“Suit yourself, dear,” said the matron. She smiled a nursey smile and busied herself with the contents of the trolley.
As he watched the matron carry on with her trolley-fiddling, Ian slowly became aware of a mounting sense of loss. What if he really was dead? Up until now he hadn’t had time to come to terms with the facts of death, so to speak, but now — in the first moment of relative calm he’d had since his brief career as a railway barrier — he found his mind drifting to what he had left behind. He worried about tasks he’d left unfinished: he’d never get around to painting the deck, or writing the memo he’d promised to file by Friday. He fretted about family and friends: he’d never father a child, never see his friends again, never again go to his mom’s house at Thanksgiving.
And then there was Penny. Would he see her again? Even if this really was the afterlife, would Ian be able to find Penny once she died? And if he could, would Penny remember him? If Tonto and Rhinnick were right — if it was true that even Penelope would forget about the beforelife, forget about Ian, forget their wedding, their first date, or the eight years that they’d been married, maybe Ian’s own amnesia would be a blessing. He couldn’t bear remembering Penny if she couldn’t remember him.
No. That wasn’t right. A voice in Ian’s head assured him that Penny would remember. She would. No matter what happened to everyone else, Penelope wouldn’t allow herself to forget. She was too strong-willed, too focused to allow a little thing like death to get in her way. And knowing Penny, Ian reflected, once she crossed the River Styx she’d tear down half of Detroit to find him.
Ian was snapped back to the present by the sound of latex rubber on flesh, the soul-numbing sound that means a nurse is about to do something so unpleasant that it calls for the donning of rubber gloves.
For the sake of decorum we will skip lightly over the next fifteen minutes, and rejoin the narrative at the climax of the matron’s efforts, which had Ian lying on his side, making the philosophical expression achievable only by a man receiving an enema. Ian hadn’t planned to consent to this particular indignity, but the matron’s voice had that commanding, wifely harmonic — that tone that resonates deep in the brain’s husbandry centre and, for reasons not understood, compels obedience. It is this harmonic that is responsible for bewildered-looking men holding purses, standing in queues at cosmetic counters, taking an interest in china patterns, or purchasing tickets for musical theatre. It reaches directly into the primal husband mind and forces compliance. As a natural-born husband, Ian was powerless to resist.
“So,” said the matron from astern, where she busied herself with final docking manoeuvres. “Now that I’ve got your full attention, let’s get down to business. I know you’re a princk, I know you think you’ve died, and I know you think that you remember some kind of life before Detroit. You’ve got BD — that’s on your chart. But take my advice. Just try to relax and let us help. You’ll be right as rain in no time. All of these thoughts — these things you think you remember — they’ll all fade within a few days.”
Ian turned toward the matron, clenching and flexing muscles that he rarely clenched and flexed. “But the memories don’t always fade, do they?” he asked. “Rhinnick says that he’s been around for eighty years and still remembers. He says —”
The matron stepped back to her trolley and silenced Ian with a look — a look suggesting that Madame Justice Matron felt that consensus among a pair of mental patients failed to amount to positive proof. She removed her latex gloves and plopped them on the trolley. “There’s no harm in telling you this,” she said. “You’re bound to hear it from Rhinnick or one of the other patients sooner or later. You can’t put stock in anything Rhinnick says. He isn’t like the other patients. And he doesn’t have BD. Not really. I doubt he even really believes in the beforelife. His condition is . . . well, special. Dr. Peericks says it’s unique.”
“How do you mean?” asked Ian.
“The doctor calls it ego fabularis. He published a paper on it last year.”
The study of Latin had not figured prominently in Ian’s education.8 Nevertheless, he took a stab: “Ego fabularis?” he said. “I am . . . fabulous?”
“Close, dear. ‘I am a fable.’ Rhinnick believes that he’s a character in a novel, that everything that happens to him is just a part of the story. You, me, Detroit, the beforelife, everything. Just figments of the Author’s imagination being recorded in a book.”
Ian blinked in baffled silence.
