by Sean Stewart
"It's a pretty cheap indulgence. Why the hell tell me? Why not just go ahead and die, damn it, and send me an invite to the funeral? Why do this?"
Dante sighed. "That was Jet's advice."
"You should have listened to him."
If I hear that much more often, Dante thought, I'm going to get angry. "Okay, so I made a jackass of myself and ruined your day, but hell, I'm the guy with four days to live. I think I'm entitled to a little resentment too."
Laura glowered at him for a long moment. "Not to mention fear, anger, denial, and bargaining."
They giggled.
"Oh God, don't laugh, it's too horrible," Laura whispered. "God. How can I make jokes?"
"My mother would say it's the only possible response."
"Yeah, well, I bet she's not laughing now."
"Haven't told her yet." Dante reached out to take Laura's hand. His bruised arm screamed and he thought better of it. "Take me with you," he said.
"What?"
"This is Bargaining," Dante said rapidly. "It comes after Denial and before Acceptance. Take me wherever you go every Sunday after church." Four and a half days. I know, I know, god damn it. But this is one of those things I'm supposed to settle up, isn't it?
"I thought you needed my help for some angel thing. Speaking Chinese."
Jet had caught up with them. "And being Chen Dai Fei's great-niece," he added.
Dante shook his head impatiently. "That can all wait. Take me with you, now."
Laura shook her head in disbelief, sending the Chrysler Towers crazily spinning. A couple of tears ran down her cheeks and she wiped them angrily away. "This is not one of your smoother pickups, you bastard."
Dante had never seen her cry before. "Hey," he said softly. "It worked, didn't it?"
* * *
They were going to visit Laura's mother.
" 'A house is a machine for living in.' Le Corbusier said that." Laura maneuvered her Elegant Vehicles compact through the narrow streets of Chinatown, angling for Main. Dante sat in the passenger seat, surreptitiously rubbing his bruised right arm. Jet was tactfully absent; he would meet them later, back at Dante's apartment.
Laura waved at the office towers rising around them as they cut through downtown. "Machines for living in. Ghastly, isn't it? Chen Dai Fei used to say, 'A building is a harlot's gown—' It emphasizes the positive and hides the flaws. You know the old saying, the woman should wear the dress, not the dress wear the woman? That's the idea with architecture too. The house must make its occupants feel beautiful, serene. It's all a question of priorities: do you shape the people to fit the machines, or the machines to fit the people?" The Chrysler building swirled, an art deco teardrop hanging beside her cheek, as she glanced over at him. "Get it?"
"Uh, I think so."
"My great-uncle was the one who came up with the big symbol—tearing down the Wall and using its stones to pave the Permitted City's East Gate and the Winding Road. That's why Dad was in the first wave of urban planners to be sent out into the world."
Dante frowned. "Why did he want to leave a perfect city?"
"He didn't." Laura shrugged. "But China needed exports, needed to show off her talents, and really, really needed hard Western currency. Uncle Chen ordered Dad to go, and like a dutiful nephew, he went. That was 1961. The Permitted City had been up and running for three years—long enough to produce the numbers the Mandarinate needed to prove the idea to the rest of the world. Production stats, crime stats. Icing on the cake, really. All they had to do was take any visitors through; let 'em live in the place for a week or two. Meet the people. Walk in the Gardens." She shrugged. "It ate my father away, you know. Coming here. After all that work, to leave the perfect city and have to live with this." She gestured at the motley collection of skyscrapers and boutiques, blues pubs and porn shops around them.
"Like being tossed out of Eden."
"Yeah." Laura laughed. "Of course the Americans were damned if the slants were going to make a Perfect City before them! This was Kennedy and Johnson and the Great Society, remember. But as soon as they tried to build a perfect city of their own, they slapped it down on a grid that would have made Corb proud. The Elegant Prison model, as my father used to say. Just like Henry Ford's factories: the great American method was to make the humans adapt to the convenience of the machines.
