Not So Much, Said the Cat

by Michael Swanwick

  I was about to go back in when Des slapped a hand on my shoulder hard. “I’ve got two items on my bucket list,” he said, speech slurred. “One is to get as drunk as I’ve ever been before. The other is to nail prissy little Miss Melissa there and make her bark like a dog. Mission A accomplished. You interrupted me in the middle of Mission B. Fair warning: I won’t help you break up any more fights. Somebody sets his own hair on fire, I’m gonna let it burn.”

  Before I could respond, he turned his back on me and was gone.

  So I went outside.

  It was hot without the air conditioning, but it was quiet too. My murderous pair had disappeared, gone to look for rocks to bludgeon each other with, was my guess. I walked a few steps away from the rec center prefab, and took a deep breath of that clean Mesozoic air. There was an acrid burnt edge to it from the accident, but I ignored that as best I could.

  What I couldn’t ignore was the fact that there were two moons in the sky. They made the night bright enough that I could see a herd of hadrosaurs nested down peaceably by the river—and that was over a mile away.

  I heard the door open again, and stepped back into the shadows. Sam came out with Constantine Chung, who was a moon-faced nebbish I’d always thought was entirely asexual. But from the way they had their arms around each other, I’d thought wrong. They disappeared behind the crater where the big expensive machinery that was supposed to bring us all home a week ago had been.

  So Chung was gay. Not long back, that would have been good gossip. Now . . . I went inside and got behind the bar.

  Somebody had to keep the booze flowing.

  “Sazerac?” Braydon Noyer loomed up before me, swaying unsteadily. A week ago, he was a big man. He was the head of the whole shebang, back when that mattered. Now he was just another drunk. His eyes opened and closed several times, as if he were having trouble staying awake. He tried again. “Can you make me a Sazerac?”

  “I can if you tell me the recipe,” I said cheerily.

  Braydon’s face did things and for a second I thought he was going to cry. He was looking at all the possibilities in the world shutting before him, one by one, like so many doors. So I rummaged around behind the bar. We were running low on everything. “How about a hard cider?” I popped the cap and put the bottle in his hand. He clutched it like a drowning man grabbing at a lifeline. “Last one I got.”

  Which, of course, meant it was the last one anywhere for the next sixty-five million years.

  Then Des grabbed Melissa’s top and ripped it off her, exposing her enormous breasts and making them swing. Melissa laughed a high shrill laugh that turned to a shriek when he grabbed her and squeezed. I grabbed a bottle and was about to coldcock him, when she stumbled back against the bar and hoisted up her skirt. So I put the bottle down.

  Nevertheless, I stepped in before things could go any further.

  “Outside, kids,” I said. “Not everybody likes to watch.”

  They left, Melissa giving me the finger on the way out. But she was pretty drunk, so I didn’t take offense.

  There was a brief respite on bar orders then—everybody had had far more than enough long, long ago—and I thought I’d go have a word with Ted. He was still drinking hard. Whenever anyone approached him, he glared them away. Not that many tried.

  Which was understandable. We were stranded here with the Chicxulub impactor on its way for reasons that everybody agreed were nobody’s fault. But if anybody was at fault, it was Ted.

  Ted looked like he could use a friend. But just as I was about to head his way, I saw that Cheryl had beaten me to it. Exactly as she had sworn she wouldn’t. She pulled up a chair and started talking intensely.

  I would have paid a lot to be able to hear that conversation.

  Then Bernie came over and said, “Pose!” I didn’t, but he took my picture anyway. “You’re the last one.” He ditched the camera on the bar, dislodging a small avalanche of bills. “I’ve now taken a picture of every human being on earth. Counting me, that’s forty-four.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “Why?”

  “Well . . . you know.” He swung his arms helplessly. Without his camera, he didn’t seem to know what to do with them. “There are only so many things you can do when you know you’re going to die. Get drunk. Punch somebody. Kiss a pretty girl.”

  “Yeah. I’ve been watching.”

