by Anne Rice
Suddenly, Myra reached out and covered my hand with hers.
My mouth fell open, a stupid trapdoor. She whispered to me.
“I’m so lonely here.” A pause, a breath. A tropical breeze. “I miss my island. This apartment, this city is so cold.”
Her body touched mine. And I was not surprised that I was instantly aroused. I felt no embarrassment, though. Especially not when she leaned closer, put her lips against my ear, whispering …
“So lonely….”
There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation on my part. I touched her face. My hands caressed her bare arms; then, like eager puppies, they were all over her.
I spent that night in the apartment. And the next. I tried to stay away the third night—after all, what if Mark came back and found me there, his best friend, making love with his wife?
But even with that resolve, I ended up at her door. And on that night, as if aware that I was battling her siren call, she answered the door naked, with aromatic candlelight flickering behind her.
I was lost.
I started to feel lost at the office, too. While Mark seemed ensconced in Purgatory, buried by legal paperwork, more Island people showed up at the office. A few of the other workers—men and women—went to the island and hadn’t come back. Life was sweet in Purgatory….
I also found I had less and less to do—so much of the day-today accounting had been moved out of my office. I didn’t care … I was delirious in my burning lust for Myra. Nothing seemed to matter.
Then I had a brief moment of awareness.
One morning, my stomach felt horrible. It had been bothering me daily, and I attributed it to Myra’s spicy island cuisine. But now it started to torture me. It was in knots, pulled tighter every hour.
My secretary looked at me as if wondering if she should call an EMS ambulance. I couldn’t very well tell her that I was eating meals prepared by Mark’s wife—
Among other things….
I hobbled to the men’s room and fell toward one of the glistening sinks, puking my guts out like I hadn’t since college. Still, no light bulb went on. I hacked at the sink, spraying it with rainbow bits of meats, spices, and wild rice.
Someone came into the men’s room and did a quick U-turn when they saw my colorful display.
And when it was finally over, I stood up, wiping at my greasy mouth. For all the wrenching horror, I felt a spot of relief.
Then I looked in the mirror….
I looked like a guy who had just been tossing his cookies—and then some—at the speed of light. But there was something else. My skin looked pale and mottled. Was it the fluorescent lights? I looked up. Sure, that must be—
I looked back to the mirror. And I saw my eyes. They reminded me of something. I stood there, arms propped on the basin, thinking … until:
“Mark.” I said the word.
Sure, that’s how his eyes looked, when he got sick, before he left, before—
He disappeared. Admit it … he disappeared.
I recoiled from the mirror.
I wiped my mouth, feeling confused, the thing taking so long to come together for me. I cleaned the basin and then walked out of the men’s room. I saw all the new faces, all the dark island people. A few looked at me as I came out.
You know, I thought. You know what’s happening to me … what happened to Mark. I kept walking, right to the elevator, down to the street, out to the icy January air.
It was January, and I was in my shirt sleeves. But I didn’t seem to feel it. In fact, I felt sweaty. People looked at me. There goes a crazy person, they must have thought.
I kept walking until I came to the stone lions standing guard outside the New York Public Library. I walked and a bug-eyed reference clerk with electric white hair made a rumpled face at me. Is it my appearance, I wondered, my smell … ?
“I’d like to find out …” I licked my lips. “About an island called …”
I looked around the cavernous library, lit by the glow of small lamps at the reading tables. The white-haired woman kept her lips locked tightly. If this was a bank, she would have already hit the alarm.
“Purgatory,” I said. “I’d like to learn about Purgatory.”
She nodded, glad to have reason to turn away from me, and she turned to her computer.
“There are some reference books …” She looked up. “But I can get you current information from The New York Times.”
Current information. I smiled. That would be good.
An old man came close, a stack of books under his arm. I looked at him and he looked at me. Got a problem, buddy? Something wrong?
He kept on moving.
The woman handed me found microfilm boxes with dates on them, from 1967, 1977, 1978, and 1988.
