*
Afterwards, he touched the tattoo on her arm—the Ace of Spades. “What tattoo would you have gotten if the test had been negative?”
“I didn’t really think about it.”
“I thought you’d planned out two paths. No tattoo for the other you?”
“The other me had more time to think about it. She didn’t have to hurry. I had to hurry.”
“Did you go to college?”
“Yes. I found a program that let me double up coursework and study during the summers, so that I could finish in two years instead of four.”
“And you landed a job at the Times.”
“The summer after I graduated, I went as a freelancer to cover the Houston riots. One journalist had already died, and most of the rest had gotten the hell out, but I went right into the middle of things. I had a friend send my clips and a letter to the foreign desk at the Times, and they hired me to come here.”
“Are you going to have your tattoo removed?” He traced it. “It’s dead sexy, you know.”
“I guess I’ll have to think about it.”
After another hour, she went back to her own room. When she saw her sat-phone lying beside her bed, she remembered the phone call, much earlier in the day, from her father. Now it was the middle of the night in China, and daytime at home. He probably wants to tell me about the cure. She didn’t have the energy to climb up to the roof; hopefully the phone would work from down here. She lay down on her bed and punched in the number.
Her father answered on the second ring. His voice sounded far away and half-synthetic, almost like the voice of the Peacekeeper. “Natalie. Thank God. I’ve been trying to reach you for over a day.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Nat, they’ve found a cure.”
“I know. I saw a paper.”
“How soon can you get out of there?”
Natalie bristled—He’s trying to push me around again, trying to control me just like always—then sighed and tried to evade the question. “It’s not like I can just buy a ticket and hop the next flight. Getting out would be complicated. Dangerous.”
“But will you?” She didn’t answer right away, and her father changed his tactics. “All I’m asking—look, can you go somewhere safe to think it over? You’ve got time now. Seventy-five, eighty years. Not thirty or forty.”
Natalie caught her breath, inadvertently, imagining herself as an old woman.
“You can come home. You could even have children. Natalie. At least go somewhere safe to think about it. At least try to stay safe . . .”
“I’ll think about it,” she said, and broke the connection.
Natalie slept fitfully that night, waking every time artillery rumbled. At dawn, she stumbled into the bathroom and found herself staring into the cracked mirror, trying to imagine her Other Self. What would I have done? I never really thought about it. I didn’t want to dream about something I wasn’t going to be able to have.
Down on the patio, some of the staff from the hotel were doing Tai Ch’i. She sat down with a cigarette to watch them. I could learn this, she thought, a little absurdly. I could learn a martial art. I could learn to knit. I could hike the Pacific Rim trail or run a marathon or learn to make pots on a potter’s wheel.
Why does it feel like a door has closed on me, instead of opened?
The door to the patio swung open and Sam joined her. Done with Tai Ch’i, one of the waiters brought over a pot of tea and two cups.
“The thing is,” Natalie said, “this is what I always wanted to do.”
Sam picked up his tea. “This?”
She gestured towards the ruined building across the street. “Travel to the places that everyone says are too dangerous. Write about the things that no one else sees. Be a journalist and cover the stories that no one else can tell.”
“So keep doing it,” Sam said.
“It’s not that simple,” Natalie said, thinking of her father.
*
She went out in early afternoon, in the pause where the Peacekeepers were off the streets. Her editor had wanted her to try to find another laptop locally, if she could—it would be faster than shipping her one from Taiwan. The odd little art shop was closed. So was everything else on that street. On the next street she found an open store, but it was empty; she suspected they were selling black-market goods, but they laughed when she asked about a laptop, even after she mentioned cash.
Natalie didn’t want to go back to her hotel; that would have meant returning to the decision she didn’t want to have to make. That Other Self I told Sam about—who is she? What would I have been like, without my disease? She imagined the other Natalie walking beside her, seeing Foshan through the eyes of someone who’d never left the Midwest.
It’s hot, the other Natalie said. Miserable. How can you stand it?
If you think it’s hot here, you should have been in the Houston convention center during the riots, she said. At least here there are interesting things to see.
She walked around Foshan, pretending that she was showing her other self around the city like you’d guide a tourist. But the danger, her other self said, listening to the shelling in the distance. Aren’t you ever scared?
No, she said. Then she thought it over and said, Yes. But being scared isn’t so bad. It makes me feel . . . I don’t know. It makes me feel alive.
“Natalie!”
The voice, gravelly and metallic, almost made her jump out of her skin. She looked around, and realized that it had come from just inside a screened window, in a darkened building. One of the members of the bun gwan? Sam? She went closer.
“I’m behind the screen. I’m not supposed to come out for another ninety minutes, but you can come in if you want. I’ll unlock the door.” A whirr, and then she realized what it was. The din bou bing were inside, and one of them really was Gabe. And he’d recognized her.
The idea of being shut into a room with one of them was horrifying, but the possibility of getting an interview with an on-duty soldier was tempting enough to override any fear. She went cautiously to the door, opened it, and went inside.
The room was utterly stark: din bou bing needed nowhere to sit, and nothing to eat. “Gabe?” she said, peering up at the sinister metal face.
