Dead Americans

by Ben Peek

  Jonas’s gaze narrowed, a still green growing cold.

  “Tell me,” I asked, my hand squeezing his. “Please. She’s important.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  With a deliberately slow movement, he lifted my hand from his. When he spoke next, his voice was empty of the sympathy he had previously shown, each word now sharply pronounced, a tiny knife that he meant to drive into me. “She’s gone, William. She’s not here. Your brother has been murdered. Ellie has been murdered. Your Mother has not. Instead, she is absent. Her wheelchair is gone, and if you look back down closely, you’ll see a tire track through your brother’s blood. A tiny rail at the edge crossing over it.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, reaching for him, but he stepped back. “What is going on?”

  “I thought it was your father.” Turning, he began walking down the stairs. “You talked about him so much, William. About his death, about how he loved his daughter. I asked myself, Who else would have interest her? Is it possible that your father didn’t kill himself? That it was simply staged. An elaborate lie to leave the family that rejected him? I’ve seen it before. And who else, when you think about it, would want the body of a girl who had wasted away? She had no lover. Your mother hated her. Your brother barely knew her. There was only you, and you—you would not do this to her.”

  “Jonas—please—don’t—”

  “Most snatches are done by family members. Just like any other crime, William.” Jonas stepped around the stairwell and approached Henry’s body. “To hear you speak of your Father and Fiona is to hear the hint of a second story. A not unusual one, true, but one that would explain why a Returned man would want to bring the body of his daughter back to life.” He stopped next to Henry’s corpse. “But there are faults in the story. There’s no soul in an empty body. It doesn’t matter if you have faith or not, William. You can’t bring back what was there. And why would your father have someone else in her body? But the bigger problem to my logic is that your father is dead. He has been dead for six years now. Dead since he ripped his heart out. The Surgeon that performed his initial return told me this. Under your mother’s angry eye, he came to this house and checked every part of the body, but there was nothing left. Nothing that he could salvage.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I cried out.

  “There is a dead girl in your kitchen, William.”

  “I know!”

  “But you do not care.”

  “I just want to know where my mother is!”

  “She’s at the Academy of Surgeons,” Jonas replied, his voice like bladed ice. “That’s where she went after killing your brother and Ellie.”

  8.

  “He has lived and died and lived again. For him, death is empty. It is nothing. We do not need it. I know this intimately, for I too have lived and died and lived again.”

  “Jonas!”

  I ran down the stairs, calling his name, but he paid me no heed as he stalked out. By the time I reached the doorway, he had disappeared into the deepening shadows of the night and houses in my neighbourhood. It did not matter, however, for I knew where he was going. I did not understand nearly enough of what he had said: that Mother had stolen Fiona’s body, that she had killed Henry, that she had hired a Surgeon . . . it was ridiculous. We were family. She would not do this. She could not. Mother had not been able to lift herself out of her wheelchair for nearly two years and was dependent on servants to prepare her food. But Jonas believed that she was at the Academy of Surgeons and, logically, that was where he was going. I quickly pulled on a shirt and boots and, avoiding the sight of my brother, left the house in pursuit.

  I caught a carriage to the Academy and sat in the back, my hands twisted into one lump of flesh, and my pulse refusing to slow even when the sharp towers appeared before me.

  While not the geographical centre of Ledornn, the Academy of Surgeons had been known as the heart of the city for hundreds of years. A designed, built, and cared for heart. It had begun as an institution where Surgeons were trained and returns were performed, but in the years since its initial opening it had expanded in both size and concept. Returns were still handled on the campus, but its expanding dark bricked form had sprawled into yellow pavements and courses on math and science and disease as well as others. Henry had attended the three years of his apprenticeship within its walls, a mark of prestige for even Mother.

  Henry . . .

  I stepped out of the carriage outside the Academy’s bronze gates. It was closed, but in the centre was a silver crest of two galloping horses. On the left was an open gate that led me onto the hard red-brown stones of the campus, my footsteps echoing in the empty, stained night.

