Entangled in my thoughts, I don’t notice Ally approach until he taps me on the shoulder. I flinch away, half stand, spilling hot coffee over my wrist. I stand up, shake my arm, cursing and hissing.
“You okay?” Ally reaches out as if to touch the burn, then pulls his hand away.
“Just a scald,” I say through my teeth. “Too painful to be serious, you haven’t burned any nerves out. Warn me when you’re coming up.”
“I tried, you were just staring into space.”
“Are you going to just stand there? Get me something cold, will you?” I glare at him, my hand covering the burned spot.
Ally looks at me a second, then goes off and approaches the drink dispenser and returns with a can of Coke. “Here.” He passes it over to me. It isn’t as chilled as it should be—none of our machines are in perfect order—but it’s cooler than tap water.
“You’d better drink this afterward. I hate Coke,” I say, pressing the metal to my forearm. The burn still stings underneath, but the cold smooth surface numbs it a little.
“How’s things?” Ally says. His hands drum together in his lap, a sound that irritates me. His heels tap on the ground as well. He’s restless as ever, but his movements are awkward, out of sync with each other. I suppose he’s worried.
“Not great,” I say, keeping my face turned toward my damaged wrist. “But then they wouldn’t be. I’ll live.”
“Have you heard anything?”
“Nothing. Not since I was told what happened. I keep waiting for the phone call that says, hey, it was all a mistake. Think it’s going to come soon?” I try to grin at him.
Ally frowns. “You aren’t staying at your own place, are you?”
“No, but I’m not saying where I am staying. No offense.” I don’t want him to know.
“Whatever.” He turns his head away from me as he says this, cranes his neck to look at the clock, tapping his fingers on the back of the seat.
“You in a hurry?”
“No.” He sighs, and turns back to me. “Listen, Lo, can we go somewhere private?”
“What?” I stiffen. “I’m not in the mood for games, Ally.”
“No, I—I want to talk to you.”
“Talk to me here.”
“Can’t we go to your office or something?” Ally takes a lock of his hair and winds it around his finger; he pulls hard enough to hurt.
“Talk to me here, Ally. I’m not in the mood for cloak-and-dagger.”
He glances around, taps his hand against his jaw.
“No one’s going to listen,” I say. “Come on, what’s so secret?”
Ally chews his lip, then leans forward. I shift back in my seat a bit. I don’t want confidences. “I heard something, okay?” He speaks quietly. From a distance, he might be telling me anything. “Someone I know in Forensics was talking to me, he wanted my advice on bullet making.”
“Bullets?” The word comes out too softly, and I struggle to find my proper voice. “What, has he got a grudge against someone?”
“Listen to me, Lo.” Ally looks over his shoulder.
“You’re acting suspicious,” I say. “Everyone’s going to eavesdrop.”
Ally takes hold of my arm above the burn and shakes it. I say “Hey!”, but he shakes for just a second more before letting me go. He has to reach right across the couch to do it. “Lo, this is—look, just listen to me, okay? He was talking about the bullet Nate was shot with.”
I take my wrist away from him and tend it in my other hand. “What about the bullet Nate was shot with, Ally?” I don’t sound like myself.
Ally’s hands tug at each other, and he looks down at them. “They dug the bullet out of his head,” he says. “It was silver.”
“What are you talking about?” All my skittishness has frozen.
Ally stares down at the floor. Even through the rags of hair hanging around it, I can see his face contort. He takes a deep breath, and doesn’t look at me. “You remember after Johnny was killed? There were rumors going around that there was something odd about the bullet he was killed with. I just found out what was odd about it, Lo. It was silver.”
“Johnny?” I hear myself speak, like a child asking for someone in the dark.
“Yeah, Johnny. Johnny and Nate. That’s what I heard, that they were both killed with silver bullets. This guy from Forensics, he wanted to do a comparison of the bullets.”
My face is cold, disconnected from the rest of me, disembodied. “He thinks someone from DORLA killed them?”