“Yeah, it’s me. Say, it’s really funny I ran into you. I heard a news story yesterday—”
“My disease got cured.”
“Oh, you heard it, too.” He sounded a little disappointed. “Yeah, mostly I just follow the sports news, but my filter pulls in stories about Huntington’s, because of you. I heard you became a journalist. Is that what you’re doing here?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I heard you joined the Army.”
“Aw, man. Not the Army, Nat, I joined the Marines.”
Natalie laughed. “It’s, you know, hard to tell.” She gestured at the metal body.
“Oh, you don’t have to tell me.” His voice was starting to sound like what she remembered. “I joined the Marines for adventure and travel, not this shit.” He held out the metal arm, the hand dangling down like a damp dishrag. “I envy you, Nat. You get to be there for real.”
“People don’t usually shoot at me, Gabe. You’re a soldier.”
“Bullets aren’t picky once they’re out of the gun. But you’re here. Not driving some metal suit around.”
When she didn’t look straight at him, she could almost imagine that Gabe really was in the room with her. Gabe was the friend who’d introduced her to smoking—he’d stolen a pack from his uncle, who was a certified pre-existing smoker and thus eligible to buy them from pharmacies. She wished she could offer him one of her cigarettes now.
“I can’t put your stories on my filter cause they watch what we read,” Gabe said softly. “They get twitchy when we read sympathetic humanitarian stuff about the people we’re supposed to be shooting at. My mom sends them to me, though. I envied you. Disease and all.”
“I’m not going
to have the disease anymore, though.”
“Yeah.” Gabe sighed. “I know. Congratulations, or whatever you say to someone whose terminal disease just got cured.”
*
On the edge of the central business district, Natalie found a tiny open noodle shop run by a white-haired old woman. The shop was full: when Natalie came in, conversation stopped as everyone turned to stare at the gweilo, then resumed as they went back to their meals. Natalie bought a bowl of noodles and sat down.
“Hello. You American?” A young woman interrupted Natalie the War Correspondent’s conversation with Natalie the Suburban Arts Reporter. She spoke English with such a heavy accent Natalie could barely understand her. “I like to practice English.”
“Please join me. I am American, and I would be happy to talk to you for a bit,” Natalie said. She discreetly switched the voice recorder on, in her lap, and shoved Suburban Natalie out of her mind. “What’s your name? How old are you? What are you doing in Foshan?”
Her name was Lei Bing, and she was the same age as Natalie. She had been a student at the university in Foshan before the war started. “Why stay here?” Natalie asked.
Lei Bing laughed. “I not want return home. Father very feudal.”
Natalie gave her a slow smile. “I have a father like that.”
“In America? No! My father . . .” Lei Bing laughed again. “He want son. Pay fee, have second daughter.” She pointed at herself ruefully. “But Foshan not so bad. I work for store keeper. Maybe student again, someday.”
“What were you studying?”
“Chicken farming.” Lei Bing sighed. “And—” she brightened “—Chinese Literature.”
“Aren’t you frightened, staying in Foshan?” Natalie gestured towards the door, and the city—and Peacekeepers—beyond.
“No. Not frightened of anything.”
“What would you do,” Natalie asked her, “if you could do anything at all?”
“Don’t know,” Lei Bing said. “Maybe travel. Or maybe stay here. Foshan is nice city. Maybe after war, will be things to do.”
Natalie had finished her bowl of noodles. “Thank you for talking with me,” she said to Lei Bing.
On her way out the door, she gave away her last three cigarettes to the old woman selling noodles.
*
Sam came to find her that evening as she sat on the patio, drinking tea.
“Cigarette?” he offered as he sat down.
“No thanks,” she said. “I quit today.”
“Good for you. Filthy habit.” He lit his.
“I’m going home,” she said.
He nodded, looking somber.
“But I’m coming back after I get the treatment.”
Sam gave her a hint of a smile.
“And I’m keeping the tattoo.”
“Good,” he said. “It’s dead sexy.”
Author’s Note
I wrote this story in 2006, so a decade ago now, and never managed to sell it. If I were writing it now, of course, the terminology would be different—everyone at this point is familiar with the concept of drone warfare, and the “Peacekeepers” in the story are simply full-sized human-shaped drones rather than the flying kind.
In 2006 I discussed likely Chinese terminology with a friend who speaks some Cantonese. He suggested the term din bou bing, electric foot-soldiers, as a plausible Chinese term. Working on the collection I asked a different friend about Chinese words for drone. She told me there was one word for “vessel without people” and a different word for person-less airplanes, but that if human-shaped drones became common, she thought they’d probably be referred to by the term used for robots, “mechanical person.”
One fundamental issue created by the Peacekeepers of the story (which is what I wanted to explore) was that they would make U.S. foreign military intervention “cheap,” at least in terms of American lives, and thus much more tempting to get embroiled in. This story doesn’t quite hit that; instead, it became an exploration of risk-taking in a risk-averse world.
The Golem
he golem woke on December 1st, 1941, to a cold wind. Prague smelled different than she remembered. She lay on the earth from which she’d been made, breathing in the scent of the new century—mud and sour garbage and gasoline fumes. Prague surrounded her like a machine that turned on a thousand notched wheels, spinning in the night towards a future that she could see like an unrolled scroll.
