She had been so sure.
There's plenty of money.
Had she known?
Isn't there?
Perhaps she had known. All along. Perhaps she had known, and had begged him to sign anyway, not caring what it might cost him.
I can't do it without your signature, Joey. They have to have the consent of a close relative.
And why hadn't he told her? Why had he kept his mouth shut? To spare her? Or to spare himself?
The game-show gave way to a commercial break, which included an advertisement for the House of Lazarus. Gordon Lazarus, sleek-haired proprietor, delivered his pitch from a well-appointed office. He sat, perched casually, yet in a bent-backed attitude of the utmost sympathy, on the edge of a walnut desk, with a marble bust of some patrician-looking Roman to his left and, to his right, a murky Augustan landscape in an ornate gilt frame. He gazed unwaveringly into the camera.
"There comes a time when each of us has to say goodbye to someone we love," he intoned. "For many, it is the most painful thing they will ever have to do."
The camera glided slowly in.
"But what if you could be spared that pain? What if you were able to remain in touch with your loved ones even after they had been taken from you?"
A slow, snakelike smile. Cut to a moving crane shot of the wall of fifty thousand steel drawers.
Lazarus, in voice-over: "Here at the House of Lazarus, years of research into cryogenic technology have borne fruit. The result? The actual moment of passing may now be delayed indefinitely."
The camera continued its swoop, finding Gordon Lazarus at the foot of the wall, standing in front of a family who were clustered around a single headset in emulation of some long-forgotten pre-television tradition, taking it in turns to talk to grandfather or great aunt or poor little junior who was torn from this world far too soon. For bereaved people, the family looked remarkably happy.
"Until recently, communication with the departed was the province of mediums and clairvoyants," said Lazarus. "No more. Here at the House of Lazarus we can keep your loved ones permanently at the threshold of the hereafter. I won't blind you with science. Suffice it to say that by stimulating the neural impulses that remain in the cerebral cortex we can enable your loved ones to talk and interact with you long after the breath has left their bodies. Though departed, they won't be gone. Though lost, they will live on." Another smile, this one ingratiating. "To find out more, simply e-mail me, Gordon Lazarus, care of the House of Lazarus, or call the free-phone number below."
A number appeared at the bottom of the screen in gilt-edged Gothic script.
With a spread of his arms, as if to say, It's that simple, Lazarus reached his conclusion: "The House of Lazarus. Where nothing is inevitable."
The image froze, and there was a brief burst of a jingle - a few bars of the chorus to "Never Can Say Goodbye" - and then a caption appeared:
THE HOUSE OF LAZARUS
KEEPING THE MEMORIES ALIVE
"Poor bashtardsh," muttered the drunk man next to Joey. "Let 'em resht in peash, thash wha' I shay."
It's for the best, his mother had said as he had signed the application form in the presence of the hospital-haunting sales rep. You'll see.
Through blurring tears Joey had appended his name to the form, which the rep had then taken and folded with a satisfied air, slipping his thumb and forefinger along the crease.
"We'll see to it that everything is in place," the rep had said. "For the final moment. It's essential that we are present for the final moment, in order to take possession of the body during the brief window of opportunity between physical shutdown and actual clinical brain-death. I'll make the arrangements with the hospital to alert one of our standby units when the time comes. Before that, we'll have to take tissue samples and carry out a few tests, including a full psychological profile. And then there's the question of payment..." He had raised his eyebrows meaningfully.
Joey's mother had strained and struggled to turn her eyes on her son again, to look at him, to beg.
Had she known? That there had been almost nothing left of the money his father had bequeathed to her? That after the government and the lawyers had taken their bites, there had been just a crust left over to pay for her treatment? That keeping her alive for six months had used up the very last of the capital?
Joey had to believe that she had not, that she had been too ill to make the calculations, that the sickness sucking on her like a spider had cocooned her from practical considerations. Otherwise... But the alternative was too awful to contemplate.
"Eastport," chimed the bus's PA system.
No one except Joey disembarked.
He was almost too exhausted to undress. He barely made it down to his underpants before the weight of his tiredness dragged him down on to the bed. With the last ebb of his strength he switched off the bedside lamp, and then he was rushing down into a darkness like every curtain in the world closing at once.
And at some point during the night he dreamed that he was standing over his mother's grave. It was a traditional grave, dug in traditional ground, with a traditional headstone carved with the name ARLENE DELGADO. Beneath that were the dates that bookended her life, and then the inscription:
A GOOD MOTHER
LOVED BY HER SON
The earth that covered her had not yet been grassed over, and when Joey prodded the side of the shallow mound of soil with one toecap it gave softly and loosely, spilling in a tiny crumbling landslide around his boots. He reasoned - with the illogical certainty of dreams - that his mother could only have been buried within the past twenty-four hours. He even vaguely remembered a funeral service.
