her gloved touch as she cut a straight line from the brow down along the side of the nostril and through the upper lip to remove a paranasal cancer. Cutting the bones, removing part of the hard palate, the orbital, sometimes the eye. The care she’d taken to leave a clear margin. You needed a certain mind-set. A sureness and serenity she didn’t have anymore. “No,” she said savagely. “I don’t want to.”

  “It doesn’t have to be medicine, but I think you need to pick one thing. Focus on it. One manageable, attainable goal.”

  “What if this is it, though? My goal. This museum?”

  They sat quietly for a minute. Hel watched young people in bad clothes kissing, arguing, and looking at their personal digital devices on the other benches. In the center of the piazza, one pigeon tried to mount another, the two birds waddling back and forth at her feet. The aggressor never got anywhere, but his intended victim couldn’t seem to escape his attentions.

  “At least help me try,” she said.

  Oliveira squeezed the flowers she’d brought between the opposing digits of his left arm, his grip crackling the green cellophane they were wrapped in. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do my best.”

  Hel stood in front of the open closet door in her bra, feeling faintly ridiculous. She wore no panties; she wasn’t sure whether underwear would show through the delicate black silk, cut on the bias, of the only dress she owned that would possibly work. She didn’t want to put it on yet; she’d bought the high-necked, unfashionable garment a year ago and worn it only once, to the funeral of a UDP from Vikram’s entry group who’d shot himself in the head.

  But tonight, she was headed to an arts fundraiser, and important well-connected people would be there, people Oliveira said she should meet. She had to look formal.

  She stepped into her shoes. She wasn’t used to heels—women didn’t wear them at home—but something about the authoritative echo they made pleased her. Still bare-bottomed, she clopped into the living room, crossing to the single pressboard bookshelf squeezed between the window and the radiator, and trailed her fingers down the spines of the titles on the top shelf, looking for an egg-blue cover. Vikram, at work for the night, kept the precious books he’d brought through the Gate on the top shelf, segregated from all of the other books he’d picked up since.

  There. The Pyronauts: A Novel by Ezra Sleight. It was an edition Vikram had bought for himself in 2001 or 2002. It contained a foreword by some professor he used to know and an afterword, as well as a chronology of the author’s other works. The cost code appeared on the back cover: $124, in their inflated currency. Priceless now. The only one of its kind.

  She’d read the book for the first time just to make Vikram happy. Now, John Gund and Asyl and even Aitch, the stranger they met in the Never, were like old friends. She couldn’t put into words the way the novel made her feel, her celebration of its beauty mixed inevitably with an exquisite sadness that there was no more. None of Sleight’s short stories or other novels survived, no articles, no interviews. The man and the ideas he’d had were completely gone from the world of this After, persisting only in the memories of a few. She decided she would take the book with her as a sort of good luck token, tangible proof she could pull out if called upon.

  If only they’d foreseen, when they packed for the cemetery. It was hard to put herself back there—not emotionally hard, though that was true too, but literally hard to remember those days. Traumatic amnesia, the psychologist who once came as a guest speaker to her Reintegration Education meeting had called it. If only there’d been a way for her to understand in advance what it would be like to be shipwrecked in a world populated by seven billion strangers with whom she had nothing in common.

  She slipped the book into her capacious bag, and went back into the bedroom to put on the dress.

  At Reintegration Education on Wednesday, they watched a DVD that promised to introduce them to the principles of the US criminal justice system. Vikram thought he would have trouble paying attention. He’d spent most of the last week dreaming of the Gate, strung in the sky above Calvary like a loop of Christmas lights—trying to remember while trying to forget. But he found this video unexpectedly absorbing. It began with a reenactment of a witch trial. A young and beautiful white woman in colonial dress was herded to a riverside by a crowd of angry townspeople, who pulled the bonnet off her braided hair and tore at her clothes before pushing her into the water. The camera pulled away before it became clear whether she would float with guilt or sink to the bottom, innocent. The words There Is a Better Way appeared at the bottom of the screen, followed by a shot of the Statue of Liberty.