"The Permitted City proved how much more productive a happy worker is. Before that, only left-liberal sociologists were interested in whether treating people like ball bearings was such a good idea. But magic caught Americans by surprise, see. They were the greatest empire of the Rationalist Age and they just couldn't use their angels right: In China, they'd been using feng shui to help design houses and gardens for thousands of years. They had a nice, clearly defined social use for magicians already in place; and the higher the magic rose, the better use they made of them."
"That's why it's good that you speak Chinese," Dante said, scrambling to put things together.
Laura nodded. "And even better that I'm related to one of the Permitted City's inner circle. Things Chinese are very hot in angel circles." She glanced at Dante again. "It's not that Chinese angels are more powerful than angels anywhere else. They're just less marginalized. They actually have a place in society, a role to perform."
"Rather than pissing their lives away without direction," Dante said dryly.
Laura shrugged. "Your words, not mine."
But that was it, of course. That was another reason he had never tried to date Laura. It wasn't just that he was afraid of intimacy; it was that he knew she wouldn't be interested. That was the bitter truth of it, Dante told himself. As a friend, old Dante could be pretty entertaining. But as a husband, a man with his shit together on whom you could depend?
A man you'd trust to raise your children?
Get serious. Laura would never dream of pinning herself to a man with the direction of a butterfly.
The thought made him close his eyes in self-disgust. Never had the gulf between them seemed greater.
Laura was a professional woman with a vision of her future and something to contribute to her community. While the only thing I have left to contribute, Dante thought bitterly, is a seven-pound sack of white silk feasting on my-internal organs.
Laura turned onto a gravel drive that led into a small park on the side of a hill dotted with evergreens; all as serene and lovely as a cemetery. Dante had never seen Laura's face so controlled and expressionless. "Welcome to Seven Cedars Nursing Home," she said. "Mother's inside."
* * *
"A retirement home is an interesting challenge for an architect," Laura remarked as she signed herself in at the front desk. " 'Flowing space' is all very well, but here you can't use changes in level to separate one area from the next." Dante's eyebrows rose. "Broken hips," she said tersely. "Any steps or ramps would make this into a machine for dying in. More than it is already, that is."
From the front desk area (a pleasant atrium welling with natural light) she led him along a wide, winding central corridor. "This is one technique," she said. "Rooms come off a central artery; the artery widens into a common area, then curves. Makes for a winding building, but each little set of Suites feels more private, without having to introduce heavy doors or dangerous steps."
She stopped and tapped her foot on the floor. "Custom carpet." It was a strange design, now that Dante came to look at it: two rich brown strips on the outside, and a wide golden band down the middle. "Carpet is better than tile for cushioning falls, obviously, but it has to be very flat, to make walking as easy as possible. The color scheme has to maximize contrast for people whose eyesight is failing: by following the gold band they can avoid walking into the walls. The wrong level of contrast will make them scared: a really dark band in the middle makes them feel they're walking in a trench; something too light, and they think they're balancing on a curb."
An old woman trotted by them as if jogging an endless marathon. She was thin, terribly thin, and fr
ayed, Dante thought.
(He remembered the same look on his grandmother's face as she lay in her dim room under the big bedspread, the one with huge poppies sewn in riots all over it. The room had smelled of dust and hairspray. She had smelled different too: not like garlic and paprika and port anymore, but like pee and used-up flowers. She never really looked at him, standing by her bed, but her thin old fingers played with his shirt cuff, rubbing it, tugging it, sliding the cloth back and forth across her fingers until he ran from her like a witch in a fairy tale, ran outside and down to the river, where he sat swinging his legs over the end of the dock and crying.
Jet had stayed. Dante had been too scared, but Jet had stayed to the very last moment, to the mysterious instant when the candles went out and the last wisp of smoke coiled up to the ceiling.)
The old woman in the retirement home was mumbling as she hurried by. Her right hand plucked repeatedly at the collar of her blouse, a mindless, mechanical motion she didn't seem to notice. Dante shuddered. "Why do they do that?"
