by Kage Baker
Stupid chimpanzees, wanting to go back to the cities of humanity! Maybe they needed an enriched environment, but not me. I’d stripped away such irrelevant nonsense from my life, hadn’t I?
I had the looming mountains to myself, and the vast empty sea and the immensity of cold white stars at night and, thank God, the silence of my own heart. It never makes a sound of complaint. It’s a perfectly functioning machine.
So I was sitting on this beach near Big Sur, a fairly crowded beach as the place goes—there were maybe a dozen people sunbathing, surfing, trying to prevent small children from eating sand—and a scuba diver in full kit came down the stairs, made his difficult way over the rocks.fiip-flopped across the sand and waded into the sea. He swam out past the white line of breakers and the surfers riding the swell, and for a while I could glimpse his snorkel moving to and fro. Eventually I couldn’t see it anymore.
It wasn’t until hours later, climbing the stairs to go back to my campsite, that I realized I had never seen him come out of the water.
Studio Dick Drowns Near Malibu
* * *
It was time to die again. Some of us don’t like faking our deaths; you have a lot of fuss and worry over making it believable, and then you have to go off someplace else and start over again. I enjoy it, though. In all the centuries I’ve been running around after things the Company wanted, shipping the loot of history up to their offices in the Future, I must have staged a dozen memorable demises. It’s the closest a cyborg like me is ever going to get to the real thing, right? So why not make it stupendous, spectacular, colossal?
I’ve died even when I didn’t strictly have to. In the old days you didn’t need to die to assume a new identity, when the Company transferred you. Riding over the horizon was as good as riding off the edge of the world, and if you never came back most mortals assumed you’d died. You could become somebody else, somewhere else, and the chances were astronomical you’d ever meet a mortal who’d known you in your previous incarnation. Even back then, though, your cover could be blown: look at that Martin Guerre guy. That was why I always liked to play it safe and get myself a nice indisputable grave before I moved on to my next posting.
And when the twentieth century rolled around, with photos and Social Security numbers and drivers’
licenses, and worse yet to come, it became more important than ever to die convincingly. No loose ends!
Still, I kind of hated leaving MGM, then of all times; it was 1938, for crying out loud. The best-ever year for movies was just around the corner: Gone with the Wind was already in pre-production, ditto Ninotchka and The Wizard of Oz, to name but a few. It was going to beswell, which in fact was why the Company was edging me out. They wanted to plant a Facilitator higher up in the studio, to be in a position to do things like grab lost footage from the cutting room floor. You wouldn’t believe what mortals will pay for The Wizard ofOz stuff by the twenty-fourth century. And I’d been there too long, anyway. Joseph Denham, Studio Detective, had done a lot of favors and knew where a lot of bodies were buried. Too many people knew my name. Time to move on. So I set up a death that would make the headlines. Well, Variety’s headlines, at least. Scuba diving hadn’t arrived yet, back then before the war, but diving enthusiasts were already beginning to fool around with homemade apparatus and snorkels. I let all my mortal friends know I had a keen new hobby, and bored them with descriptions of the amateur dive equipment I was buying. Moved from my furnished room in Hollywood to a furnished room in Santa Monica so I could be closer to the sea. Let slip that I wasn’t really all that good a swimmer. There were a few people at the studio already, Garbo among them, who’d have liked nothing better than to see me drown.
I met my fellow cyborg Lewis at Musso & Frank’s for one last round of drinks while we went over what he’d tell the cops; that was Friday night. Saturday morning I was off to Santa Monica, where I parked my nice new Ford near the pier, bid it a regretful farewell, and carried my outsized duffel and striped umbrella to the nearest changing rooms.
Ten minutes later I was making my awkward way to the sea through all the other striped umbrellas, and, brother, was I a sight to behold. That was the idea, of course.
I had on a kind of tight union suit of black wool, with a hood over which I’d fitted a pair of goggles with the breathing tube and its little float clipped to the side. It would have been smarter to have waited to put on the rubber flippers until I was right at the water’s edge, but more people noticed me floundering across the sand with them on. Picking a likely spot, I flop-flopped up to it and set down my things alongside.
The couple in beach chairs—old mortals, always pick old mortals for your witnesses because they watch everything and they love to testify to cops—stared at me in amazement as I opened my duffel and spread out a little beach mat. Humming to myself, I laid out a rolled-up towel and opened my striped umbrella and stuck it in the sand at a jaunty angle. Finally the old guy said, as I’d been waiting for him to say:
“Christ Almighty, what’re you supposed to be? A frog?” .
“What?” I looked over at him in apparent surprise. “Who, me?”
“He’s some kind of diver, Harry,” said the old lady.
“Well, you look like a frog to me,” said the old man.
“That’s right, ma’am, I’m a diver,” I said, smiling at the old lady. “Not deep-sea, of course, I just sort of swim around the surface and look at stuff. It’s a great hobby. You see a lot of fish.”
“Is that so?” said the old lady. “Do you ever see any shipwrecks?”