  The members of Vikram’s group sat in a semicircle, stone-faced. After nearly three years of enforced weekly meetings, it took a lot to provoke a reaction from them. Old Catalina, however, could always be relied on. “Do they really think we need to see this?” she asked Vikram in a highly audible whisper. She spat on the floor. “Reeducation horseshit.”

  “Hey!” barked Emily Sato, their Reintegration Liaison Officer, from her seat by the door. “Mrs. Calderón, we’ve talked about this! That’s not sanitary.”

  “Bah!” Catalina muttered. Vikram watched her smear the spittle across the floor with the tread of her walking sneaker as the video went on to show a group of modern jurors—a group as racially and ethnically diverse as the UDPs sitting in this high school basement tonight, though much more cheerful and enthusiastic—as they listened to the evidence in a case presided over by a wise-looking judge. Without Your Participation, No Justice Is Possible read the caption.

  The DVD ended and Officer Sato flicked on the lights. “So, what did you think? Mrs. Yee? Mr. Westmorland? Anyone?”

  Vikram looked around; each member of the group seemed immersed in a private stupor. Several people covertly checked their phones. Was anyone else thinking of the notorious Debrief abuses? About the way assaults against their people were never prosecuted as hate crimes? About the phony charities that had raised money in their name but never turned it over? No one responded to Sato’s question. “I thought this would be a good segue into a discussion of the type of justice system you guys had back at home!” she said. “Compare and contrast. Plus, good stuff to know if you ever get chosen for jury duty, right?”

  “I don’t think any of us have to worry about that,” said a tall black man in the back whose name Vikram didn’t know. The guy was new—he’d arrived from his original resettlement destination in another state when the graphic design firm where he’d found work transferred him up to its New York office. His boss must have deemed him good at his job, valuable enough to go to the trouble to sponsor UDP Change of Residence paperwork. Resentfully, they’d all kept their distance from the newcomer so far.

  “Great comment!” Sato said. “Want to elaborate, Mr. Agnew?” Vikram knew Sato was an intelligence officer of some kind—she wouldn’t tell them what agency—but she was certainly junior and low-ranking. Her questions had obvious right answers; any traps she set were easy to avoid. Still, seeing her take notes on her tablet, as she was doing now, always made Vikram nervous.

  “I don’t think they ever call UDPs for jury duty,” Agnew said. “We’re not exactly the ‘peers’ of most of our fellow citizens. And
even when it’s one of us that gets accused of the crime, it seems like they don’t trust the rest of us to be on the jury. There were no UDP jurors on the Micallef trial, right?” He looked around at the rest of them, shrugging. “Have any of you served on a jury up here? None of the UDPs I knew in Tampa ever got called.”

  Catalina shifted in her seat. “Oh, shut up, you ass-whore,” she said, her words accented but perfectly intelligible to everyone in the room. She was from Colombia, first state among equals in the America Unida system. For the thirty years before the disaster, she’d led an ordinary immigrant life in their Brooklyn, but Vikram knew that before that, in her long-ago youth, she’d fought against the United States as one of a second generation of woman commandos in its on-again, off-again war against Capitalism. Once, Catalina had brought in her old uniform shirt to group and shown them the many medals pinned to it, explaining with pride what each one meant. A small condor emblem for her birthplace. A bee in memory of the fallen dictator, El Mero Mero. A purple hammer and sickle representing ideological purity. A double bar on a black chevron, awarded to Catalina for excellence in marksmanship.

  “Mrs. Calderón!” Sato snapped. “That’s enough! You need to leave, now.”

  This seemed to be what the old woman had been angling for all along. She stood slowly, shuffling away from the circle of folding chairs toward the corner, where her mobility scooter was parked. She showed a triumphant, broken-toothed grimace. “I’m just trying to help him.”

  “How are you possibly helping?”

