by Tricia Reeks
Not at first, though. Not before he’d seen her naked often enough to erase the mystery, met her family, and decided exactly how much effort he had to put into this to keep her around. Before that, he’d found her every syllable a new discovery, inspecting it, holding it, questioning it. After . . . there was no reason to lie to himself, he’d fallen into the pattern of letting her words pass over him, his mind filling with the silence between them like a swimmer gasping for air between waves.
“We’re like Adam and Eve,” Alice said. “A boy, a girl, a tree. Parents of a shitty new world.”
“We can’t be parents,” Rob said. “You’re dead. But maybe we’re like Noah and his family. Except instead of dying by water, the world died for it.” The extent of his religious knowledge didn’t extend much further than that. Like most children of broken homes, he viewed all institutions warily, suspiciously fallible.
“Fucking eerie,” Alice muttered.
The dream collapsed, and Rob woke with a sudden jerk, banging his knees against porcelain. He was curled in the bottom of a bathtub. His rifle was tucked against his body; the barrel poked down between his bent legs like an android phallus, the butt beneath his chin. The world was a very dangerous place, now. Not as bad as during the dying, or right after (was there ever a positive to say the killing had leveled out?), but you could still get shot for a drink of clean water.
Rob worked his way to his feet. His lower back ached, but that was the price of sleeping in a bathtub. It was the only place he felt safe sleeping indoors. A psychologist would probably have a field day with it. Links to the womb. A locus of yearning for the precious liquid lost. Maybe, if he found a psychologist really out there, the porcelain tub was the physical divination of his spirit animal, the turtle! To Rob, tubs were just safe places. It concealed him as he slept and, as a person reared in Tornado Alley, it’d been hammered into him that tubs were the best spot in any emergency to tuck into a ball and kiss your ass good-bye. Earthquake—tub. Nuclear war—tub. It was a tub he’d hidden in as the world had gone to shit. Of course, he’d lined it with couch cushions and pillows. He wasn’t a masochist.
What struck Rob as weird was sleeping in people’s beds. A bed is sacred ground. People spend a third of their life in one, they dream in them, they make love and share their fears in them. Sleeping in other people’s beds was an intrusion, even if the owners were dead.
He left the bathroom, rifle slung over his shoulder, and was stopped by what remained of the rising sun. Most of the east face of this building was gone above the fifteenth floor. He was on the twentieth. The ceiling near the missing wall lacked a section, carpeting from the apartment above sagging down like a dead animal’s tongue.
The sky was constantly overcast, but the hues of dusk and dawn filled the sporadic gaps between the monstrous clouds like swipes of high art. Spillman or Tolndover. Rob stood there watching the pink streaks evanesce into a bland white that shot across the landscape in dramatic pulses, reminding him of police searchlights in old prison movies. He didn’t know if the sky would ever again be as blue as it had been in his dreams.
When Rob finally turned around, Alice was sitting on the back of the couch, feet on the springs where the removed cushions would have been. “I had a dream with you in it,” he said, scratching his thick facial hair.
“Again?” A smile snaked across her face. “Was I doing naughty things?” The ghost Alice in his dreams was never the ghost Alice of awake.
“We talked about biblical stories,” he said.
Her face scrunched up in the cutest way. “That doesn’t sound like me.” She stood. “Do you think it’ll rain today?”
“Maybe,” Rob said. He wished he had more answers. Who didn’t? There were too many troublesome questions running around like orphaned children, the answers that parented them long deceased. The rain, if it came, would be like the blasts of sunlight—sporadic and brief. “I think we’ll move on to a different building today.” Every night he’d choose a different apartment, moving across the city building by building. There was no hurry, anymore. That life had died of thirst. And he (and Alice) would scour the apartment’s cupboards and closets. They usually found canned goods and prescription pills and porn. There was probably a deeper statement about the times they’d lived, in that.
Today’s modest banquet consisted of creamed corn, beef jerky, a priceless can of mixed fruit and lightly molded biscuits you could use as a weapon. He drank from a bottle of clouded water, careful to never waste a drop.