  “It’s like we’ve all reverted to apes. The heck with that. I wanted to do something else, you know? Like you. You’ve been keeping everything peaceful. I admire that.”

  I couldn’t see any reason to lie. “Actually, I’ve been meaning to punch out Ted all evening. Only something keeps happening.”

  “Ted?” Bernie sounded surprised. “For the accident, you mean?”

  “Among other things.”

  “That’s crazy,” he said. “What would be the point?” And then, “Now in particular.”

  I was about to shrug when Ted shoved his table into Cheryl’s stomach and, lurching to his feet, jabbed an angry finger at her. “It’s your fault this happened. Your fault we’re going to die. Yours, you pathetic . . .” He reached for the right word, failed to find it, and settled for “slut!”

  Every voice was stilled. Every face turned toward him.

  Then he bolted out the door. The faces turned away and the conversations resumed.

  So it looked like I wasn’t going to get to punch out Ted after all. Deeply involved as I was in the fallout of his life, I was able to read more into his outburst than anybody else present, with the possible exception of Cheryl: That he never had loved her, not even a little. That she had never been anything but a convenient piece of tail to him. People reveal themselves under stress. Even with his life about to end, the sonofabitch wasn’t man enough to spare her a few comforting lies.

  Cheryl came running toward me. She was crying.

  “C’mere.” I opened my arms and Cheryl slammed into them. “Don’t take what Ted said seriously. He’s just—”

  “I thought he was playing a video game. I snapped off the screen because I wanted his attention. I was just flirting, was all.” She buried her head in my chest. “What a stupid, stupid, stupid thing for me to do.”

  All around us, people were drifting away. To see the fireworks, no doubt. There wouldn’t be enough time to do much of anything else.

  “It’s all water over the dam,” I said. “Let it go.” Cheryl was clutching my shirt with both fists so hard that it hurt. The cloth was wet with her tears. I would have been happier if she’d been crying because she’d killed us all, rather than because the guy she wanted didn’t want her back. But what the heck. When you’ve only got minutes to live, there’s no time to obsess over the side issues.

  Without thinking, Cheryl swept her head back and forth, wiping her nose against my shirt. Then she said, “Oh, Hank, I’m so sorry. You’re so good to me, you always have been. If only I’d fallen in love with . . . If only I could have. . . .” Finally looking up, finally looking me bleakly in the face, she said, “Life’s a real bastard, isn’t it?”

  “Hush there,” I said. “Hush, there. Hush.” I’d never loved her so much or wanted her so badly as I did then. I wished I could kiss her. But she was so fragile in that instant that I knew it would break her right open. “There’s nothing wrong with life. We just don’t appreciate it enough, is all.”

  OF FINEST SCARLET WAS HER GOWN

  Of finest scarlet was her gown;

  It rustled when it touched the ground.

  Even the Devil, with all her wealth,

  Had no such silks to clothe herself.

  Su-yin was fifteen when her father was taken away. She awoke from uneasy sleep that night to the sound of tires on the gravel drive and a wash of headlights through her room. From the window she saw a stretch limousine glide to a halt in front of the house. Two broad-shouldered men wearing sunglasses got out to either side. One opened the passenger door. A woman emerged. She wore a dress that covered everything from
her neck to her ankles except for a long slit on the side that went all the way up one leg.

  A thrill of dark foreboding flew up from her like a wind.

  The woman cocked a wrist and one of her bodyguards—Su-yin had seen enough of their kind to know them at sight—handed her a cigarette. The other lit it. Flickering match-light played over the harsh planes of a cruel but beautiful face. In an instant of sick revulsion, Su-yin experienced a triple revelation: first that this woman was not human; then that whatever she might be was far worse than any mere demon; and finally that, given the extreme terror her presence inspired, she could only be the Devil herself.

  Quickly, Su-yin pulled on her clothes—jeans, flannel shirt, running shoes—as she had been taught to do if strangers came to the house late at night. But she did not slip out the back door and run through the woods as she was supposed to. Instead, she knelt by the window and watched through the slats of the venetian blinds.