  As I drew closer to the main building, my approach was smothered by sounds of boots hitting the ground, of grunts, and unclear words. The centre of the campus was dominated by a large building shaped like an obelisk and scattered with bright yellow lights across its form like weeping sores. It was in the light of that building that I saw three men fighting across the pavement. The first was Jonas, and he moved with a quick fluidity, ducking beneath attacks from two clean skinned men holding blunt nightsticks. I slowed as I approached, but my arrival caused the two men fighting Jonas to pause and, using that, Jonas drove his fist into the head of the man to his right. He stumbled, and Jonas kicked his feet out from under him. The second man hit Jonas across the side of the face.

  There followed, suddenly—as if it were the physical manifestation of Jonas’ rage—a glint. Then the man that had hit him stumbled backwards, clutching at his throat, trying to stop blood that was spraying from his neck. Once he had fallen, Jonas walked back to the second man and stomped viciously on his head until he went limp.

  Without turning to me, he said, “You shouldn’t be here. Go home, William.”

  “I don’t understand what is going on,” I said. “Mother didn’t do the things you said she did. I know that.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Neither do you!”

  He shrugged and began walking up the stairs into the main building.

  I followed, trying to speak to him again, but he ignored me. His bruised face, which had once turned cold and impassive to shut me out, was no longer so. Now, it showed me nothing. It was as if I did not exist. As if I had never walked my fingers up and down his spine. As if he had never shaved me in the mornings. Around us the electric lamps of the building burned in thick buttery light, stripping back the emotions on each of us, allowing us, for the first time, the ability to see the other as we truly were. I saw the pride, the kindness, the ruthlessness, and he saw the hurt and pain and whatever else I revealed, but unlike me, Jonas was not moved. He kept walking until finally he began to descend into the bowels of the building where the operating theatres were kept.

  I hesitated, but followed.

  Until I left that narrow hallway, I had never seen a Surgeon’s theatre. My father had no faith, my mother more than enough, but the one thing they shared was a moral objection to returning, in your own body or another’s, made more so by our family history. Most returns were fashioned out of two or three bodies, with the skin being taken and preserved by those who had not died from disease. I grew up in a house that did not support returns, an anomaly, certainly, and one further raised due to the fact that Father home schooled all his children. So it was that when I stepped into the dim operating theatre, I did not know what I would truly encounter.

  Jonas had already entered, shoving the double doors open, and stalking through the dim green light of the room.

  On the ground lay an elderly Surgeon. He was tall and silver haired and wore the white and black edged gown of a Surgeon. And he was quite dead, his neck having been twisted sharply so that bones had pierced the skin.

  I had seen too much death by then to let this anonymous corpse bother me at all. Instead, my attent
ion was drawn to the hum in the room.

  It was a background noise at first, a susurration, almost hypnotic once it was noticed. It was caused by the three large silver boxes on the wall. They were discoloured by the green light emitted from the two long tubes suspended in the air. Each tube was filled with bubbles—bubbles that obscured the inside as if a person had breathed into each. The two tubes were attached to a metal framework above that also kept the power boxes, hanging like pendulums, in place. From each pendulum, like thick tentacled hands, emerged black coils that pushed deeply into the tubes, deep into the green fluid that filled each.

  To the right of the room sat Mother’s wheelchair, empty, but with her purse and Fiona’s postcards sitting on the seat.

  “William.”

  Fiona.

  “William.”

  Fiona’s voice, but my mother’s words, coming out of speakers on the ground.

  Beneath the tubes, Jonas turned towards me. Above him the bubbles dissipated slowly but surely to reveal Mother and Fiona. Around each head was a crown of thin, black wires. Both their eyes were open and watching me. Each movement they made was in union. Two sets of eyes blinked. Two left arms twitched. Two sets of lips parted.