It was a large, tomb-crowded cemetery, stark in winter, lit by a bright, unclouded sun, and he was alone. In front of him, not two yards beneath his feet, the body of his mother lay. It was almost impossible to believe that she could be so close and yet seem so distant. (Perhaps this was an alert part of his consciousness gently reminding him that he was dreaming; that his mother really lay elsewhere, halfway across the city.) If not for the earth and the lid of the coffin, he could have reached down and actually touched her cold, placid face. The idea made him quite angry. What a ludicrous convention this was, to shove the dead under a few feet of soil. It was a kind of masochism, to allow your loved ones to be left so tantalisingly near. The dead ought to be thrown into bottomless pits, where they could disappear for ever and be forgotten. They shouldn't be put where anyone with two hands and sufficient determination could dig them up again...
As he was digging up his mother now.
He had no recollection of falling to his knees and starting to hand-shovel the earth away. The dream edited that bit out in a jump-cut. All he knew was that he had scooped aside a few handfuls of dirt and that he was already scraping the lid of his mother's coffin. Not even the full six feet down! What kind of cheapjack gravediggers did they employ at this cemetery?
The earth cleared easily from the lid, rattling down into the gaps between the sides of the coffin and the walls of the grave. Suddenly, with dream simplicity, the lid was free from dirt, shiny and clean. Its brass fixtures gleamed in the sun. Six butterfly nuts secured the lid. Feverishly Joey unscrewed them, tossing each over his shoulder as it spun free. As the final nut was removed the lid gave a little jump, as though eager to be opened.
Here, the dream allowed Joey to hesitate. Seconds away from seeing his mother's face again, it occurred to him that she might not be a pretty sight. Already, even after only a day, decay and worms might have begun their work. Did he really want to remember her rotten and half eaten?
But no - he had to see. He had to see her for himself: lifeless, motionless, serenely and securely under death's spell.
He wedged his fingers under the lid and levered it up. It was surprisingly light, as though made of balsa wood rather than pine. It all but flew off, landing and bouncing on the graveside grass, finally settling upside-down to lie rocking gently to and fro.
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And now the unknown director of the dream decided to shoot everything in slow motion, and it took Joey what seemed like an eternity to transfer his gaze from the upturned lid to the opened coffin. He was anxious that he might wake up before he had a chance to look. So many of his dreams ended on precisely this sort of anticlimax. And having actually thought about waking up, he became more anxious still, because the thought usually preceded the reality. He forced his gaze towards the coffin, forced himself to stare in...
And even as he surfaced from sleep, to wake the customary three minutes before the alarm clock went off, he realised that he had known all along that the coffin would be empty. What else had he expected? His mother was lying in cold storage at the House of Lazarus. Of course she wasn't buried in any cemetery. Honestly, he did have the dumbest dreams sometimes.
But if only it had been that easy to dismiss the dream. All through the day, while he processed the orders that came through on the TeleStore computer and made sure that the correct packages were dispatched to the correct addresses, Joey couldn't shake from his head the dream's closing image: the gaping box, the lining of flesh-red quilted satin, the absence of any indication that his mother had lain there for even a second. Likewise at his evening job at the bar on Wiltshire Street, there was not a minute, not even during the headlong rush of happy hour, when he did not think of the coffin's mocking emptiness.
During a lull he mentioned the dream to Corinne, the bar manageress, who was into horoscopes and prediction and all that malarkey. She nodded authoritatively as he described the dream to her. "It's a classic guilt/anxiety manifestation," she explained. "The empty coffin symbolises the loneliness you feel. The red lining symbolises your pain and grief, which are still unresolved. The fact that you dug her up means that you're trying to confront your dilemma, bringing your subconscious uncertainties to light." Corinne smiled, glad to be of service. "Does that help?"
"Yes," he said. "It does. Thanks."
But it didn't help. Not one bit.
The trouble was, Joey could no longer remember his mother's face clearly. This had obsessed him all day, the obsession deepening as the day wore on and the work became more and yet more numbingly dull. In vain he racked his brain for an image of his mother that didn't involve her lying in a hospital bed with eyes full of fear and almost no flesh on her body. He tried to recall how she had looked when he was a child, and nothing came. He tried to think of a hairstyle, a shade of lipstick, a favourite item of clothing, anything that might jog his memory. No use. Any recollections he might have had of his mother before she fell ill had been supplanted by the image of the pitiful thing that had pleaded with him in the hospital, clutching a House of Lazarus leaflet in one skeletal hand. He could barely even remember what she had looked like then. His mother had become almost completely associated with an emotion, and that emotion was disgust, and the disgust smeared everything in dark, obscuring hues that hid facial features, expressions, gestures, kindness, love.
At midnight, when the bar closed, Joey mopped the floor, bagged the empties and left them out on the pavement for the recycling lorry, and then did not take the bus home. Instead, he took the bus across town to the House of Lazarus.
The receptionist was mildly surprised to see him, but no less displeased for that. This time she remembered his name straight away (it had, after all, been only a day since he had last visited). This made Joey feel uncomfortable. He preferred the formality of anonymity.
"Your mother will be delighted," the receptionist said. She obviously felt that, in successfully persuading Joey to come to the House of Lazarus more often, she had done her job well.
An orderly Joey didn't recognise took him through to the chamber. This man had either previously worked in a funeral parlour or else had decided that a sepulchral voice and a funereal pallor were appropriate to the job at hand. He talked with his lips alone. The rest of his face stayed immobile, like a wax death mask.