“Do you think it’s ever too late for a man to find himself?” he asked, wrist-wiping his mouth.
“It’s never too late to discover good things,” Alice said. “You’d have to be a prick to think so.”
Rob ate in silence, looking out at the city through the space of a missing wall. The view was the kind a man could relax and die taking in, wrought of pure destruction.
No one knew how the water became polluted, or contaminated; at least, Rob didn’t. The last radio transmission he’d heard had been about a bacterium resistant to this and that, but others were crying out about pollution and Mother Nature finally having had enough of us and . . . did why really matter now? Most of the water in the world would kill you with one drink. It was a horrific way to die. He’d seen it happen, run from it.
Once the sickness had started to spread, the wars began. Not only country against country, but neighbor against neighbor. Streets rallied against streets. The thirsty mobbed rumored sources of clean water, and the atrocities were countless. The clouded sky was the result of superpowers flexing their muscles. China and Russia had both sprinted for the Arctic Circle, wanting what remained of the ice, destroying one another along with it. Pakistan had thrown a few nukes at India. North Korea had lobbed a few of their backyard fusion experiments south, just for the hell of it—everything was going down, why not settle a score or two?
Had America skipped through unscathed? He’d heard that most of the western seaboard was bright enough to read by at night in the Rockies. Who knew how bad it’d gone down in the east.
The poisoned rain had followed, killing plants and people alike. He’d been alone by then (as alone as a man with a ghost can get), drinking from a small stock of bottled water he’d killed a man to get. But over the last months, the rains had changed. The smell was different. What few animals were still alive drank from fresh puddles and survived.
Alice was standing on the far side of the apartment, looking out. The cool wind wrapped sinuous streams around her, brushing her dark hair. Daylight broke distantly through the scattered cracks in the restless sky; narrow sheaves of white light wafted with ephemeral shadows like shifting gossamer drapes. She was utterly beautiful, caught in youth eternal and framed by the dark hues of destruction unfolded. It was the end of this world, and he wished he could hold on to this image of her forever. Even if she wasn’t real.
When they left the building later, Alice walked beside him, sometimes talking, sometimes keeping her thoughts inside. In the brief bursts of sunlight, she’d never cast a shadow. Her steps had never made noise. When she yelled, her voice didn’t echo off the buildings’ indifferent faces, only in the chambers of his mind. But she was there. When they touched, he felt her; when he spoke to her, she responded; when he needed her, she was there. And, yet, he could never settle on her reality. Were all ghosts like this, given to haunt only a few? The shadow in the room that only one sees? Or was she not a ghost at all? Simply a configuration of his addled mind, the brightest star in the constellation of what had been, a dead light to wish upon?
He had watched her die in the bed they had shared. It is so hard to go thirsty when you can smell water that’s sitting in the other room. You go crazy, lips cracking like drought-stricken land, blood thick, mind sluggish and pounding. The longer it draws on, the stronger the scent of water gets, teasing you, making simple hunger look like pussy problems. But you know it’s poisoned. Rob had heard stories of people stuck in life rafts, drifting a
round the ocean. How, even though all the saltwater could do was kill you more quickly, after a while some would jump in and try to drink the ocean, try to drown in it, they were so thirsty.
The water mocks you.
He didn’t know where she’d drunk from—they were getting by on small pools of liquid in the bottom of canned vegetables—but he suspected it was the toilet. It had to have been in the middle of the night, while he’d slept. All he knew for sure was that one morning, her skin had been a telling red. Blue, bulging veins could easily be traced across her brow, her arms, her back. By midday, the milkiness had clouded her eyes. All Alice could do was curse and scream. The pain drove her mad. She’d bled all over their designer sheets.
Within forty-eight hours, she was gone, like all the others. Had a part of him felt relief? The screams had stopped. What few supplies they’d had didn’t have to be shared.
Rob shook his head, aborting the question. They had found a small patch of only half-wilted, bleached grass near the river. He loved the sound of it, something he’d never been aware of before. They lay there for a while. It was strange that it had taken a fallen world for him to face the fraud of a life he’d pretended to love.