“Ask him about it if you like,” said the matron. “He’ll go on about it for hours. Fascinating, really. He thinks that the Author is writing everything we do, and will continue to write the novel until The Final Revision comes, when only the worthy will escape the Editor’s Great Red Pen. It’s a complex case. Sad, too. But as far as Rhinnick’s BD is concerned, it can’t be cured because it isn’t real. He doesn’t honestly believe in the beforelife, he just thinks the Author has written him to have BD.”
Ian sat up gingerly. “A novel?” he said. “Really? But that’s, that’s —”
“It’s best not to judge, dear.”
“But how —”
“Don’t you worry about Rhinnick, love. The doctor is treating him, and I’m sure it’ll turn out fine. And as for you,” she said, making a notation on her charts, “you just relax and try to make yourself feel at home. Your treatment won’t be difficult. Not much to do, really. We’ll just monitor your condition, help you relax, and keep you comfortable until your delusions disappear on their own.”
“And by keep me ‘comfortable’ you mean locked in the hospice, don’t you?” asked Ian. “Rhinnick said that we can’t leave.”
“Well of course you can’t leave before you’re cured, love. Can’t have you running around in public spreading notions like mortality. It’d upset people. Cause a panic.”
“But why would —”
“Try to be calm, dear. It’s hard enough for me to do my job without you getting yourself worked up.” She began to pack her trolley. “I am curious about one thing, though,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve treated enough princks to know that you believe that when you die you leave your body behind, and that people bury or burn it. Ghastly idea if you ask me. But you believe you’ve left your body back wherever you came from.”
“I . . . I guess that’s right.” said Ian, cautiously. He could see where this was going. If his body was left behind, crushed by a train or buried or burned, why did he have a body now? And why did it look just like the one he’d had before the train had killed him, down to the freckle formation on his left elbow and the last ten pounds that he’d meant to lose for the past twelve years? He’d asked himself the same question.
“I can’t explain it,” Ian admitted. “I’m new at this. But maybe you’re . . . I don’t know . . . issued a new body when you arrive. One that looks just like whatever body you had before you died.”
The matron looked at him skeptically. “And your memory?”
“What about it?”
“Memory, dear. It isn’t magic. It’s physiological. Electrochemically stored and processed by your brain.”
“So?”
“It’s produced by physical structures in your brain. That’s why brain damage can cause memory loss or personality changes. And you believe that your brain is buried somewhere back in the beforelife. But if you didn’t bring your body, if your brain was left behind, how did the physical bits responsible for your memories make the trip?”
“Grnmph,” said Fenny, clearly impressed by this line of reasoning.
Ian might have admitted that this seemed sensible, but “sensible” didn’t apply in the present context. He was in the afterlife, “he” meaning something distinct from his original body, which had clearly been left behind. If there was a “he” distinct from his body — a soul, a spirit, an “essence of Ian�
� or whatever you wanted to call it — well, that’s where his memory was, whatever scientists thought they knew about memory storage. It didn’t have to be logical or coherent. If the world made any sense at all, Ian reasoned, the afterlife wouldn’t feature enemas.
Ian was overcome by a sense of urgency. Not the urgency of a man faced with an existential crisis, but the urgency common to all recent recipients of this particular medical treatment.
“Grnmph!” said Ian, winning a nod of acknowledgement from Fenny.
“Out the door, head to your left; you’ll see the signs,” said the matron. “Try not to run,” she added, a bit ambiguously for Ian’s taste.
* * *
6That isn’t a euphemism, but it should be.
7He’s Canadian. That’s what they do.
8As a dead language, Latin had made its way to Detroit.
Chapter 4
The Eighth Street Chapter was having a bad week. Less than twenty-four hours ago they’d tried to grab their marks — some noob named Ian and his guide — when everything had suddenly gone south. And now they were lying low in a dingy, no-star motel, still recovering from their wounds and struggling to work out what had happened.
“I still can’t believe the way she moved,” said Philly the Rook, for the sixth time in as many hours. “It just ain’t possible!”