“No.” Ally looks up at me. “No, that’s not it. He was asking about how well we guard our stores. And whether someone could make bullets on their own, homemade ones. I don’t know, I’m not Forensics and I didn’t see them. I’m just…He…” Ally rubs his face. His shoulders are hunched as he looks up. “I just thought you might want to know about it.”
TWENTY
Silver bullets.
When I was nine, I saw bullets being made. We were taken to a factory where machines whirred and flashed past and bullets piled up in great containers, not burnished as we’d expected silver to be, but dull. They could have been steel or lead. We tried putting our hands into them like lucky dips, but the metal was heavy and resistant, we couldn’t push through it. It was a standard trip to be taken on, every non school takes its pupils on tours of the factories where lycos spend their time manufacturing for us. Usually, the children are bored; the irony of lycos working to supply us only occurs to the grown-ups. An unpopular job. “I work in metal processing” is a phrase I’ve heard more than once. Still, the money’s good because it has to be, they’re better paid than steeplejacks or slaughtermen, and the factories are always humming. The graffiti on the walls and the rocks thrown at the chicken-wire-covered windows don’t stop the machines.
Mostly I was disappointed. I wanted the bullets to be shiny.
When you melt metal down, it holds together, heavy and lithe. I’ve seen them pour it. I think of the pain of boiling water on my skin, and when I imagine molten metal I can only imagine how it would feel to the touch. Thinking of pain of that caliber is impossible, like trying to invent a new color. Like trying to imagine things in Paul’s description of lune monochromatic vision. Or perhaps it would burn out all your nerves before you could feel it. Perhaps. It’s hard to believe that. No one gets used to the heat of hellfire. I don’t understand how anyone could melt down silver to make a bullet without fear of the heat overcoming them.
The human skull isn’t very thick. I used to think of human flesh as tough, because of an experiment I did when I was a child. I tried to bite my tongue. There was discomfort that rose smoothly to pain as my teeth pressed down, and the flesh thickened under them, became dense, fibrous, hard to get through. I wasn’t going to put it to the test, of course, not all the way, but I seemed to have discovered something. Under pressure, my tongue was tough meat; biting through it wouldn’t be easy.
It was only years later I understood that it wasn’t the resilience of my tongue stopping me. It was the pain.
I thought the skull was a fortress. Curved like the sky, smooth and beautiful, a stone-walled bastion for the butter-soft brain that carries so much inside it. But really, it isn’t so strong. A hammer will break through, without even needing much strength of arm. A chisel, a rolling pin, a lead pipe. A little fall will put a crack in it. Just the distance between eye level and the ground. It doesn’t need a bullet. Five or six feet will do the trick.
Johnny is rotting in the ground. The charge has gone from his body. With nothing to hold it upright, his flesh went slack, and now the microbes have him. Somehow they knew. His life left him and with it went all protection, and somehow the worms knew that it was their time, that they could open their mouths and bite.
Johnny will be pulp and curds now. Tiny creatures will have breached his surface. No violence in the grave, only hunger. Even that hunger will not be violent. Just insensate, relentless. Little spores will send thread-thin tendrils down throug
h Johnny’s arms and face, and nothing will stop them taking root. Soon, he’ll be honeycombed all through. Perhaps some of the skin is still left, but it wouldn’t be smooth to the touch. It will break under the impact of a fingertip, yield and sink into the teeming marsh beneath.
And Nate. They won’t let us go to the funeral. Just the family, we were all told. Only his own flesh and blood. But I know they mean to cremate him, and I’ve seen cremations before. A fine coffin of polished wood and gleaming bronze handles, a crest of flowers on top. Dignity, arrangement. Hair coiling in on itself, half-settled blood boiling within the flesh. The body won’t long withstand the flames.