I looked at the microfilm boxes. “The machines are back there,” she said, pointing at a dark area off to the side. I nodded and walked away with my newspapers on microfilm.
I read the first story, ignoring the ads for bell bottoms and Barbarella, before Jane Fonda went to Hanoi.
Purgatory had a revolution in 1967 and, after bloody battles in its two small cities, a military dictator, Simon Duvic, was installed.
I skipped to the next reel, the next stories in 1977. And Purgatory was again having problems, probably with the CIA’s help, New York Times reporter Sidney Hersch speculated. Open gunfire between government troops and the people left their small island a tiny war zone.
Then—disaster. The dictator, Duvic, ordered total annihilation of the rebel population. But who were rebels and who were loyal? There was a photo of Duvic, then a shot of the island, dotted with fires, the cities smoking ruins.
In an act of suicidal genocide, Duvic had nearly wiped out everyone. Purgatory turned into hell.
I stopped for a moment. I heard whispered voices, the sound of the other people using the microfilm display machines. I thought of Myra. I could just walk away from here, simply leave, go back to her. She’d make me feel better, and—
I put on the last roll of microfilm. It took a while to find the story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. “The Miracle of Purgatory” marveled at how the island recovered from all the violence of previous decades, how it evolved into a rich and successful island paradise. There were photos of the cities, the shiny new hotels, stories about the burgeoning tourist industry.
There was a photo of Duvic.
It’s the same photo, I thought, from twenty years ago. They used the same photo. But no—
He was standing in front of one of the shiny new hotels.
I stared at the screen.
Everyone had been killed, massacred, gassed. Shit, the island had been blown into submission.
So where did everyone come from?
My stomach tightened again.
I got up, turned to the exit, leaving the microfilm in the machine. And I walked back to the Morra Building … because I didn’t know what else to do.
And they seemed to be waiting for me, those unfamiliar faces, now with same sloe eyes I had seen on Myra. They looked at me, and I thought I saw a few grin.
“Welcome back, Col,” I heard a dull voice say.
I turned, and there was Mark. He looked so thin, he was almost unrecognizable, and there was no mistaking his unhealthy pallor. He moved toward me, slowly. Of course, he’d move slowly, I thought. He shook my hand and it was like grabbing a fish plucked from the coldest, deepest abyss in the Atlantic.
“Welcome,” another voice said. Low, sensuous.
I turned and saw Myra. I shook my head, telling her no … I don’t want anything to do with her, no more home-cooked meals that—
But there was no time to say no.
Mark touched my shoulder, his fish hand resting on my shoulder, dull, cold…. dead.
“Are you dead?’” I whispered to him, as if it was a secret. Did she kill you, poison you so you could be like them, an island of dead people—
The fish hand stayed there.
“The n
ew boss wants to say hello,” Mark said. His voice gurgled, as if speaking was difficult, a skill still being integrated into this new existence he had.
I heard steps.
There was a moan. No, not a moan, a mumbling chatter, and I realized it was a chant. The entire group was mumbling something to whoever was walking behind me.
Mark gave me a small push to turn around.
My mouth opened. The low chanting filled my ears like the buzz of mosquitoes.
I turned and saw Simon Duvic standing there.
Mark’s hand pulled away. “Meet the new CEO, Col.” The chanting swelled. My mouth was open. I had to say something, to break the spell. I didn’t know that it was already too late—
“Are you ready?” Duvic said. I started to say something. Duvic grinned. “Are you ready to go to Purgatory?”
I looked around the office.
A business trip. A chance for a vertical promotion. To become part of the A-Team for the new combined Island-Morra holdings….
I wanted to say no. That’s what I tried to do … as if I could still make my own decisions. But when I made a sound, all I could hear—from my own lips—was the same mumbling chant, the gibberish now so soothing.
Maybe I’m dead already, I thought … or maybe that’s still to come. And did it really matter?
I kept chanting … Ade due, Zamballa. Ade….