  “I’m giving this little gootch some extra Reintegration Education.” Catalina pointed a shaking finger in Agnew’s direction. “Trying to show him what’s good for him. Why you didn’t learn to keep your trap shut in Tampa?” she scolded as she sank down into the scooter’s seat. “You can’t say stuff like that. You should know they put in your file. Never criticize them, dummy.”

  “What about you?” Agnew asked. “You’re not exactly staying quiet.”

  “Ha! I don’t gotta worry. I be dead soon. What they gonna do to me? But the rest of you. You wait. The government, they gonna put UDPs in camps.” She tilted her head back to look Sato in the eye. “Camps, just like your America done to the Japs. I read in my textbook. How you like that?”

  “Christ, just get out,” Sato said. They could hear the whine of the motor fade as Catalina moved down the hallway to the elevator. “Can the rest of you just take out your Citizenship Workbooks?” Vikram checked the time and settled back into his seat to live out the rest of the session. Fifteen minutes left. Fifteen minutes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hel skulked around the edges of the reception room on the fourth floor of a SoHo hotel that should not even exist. This ought to be a park. She remembered it: Palast Park, with its fountain, its lion mural, its hobs for games of quoits. She stood where it ought to be impossible to stand, twelve meters above the surface of the earth, her own displaced self displacing nothing but air, floating in what ought to be empty space high above the benches and the tops of the elm trees and, a block away, on Broadway, the elevated tracks of the K train. But here, in this New York, there was no Palast Park. A blight had killed off most of the elms and relegated the survivors to cages. Even the trains, most of them designated with different letters and numbers, routed underground. It was all wrong.

  And Oliveira was nowhere to be seen. Again, she checked the clock above the bar, where two white-jacketed servers mixed drinks for a throng of partygoers, the servers working together without speaking or even looking at each other. It was 20:15 already. He was not here.

  How would she ever find the person he’d sent her to meet, the museum director? Hel considered asking the efficient young employee stationed at the door, but before she could decide whether this was reasonable, a fashionable stranger in a sequined jumpsuit and heels whirled away suddenly from the group she’d been part of. The contents of the woman’s cocktail splashed deliriously outward, soaking the top of Hel’s dress.

  Hel shuddered from the cold impact and felt a flash of irrational fury, the way she felt when someone stepped on her shoe on the crowded subway platforms here. Ice cubes clattered against the polished floorboards.

  “Oh my God!” the woman said, her cheeks flushed and eyes wild. Her male companion began to laugh at her. “You asshole! Why didn’t you tell me someone was standing right there!” The woman glared for a second, seeming to look straight through Hel, then turned abruptly and loped toward the bathroom without offering an apology.

  The drink dripped between Hel’s breasts, cold and sticky. Her anger faded; she felt foolish instead. What was she even doing here?

  “Hey.” A round brown-skinned woman with short-cropped hair now stood before her. “Hey, are you all right?” She held out a wad of cocktail napkins. “You want to take care of that yourself, or do you want some help?” She winked, and Hel noticed bitterly that she wore trendy sneakers and a flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows—unlike Hel and every other woman in the room, she was dressed for comfort.

  Hel took the napkins and dabbed at the damp fabric. “Thanks.”

  “I’m Angelene,” her rescuer said. “I’m an industrial chemist. Are you an artist?”

  Hel shook her head no.

  “See, that explains it. That’s why you look so surprised. We’re just, like, normal people. You and I sit at desks and answer to bosses and shit. Whereas someone like Leslie over there, consumed by her muse, operates under conditions so rarified we’re not even capable of understanding them.” Angelene leaned forward. “Leslie makes sculptures out of split telephone cable. My wife’s a fan.”

  Hel was taken aback by the terminology, but tried not to show it; at home, verts could only legally partner, not marry. “Really?”

  “Yeah. My wife says the work has to do with communication and with representing the electrical impulses in our brains, mapping the threads of the unconscious. Sounds super-important, huh?”