  “I don’t want to die,” Mother’s voice began.

  Fiona’s voice finished, “Don’t let him kill me.”

  “Why have you done this?” I cried out.

  “She can’t reply!” Jonas yelled over the hum of the machinery. “She can see you, but she cannot hear you!”

  “Why did she do this?”

  “There’s nothing but hate in her!”

  I began to reply, but could not, and only shook my head.

  “On the uniform of one of those men I fought was dried blood! William, who goes to work with dried blood splashed across their clothes?” Jonas reached up and grabbed one of the cables that connected the tubes, his long, black nailed fingers curling around it tightly in a grip that would not be broken. “Those are the men who came for your mother! Who killed your brother! Who killed Ellie! Those men who your mother had hired days ago—”

  “Why are you saying this?”

  “This cannot continue!”

  “You have no right!”

  “You would let this happen?” he shouted.

  I hesitated. Would I? Would I? I heard again the faint murmur of her words emerging through Fiona’s vocal cords, given sound by a fuzzy microphone in the tube with her. Giving her the chance to plead for her life, to tell her son that she needed him. How did Henry react? With anger, I was sure. And Fiona? What would she say? Did it matter? We were family. Family. You didn’t do this to your family. Mother’s voice whispered my name, again.

  “Would you?” Jonas demanded.

  “She’s my mother!”

  “It’s not enough!”

  9.

  The Surgeon opened his shirt, revealing pale, pale skin and a long, jagged scar down his chest. Picking up an electric lamp, he shone the light onto himself, and revealed, in his chest, a network of gears and wires, each of them moving at a steady pace. Clicking, turning, powered in ways we could not comprehend, designed by a mind we could not know, but a gift to us. To all of us, should we want it.

  In the morning, I left for Issuer with Mother, Henry, and Fiona wrapped tight in white burial sheets. I was taking all three to the Ovens. I would hand each of them over to the clean skinned men and women who operated them, who had a different kind of faith than I, again. No longer an atheist, unable to believe in God, no words to mark myself with, no faith. I was lost and after handing over the bodies in Issuer, I would sit alone and wait, until the end of the week, when the dead were burned. Afterwards, I did not know what I would do. For the journey there, Jonas sent a young, red haired Mortician to Mother’s—my—house to prepare everything. Jonas would not come himself. I would never again see him, I knew. And so, in the morning, when the Mortician I did not know arrived in a carriage with my family, and sat there, waiting for me to step out, I did so with a feeling describable only as emptiness. I sat inside the carriage, surrounded by my silent family and own thoughts, while the Mortician drove us down an empty road beneath a red sky that had turned black.

  Soon, ash would fall.

  John Wayne

  (As Written by a Non-American)

  Autumn, New York, 1949.

  John Wayne leaned casually against the Empire State Building. Six foot four, with large, blunt features, he looked as if he’d been shaped by the hand of God on the day that He had forgotten His tools. He wore an expensive, but plain, dark brown suit with a simple, long sleeved, white shirt beneath it. His feet were encased in a pair of creased leather boots and the wide brimmed leather hat that he wore was sun-faded, its rich brown texture leeched away by the ritual rise of the sun. Wayne wore the hat pulled low to obscure his features as he waited and watched the crowd shift and twist its elongated form around him.

  He had been waiting for nearly sixteen minutes. The worn out stub of a cigarette staining his fingers with faint, decay-yellow nicotine measured the time. Once he had been the kind of smoker that burned through a smoke with impatience, but now, in his forties, Wayne had changed his style. He smoked slowly, tasting the tobacco, nursing the hot sensation into his throat, allowing it to soak into the flesh. It took him eight minutes to make his way down to the end of his cigarette, until he had nothing more than a tiny nub in his fingers to drop onto the pavement and squash beneath the front of his boot.

  A second butt crushed: sixteen minutes exact.