He wished that he could say he’d lain beside her as she’d thrashed in the torment of gripping death. That his comforting had eased her fear and pain somewhat. He wished he could say that. The closest he’d gotten was the doorway. The sickness scared him. Like a child afraid of the dark room, he’d stood there, asking if she were okay, knowing she wasn’t.
After she’d died, he’d left their condo.
Their building had been populated by go-getters. Lawyers at the bottom of the ladder, first-year doctors, the young and upwardly mobile. Rob was a broker, stretching his hand up toward the middle rungs, with nice clothes, a leased BMW, a beautiful live-in girlfriend. He’d known it all and had it all, and in the end it was all a handful of dust. How do you drink a gold watch? How do you feel superior when all there is is you? His closest relationship was a woman he’d forgotten he loved. It all seemed pointless, now.
He had grown up somewhat humbly. His dad had been a maintenance man and, for some reason, Rob had been ashamed of this. And the clothes he’d worn. And the limits on life. That’s why he’d pushed himself so hard, he figured. The right address, the right car, the right clothes. Be the kind of man others want to be. It was almost laughable, now. It’s the people without money that try the hardest to show it off. And just when he’d grabbed what he’d wanted, the world ended and proved all his prizes insubstantial.
Lying on the half-wilted grass, he placed his head in Alice’s lap and wept. She stroked his head without a word.
Alice had shown up two days after Rob had abandoned her in the condo. Most people were dead. Those that weren’t were violent and paranoid. He’d hidden whenever people came around, gripping the end of a small baseball bat with a trembling hand. From a covered vantage point, he had watched a small war over a hot tub on the fourth floor, next to the gym, after Alice had died. Neighbors that he had known passingly brutally cut one another down. The water was bloody at the end, but the victors had drunk from it deeply then filled their containers.
Rob had been on the brink of suicide by water when she’d spoken. He’d been curled up on the floor of someone else’s exclusive condo near the roof. All of his dirty clothes had designer labels; his loafers were Italian leather, and his breath was Calvin Klein because he’d tried to drink cologne. And then she’d said his name, and it was like being awakened to a new life.
“But you died,” he’d said.
“The dead don’t always leave,” Alice had responded. Smiling, beautiful Alice whom he had held back with his distance and biting criticisms. He had always been afraid that she would see that he needed her more than she needed him. It was a truth that had crawled among his fears like a sole maggot in the dead of night.
Alice had taught him how to get water from a water heater. From a radiator. She had helped him build the distillery he now carried that had saved his life. It was the only thing that could clean the water, a bit of knowledge that came along way too late for way too few. His was small—two metal containers connected by a copper tube. Contaminated water was poured into the first container, capped, then placed over fire. The water boiled, the steam passed through the copper tube and became liquid in the second container, as it cooled. His setup could clean a gallon of water overnight. He’d seen much bigger stills among the larger groups, but Rob preferred the shadows.
They spent the night in another apartment. Rob pulled the cushions off the couch, then read from a book of poetry he’d rescued from a battered store. He’d never been much of a poetry fan before. All the books on his tablet had orbited a central theme: success. But true success lasts, and all of his had proven false.
He read poetry because Alice liked it, because it meant something. Same reason he’d spent two days fixing a truck he’d driven long enough to realize he enjoyed the walking. Alice had said she believed it was never too late for a man to do good things. Rob wasn’t sure how much of it this world held, but he wanted to live with substance. He didn’t know how far that would go in redeeming him from such a wasted life, but he felt he had to try.
“Bury my body,” Alice had said after she’d appeared.
“And then what happens? Will you go away?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you even really here?”
“I don’t know that either.”
He’d buried her in a nice, open park. Her body was wrapped in fine cotton sheets. In the dirt above her, he’d planted an apple seed taken from a looted gardening shop. Then he’d walked around the park, planting seeds. He liked the idea that in some future, some kid might run laughing through a forest of apple trees. Not once would the kid wonder why the trees were here.
