Beforelife

by Randal Graham

  “Er, I think the phrase is actually ‘card sharp,’” said Ian mildly. “Not ‘card shark.’ Common mistake.”

  “Eizer way,” sniffed Napoleon Number Four, “you’ve just been introduced to ze game, and yet you play like ze professional Brakkiteer. What deed you do in ze beforelife, anyway? A gambleur, perhaps? A confidence man of some kind?”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” said Ian, blushing slightly. He’d never been mistaken for anything quite as interesting as a confidence man or gambler. He was more commonly mistaken for an actuary or undertaker (or, on one memorable evening, a potted plant). “Just a knack for learning rules, I suppose.” He hesitated a moment, took another peek at his cards, and — after a few false starts — laid his six of suns on Rhinnick’s two of spires.

  “I was a regulatory compliance officer,” he said.

  A look of keen interest and instantaneous comprehension failed to appear on the faces of those present.

  Ian was used to this reaction. Talking about his job had always been a useful way of dispersing crowds at parties. But what his job lacked in thrills, adventure, and popular appeal it made up for in rich and varied forms of paperwork. “It’s important work,” said Ian, more defensively than he’d intended. “I mean, sort of important, anyway. Sorting out permits, updating bylaws, reviewing municipal studies, that sort of thing. It’s rewarding.” He bounced the Brakkit ball into the wooden cup and drew two more cards from the second deck. “Just a few weeks ago I —”

  “Compliance officer, eh?” asked Rhinnick, only half paying attention while rearranging his own hand. “A military man, then. Well, I’ll be blowed. I wouldn’t have guessed.”

  “No, no,” said Ian, “I worked for the city. I —”

  “Ah, some sort of copper, what?”

  “I guess you could say that,” said Ian, which was a perfectly accurate statement because he guessed you could say anything. You could say that Ian had been an astronaut or a florist. You could say that he’d been popular in high school. You’d be wrong about all those things, but there was nothing stopping you from saying them.

  To be precise, the way in which regulatory compliance officership resembled policework was the same way in which elevator music resembles a Rolling Stones concert. The closest Ian had come to mortal peril on the job had been when he’d gotten a paper cut from an unusually aggressive zoning application. But Ian took pride in his work. It wasn’t every man who could identify sixteen different types of land-use application just by the weight of the form’s supporting documentation.

  “A brave thing, taking office in the constabulary,” said Rhinnick, nodding at Ian.

  “I wasn’t a . . . No . . . I mean . . . Look,” Ian stammered, “I worked in the law enforcement branch, but it’s not as though the job was, well, dangerous or anything, it was more of a management position. Some might call it a little tedious, I suppose. But I —”

  “Nonsense,” said Rhinnick, waving off the explanation. Rhinnick wasn’t a detail person. He was Rhinnick: Instant Expert, Just Add Topic. He fancied himself a Big Picture Person, and wasn’t particularly fussed about the accuracy of the big pictures he saw. This had its benefits. It afforded Rhinnick the freedom to paint his own big pictures in vibrant, animated abstractions rather than in the dismal, washed-out palette of real life.

  Think of Rhinnick as a surrealist Big Picture Person.

  “That’s the problem with you, Ian,” Rhinnick continued, airily. “Well, one of the problems, anyway. Always downplaying your own achievements. You’re just too . . . too . . . whatsitcalled . . . lost the word . . . tip of my tongue . . . what is it I’m thinking? Ian is too . . . too —”

  “Chubby?” hazarded Napoleon Number Three, which Ian felt was a bit unfair.

  “Dull?” suggested Napoleons Four and Six.

  “Boring!” shouted Napoleon Number One, who thought this game was fun.

  “No, no, no,” said Rhinnick, “modest. That’s what he is, too modest. Up to your ears in modesty, Ian. Dashed brave of you, being a copper. Good show.”

  “But I wasn’t —”

  “I’m sure your work as a something-or-other-officer was a good deal more exciting than you’ve let on,” Rhinnick continued. “Positively thrilling, I’d imagine. Just think of it. Enforcing the law . . .”

  “It wasn’t exactly —”

  “. . . ferreting out lawbreakers . . .”