“Tell me about it,” said Kari Slice, and meant it. She had emerged from her trauma-induced coma only twenty minutes ago and had missed most of the awestruck rehashing that had taken place thus far. “I could barely see her. It’s like she was just, just —”
“Just a blur,” said Thirsty Vern. “S’like I been sayin’. One minute she’s jus’ this chick, drivin’ a truck, y’know, and the next she’s on us like . . . like . . . I dunno, like one o’ them . . . uh, whassitcalled, one o’ them fast things.”
“Nicely put,” said Alphonse, who didn’t have a nickname.
“I’m just sayin’,” said Thirsty Vern. “She’s fast, is all. We shoulda had better weapons.”
Thirsty Vern was the newest member of the Eighth Street Chapter, and hadn’t counted on things being quite this difficult when he’d joined. Sure, membership had its privileges — invitations to the best underground raves, exemptions from neighbourhood protection taxes, an unmatched opportunity to beat up on easy prey, and, as the gang recruiter had put it, a way to stick it to The Man . . . though Thirsty Vern wasn’t at all sure who The Man was, let alone what ought to have been stuck to him. But all of Thirsty Vern’s friends were joining, and he wasn’t one to buck a trend. Of course, Thirsty Vern hadn’t considered the debit side of the ledger. He’d been in the crew for only three days and already he’d been beaten to a pulp by the merest slip of a girl, and then watched her thrash the rest of his crew without so much as breaking a nail.
It had been just like ballet, thought Thirsty Vern — or at least that’s what he would have thought had he been exposed to forms of dance that involved costumes more substantial than two Band-Aids and a bit of floss. But it was certainly like dancing, the way she had moved among his cronies, a flurry of effortless kicks, spins, and throws that left the members of the Eighth Street Chapter unconscious and bleeding in the alley where they had tried to swarm her truck.
Thirsty Vern padded across the darkened room and sat on the milk crate next to Kari.
“Better weapons?” she said, peeking past the window shade and into the gas-lit streets below. “We had guns. What did you want, military hardware? Against one girl and a passed-out noob? How were we supposed to know that she’d be so . . . so . . .”
“Beautiful?” sighed Llewellyn Llewellyn, the chapter’s leader. “I’ve never seen a woman like that. And more firepower wouldn’t have helped us,” he added, ignoring a scowl from Kari. “She’s had training. Serious training. Military, maybe, or Secret Service. She had my gun out of my hand before I could aim it; grabbed it just as she was spinning to kick Philly. It’s a mercy she didn’t turn the guns on us; we’d still be lying there now if she’d opened fire. It takes forever to heal from gunshot wounds.”
“I dunno ’bout military trainin’,” said Thirsty Vern, “but she was usin’ some o’ that stuff on us, you know, fancy kicks and stuff. Ends with Fu.”
“Kung,” said Philly the Rook, helpfully.
“Yeah, Kung,” said Thirsty Vern. “An’ she kicked me right inna, inna — whatchacallit?” Vern faltered, turning to Kari Slice for aid. “Whatcha call that thing she kicked me in?”
“An SUV,” supplied Kari.
“Yeah, right in the SUV, right when I was tryin’ to get to the noob. I flew clear through the windshield! And the noob just laid there sleepin’, all peaceful like.”
“Profile says she’s twenty-five,” said Llewellyn Llewellyn, staring into the flickering screen of his handheld datapad. “Bloody lie if you ask me. She’s an ancient. Nothing else could explain the way —”
“Don’t you start with that ‘ancient’ mumbo jumbo again,” interrupted Philly the Rook. “Three hours of ‘ancient this’ and ‘ancient that’ and I’ve had it up to here.” He contrived to indicate a point above his head but stopped short for fear of retearing a shoulder muscle that hadn’t fully repaired itself since the attack. “Ancients aren’t magic, Llew, they’re old. Nothing special. It’s not as though you get a gift-wrapped box of superpowers on your ten-thousandth manifestival. And if ancients were magic, Llew, d’you think the Organization would send us up against one o’ them?”