  When he returned his gaze to the world, he found his companion crossing the road: Orson Welles. Younger than Wayne, and pressing outwards in a fleshy smear, Welles was still an imposing figure. He was supporting a short goatee around the chin of his boyish face, and wore a bone-coloured suit, a red handkerchief in the left breast pocket, and a dark grey shirt beneath the jacket. In his pale hands, he carried a long cane. Much to the irritation of Wayne, he held it as an accessory, rather than a necessity, and spun it in a circle as he crossed the road.

  Wayne said nothing about it. Instead, he pushed himself off the wall, tilted back his hat, and grasped Welles’ hand in a friendly shake.

  “I apologize for my lateness,” Welles said with exaggerated politeness, waving his cane at the traffic. “You know how Manhattan is.”

  Wayne nodded and, without another word, the two men began walking, joining the pedestrian flesh that ran throughout the city in a long, sinuous vein.

  In front of Wayne was a young, slowly fattening Indian couple who, when they glanced behind, began whispering quietly but excitedly to each other. On his right walked a black man in a green suit, holding a tiny blue radio (Wayne was sure it was a radio) up to his ear. To his left was Orson, and then the traffic, full of crawling yellow and black cabs.

  “It’s good to see you, John,” Welles said, his cane taping out a disjointed rhythm.

  “You too.”

  “You look good.”

  Wayne glanced at his companion slowly, then said, “You look like you’ve put a bit of weight on.”

  “It comes and goes.”

  Reaching into his jacket, Wayne pulled out a cigarette, followed by a box of matches. “Still, you ought to watch what it makes of you.”

  “Indeed.”

  Wayne followed Welles into a narrow alley. The buildings rose in a patchwork pattern of red and brown brick, laced with cement, while the pavement beneath was swept clean. At the end was a single door, without a sign, and through it a dimly lit anti-chamber. Welles nodded at the tall, lean black woman standing behind the counter in a tailored black suit, and Wayne expected her to speak in return, but she inclined her graceful neck and directed them to the door wordlessly. Beyond it was a long, dimly lit restaurant: the booths and seats were covered in rich crimson splotches of velvet, and down the middle was a line of black circular tables. In the dark, Wayne could not make out the pa
trons easily, though he could hear the scrape of their knives and forks and the inaudible whisper of their conversation.

  A black man in a crimson jacket directed the two to their booth. He had an ethereal quality about him, suggesting that his station, dictated by the matching jacket, was more important than his personality. To Wayne, it was the nature of the service industry, though he was surprisingly irritated when the waiter tilted his head and smiled in his direction and, ignoring Welles, uttered the only words he would say throughout the entire meal, “I’m a big fan, sir. It’s my pleasure to serve you.”

  Once seated, Wayne dragged the ashtray towards him and ground out his cigarette in the glass bowl, leaving black stains. “Strange place,” he observed, removing his hat.

  “Always the obvious statement, I see. But I like it,” Welles replied. “It’s unlisted, and very quiet about what one orders.”

  “Really?”

  “The press is a pestilence.”

  “Has its uses when movies come out.”

  “Indeed it does, but we’ve had this conversation before, I think.”

  “True,” Wayne replied. He fell silent as the waiter placed a menu in front of him. When he had left, Wayne said, “Guess we’ll need a new topic.”

  Welles leaned forward and whispered, “How about the Soviet Union?”

  “What?”

  “Or Joseph Stalin?”

  “Christ,” Wayne muttered sourly. “That ain’t funny, Orson.”

  Welles leaned back, smiling faintly but without mirth. “I’ve got to warn you, John. I’ve heard that Stalin himself has put a price on your head.”

  “Best of luck to him.”

  “It’s not a joke. You’ve been quite public with your hate for communism.”

  “It ain’t no democracy,” Wayne replied, his voice rising. He hesitated, not wanting to speak politics, but gave in. “There ain’t nothing right and decent in the way Stalin runs his people over there, and I ain’t going to be quiet about it.”