  “Hey, don’t be like that,” said a regal woman in a silver sheath dress. She might have been annoyed. Or she might have been gently amused. It was hard to tell.

  “Am I not getting it right, babe? Isn’t it electrical impulses?” Angelene slid an arm around her middle. “Or is it synapses? Neurons?”

  Ignoring her, the regal woman turned to Hel. “Hi. I’m Ayanna Donaldson.” Her hair, elaborately coiffed, rose in a crest up the center of her head. The fabric of her sheath glittered in the light.

  Hel felt unbearably frumpy in her death dress. “I know you by reputation. I’m very pleased to meet you.”

  Donaldson shook her hand. “How are you enjoying the party?” she asked. “Have you checked out our silent auction, by the coat check?”

  “Yes, the items are . . . yeah, great. I’m sorry—I’m Helen Nash.” She should have said that during the handshake. “Dr. Oliveira put me down as his plus-one.”

  “Right, Carlos. He collects nonrepresentational line etchings, doesn’t he?” Donaldson sipped at a clear, still liquid in her narrow champagne flute. “Are you interested in contemporary Asian, too?”

  At a party like this at home, with nothing to prove, Hel would have just said no and moved away. Here, she was conscious of the strap of her bag on her shoulder and the weight of the book inside, and she thought of all the other books, big volumes on the coffee tables of her vanished friends, books left behind on bookshelves and on library shelves and in extinct bookstores. Thick volumes with their pages of photographs. Photographs of canvases, sculptures, and assemblages that no longer existed in physical reality, which had no home anywhere outside the memories of her people.

  The picture books she’d read to her son.

  “I’m not a collector. I’m a doctor, a medical doctor—by training, anyway—and I don’t know much about . . . I’m not really . . . It’s sort of hard to explain. I was hoping Dr. Oliveira would be here. He said he’d introduce me to you. I’m like him—one of the Hundred Fifty-Six Thousand.” Behind her, Hel heard Ang
elene release an appreciative gasp. The others in the group quieted. Even the laughing man, caught in the middle of a story, finally shut up.

  “That must be very difficult,” Donaldson said after a minute. “To be so far from home.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  Donaldson put down her drink on one of the small tables scattered around the room. Hel felt the weight of the woman’s full attention on her, all at once, as if Donaldson were a sleepy cat and she a squirrel who’d just been noticed in a nearby tree.

  “Usually, people expect me to be grateful,” Hel said. “And I am. I’m grateful for my life. But everything is different here. People ask me what I think. I want to be able to tell them, but there’s so much, and I’m only one person.” Donaldson was nodding along; this was Hel’s chance. “I want to teach them. I want to be able to show them. I know you’re the director of the Museum of Modern Thought. A lot of us, we have things. Things we brought through the gap. Things like this.”

  She opened her bag. Thankfully, the leather flap had protected the volume inside from the spilled drink. She hadn’t really intended to show The Pyronauts, but here she was lifting it into the light with careful hands. Around her in the room, the party seemed to have gotten even louder than before.

  She flipped to the title page, then turned the book so that Donaldson could see it. Angelene and Leslie and the man who’d laughed moved nearer so that they could see too. “I’m not a literature person, but where I’m from, Sleight is canonical, like Poe. Like your Lovecraft. He wrote five novels, all of them gone now except for this. This is the only copy of any of his work that anyone has, as far as we know.”

  She and Vikram, disalike in every way. When he was going through his hardest times, she would come to his apartment, where they’d lay themselves out on his duvet together like corpses, holding hands, the cold wind blowing in through the open window. She was just a visitor, she told herself—a visitor to this grief, this building, this street, this world. The two of them would share a benzodiazepine, bought from a kid down the hall and cut in half, and once the anti-panic drug took effect, he would relate to her, in detail, the plots of the four missing novels of Ezra Sleight. Chinese Whispers. The Pain Ray. What to Do with the Night. The Poorhouse.