  The Devil unhurriedly smoked her cigarette, exhaling through her nostrils. Then she flicked away the butt and nodded. One of her underlings went to the front door and hammered on it with his fist. Bam! Bam! Bam! The sound was an assault upon the helpless house. There was a long silence. Then the door opened.

  Su-yin’s father stepped outside.

  The General’s bearing was stiff and proud. He listened politely while the bodyguard spoke. Then he gestured the man aside, dismissing him as irrelevant, and turned to confront the dark woman.

  She handed him a rose.

  For the space of three long breaths, Su-yin’s father clutched the flower, black as midnight, staring down at it in horror and disbelief. Then he seemed to crumple. It was as if all the air had gone out of him. His head sagged. Weakly, he half-turned toward the house, lifting a hand in a gesture that as good as said, “At least. . . .”

  The Devil snapped her fingers and pointed toward the limousine, where a bodyguard held open a door. She might have been giving orders to a dog.

  To Su-yin’s shock, her father obeyed.

  Doors slammed. The engine growled to life. Heart pounding, Su-yin sprinted downstairs. Snatching the keys from the end table by the door, she ran for the Lexus. She didn’t have a learner’s permit yet, but the General had taken her to the parking lot at the stadium when no games were in the offing and let her try the car out under his careful supervision. So she knew how to drive. Sort of.

  By the time she’d gotten down the driveway and onto Alan-a-Dale Lane, the limousine was almost out of sight. Su-yin drove as fast as she dared, the steering wheel loose in her hands. She could see the limousine’s red taillights in the distance and did her best to keep up, wandering off the road and jerking back on again. A truck swerved out of her way, horn blaring. Luckily, there were no cops about. But the limo pulled steadily away from her, dwindling on the miracle mile and then disappearing on Route One.

  It was gone.

  Su-yin mashed her foot down on the accelerator. The car leapt wildly forward and through a red light. She heard brakes screeching and horns screaming and what might have been an accident, but paid them no mind. All she could think of was her father.

  Her father was never a religious man. But when her mother died, he had emptied out the mud room and built a shrine there with candles, a framed photograph of his wife, and some of her favorite things: a carton of Virginia Slims, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a stuffed toy that had somehow survived from her childhood in rural Sichuan. Then he had gone into the little room, closed the door, and cried so loudly that Su-yin was terrified. He had seen that fear on her when he emerged, more than an hour later, his face as expressionless as a warrior’s bronze mask. Scooping her up, he had lifted her into the air over and over again until she laughed. Then he’d said, “I will always be here for you, little princess. You will always be my daughter, and I will always love you.”

  Su-yin’s hands were white on the wheel and there were tears flowing down her face. It was only then that she realized that she, the General’s daughter, was displaying weakness. “Stop that right now,” she told herself fiercely. And almost overshot the strip club in whose lot the Devil’s stretch limo was parked.

  Su-yin parked the car and composed herself. The club was shabby, windowless, and obviously closed. But where else could they have gone? She went inside. In the foyer a bearded man with a sleeveless shirt that showed biker tattoos said, “You ain’t got no business here, girlie. Scram!”

  “I have an interview,” Su-yin said, making it up as she went along. “An audition, I mean. With the head lady.”

  “You’re talent?” The man stared at her impudently. “Oh, they gonna eat you up.” Then he jerked his head. “Enda the hall, down the stairs, straight on to the bottom.”

  Trying not to show how terrified she was, Su-yin followed his directions.

  The hallway smelled of disinfectant, vomit, and stale beer. The handrail down the stairs rattled and some of the treads felt spongy underfoot. A lone incandescent bulb faded farther and farther into the distance behind Su-yin.

  Save for the sound of her own feet, the stairway was completely silent.

  Flight after flight she descended, the light growing steadily weaker until she was groping her way in absolute darkness. At some point, because it seemed impossible that the stairway could continue as far down as it did, she began counting landings. At twenty-eight, she bumped into a wall.