“Oh, sometimes,” I said, fitting my goggles over my eyes, “but you have to be really experienced to explore a wreck, and I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks. I’m not very good at it yet.”
“Those things on your feet make you look like a frog,” said the old guy”Yeah,” I said, shading my eyes to look out at the ocean. “Say, look at those whitecaps! The water’s pretty rough today, isn’t it? I guess I won’t stay out too long. Would you folks mind keeping an eye on my things here, until I come back?” I leaned close to add, in a loud whisper, “My wallet’s in my bag with my driver’s license and everything, you know.”
“Sure we will, mister,” said the old lady. “You be careful, now.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said, and, squaring my shoulders, flop-flopped on down to the water. Adults stared, children pointed, somebody’s toddler shrieked with terror as I passed. I waded in and turned, once, to wave cheerfully at the old couple. Joseph Denham, confidant to the stars, makes his unforgettable exit!
I paddled around out there for a while, splashing like a clumsy mortal swimming, and I made sure they could see the yellow float bobbing like a lemon on the waves. Farther out, and farther out, just like a mortal getting careless in his enthusiasm. At last I surfaced for a little while, pulling in breath, oxygenating my tissues; then I dove, way deep down, and yanked off the float and let it rise by itself up to the glassy bright roof of the world. Turning, I swam away into the green darkness.
I headed north, past Malibu. By the time I was passing Point Mugu, I was pretty sure the old couple would have alerted the lifeguard that I’d failed to come back. The yellow float would have washed ashore, the only trace of me, because of course no body would ever be recovered. There’d be a brief homicide investigation, but I’d made it pretty darned obvious it was a case of accidental death. My will was in a shoebox in my dresser, along with the other papers that had affirmed Joseph Denham’s existence. Lewis would inherit my car and the small change in my bank account, along with the job of notifying the studio. A paragraph in Variety, a short service at Hollywood Memorial, and somebody else would take over my customary spot at the bar at Musso & Frank’s Grill. The hole that Joseph Denham had left at MGM would disappear in a few days.
Neat, huh? It certainly beat the last time I died of old age, when I had to lie in my coffin for hours sweating under appliance makeup and listening to the funeral mass drone on and on and on… And I
had no regrets. I’d died in Hollywood before and I knew I’d eat lunch in that town again some day, when my former cronies there were all tucked away under white marble at Hollywood Memorial or being wheeled around the grounds of the Motion Picture Home. The Company always needs a few of its smooth operators in the movie industry, just as it needs us in the mortals’ churches and governments: unobtrusive little guys like me to weight the dice of history now and then, or slip an extra ace into the deck. Nothing too obvious, you understand: somebody helpful standing at his Holiness’s elbow to supply that mot juste when he’s writing a papal encyclical, somebody to remind the senator where he left his pants, somebody to put a particular script where Mr. Hitchcock or Mr. Lucas will just happen to glance at it.
Yes, it’s an important job, all right. Most of the time it makes up for having no life of my own. Anyway I cruised on like an eel, ditching the snorkel tube and mask somewhere past Santa Barbara; I didn’t really need them and they dragged in the water. The big heavy flippers I kicked off around Point Conception. Streamlined as a seal, I went my merry immortal way, coming to the surface once in a while to breathe. Night fell and day followed it, and I was still heading north. There’s a place above Cape San Martin called Jade Beach. You really can find jade there, if you’re foolhardy enough to climb down the precarious wooden stairs from the clifftop to the sand far below. If the most recent winter storm hasn’t washed out the stairs anyway, it’s worth the uneasy descent. The place is all serpentine. The cliffs are green, the sand is green, the sea is green as emerald in that little cove. But there’s hardly ever anybody there.
I’ve only been there myself because I knew a girl who loved the place, a long time ago before the stairs were built. That’s another story.
The point is it’s usually deserted, which was why I’d come up here in my Ford two months earlier, hauling a Company-issue cachebox with me. In it were all the things I’d need to get started with my new identity: paperwork, clothes, keys, money. I’d buried it at the base of the cliff, deep under the gritty cobbles. It had been a lot of work, but all I needed to do now was dig it up. As soon as I did I’d be Leslie Joseph, with papers to prove it, on his way to a hot meal in Monterey and an apartment and a job in San Francisco.
It was late afternoon when I turned right and made my way through the kelp forests into the cove. I was dead tired and cold; I figured acouple hours’ snooze on the beach were in order before Leslie Joseph made his entrance. About a mile out I began my ascent to the surface, scanning to be certain there were no mortals around.
And, wouldn’t you know it… there was one right on top of me.
Literally, I mean. There was a mortal female struggling in the water less than a fathom above my head. As I stared up at her, open-mouthed, she began to sink.
Well, I had to do something. My official designation is Preserver, isn’t it? Maybe that was why, without even thinking, I shot upward like a cork and grabbed her, and a second later we broke the surface. All the same, it was a dumb thing to do.