"Sir is familiar with the arrangements here?" he enquired as Joey sat himself down.
"Sir is," Joey replied, fitting on the headset.
"Then," said the orderly, tapping a last few instructions into his portable console, "have a most enjoyable conversation."
There were perhaps no more than three dozen living souls in the entire chamber (not counting the fifty thousand sealed in their sub-zero halfway houses), and while Joey waited for his mother's voice to manifest itself in the headphones, he looked around until he located the customer who was sitting closest to the door marked "STRICTLY PRIVATE", through which the orderlies came and went as required. The customer was an old lady with whom bereavement clearly agreed. She was talking animatedly into the headset microphone, stopping only to listen briefly and laugh before continuing her side of the dialogue.
When he heard the first muffled murmurings of his mother's voice, he hit the Mute button on the chair's armrest, slid the volume control down to zero, and started to talk quietly.
"I know you can't hear me, Mum. If it's any consolation, I can't hear you either. I'm sorry about this. It must be very confusing for you. You're probably wondering what's gone wrong. You're probably complaining bitterly. I'm sorry. This is just something I have to do..."
All the while, as he apologised to thin air, his attention was focused on the old woman. He was waiting for her to finish her conversation and hit Disconnect with her gnarled old finger, which would automatically summon an orderly.
And at last, after about five minutes, the woman began gathering her belongings together, settling her handbag on her lap in readiness to leave. One final goodbye, and then her hand went to the armrest.
Joey snatched off his headset and got to his feet.
He hadn't had a plan when he had taken the bus here instead of going home. He had simply been obeying an instinct, an urge. And even now, when he was about to take action, he still didn't have a plan. He was extemporising, using situation and circumstance to get him where he wanted to be: on the other side of the wall. For, he believed, on the other side lay the means of reaching Drawer 41 in Stack 339, and not just reaching the drawer but opening the drawer and looking into the drawer.
It was the dream that had done it. The dream had in fact supplied the answer to its own question: the coffin had been empty because Joey could no longer remember how his mother had looked. Adrienne had been wrong. The coffin represented his memory. And so he had to see his mother's face again. It was no longer enough just to hear her voice, to talk to her and listen to the disembodied replies coming from an electric void. He had to fix her features once more in his mind. He had to see her once more in the flesh. This was something which a standard burial did not allow but which the House of Lazarus made possible (or so the dream had seemed to be telling him, if a little obliquely). All he had to do was get to the drawer, pull it open, take a good long look, and he was sure he would never forget her face again.
He was already moving towards the door when an orderly came out to shut down the old woman's relative. The orderly nodded politely to Joey as he passed, no doubt thinking Joey was merely making his way to the main exit. The door crept shut on a slow sigh of its pneumatic spring, and just as it was about to close Joey stepped nimbly into the gap, holding the door back long enough to insert himself through.
He found himself in a white corridor that reverberated with the throb of all the hardware overhead. About ten yards along, set into the left-hand wall, was a door which Joey presumed led to the place where the orderlies waited when they weren't attending to customers. Opposite it was another door, marked "WC". At the end of the corridor, about thirty yards away, was a lift.
Joey was almost certain that he had not been spotted sneaking in behind the orderly's back, but he couldn't afford to hang around, just in case he had not been as stealthy as he had thought. (Even now the orderly could be tapping in his door-code, alerted by some vigilant customer.) He set off along the corridor at a loping jog-trot, scarcely able to believe that he had had the audacity an
d the opportunity to get this far. He was on the other side of the wall. The lift would surely provide access to each and every drawer. He was going to see his mother again!
He smacked the button to summon the lift, and the heavy doors trundled open. He was just about to enter the lift when the lavatory door back down the corridor opened on a crescendo of flushing water. Joey froze, and then, realising that this was precisely what he shouldn't be doing, skipped smartly across the threshold of the lift. Turning to face the control panel, he caught sight of an orderly in the corridor. It was the same funereal fellow who had assisted him earlier. Blindly Joey hit the first button his fingers found. At the same instant the orderly turned and caught sight of him. A startled look discomposed the man's waxy features.
"Hey! What are you -?"
The lift doors closed, cutting off the rest of the question.
The lift ascended swiftly. Of the three floor-levels listed on the control panel - Ground, Maintenance and Administration - Joey had, more by luck than judgement, pressed the button for the one he needed: Maintenance. When the lift hissed to a halt, the doors opened to reveal a gantry that travelled parallel with the wall, running some twenty feet above the ground floor. Like almost everything else Joey could see on this side of the wall, the gantry was painted white.
In front of Joey the drawers rose in their stacks, much as they did on the side he was already familiar with. The stacks stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see, and the mechanical hum was just as prevalent here. The major difference was that on this side the drawers were serviced by hydraulic cranes. In the distance two of them were moving with a slow and stately gracefulness up and down and along the stacks, each carrying a white-clad orderly in its cherry-picker. The cherry-pickers paused at each drawer to allow the orderlies to run diagnostic checks. Watching the two long mechanical arms rising and falling, Joey thought of a pair of long-necked dinosaurs engaged in some elegant, elaborate courting ritual.
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