The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  The horror of my existence overtook me then, an acute awareness of the squalor in which I dwelt, the danger which surrounded me, and the dark mystery informing my universe.

  I wept for all that I had lost.

  Eventually, the sun rose up like God’s own Peterbilt and with a triumphant blare of chromed trumpets, gently sent all of us creatures of the night to sleep.

  ***

  When you die, the first thing that happens is that the world turns upside down. You feel an overwhelming disorientation and a strange sensation that’s not quite pain as the last strands connecting you to your body part, and then you slip out of physical being and fall from the planet.

  As you fall, you attenuate. Your substance expands and thins, glowing more and more faintly as you pick up speed. So far as can be told, it’s a process that doesn’t ever stop. Fainter, thinner, colder…until you’ve merged into the substance of everyone else who’s ever died, spread perfectly uniformly through the universal vacuum, forever moving toward but never arriving at absolute zero.

  Look hard, and the sky is full of the Dead.

  Not everyone falls away. Some few are fast-thinking or lucky enough to maintain a tenuous hold on earthly existence. I was one of the lucky ones. I was working late one night on a proposal when I had my heart attack. The office was empty. The ceiling had a wire mesh within the plaster, and that’s what saved me.

  The first response to death is denial. This can’t be happening, I thought. I gaped up at the floor where my body had fallen, and would lie undiscovered until morning. My own corpse, pale and bloodless, wearing a corporate tie and sleeveless grey Angora sweater. Gold Rolex, Sharper Image desk accessories, and of course I also thought: I died for THIS?

  By which of course I meant my entire life.

  So it was in a state of both personal and ontological crisis that I wandered across the ceiling to the location of an old pneumatic message tube, removed and casually plastered over some fifty years before. I fell from the seventeenth to the twenty-fifth floor, and I learned a lot in the process.

  Shaken, startled, and already beginning to assume the wariness that the afterlife requires, I went to a window to get a glimpse of the outer world. When I tried to touch the glass, my hand went right through. I jerked back. Cautiously, I leaned forward, so that my head stuck out into the night.

  What a wonderful experience Times Square is when you’re dead! There is ten times the light a living being sees. All metal things vibrate with inner life. Electric wires are thin blue scratches in the air. Neon sings. The world is filled with strange sights and cries. Everything shifts from beauty to beauty.

  Something that looked like a cross between a dragon and a wisp of smoke was feeding in the Square. But it was lost among so many wonders that I gave it no particular thought.

  ***

  Night again. I awoke with Led Zeppelin playing in the back of my head. “Stairway to Heaven.” Again. It can be a long wait between Dead Milkmen cuts.

  “Wakey-risey, little man,” crooned one of the Sisters. It was funnyhow sometimes they took a close personal interest in our doings, and other times ignored us completely. “This is Euphrosyne with the red-eye weather report. The outlook is moody with a chance of existential despair. You won’t be going outside tonight if you know what’s good for you. There’ll be lightning within the hour.”

  “It’s too late in the year for lightning,” I said.

  “Oh dear. Should I inform the weather?”

  By now I was beginning to realize that what I had taken on awakening to be the pressure of the Corpsegrinder’s dark aura was actually the high-pressure front of an advancing storm. The first drops of rain pattered on the roof. Wind skirled and the rain grew stronger. Thunder growled in the distance. “Why don’t you just go fuck your—”

  A light laugh that trilled up into the supersonic, and she was gone.

  I was listening to the rain underfoot when a lightning bolt screamed into existence, turning me inside out for the briefest instant then cartwheeling gleefully into oblivion. In the femtosecond of restoration following the bolt, the walls were transparent and all the world made of glass, its secrets available to be snooped out. But before comprehension was possible, the walls opaqued again and the lightning’s malevolent aftermath faded like a madman’s smile in the night.