You wouldn’t know it from the coffin. But then I look again inside my mind, and I see something else. A fallen tree, hewn and scraped and slashed into place. How much damage the wood took to become that handsome casket. And the lilies and orchids on the top are dying already, their spines broken when some diligent florist clipped them from the ground. More than one dead thing goes into the fire. Only the handles are truly free, the nerveless tranquil metal. It comes out of the mines to be fixed onto a wooden box, and scalds no living flesh when it melts.
There’s no reason, not a technical one anyway, why you’d make a bullet out of silver if you were hunting in the daylight. It’s too soft. There’s the question of the alloy, as well. We use a special combination, enough silver to trigger the allergy, enough hard metal mixed in to give them some stopping power. Silver isn’t a practical weapon.
It can only be a symbol. I can think of no other reason in the world why someone would put together an expensive, inefficient set of bullets and shoot two of my people.
It’s beyond insult. It’s beyond attack, beyond curses sprayed on our office buildings every night and fucking skins and bareback and night after night with teeth at your throat. It’s beyond being beaten up in bars and getting followed home and wearing gloves in summer.
Another part of me can’t take it in. I have a chilled, fragile urge to laugh, because there’s an awful comedy to this. It’s so perfect. Of course. They lay down rules that set us to guarding them from each other every month. We bleed and die and have to treat them with tender caution because if we hurt them the least little bit when they try to kill us, the next morning they’ll rise from their beds and sue. For this, they call us names and pay us nothing and let it be known that they despise us. Liberals hate our methods, reactionaries hate our kind, children laugh and the old shake their heads at the state of the world that has us in it. And finally someone takes silver, the one defense we have, the only thing in this life that hurts them more than it hurts us. They didn’t need to. A lead bullet would have done just as well. There was no need to use our only weapon, to flaunt and mock with the killing, to shoot at us as if we were…what was Seligmann’s word?
Soulless. Ghouls that walk among the living, shut out of the bright world and foraging on the edges. Be good, or the barebacks will get you. And perhaps it’s true, perhaps Seligmann thought himself in hell, perhaps he was afraid of us. I stood back and watched Nate beat him until he couldn’t sit up. And now I’m not even sorry. I should have let Nate kill him when we had the chance. Even as I think that, I know I wouldn’t have done it, not faced with a real flesh-and-blood man whose life was so far beyond me that I wouldn’t have dared snuff it out, but I’m not sorry for hurting him. There’s no pity left in me. Maybe that makes me what he called us, soulless, the spooks, the bogeymen. It’s not what I’d have chosen to be.
Someone thought they would make a grand gesture, find the best, most beautiful insult, so perfect you could mistake it for justice if you half closed your eyes. They found silver and melted it down and followed people I knew down the road to hit them in the back of the head with this final, artistic affront. Someone put thought and effort into this. They cared enough.
It’s an impossible desecration, beyond belief. But now that it’s happened, I can’t push it away from me, I can’t fault it. A silver bullet. Of course. What else? It’s the final wrong anyone could do us, the last twist, the perfect consummation.
TWENTY-ONE
Paul is already home when I get back. He rests on the sofa, his feet bare, a book held above his face—something about ancient Roman portraits with pictures in it. His soles are dusty, flat, the skin on them dark as hooves.
“Good day?” he says, sitting up and laying his book open-faced across the arm of the sofa.
“No.” I speak staccato, close off the word before it starts to shake.
“Bad day?”
“Yeah.”
Paul sets up a cushion for me, arranges it and waits for me to join him. I walk to the sofa and sit, upright, straight-limbed, without expression. “What happened?” he says, touching my hair.
I pull my head away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Are you worrying about Marty?” His face is sympathetic, and I feel an ugly thump in my chest. I haven’t thought about Marty once since Seligmann escaped.
“No. I said I didn’t want to…” It’s too much trouble to finish the sentence.
“Oh.” Paul puts his hands blamelessly in his lap. “Well, would you like to talk about something else?”
“I don’t know.” The words make no sense. I stare at the painting that hangs on his wall, a homemade thing, the canvas tacked roughly to the frame, the work of some friend of his. Bright fresh colors smeared into patterns, the paints not fully mixed so that different colors swirl together. The beauty of the materials. Adult finger-painting.