"Trying to feel," Laura said. "Sense of touch goes too. Didn't you know that? That's Mrs. Clithe. She can't feel the edges of her silverware anymore, can't remember what the spoon is for, or the fork or knife. The staff do what they can, but she doesn't eat much these days. Just runs through the corridors. Goes through three pairs of sneakers a year, they say."
"Jesus." Dante looked at Laura. Her face was still set and expressionless.
Glancing through an open doorway into one of the suites, Dante saw an old man lying in bed, and heard voices coming from an unseen TV. A pair of Velcro straps ran over the man's body, like seat belts in a car.
"That's Mr. Silverstein. He used to be an absconder," Laura commented. "Staff spent half their time combing the grounds for him."
"Is that why they locked him up?"
She shook her head. "They get paid to chase him. But he's lost too much now: he's violent most of the time. It's 1944 for him. He's not sure where he is, but he knows they've got him imprisoned here. The staff are the Nazis who gassed the rest of his family. He's waiting for them to torture him."
"Paranoid."
Laura pursed her lips. "It's the best and most logical theory he could devise, Dante. How else to explain why a twenty-four-year-old Jew from Warsaw is being strapped to a bed in a house where everyone else is old and feeble and useless?"
Time like a sequence of slides, Dante thought. But there are only a few slides left, and a pile of shattered glass. How to build a life around a few moments and a few facts? How to resurrect a man from his thumb bone and a faded photograph?
"This is why you live in my building, isn't it?" Dante said quietly. His glance took in the custom carpet and the beautiful grounds, visible through wide windows in each common area. Across the way a long-suffering nurse helped an old man into his bathroom. "This is where your money goes."
Laura didn't look at him. "My mother's suite is just ahead."
Sally Chen was sitting at a polished cherrywood table overspread with a white lace cloth. A photo album lay open in front of her, and she was picking at the plastic film over one of the pages. Finally she managed to peel it back with a sticky, tearing sound. Then she pulled out one of the pictures on the album page and put it in a small pile beside her. There might have been a dozen snapshots already in the pile.
Laura's mother was from Kansas. She had moved to the big city and met Chen Shoyu while working as a secretary in the architecture firm he joined as a high- priced consultant. Time had come like a prairie wind and stripped the big city from her, leaving her weathered and raw-boned and gaunt. Dante thought, She doesn't eat much anymore.
"Hi, Mom. It's me. Laura."
The old woman looked up, seeing them for the first time: She blinked, as if trying to collect her thoughts.
Distractedly she smiled. "I have a daughter named Laura; isn't that funny?"
Laura's long face was expressionless.
Mrs. Chen cocked her head to one side, and ran one big-boned hand through her thin gray hair. "You remind me of someone," she murmured. "Oh, of course," she said, embarrassed. "You're Bill's new wife. How silly of me. 9 5
"No, that's Aunt Cindy." As her mother's smile faded, Laura walked briskly over to the table. "This is my friend Dante," she said. "So what are you doing today?"
Sally Chen turned back to the photo album with obvious relief. "Looking at pictures. I don't have much to do here, but I do like my pictures. Only someone else has gotten their pictures mixed up with mine, so I'm trying to set things in order." She looked over at Dante, making an effort to include him in the conversation. "I get such a comfort from them; I hate to think of someone else missing their photos!"
Her voice faltered, and her eyes became distant. She was still looking at Dante, but he could tell she wasn't really seeing him. Talking was an effort for her, something she did because she felt it was proper; but most of her energy was directed elsewhere. To listening, Dante thought suddenly; listening to something deep inside herself. Pain. Pain and the whisper of blood, and aching joints, and the whole rot of her insides. Listening to her own decay.
He thought of the white sac growing slowly inside himself. What if he had to listert to that cancer growing there for years? Wouldn't he have this same distracted air? Would he even do as much as Laura's mother did? Or would he hunker down, unable to think of anything but his own corrosion?