  By feel, Su-yin found a doorknob. It turned and she stumbled through a doorway into a dim red city. A sun the color of molten bronze shone weakly through its clouds. The air stank of coal smoke, sulfur, and diesel exhaust. Sullen brick buildings, scarred with graffiti, overlooked narrow streets where trash blew in the cold breeze. There was no trace of either her father or the Devil.

  Su-yin took a step backward and bumped into the side of a brick building. The door through which she had come had disappeared.

  “Where am I?” she asked out loud.

  “You’re in Hell, of course. Where else would you be?”

  Su-yin turned to find herself face to face with a scrawny, flea-bitten, one-eyed disgrace of a tomcat perched atop an overflowing trash can. He grinned toothily. “Spare a few bucks for a fella what’s down on his luck?”

  “I. . . .” Su-yin seized control of herself. She had to expect things would be different here. “Take me to the Devil, and I’ll give you whatever money I have.” Then she remembered that she’d left behind her purse. “Actually, I only have a few coins in my pocket—but I’ll give you them all.”

  The cat laughed scornfully. “I can see you’re going to fit in here really well!” He extended a paw. “I’m Beelzebub. Not the famous one, obviously.”

  “Su-yin.” She shook the paw carefully. Its fur was greasy and matted. “Will you help me?”

  “Not for the crap money you’re offering.” Beelzebub jumped down from the trash can. “But since I got all eternity with nothing better to do, I’ll help you out. Not because I like you, understand. Just because it’s an offense against local community standards.”

  Hell was a city like any other city save that there was nothing good to be said about it. Its inhabitants were as rude as Parisians, its streets as filthy as those of Mumbai, its air as tainted as that of Mexico City. Its theaters were closed, its libraries were burned-out shells, and, of course, there were no churches. Those few shops that weren’t shuttered had long lines. The public facilities were far from clean and, without exception, had run out of toilet paper long ago. It didn’t take Su-yin long to realize that her father was not going to be easily found. There was no such thing as a City Hall or, indeed, any central authority of any kind. Hell appeared to be an anarchy. Nor was there a wealthy district for the privileged. “It’s a socialist’s dream world,” Beelzebub told her. “Everybody’s equally miserable here.”

  The Devil could be anywhere. And though the cat led her up streets and down, there was not a trace of that Dark Lady to be seen.

  In a rundown park little better than a tras
h dump she came upon a pale-skinned young man sitting cross-legged on a park bench whose back slats were missing. His hands were resting on his knees, palms up, thumbs touching the tips of his forefingers. His head was tilted back. His eyes were closed. “What are you doing?” Su-yin asked him.

  “Curiosity? Here?” The young man continued staring sightlessly at the sky. “How . . . curious.” Then he lowered his chin and, opening his eyes, stared at her through a shock of jet-black hair. His eyes were faintest blue. “A pretty girl. Curiouser and curiouser.”

  Su-yin blushed.

  “Watch out for this one, Toots,” Beelzebub said. “He’ll talk the knickers offa you in no time flat.”

  “It seems you have a friend. In Hell. Inexplicable. Tell me what you see.”

  “See?”

  “See,” the young man said. “Hell is different for everybody. What you see is pretty much what you deserve.”

  “Then I guess I don’t deserve much.” Su-yin described the litter-filled park and the sad buildings that surrounded it as best she could.

  “No wasps? No flames? None of those nasty little things you can only see out of the corner of your eye? I begin to wonder if you belong here at all.” The young man uncrossed his legs, and sat like a normal boy, all elbows and knees. “In answer to your question, I was meditating, foolish though that may well seem to you. Against all reason, I appear not to have entirely given up hope. But I doubt that you’re interested in my story.”

  “I am, actually.” Su-yin sat down on the park bench beside the boy. Unlikely though it was, she couldn’t help hoping that he was nice. “What’s your name?”

  “Rico. When I was alive, I thought I was a pretty hard sort. I cut class, boosted cars, smoked reefer, had sex with girls. Oh, and I died young. That’s important. I was shot dead in my very first hold-up. I strutted through the gates of Hell like a rooster, convinced that I was the baddest, wickedest man ever consigned to damnation.