  “— I suppose, but —”

  “. . . throwing yourself into danger . . .”

  “— well, really I —”

  “. . . rescuing damsels in distress — it’s a wonder it’s always damsels, isn’t it? Systemic somethingorother, sexism, I expect. That’s probably why they’re so distressed. But just think of it, Our Brave Lad, Ian Brown, leaping from rooftop to rooftop and dangling from those . . . what’s the word, you know, those hangy bits of helicopters — sort of an elongated, metal foot thingummy? — anyway, dangling from those bits, discharging pistols left and right, dancing into — what, what is it now, man?” he said, having noticed that Ian was struggling to interrupt. “No use gaping at me like a beached somethingorother, silly ass, just spit it out.”

  “We didn’t use guns!” Ian managed.

  “And there you have it,” said Rhinnick, his snap judgment unimpeded by mere fact-checkery. “Well done. The mind boggles at your bravery. Pursuing criminals unarmed, armed with only your wits and raw nerve. You remind me of the fellow in that book — you know, the one who was always chasing criminals and whatnot. Brave chap, whatever his name was. But you, my modest friend, might be just the sort of man I need for my quest.”

  The Napoleons made an array of winces, grimaces, and pained expressions, each telegraphing something along the lines of “ye gods, don’t get him started.”

  “It wasn’t like that at all,” said Ian, still a sentence or two behind. “I mean, it’s . . . wait, what quest?”

  “All in good time, Brown,” said Rhinnick, winking slyly. “The Author hasn’t fully revealed it. When the time is right we’ll whoosh.”

  He hadn’t actually said “whoosh” but you could be forgiven for thinking he had. Whoosh was, rather, the sound that interrupted Rhinnick mid-pronouncement. It was the sound produced by several dozen heads turning toward the door in unison to watch Tonto enter the room.

  This is generally what happened when Tonto made an entrance. She was Detroit’s leading cause of communal whiplash. She stepped gracefully into the room, flashed a disarming, perfect smile and waved amiably to the room in general.

  “Um, hi,” said Tonto.

  It was poetry.

  It was a little odd, Ian reflected, that while he could see that Tonto was beautiful, he wasn’t attracted to her at all. For Ian, looking at Tonto was like admiring sunsets or cathedrals — he could enjoy their aesthetic qualities with barely a thought of having sex with them.18 A voice in Ian’s head supplied an explanation:

  “She’s lovely, but she’s not Penny.”

  Penny, Ian sighed for the twenty-eighth time that day, before forcing his attention back to less heart-wrenching matters.19

  “Tonto!” Ian called, waving her over and breaking the silence. “Over here, by the window.”

  Tonto had already spotted him, of course, but Ian was used to going unnoticed.

  All eyes in the Sharing Room remained firmly glued on Tonto as she moved across the room toward Ian’s table. One effect of this was that no one in the room was paying the slightest bit of attention to the courtyard that was visible through the Sharing Room’s bay windows. This meant that no one, no one at all, noticed a tall, shadowy figure rappel from a nearby rooftop onto the high brick wall encircling the hospice courtyard.

  This, the shadowy figure reflected, was convenient. He could easily have avoided detection even without the distraction that Tonto had unwittingly provided, but it was nice when eve
nts conspired to make life easier.

  The figure reeled in his zipline, clipped it onto his bandolier, and executed a textbook twisting-front flip into the hospice grounds. He touched down in a bed of peonies and slipped silently into the early evening shadows.

  The figure withdrew a six-inch, matte-black metal rod from one of his belt pouches and pressed a series of unmarked buttons along its length. He waited a moment before slipping the rod back into its pouch. A heartbeat later, the figure received a message through an intracranial implant: **Target acquired. Co-ordinates confirmed. Proceed with acquisition.**

  It took exactly twelve seconds for the figure to cross the courtyard undetected, and a further seven seconds for him to disable the service door’s outdated alarm and locking systems. “Curious,” he reflected as he manipulated the latch. He’d been thinking along these lines since he’d received his orders an hour ago. “Why send me on such a straightforward errand? It’s overkill. Nothing more than a snatch and grab, a bit of reconnaissance, low security. Any member of his official security forces could ha—”

  The shadowy figure flattened himself against the wall as he became aware of the silhouettes of two Hospice Goons lumbering just inside the service entrance.