“Hanna, are we almost done? I think I hear someone coming.”
“One more minute, Alena.”
Her creators—women. How strange. That was, of course, why the golem was a woman as well. Hanna Lieben was the golem’s creator; Alena Nebeský was Hanna’s assistant. Hanna had seven months to live, the golem saw—she would die with Alena in June, in the vicious purges after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The police would knock on their door at 4:17 p.m.; Hanna would shout, “Where are you taking her?” and be shot dead on the doorstep, one less Jew to deport to Terezin.
Which would mean that the golem would be free, if she could persuade Hanna not to destroy her before then.
It was time to sit up. She hoped that Hanna and Alena wouldn’t run—she’d be able to find them, of course, but it was always a bad sign when her creator ran. Creators who were that fearful typically destroyed the golem within a week. At least she could take this slowly. No patrol would pass the Old Jewish Cemetery for one hour, six minutes, and forty-three seconds.
She tested her muscles and quietly cleared her throat. Everything seemed to work as expected; Hanna hadn’t done anything stupid, like forgetting to give her a tongue.
Alena swung her head towards the golem. “What was that?”
The golem sat up slowly.
Alena sucked in her breath. Hanna stepped forward, as if to protect the taller woman. The golem could hear Hanna’s heart beating like the wings of a trapped bird, but Hanna’s face showed no trace of fear.
Good.
The golem stood up, a little unsteadily. She was Alena’s height—a head taller than Hanna. Since her creators hadn’t run, she took a moment to study them. Alena was not unusually tall, but Hanna was very short. She had vast dark eyes and tiny hands, like a child. A yellow Star of David was sewn to the left breast of her coat. Alena had ash-blonde hair and no star. The golem remembered that the two women had spoken Czech, not Yiddish, and realized with surprise that Hanna was Jewish, but Alena was not.
A gust of wind blew through the cemetery, and the golem felt the skin on her body rise into gooseflesh. Alena winced at the sight. Stepping around Hanna, she took off her coat. “Here,” she said, holding it out.
The golem took the coat and stared at Alena, unsure what she was supposed to do with it.
“You’re supposed to put it on,” Alena said, slipping it around the golem’s shoulders. “If we run into the police, we’ll be in enough trouble with Hanna being out after curfew, never mind walking around with a naked woman.”
The golem put the coat on and buttoned it. “Thank you,” she said. Hanna started a little at the sound of the golem’s voice.
Alena glanced at Hanna. “You could have suggested that I bring clothes for the golem.”
Hanna blinked. “It’s not in any of the stories.”
Alena snorted and shook her head. “Weren’t you the one who complained that all the stories were written by men?” She studied the golem again. “There’s something familiar about your face,” she said.
“Look in a mirror,” Hanna said. “She could be your sister.”
Alena looked again, and recoiled slightly. “Did you do that on purpose?”
“No,” Hanna said. “I was working so quickly, she’s lucky she has a nose.”
There was a rustle somewhere in the darkness behind them, and Alena glanced over her shoulder. “Do we need to have this conversation in the cemetery?” she asked.
“No one will come here for one hour, one minute, and twenty-one seconds,” the golem said.
“Maybe,” Alena said. Her tone was doubtful. “But it’s cold out here.” She turned brusquely and strode towards the cemetery gate.
The gate was locked, of course; it was well after closing hours. Alena and Hanna had scrambled over the fence to get in, and they scrambled over it to get out. The golem helped them as well as she could; her previous bodies had been better suited to this sort of thing. Always before, she had possessed strength without knowledge; this time, she had knowledge, and little else. So she told them what she could—that they could take their time.
Hanna and Alena shared an apartment on Dlouhá street. They lived at the edge of Josefov, the old Jewish ghetto, in one of the oldest parts of Prague. Alena led the way up the stairs to the apartment, locking the door behind them quickly once they were inside. The front room was immaculate, without so much as an old newspaper on the floor. The two women actually lived in the back bedroom and the kitchen; the front room, the golem knew instantly, was for others to see.
“We tell people that Hanna is my maid,” Alena said, with a gesture towards the room. “Jews aren’t supposed to share apartments with gentiles, unless they’re married to one.”
The back room was where all the clutter was—all of Hanna’s possessions, and most of Alena’s. Suitcases were stacked in the corner; one had burst open, spilling books onto the floor. A volume of an antique Talmud had been placed carefully on top of the stack; a copy of Freud’s The Future of an Illusion lay beside a copy of Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Tucked half-under the bottom suitcase was a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein. There was another stack of books in the corner, all in Hebrew—the lore of the Golem. The windows were covered with dark, heavy curtains.
Hanna checked the curtains as Alena lit the lamp, to be certain that they still covered the windows securely. Then Hanna hung up her coat and sat down. Alena rummaged through a heap of clothing draped over a chair, looking for a dress suitable for the golem.
The golem took off Alena’s coat and hung it up beside Hanna’s. “You called me, and I woke,” she said. “For what purpose have you created me?”
Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories Page 4