"It's the staff's fault," the old woman muttered. "They're always misplacing things. Stealing things too," she added bitterly. "And they won't take messages. They never take Shoyu's messages for me. I go down to the desk three or four times a day and listen, just listen to them answer the phone, but they're very clever."
Gently Laura fanned out the photos her mother had winnowed from the family album. The pile of discards were all of Laura: Laura at thirteen in a ponytail and shorts, blowing out birthday candles. Laura graduating from high school and University and architecture school. Any Laura more than six or seven years old. "I'm sure they do their best," she said gently.
Her mother bit her lip. "What's he going to do?" she whispered. "He doesn't know what to put in her lunch. He said she should just eat at the cafeteria, the idiot. Doesn't understand what it means to be a cafeteria girl. The other kids will tease her. They'll tell her that her mother doesn't love her."
"She'll be fine," Laura said gently.
Laura's father had died in '85. They had flown his ashes back to China.
"What will she think?" Sally Chen said tearfully. "Why doesn't her mommy come home anymore? She's six years old!" Tears ran from her eyes; she covered them with a gaunt, long-fingered hand. "Why doesn't her mommy call? She thinks I don't love her. She's forgotten me."
"She hasn't forgotten you."
"Every night I pray to God and I ask, How long do I have to stay here? How long, sweet Jesus? How long?"
Laura cradled her mother's gray head in her arms.
She lived in a little flat in a poor section of town so her mother could be cared for. And once a week (or twice, or five times, for all Dante knew) she came here and endured this.
Why?
Dante looked with angel's eyes, and felt understanding break open inside him (where blood ran whispering through veins long left dry).
This place made Laura strong. Not her job or her professional degree, but this. Her mother's head, cradled in her arms, had forced her to leave her own childhood behind as Dante never had.
How insubstantial he must seem to her. Laura, who faced this every week; how could she help but despise a man who could not face himself?
In time the crying stopped, and Sally Chen's old hands reached once more for her family album. Two heads bent over the pictures, murmuring: one glossy black, one iron- gray.
Near the end of the book, the page fell open to a picture of Laura's mother, taken only two or three years earlier, when she was still living in the family house. She balked, picking at the plastic film, frowning at this stranger. She doesn't recogniz
e herself, Dante thought. In her mind she's still thirty-four, with a young daughter, thanking God and her stars for the new life she's found. She looks in the mirror of the family album and doesn't recognize the face looking back.
What mystery moved her, then, to scrabble suddenly at the album, and pull the picture out, and tear it into pieces before Laura could react? Tear it and tear it into scraps of color, her hollow cheeks flushed with outrage. Her rasping breath harsh.
"She's not a monster," Laura said as they were leaving. "What?"
"I saw the way you looked at her. She's not a monster. She's not grotesque." Laura's dark eyes were bleak. "She's an old woman going senile. It's a fact of life. It will happen to me."
"Not necessarily," Dante said. "Even with genes and whatever, there's a long time between now and. . ."
Laura unlocked his door and walked around to the other side of the Elegant Vehicle. She had painted a pair of eyes on the front side panels, to help see accidents coming. "You've got to check these things before proposing," she said, smiling humorlessly. "Like inspecting a used car for rust before you buy."
She opened her door and slid inside. "At home I've got three feathers in a bowl on top of my votary."
"I remember," Dante said, seeing again her beautiful apartment, all cherrywood and brass, the three feathers in the bowl, arranged like flowers, almost but not quite breaking the subtle harmony Laura had fashioned there.
"They're from a hawk my mother shot when she was fourteen years old. It was a red-tailed hawk; they thought it might have taken one of their chickens. Used to hang around the farm. So anyway, one day my mom shot it. Took it down against a clear sky with her own .22. I asked her why she kept the feathers, you see. That's how I know the story." Laura's face, so full of expressions, was empty now. "She grew up in this little Midwest town. She stole books from the library because the librarians wouldn't let her take out anything that wasn't from the children's section. It was hot in the summer and the dust blew in her throat and sometimes she felt like she was suffocating standing up, just standing up.