  Through it all the Seven Sisters were laughing and singing, screaming with joy whenever a lightning bolt flashed, and making up nonsense poems from howls, whistles, and static. During a momentary lull, the flat hum of a carrier wave filled my head. Phaenna, by the feel of her. But instead of her voice, I heard only the sound of fearful sobs.

  “Widow?” I said. “Is that you?”

  “She can’t hear you,” Phaenna purred. “You’re lucky I’m here to bring you up to speed. A lightning bolt hit the transformer outside her house. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Your Nemesis—the one you call the Corpsegrinder, such a cute nickname, by the way—has her trapped.”

  This was making no sense at all. “Why would the Corpsegrinder be after her?”

  “Why why why why?” Phaenna sang, a snatch of some pop ballad or other. “You didn’t get answers when you were alive, what made you think you’d get any now?”

  The sobbing went on and on. “She can sit it out,” I said. “The Corpsegrinder can’t—hey, wait. Didn’t they just wire her house for cable? I’m trying to picture it. Phone lines on one side, electricity on the other, cable. She can slip out on his blind side.”

  The sobs lessened and then rose in a most unWidowlike wail of despair.

  “Typical,” Phaenna said. “You haven’t the slightest notion of what you’re talking about. The lightning stroke has altered your little pet. Go out and see for yourself.”

  My hackles rose. “You know damned good and well that I can’t—”

  Phaenna’s attention shifted and the carrier beam died. The Seven Sisters are fickle that way. This time, though, it was just as well. No way was I going out there to face that monstrosity. I couldn’t. And I was grateful not to have to admit it.

  For a long while I sat thinking about the Corpsegrinder. Even here, protected by the strong walls of the Roxy, the mere thought of it was paralyzing. I tried to imagine what Charlie’s Widow was going through, separated from this monster by only a thin curtain of brick and stucco. Feeling the hard radiation of its malice and need…It was beyond my powers of visualization. Eventually I gave up and thought instead about my first meeting with the Widow.

  She was coming down the hill from Roxborough with her arms out, the inverted image of a child playing at tightrope walker. Placing one foot ahead of the other with deliberate concentration, scanning the wire before her so cautiously that she was less than a block away when she saw me.

  She screamed.

  Then she was running straight at me. My back was to the trans-former station—there was no place to flee. I shrank away as she stumbled to a halt.

  “It’s you!” she cried. “Oh God, Charlie, I knew you’d come back for me, I waited so long, but I never doubted you, never, we can—” She lunged forward as if to hug me. Our eyes met.

  All the joy in her died.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s not you.”

  I was fresh off the high-tension lines, still vibrating with energy and fear. My mind was a blaze of contradictions. I could remember almost nothing of my post-death existence. Fragments, bits of advice from the old dead, a horrifying confrontation with…something, some creature or phenomenon that had driven me to flee Manhattan. Whether it was this event or the fearsome voltage of that radiant highway that had scoured me of experience, I did not know. “It’s me,” I protested.

  “No, it’s not.” Her gaze was unflatteringly frank. “You’re not Charlie and you never were. You’re—just the sad remnant of what once was a man, and not a very good one at that.” She turned away. She was leaving me! In my confusion, I felt such a despair as I had never known before.

  “Please…” I
said.

  She stopped.

  A long silence. Then what in a living woman would have been a sigh. “You’d think that I—well, never mind.” She offered her hand, and when I would not take it, simply said, “This way.”

  I followed her down Main Street, through the shallow canyon of the business district to a diner at the edge of town. It was across from Hubcap Heaven and an automotive junkyard bordered it on two sides. The diner was closed. We settled down on the ceiling.

  “That’s where the car ended up after I died,” she said, gesturing toward the junkyard. “It was right after I got the call about Charlie. I stayed up drinking and after a while it occurred to me that maybe they were wrong, they’d made some sort of horrible mistake and he wasn’t really dead, you know? Like maybe he was in a coma or something, some horrible kind of misdiagnosis, they’d gotten him confused with somebody else, who knows? Terrible things happen in hospitals. They make mistakes.