That felt substantial.
“Where will we go?” Alice finally asked. They were sitting on the roof of a new building. Behind them, the still had been erected, and fire curled around the bottom of a metal container. In front of them was the doomed cityscape and the distant bend of the river.
“North, I think. Where it used to snow a lot.” It was his best plan. “I don’t feel hurried,” he explained. How much of life had been wasted by rushing? “Do you think anyone else has a personal ghost?” He smiled.
“I don’t know,” Alice said thoughtfully. “Maybe I’m not a ghost. Maybe this is a dream. Maybe you’re in a coma. Maybe you’re batshit crazy.” She laughed lightly. “Or maybe all that’s bullshit, and you’re the ghost. I’m simply your guide through the land of the dead.”
Rob looked around at the city. It really was beautiful.
Sing
Karin Tidbeck
Originally appeared in Tor.com, April 2013
The cold dawn light creeps onto the mountaintops; they emerge like islands in the valley’s dark sea, tendrils of steam rising up from the thickets clinging to the rock. Right now there’s no sound of birdsong or crickets, no hiss of wind in the trees. When Maderakka’s great shadow has sunk back below the horizon, twitter and chirp will return in a shocking explosion of sound. For now, we sit in complete silence.
The birds have left. Petr lies with his head in my lap, his chest rising and falling so quickly it’s almost a flutter, his pulse rushing under the skin. The bits of eggshell I couldn’t get out of his mouth, those that have already made their way into him, spread whiteness into the surrounding flesh. If only I could hear that he’s breathing properly. His eyes are rolled back into his head, his arms and legs curled up against his body like a baby’s. If he’s conscious, he must be in pain. I hope he’s not conscious.
***
A strangely shaped man came in the door and stepped up to the counter. He made a full turn to look at the mess in my workshop: the fabrics, the cutting table, the bits of pattern. Then he looked directly at me. He was definitely not from here—no one had told him not to do that. I almost wanted to correct him:
leave, you’re not supposed to make contact like that, you’re supposed to pretend you can’t see me and tell the air what you want. But I was curious about what he might do. I was too used to avoiding eye contact, so I concentrated carefully on the rest of him: the squat body with its weirdly broad shoulders, the swelling upper arms and legs. The cropped copper on his head. I’d never seen anything like it.
So this man stepped up to the counter and he spoke directly to me, and it was like being caught under the midday sun.
“You’re Aino? The tailor? Can you repair this?”
He spoke slowly and deliberately, his accent crowded with hard sounds. He dropped a heap of something on the counter. I collected myself and made my way over. He flinched as I slid off my chair at the cutting table, catching myself before my knees collapsed backward. I knew what he saw: a stick insect of a woman clambering unsteadily along the furniture, joints flexing at impossible angles. Still he didn’t look away. I could see his eyes at the outskirts of my vision, golden-yellow points following me as I heaved myself forward to the stool by the counter. The bundle, when I held it up, was an oddly cut jacket. It had no visible seams, the material almost like rough canvas but not quite. It was half-eaten by wear and grime.
“You should have had this mended long ago,” I said. “And washed. I can’t fix this.”
He leaned closer, hand cupped behind an ear. “Again, please?”
“I can’t repair it,” I said, slower.
He sighed, a long waft of warm air on my forearm. “Can you make a new one?”
“Maybe. But I’ll have to measure you.” I waved him toward me.
He stepped around the counter. After that first flinch, he didn’t react. His smell was dry, like burnt ochre and spices, not unpleasant, and while I measured him he kept talking in a stream of consonants and archaic words, easy enough to understand if I didn’t listen too closely. His name was Petr, the name as angular as his accent, and he came from Amitié—a station somewhere out there—but was born on Gliese. (I knew a little about Gliese, and told him so.) He was a biologist and hadn’t seen an open sky for eight years. He had landed on Kiruna and ridden with a truck and then walked for three days, and he was proud to have learned our language, although our dialect was very odd. He was here to research lichen.