We gulped in breath and she gave a feeble scream, staring at me with enormous black eyes. She struggled frantically for a few seconds and then hung limp, so I was able to get us ashore without wasting my breath on argument.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. She had to be a suicide; she was fully dressed, and anyway I’ve seen them often enough to know the look mortals get in their eyes when they’re determined to check out. She wouldn’t thank me and I hadn’t done myself any favors, either, by saving her life. What the hell was I going to do with her now?
I dragged her up on the sand and dropped her, and she lay there at my feet gasping, with her eyes shut tight.
“Please,” she said. “I changed my mind at the end. I really did. I, was trying to swim back. You must have seen that.” j
I peered down at her. Her hair trailed across her face like seaweed. She was young, maybe twenty, and from her clothes she wasn’t rich, wasn’t a farm girl either. Somebody’s stenographer, maybe? I saw the purse and the battered shoes on the last step of the cliff stair. She’d walked a long way in shoes that were meant to sit side by side under a typing stand.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” I said, which was pretty obvious but what else was I going to say?
“I’m sorry!” she wept. “Oh, you can’t take me to Hell! Haven’t I been there already, the last two days?” She got up on her knees to clutch at me, and I saw myself reflected in her desperate eyes: black-clad thing with a white face, like Death in The Seventh Seal, and looking none too good after two days in the water either, eyes still sunk back in my head and protective lenses still raised. Okay, she thought I was something supernatural. Maybe I could work with that. I’ve had to impersonate gods in my time, working with mortals, and she seemed half-crazed with fear already.
“This is nothing to the fires of Hell,” I said sternly.
But the girl was taking in the mundane details of my appearance.-the buttons on my suit, the sagging wool, the stubble on my unshaven face. Her eyes were still frightened, but her lip curled in rage. She looked around. She spotted her worn-out shoes, saw the dead fish stranded a few feet away, saw the broken pop bottles under the stairs.
“But this is—everything’s the same!” she shouted. “Everything’s dirty and squalid and it isn’t supposed to be this way still, not when you’ve died! Look atjouf What kind of Angel of Death needs a shave?”
“For your information, I’m the Angel of Death by Drowning,” I improvised, summoning all the dignity I could. “I work on a limited budget, okay? And you aren’t exactly dead yet, which is why you still see the world with mortal eyes.”
She said something nice young stenographers didn’t often say in 1938, not where they could be heard anyway, and sagged backward and hid her face in her hands.
I had three options here. I could let her swim out again and finish the job she’d started, which was what Company policy recommended in a situation like this: we’re not supposed to interfere in their mortal lives. That way I could recover my cache without a witness.
I could kill her myself. This would also solve my witness problem, but such action is against official Company policy, yet still happens anyway sometimes, more often than they’ll admit is necessary. I hate killing mortals, though. I almost never do it. Besides, the girl reminded me of somebody I used to know. It made me uncomfortable.
I wasn’t sure what my third option was. It probably involved some fast talking. So I cleared my throat and said:
“I wouldn’t use that kind of language, if I were you. You might very well be going before the Eternal Throne in a minute or two, and you’re in enough trouble already. What can have been so terrible you’d risk eternal damnation rather than live?”
The girl lowered her hands and blinked at me.
“Don’t you already know?” she demanded, looking scornful.
“Do I look like they give me all the details up there?” I countered, wringing out a fold of my saggy suit. Her look of scorn deepened. I decided to try a cold reading.
“I was told something about an office,” I said, and from her face and her pulse and respiration I knew I was right. “There was some trouble there—?”
“You can say that again, brother!” the girl said, laughing bitterly. “Ten thousand dollars’ worth of trouble.”
“That’s right,” I said. I noticed the grief below the laughter. “And love.” Right again. The laughter died away and her face grew terribly quiet.
“That was my own fault,” she said, in a voice a mortal couldn’t have heard below the boom of the surf.
“And he deserted you,” I guessed. She flinched. Right again. I usually enjoy batting a thousand, but today it made me feel lousy. Scanning her, I saw that at least she wasn’t pregnant. I sat down on the sand beside her. Love, betrayal—and money. And an office. How did they all fit together? Theft?
Embezzlement? I decided to try another angle.
“Why aren’t you mad at him?”
She didn
’t answer right away, but from the way she avoided my gaze, staring out to sea, I could tell I was still on the track. At last she shrugged.
“It was my idea, wasn’t it?” she said. “Maybe he’d have come up with the money some other way. He was in so much trouble and it wasn’t his fault he didn’t know how to live on a salary, you see. His people had always had money! Not like mine. He was raised with higher expectations. So then… once I’d told him about the Friday afternoon deposits, when I saw the way his face lit up… well, I knew we had to do it.”
“You still love him,” I said. I wasn’t guessing on that one; I knew, and so would anybody else, mortal or immortal, who saw her face as she watched the green water rolling in.
“I think he must have gotten scared,” she said. “I’m sure he didn’t plan it. I guess he got to worrying, with me asleep there and unable to reassure him. I guess he thought it would be just me the police would be looking for. Maybe he was afraid of what his family would think, if we were caught and it got into the papers.”