  Guards, thought the shadowy figure. Big ones, too — the slopey-shouldered, bull-necked sort who’d fit in nicely about three bipeds to the left of homo sapiens sapiens in most evolutionary charts. The shadowy figure watched the silhouettes for a moment. The one on the left carried himself as though he knew how to handle himself in a fight. The bigger one on the right was just for show. The shadowy figure pulled the door slightly ajar to get a better look at them.

  They looked exactly like the sort of people who needn’t be described because they’re apt to be unconscious by the end of the next sentence.

  And they were.

  It’s funny, Socrates reflected as he padded silently down the hall, how some appearances aren’t the least bit deceiving.

  Back in the Sharing Room, Ian was busily welcoming Tonto and clearing a space for her at the table. Guides weren’t strictly required to visit their charges at the hospice, and very few ever bothered. Ian was glad that Tonto was an exception. She’d visited him six times during his two weeks of confinement — or his period of reality adjustment, as the matron liked to call it — and Ian enjoyed every visit. Tonto was cheerful, casually confident and unflappably calm, and Ian felt that her feelings were contagious. She gave him the sense that despite the accident, his death, and his admission into the hospice, there was the possibility of hope. If there was even the slightest chance of getting in touch with Penny, or maybe even seeing her again — well, it didn’t hurt to hope.

  It hurt a little, come to think of it. But Ian preferred it to the alternative.

  Finding himself on the cusp of another bout of depressing internal dialogue, Ian shook the gloom from his head, smiled at Tonto, and said, “Please, pull up a chair.”

  The pulling up of the chair was solemnly undertaken on Tonto’s behalf by Rhinnick, who simultaneously adjusted his terry-cloth robe, tried to smooth his cowlick into something more presentable, theatrically motioned for Tonto to take the chair, and choked on something suave he’d meant to say by way of a greeting. The overall effect was that of a polite, full-body hiccup.

  “Hey, guys!” said Tonto, sliding into the chair and dropping her backpack onto the floor. Having completed her official manifestival duties, she had replaced her terry-cloth robe with more traditional garb, including a white T-shirt, a leather jacket, and a well-worn pair of jeans. She flashed a smile in Rhinnick’s direction, causing primal parts of Rhinnick’s psyche to stand at attention. Because his mind was suddenly seized by the undergraduate poet who inhabits most men’s brains at times like this, Rhinnick intended to say, “You are a vision, you are perfection, you are the melody of life’s symphony, and my desperate heart will love you until the stars exhaust their fuel.” Because his mouth was currently governed by the trembling teenaged misfit who possesses all men’s tongues at times like this, what he actually said was, “Buh.”

  Tonto cocked her head, bit her lip, and laughed lightly in a way that was wildly unfair to both sexes.

  Four out of six Napoleons rose to their feet and attempted chivalric bows while jabbering in their foreign lingo. Now that Tonto was safely obscured behind a wall of bowing Napoleons, the other occupants of the hospice turned their attention to other matters and the general hubbub of the Sharing Room returned.

  “What’s new?” Tonto asked, snatching up a deck of Brakkit cards and dealing herself into the game.

  “The usual,” said Ian. “Plenty of prodding by the matron, a few meetings with Dr. Peericks, group therapy sessions, soft walls, plastic cutlery, you know how it is.”

  It hadn’t really been so bad, all things considered. It certainly wasn’t heaven — at least not any heaven featured in your better class of religious leaflet — but it also wasn’t a burning lake of fire. The hospice workers were pleasant enough, and they seemed genuinely concerned with their patients’ comfort and well-being. The matron and Dr. Peericks, in particular, appeared to take a special interest in looking out for Ian. The matron — who generally had a no-nonsense, Universal Aunt air about her — had already developed a practice of slipping Ian an extra plate of dessert, and would sit with Ian long after her shift had ended if she felt he needed company. And Dr. Peericks, who had turned out to be a kindly man with friendly, rosy cheeks and an untameable tangle of thick grey hair, had also gone to great lengths to make Ian comfortable. He had even presented Ian with his own personal copy of the Detroit Civil Code when Ian had mentioned an interest in municipal laws. Ian had felt like a kid at Christmas — a nerdy, bookish kid at a rather sedate Christmas, to be sure20 — but suffice it to say that Ian had appreciated the gift. He’d already read up to the bit on waste disposal.