  “I decided I had to go and straighten things out. There wasn’t time to make coffee so I went to the medicine cabinet and gulped down a bunch of pills at random, figuring something among them would keep me awake. Then I jumped into the car and started off for Colorado.”

  “My God.”

  “I have no idea how fast I was going—everything was a blur when I crashed. At least I didn’t take anybody with me, thank the Lord. There was this one horrible moment of confusion and pain and rage and then I found myself lying on the floor of the car with my corpse just inches beneath me on the underside of the roof.” She was silent for a moment. “My first impulse was to crawl out the window. Lucky for me I didn’t.” Another pause. “It took me most of a night to work my way out of the yard. I had to go from wreck to wreck. There were these gaps to jump. It was a nightmare.”

  “I’m amazed you had the presence of mind to stay in the car.”

  “Dying sobers you up fast.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And without the slightest hesitation, she joined right in with me. It was a fine warm moment, the first I’d had since I didn’t know when. The two of us set each other off, laughing louder and louder, our merriment heterodyning until it filled every television screen for a mile around with snow.

  My defenses were down. She reached out and took my hand.

  Memory flooded me. It was her first date with Charlie. He was an electrician. The people next door were having the place rehabbed. She’d been working in the back yard and he struck up a conversation. Then he asked her out. They went to a disco in the Adam’s Mark over on City Line Avenue.

  She wasn’t eager to get involved with somebody just then. She was still recovering from a hellish affair with a married man who’d thought that since he wasn’t available for anything permanent, that made her his property. But when Charlie suggested they go out to the car for some coke—it was the Seventies—she’d said sure. He was going to put the moves on her sooner or later. Might as well get this settled early so they’d have more time for dancing.

  But after they’d done up the lines, Charlie had shocked her by taking her hands in his and kissing them. She worked for a Bucks County pottery in those days and her hands were rough and red. She was very sensitive about them.

  “Beautiful hands,” he murmured. “Such beautiful, beautiful hands.”

  “You’re making fun of me,” she protested, hurt.

  “No! These are hands that do things, and they’ve been shaped by the things they’ve done. The way stones in a stream are shaped by the water that passes over them. The way tools are shaped by their work. A hammer is beautiful, if it’s a good hammer, and your hands are too.”

  He could have been scamming her. But something in his voice, his manner, said no, he really meant it. She squeezed his hands and saw that they were beautiful too. Suddenly she was glad she hadn’t gone off the pill when she broke up with Daniel. She started to cry. Her date looked alarmed and baffled. But she couldn’t stop. All the tears she hadn’t cried in the past two years came pouring out of her, unstoppable.

  Charlie-boy, she thought, you just got lucky.

  ***

  All this in an instant. I snatched my hands away, breaking contact. “Don’t do that!” I cried. “Don’t you ever touch me again!”

  With flat disdain, the Widow said, “It wasn’t pleasant for me either. But I had to see how much of your life you remember.”

  It was naive of me, but I was shocked to realize that the passage of memories had gone both ways. But before I could voice my outrage, she said, “There’s not much left of you. You’re only a fragment of a man, shreds and tatters, hardly anything. No wonder you’re so frightened. You’ve got what Charlie calls a low signal-to-noise ratio. What happened in New York City almost destroyed you.”

  “That doesn’t give you the right to—”

  “Oh be still. You need to know this. Living is simple, you just keep going. But death is complex. It’s so hard to hang on and so easy to let go. The temptation is always there. Believe me, I know. There used to be five of us in Roxborough, and where are the others now? Two came through Manayunk last spring and camped out under the El for a season and they’re gone too. Holding it together is hard work. One day the stars start singing to you, and the next you begin to listen to them. A week later they start to make sense. You’re just reacting to events—that’s not good enough. If you mean to hold on, you’ve got to know why you’re doing it.”