“Oh. See, that’s a problem. I’m going to have to not be curious about your bad day, which means we’ve got to talk about something else, or we’ll just spend the evening carefully not talking about your bad day. Very awkward.” He nods at me, not really serious.
“Stop,” I say. I raise my hands, parallel, touch my temples. The painting will never hang in a gallery, but there’s some eye for proportion in it, the colors are nice. I don’t want color. I want the world white and soundless, cool, air around me. If I get sick, perhaps I can lie on a wheeled bed in a tiled operating theater with a clean echo and people around me in thin safe masks, and I won’t have to move or speak.
“Hey. Hey, are you okay?” Paul shifts on the cushion, looks into my face.
“No,” I say, trying hard to make my voice normal. “No, not really. I—People were talking a lot at work about the boy who died, and it was—I’m upset, I guess.” I try to lighten up, but my laugh sounds bitter. “Not that I ever liked him.”
Paul puts an arm around me. I flinch, stop myself from pulling back. He rests his arm a moment on my tense shoulders, then takes it away.
“I’ve been thinking all day,” I say. “I’ve had enough thinking.”
“Do you want to go out?” Paul sits up, crosses his legs. “We could go to a movie. You wouldn’t have to think or talk about anything at all for two hours straight.” I twitch, stiffen my hands. That would be my reason for going to the cinema. It unsettles me that Paul can put his finger on it, drag it out into the light so casually.
“Or we could go to a meeting or something. I’ve got an old school friend whose boyfriend writes the most god-awful conceptual poetry and gives readings every other week; we could go to that. Last time I went he read out a sonnet that included a five-minute silence in between each quatrain and making faces every other rhyme. It was oddly compelling after a while. How about it? Maybe some schadenfreude would pick you up.”
“I don’t want to go out.” He can’t just pick me over, toss my faults from hand to hand like jokes. “I get enough looking over my shoulder during the day without adding the cover of night to any stalkers, thanks.”
“Oh. Sorry.” He strokes my hand. The tolerance burns my skin. “Well, okay, we’ll stay in then.” He rises, goes over to the window and pulls the curtains closed. Crossing to the cupboard where he keeps his drinks, a battered pine construction with old postcards of landscape paintings and a few cocktail recipes tacked to it, he crouches down
and pours me a glass of whisky. I didn’t ask for it, and it hasn’t been my habit to drink when I got home. Not while I’ve been living with him. He hands it to me, and I look at it without speaking for a moment. Then I raise the glass, knock back the whisky and set it down on the table with a hard clatter.
“Another?” He stands beside me. Something about him is poised, alert, as if he were standing on the balls of his feet.
“No thank you.” I stare at the empty glass. A little film of whisky runs down its inside and settles on the bottom.
Paul sighs, rubs his head. His hands open and close. Then he shakes them and comes around the back of the sofa, touches my shoulders, starts to massage them. His thumbs easily find the knots. By now he knows where my tense places are, on my back.
I wriggle in his grip. Once I’ve started, the pressure of his hands feels more and more and more irritating against my twisting shoulders, and I wrench myself away to find my hands have become fists. “Stop it!” I say.
“What?” He stands away, his hands raised as if innocent.
“Just—stop it. Stop treating me like an invalid.”
“I’m not.” He backs away.
“I—I don’t want it. I’ve seen you give me drinks, I’ve seen you rub my shoulders, propose trips. I know the repertoire. Stop trying to fix me.”
“I was trying to cheer you up.” He walks around the sofa to face me.
“Don’t try to do things with me.” I don’t know what I’m saying. Only that my hands are clenched and my shoulder blades are folded tight, there are straps around me, binding me.
“I’m trying to be nice, Lola.” He sounds almost as if he’s giving me warning.
“Nice doesn’t cut it. Nice isn’t helping. This isn’t a nice time.”
Benighted Page 24