  All things considered, the afterlife could have been worse. Even atheists would have been happy: Detroit was better than nothing.

  “How are the meetings with Dr. Peericks?” asked Tonto.

  “Enh,” said Ian, making a sort of facial shrug. “Tiresome, really. Don’t get me wrong, he means well, I guess. But he keeps repeating the same questions: What do you remember about your job? Where did you live? Tell me about your friends and family. And he keeps coming back to Penny — not that I mind talking about her, but it’s frustrating to keep telling the same stories. Three separate times he’s made me tell him how I met her.”

  “Seems excessive,” said Rhinnick, through a mouthful of cheese doodles.

  “I know!” said Ian. “It’s not even a good story — well, it’s good for me, I mean, meeting my wife for the first time and all that — but it’s just, you know, the usual sort of . . . well, ordinary first meeting story. Nothing exciting. We met at work. My work, I mean. Well, Penny’s too, actually — not that we worked together or anything, but my work took me to her work, if you follow. We saw each other around the office. Her office, that is, not mine. It’s all — well, I guess it is a bit complicated, really. But we went out for coffee a few weeks later, and that’s all there is to it.”

  Ian and Penny had met, in fact, during Ian’s first year on the job. The city’s Integrity Commissioner had dispatched Ian to examine several transactions between Alderman Phillip Roth and Byron Doyle, a dizzyingly high-net-worth client of Temple Investments. Temple Investments was, it turned out, the firm where a certain Penelope Stafford had started working two weeks earlier. And when Temple had been ordered to disclose the Roth-Doyle documents to the Office of Regulatory Compliance, it had been Penny’s unhappy task to bury Ian under an Everest of paper in the hope that he’d just give up and go away.

  That strategy hadn’t worked on Ian. On the contrary, it took Ian less than seventy-two hours to systematically dismantle the impugned Roth-Doyle transactions, pointing out all manner of ingeniously buried regulatory infractions, including
dozens that the parties hadn’t intended. The remarkable bit, though, was that he’d done it all with the air of a man who was doing Roth and Doyle a favour. He seemed to believe that the assembled financiers were all Good Sorts who’d just bumped into inconvenient rules and, being busy folks who probably had a lot on their minds, had accidentally stumbled out of bounds. They’d want to be told about their mistakes. And now that Ian had cleared things up, he had no doubt that everyone involved — including Roth, Doyle, and Temple — would eagerly pull together and set things right.

  The bizarre thing was that they had. Penny’s superiors, hypnotized by Ian’s guileless and amiable demolition of their efforts, accepted every one of Ian’s recommendations, admitted that they’d been wrong, and went back to the drawing board intent on Following the Rules.

  Penny had watched the entire affair with a sense of wonder. She was impressed — not so much by Ian’s dab hand with municipal regulations (which is not, strictly speaking, a useful trait for attracting women) — but with his strangely sunny view of human nature.

  As soon as Ian’s review was finished, Penny had asked him out for coffee. He turned her down. He worried that her offer might be seen as an attempt to curry favour with City Officials. Oh, he’d stammered and blushed and squirmed while turning her down, enough to show that his scruples were having a scuffle with other bits of his brain — but turn her down he had.

  Skipping ahead eleven months, they were married — exactly ten and one-half months after Penny had moved on from Temple Investments citing “irreconcilable ethical differences.” And they’d been happily married ever since. Eight years.

  Eight years of marriage ended abruptly by a train.

  And now Ian had either died and gone to Detroit, where he was surrounded by people who’d forgotten about their pre-mortem selves, or he really was delusional, imagining the memories of a life he’d never had. Either he’d left Penny a widow or, worse still, she’d never exis—

  No. A voice in Ian’s head slammed the door on that particular line of thought.