“I don’t know,” said Kari. “Maybe LlewLlew’s right. It wasn’t normal, the way she moved. And there was something strange about that noob, too, the way he slept through the whole thing. He had a funny look about him.”
“How do you mean?” asked Philly the Rook.
“I saw it too,” said Thirsty Vern, “he looked all mysterious like, you know, kinda, thingy, umm, eldritch. Had an eldritch air about him. Spooky, like.”
“I do believe you’re talking out of your arse,” said Philly the Rook. “So the fella’s a deep sleeper. Probably drunk. Nothing eldritch about that. He’s just lucky to have a guide who’s some kinda ninja supermodel.”
“It was a trick,” said Alphonse, who’d been stewing about the issue ever since Tonto had gripped him by the head and tossed him effortlessly into a brick wall, where a vaguely Alphonse-shaped depression remained as testament to his participation in the mêlée. “Some kinda trick,” he repeated.
“Do these look like tricks?” asked Kari, indicating an ugly welt beneath her eye, and then the broken stiletto heel she’d finally managed to extricate from the small of her back. “It’s not even healing properly,” she added. “Besides, what kind of trick could explain what happened?”
“I dunno,” said Alphonse, “just a trick. It’s like you guys said. No one can move like that.”
“I can,” said a gravelly-voiced shadow right behind Llewellyn Llewellyn.
That’s when things really went downhill for the Eighth Street Chapter.
Chapter 5
Darkness fell on Detroit Mercy Hospice.
Well, it didn’t so much “fall” as stay exactly where it was. It’s what darkness does best, really: staying put. The point for the present narrative, though, is that it was night-time in Detroit, and the patients in the hospice had gone to bed. In the unobscured, completely immobile, and omnipresent dark.
“Nothing at all?” whispered a voice.
“That’s what I keep telling you,” said another, “nothing at all.”
“Electrocution? Stabbing?” said the first voice.
“No. I wouldn’t recommend them, though. Dashed painful, I’d imagine. But you’d recover.”
Ian and Rhinnick lay awake in their darkened room discussing the finer points of afterlife biology. Ian was having trouble with immortality. He’d tried to explore the subject with the succession of nurses, inte
rns, and doctors who had paraded through his room during daylight hours, but they weren’t helpful. They were too busy asking Ian increasingly detailed questions about the content of his “delusions,” as they called them. They’d asked him about his home life, his career, his wife and family, they’d asked him to recount any major news events he remembered. Ian did his best to comply. It’s not that he thought he’d convince his interviewers that his memories were real. But Rhinnick’s warning had given him pause: beforelife memories fade, Rhinnick had said. Maybe discussing them with others — even people who thought he was crazy — would help keep them fresh in his mind.
The interviewers had taken extensive notes while Ian answered each of their questions, recording minute details of each of the memories he recounted. Rhinnick later explained that they would take their assembled notes to Dr. Peericks, who would review Ian’s answers with a view to exposing any inconsistencies in Ian’s recollections, or proving to Ian that bits of his memories really belonged to other people who’d simply deposited them in the river during their manifestival rituals. Ian didn’t worry about that. His memories were real, more real to him than anything that had happened since his arrival in Detroit. And talking about his memories made him feel more at home than he’d felt since the moment Tonto had found him by the river. It felt good to talk about his work and other humdrum things that had comprised his daily routine. And it felt especially good to discuss Penelope, the one splash of technicolour in Ian’s otherwise monochromatic past.
One thing seemed odd, though. Ian couldn’t help but notice that his interviewers were genuinely puzzled by his memories. They’d stared at him while he answered some of their questions, furrowing their brows or urgently whispering to one another when he had described the fine details of some recollection or other. They seemed particularly agitated by his account of routine, day-to-day events. That had been downright weird. They claimed to have dealt with hundreds of princks before him, and Ian couldn’t imagine why his particular memories of the beforelife were so baffling to the staff of Detroit Mercy.
Beforelife Page 5