Over and over.
After all—in this economy—how could I walk away from such a secure job?
EMMA’S DAUGHTER
ALAN RODGERS
EMMA went drinking the night after the cancer finally got done with her daughter Suzi. Suzi was eight, and she’d died long and hard and painful, and when she was finally gone what Emma needed more than anything else was to forget, at least for a night.
The bar Emma went to was a dirty place called the San Juan Tavern; she sometimes spent nights there with her friends. It was only four blocks from home—two blocks in another direction from the hospital where Suzi died. A lot of people who lived around where Emma did drank at the San Juan.
It made her feel dirty to be drinking the night after her daughter died. She thought a couple of times about stopping, paying up her bill, and going home and going to sleep like someone who had a little decency. Instead she lit cigarettes, smoked them hard until they almost burned her lips. She didn’t usually smoke, but lately she felt like she needed it, and she’d been smoking a lot.
The cigarettes didn’t help much, and neither did the wine. When she was halfway through her third tumbler of something that was cheap and chalky and red, Mama Estrella Perez sat down across from her and clomped her can of Budweiser onto the Formica tabletop. Emma expected the can to fall over and spill. It didn’t, though—it just tottered back and forth a couple of times and then was still.
Mama Estrella ran the bodega downstairs from Emma’s apartment. She was Emma’s landlord, too—she owned the building. Her bodega wasn’t like most of them; it was big and clean and well-lit, and there was a big botanica in the back, shelves and shelves of Santeria things, love potions and strange waters and things she couldn’t figure out because she couldn’t read Spanish very well. Emma always thought it was cute, but then she found out that Santeria was Cuban voodoo, and she didn’t like it so much.
“Your daughter died today,” Mama Estrella said. “Why’re you out drinking? Why aren’t you home, mourning?” Her tone made Emma feel as cheap and dirty as a streetwalker.
Emma shrugged. She knocked back the rest of her glass of wine and refilled it from the bottle the bartender had left for her.
Mama Estrella shook her head and finished off her beer; someone brought her another can before she even asked. She stared at Emma. Emma kept her seat, held her ground. But after a few minutes the taste of the wine began to sour in her throat, and she wanted to cry. She knew the feeling wasn’t Mama Estrella’s doing, even if Mama was some sort of a voodoo woman. It was nothing but Emma’s own guilt, coming to get her.
“Mama, my baby died today. She died a little bit at a time for six months, with a tumor that finally got to be the size of a grapefruit growing in her belly, almost looking like a child that was going to kill her before it got born.” She caught her breath. “I want to drink enough that I don’t see her dying like that, at least not tonight.”
Mama Estrella was a lot less belligerent-looking after that. Ten minutes later she took a long drink from her beer and said, “You okay, Emma.” Emma poured herself some more wine, and someone brought Mama Estrella a pitcher of beer, and they sat drinking together, not talking, for a couple of hours.
About 1 A.M. Mama Estrella got a light in her eye, and for just an instant, just long enough to take a breath and let it out, Emma got a bad feeling. But she’d drunk too much by that point to feel bad about anything for long, so she leaned forward and whispered in her conspiracy-whisper, “What’s that, Mama Estrella? What’re you thinking?”
Mama Estrella sprayed her words a little. “I just thought: hey, you want your baby back? You miss her? I could bring her back, make her alive again. Sort of.” She was drunk, even drunker than Emma was. “You know what a zombie is? A zombie isn’t a live little girl, but it’s like one. It moves. It walks. It breathes if you tell it to. I can’t make your baby alive, but I can make what’s left of her go away more slowly.”
Emma thought about that. She knew what a zombie was—she’d seen movies on television, even once something silly and disgusting at the theater. And she thought about her little Suzi, her baby, whimpering in pain in her sleep every night. For a minute she started to think that she couldn’t stand to see her baby hurting like that, even if she would be dead as some crud-skinned thing in a theater. Anything had to be better, even Suzi being completely dead. But after a moment Emma knew that just wasn’t so: life was being alive and having to get up every morning and push hard against the world. And no matter how bad life was, even half-life was better than not being alive at all.