  “So why are you?”

  “I’m waiting for Charlie,” she said simply.

  It occurred to me to wonder exactly how many years she had been waiting. Three? Fifteen? Just how long was it possible to hold on? Even in my confused and emotional state, though, I knew better than to ask. Deep inside she must’ve known as well as I did that Charlie wasn’t coming. “My name’s Cobb,” I said. “What’s yours?”

  She hesitated and then, with an odd sidelong look, said, “I’m Charlie’s widow. That’s all that matters.” It was all the name she ever gave, and Charlie’s Widow she was to me from then onward.

  ***

  I rolled onto my back on the tin ceiling and spread out my arms and legs, a phantom starfish among the bats. A fragment, she had called me, shreds and tatters. No wonder you’re so frightened! In all the months since I’d been washed into this backwater of the power grid, she’d never treated me with anything but a condescension bordering on contempt.

  So I went out into the storm after all.

  The rain was nothing. It passed right through me. But there were ion-heavy gusts of wind that threatened to knock me right off the lines, and the transformer outside the Widow’s house was burning a fierce actinic blue. It was a gusher of energy, a flare star brought to earth, dazzling. A bolt of lightning unzipped me, turned me inside out, and restored me before I had a chance to react.

  The Corpsegrinder was visible from the Roxy, but between the burning transformer and the creature’s metamorphosis, I was within a block of the monster before I understood exactly what it was I was seeing.

  It was feeding off the dying transformer, sucking in energy so greedily that it pulsed like a mosquito engorged with blood. Enormous plasma wings warped to either side, hot blue and transparent. They curved entirely around the Widow’s house in an unbroken and circular wall. At the resonance points they extruded less detailed versions of the Corpsegrinder itself, like sentinels, all facing the Widow.

  Surrounding her with a prickly ring of electricity and malice.

  I retreated a block, though the transformer fire apparently hid me from the Corpsegrinder, for it stayed where it was, eyelessly staring inward. Three times I circled the house from a distance, looking for a way in. An unguarded cable, a wrought-iron fence, any unbroken stretch of metal too high or too low for the Corpsegrinder to reach.

  Nothing.

  Finally, because there was no alternative, I entered the house across the street from the Widow’s, the one that was best shielded by the spouting and stuttering transformer. A power line took me into the attic c
rawl space. From there I scaled the electrical system down through the second and first floors and so to the basement. I had a brief glimpse of a man asleep on a couch before the television. The set was off but it still held a residual charge. It sat quiescent, smug, bloated with stolen energies. If the poor bastard on the couch could have seen what I saw, he’d’ve never turned on the TV again.

  In the basement I hand-over-handed myself from the washing machine to the main water inlet. Straddling the pipe, I summoned all my courage and plunged my head underground.

  It was black as pitch. I inched forward on the pipe in a kind of panic. I could see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing, taste nothing. All I could feel was the iron pipe beneath my hands. Just beyond the wall the pipe ended in a T-joint where it hooked into a branch line under the drive. I followed it to the street.

  It was awful: Like suffocation infinitely prolonged. Like being wrapped in black cloth. Like being drowned in ink. Like strangling noiselessly in the void between the stars.

  To distract myself, I thought about my old man.

  When my father was young, he navigated between cities by radio. Driving dark and usually empty highways, he’d twist the dial back and forth, back and forth, until he hit a station. Then he’d withdraw his hand and wait for the station ID. That would give him his rough location—that he was somewhere outside of Albany, say. A sudden signal coming in strong and then abruptly dissolving in groans and eerie whistles was a fluke of the ionosphere, impossibly distant and easily disregarded. One that faded in and immediately out meant he had grazed the edge of a station’s range. But then a signal would grow and strengthen as he penetrated its field, crescendo, fade, and collapse into static and silence. That left him north of Troy, let’s say, and making good time. He would begin the search for the next station.