Emma started to cry, or her eyes did. They kept filling up with tears even though she kept trying for them not to. “I love my baby, Mama Estrella,” she said. It was all she could say.
Mama Estrella looked grim. She nodded, picked up her beer, and poured most of it down her throat. “We go to the hospital,” she said. “Get your Suzi and bring her home.” She stood up. Emma took one last swallow of her wine and got up to follow.
It was hot outside. Emma was sure it was going to be a hot summer; here it was only May and the temperature was high in the eighties at midnight.
The moon was out, and it was bright and full overhead. Usually the moon looked pale and washed out because of the light the city reflected into the sky, but tonight somehow the city was blacker than it should be. And the moon looked full and bright as bone china on a black cloth.
They walked two blocks to the hospital, and when they got to the service door Mama Estrella told Emma to wait and she’d go in and get Suzi.
Mama left her there for twenty minutes. Twice men came out of the door carrying red plastic bags of garbage from the hospital. It was infected stuff in the red bags; dangerous stuff. Emma knew because her job was cleaning patient’s rooms in another hospital in another part of the city.
After ten minutes Emma heard a siren, and she thought for a moment that somehow she and Mama Estrella had been found out and that the police were coming for them. But that was silly; there were always sirens going off in this part of the city. It could even have been the alarm on someone’s car—some of them sounded just like that.
Then both sides of the door swung open at once, and Mama Estrella came out of the hospital carrying poor dead little Suzi in her arms. Emma saw her daughter’s too-pale skin with the veins showing through the death-white haze that colored the eyes, and her heart skipped a beat. She shut her eyes for a moment and set her teeth and forced herself to think about Suzi at the picnic they had for her birthday when she was five. They’d found a spot in the middle of Prospect Park and set up a charcoal gr
ill, and Suzi had run off into the trees, but she didn’t go far enough that Emma had to worry about keeping an eye on her. Just before the hamburgers were ready Suzi came back with a handful of pinestraw and an inchworm crawling around on the ends of the needles. She was so excited you’d think she’d found the secret of the world, and Emma got behind her and looked at the bug and the needles from over Suzi’s shoulder, and for just a moment she’d thought that Suzi was right, and that the bug and the needles were the secret of the world.
Emma forced her jaw to relax and opened her eyes. Suzi was special. No matter what happened to Suzi, no matter what Suzi was, Emma loved the girl with all her heart and soul. She loved Suzi enough that she didn’t let it hurt, even when her eye caught on Suzi’s midriff and she saw the cancer that made it look like she had a baby in her belly. Emma felt a chill in spite of her resolve; there was something strange about the cancer, something stranger than just death and decay. It frightened her.
“You okay, Emma?” Mama Estrella asked. She looked a little worried.
Emma nodded. “I’m fine, Mama. I’m just fine.” When she heard her own voice she realized that she really was fine.
“We need to get to my car,” Mama Estrella said. “We need to go to the graveyard.” Mama kept her car in a parking garage around the corner from the San Juan Tavern.
“I thought we were just going to take her home,” Emma said.
Mama Estrella didn’t answer; she just shook her head.
Emma took Suzi from Mama Estrella’s arms and carried the body to the garage. She let the head rest on her shoulder, just as though Suzi were only asleep, instead of dead. When they got to Mama’s car she laid Suzi out on the back seat. She found a blanket on the floor of the car and by reflex she covered the girl to keep her from catching cold.
The drive to the cemetery took only a few minutes, even though Mama Estrella drove carefully, almost timidly. When she came to stop signs she didn’t just slow down and check for traffic; she actually stopped. But the only thing she had to use her brakes for was the stop signs. Somehow the traffic lights always favored her, and whichever street she chose to turn on was already clear of traffic for blocks in either direction.