by K. W. Jeter
This was the one zone where McNihil’s vision matched up perfectly with exterior hard reality. The black-and-white movies inside his eyes might just as well have leaked out and congealed, thick and heavy, on the dark landscape.
He turned away from the window at his side and glanced around the interior of the train. The perceived aspects of the world outside had permeated the train as well. Empty, the seats’ torn vinyl extruded dirty-gray stuffing like infected tongues across the narrow floor’s mounds of rubbish. Spray-can placa, even more stylized than the previous century’s glory-days tags in the prescrub New York subways, flowed across walls, seats, windows, and the more permanent strata of trash, as though some judging angel had crashed a party gone badly wrong. McNihil couldn’t read the scrawled, looping words; he’d always found third-generation Huichol slang in Cyrillic characters somewhat beyond him. Mene mene tekel upharsin-he wouldn’t have been surprised if that was how it translated, given the nature of the territory they had entered. Weighed in the balance, thought McNihil glumly, and tossed out.
The meter-high graffiti included a psychotic drawing that didn’t need to be translated. In rapidly shaded Day-Glo, the artist had sketched a malevolently grinning skull, complete with dangling bony vertebrae for a throat. Some minimal animation had even been done, if that term could be applied to a depiction of corpse pieces. Enough sulfurous daylight slid in through the windows on the opposite side to trigger the paint’s remaining shutter-pixels, cycling the image through its program of one empty bone-orbit closing and reopening in a leering wink. The skull’s white forehead was splintered open, with uprooted male genitalia thrust through the chasm; a drop of bloodied semen sparkled and faded, over and over, like a false and deceptive pearl.
McNihil didn’t know, and didn’t care, whether the skull was the vanished artist’s self-portrait or an iconic homage to the passing landscape’s ruling deity. He was going down to see and to talk to his dead wife. Slumping lower in the seat, he folded his arms across his chest, though there was no chill in the air. On the contrary: the climate just south of L.A. was an unvarying hell, unbroken by either grace or rain.
“Don’t forget the mesolimbic dopamine system,” said a little voice right behind his ear.
He turned and saw no one. Which was all right with McNihil; he preferred the occasional random auditory hallucination to sharing a train car with the low-level businesspersons encountered farther north along the Gloss’s edge. Those could creep him out the most; he hated watching them busy in their seats, as they worked with the muscles and nerve endings from their brows to their chins converted to interfaces for their built-in databases and spreadsheets. A trainful of those types looked like a clinic for terminal Bell’s palsy victims, all of them winking and grimacing and twitching away. Some of them, McNihil had always suspected, were frauds, poor bastards who’d gotten downsized out of their jobs but kept up their fronts regardless, going through endless facial spasms to give the impression of productive labor.
Even that was better than seeing some of the graying oldsters, tapping away on their antiquated laptops. Especially the ones whose companies had made them have the Tiny Biz-y Hands™ manual-abatement operation. The sight of those particular poor bastards, with their squirrel-sized paws sticking out from their shirtcuffs, infant-sized fingers skittering across the hundreds of ideograms on combined English-Mandarin keyboards, always put a sour rock in McNihil’s stomach.
The little voice spoke again: “If you correlate the info from the ventral tegmental area scans… implications are clear…”
This time, McNihil caught the source. Literally: his hand darted up and grabbed a fluttering black image just above his head. The holo’d piece of E-mail stayed trapped in his fist just as though it were made of something more physical than intersecting beams from the geosynchronous satellites over the Gloss.
He could tell it was a data-scrap, something too broken and damaged to live much longer, the minute strength ebbing away as it scrabbled at his palm. Not even addressed to him; he didn’t pay for any accounts that covered a service area extending this far south. On a hunch, McNihil dug into his jacket pocket with his other hand and came up with the little cross on a chain that he’d shown the Bishop of North America. The E-mail scrap struggled harder in his fist, trying to reach the bit of cheap gold-toned metal.
The E-mail was Travelt’s. It orbited the cross dangling from McNihil’s hand, responding to some faint emanation of its dead addressee. The lack of any security encryption made him suspect that Travelt had written it to himself, a little personal-reminder memo. Of what?
Hard to say; the recorded voice had faded down to near-inaudibility. “… axons narrow… engine of addiction…” McNihil couldn’t be sure of the squeaking words. “… the hand on the valve…”
There was no point in trying to figure it out. McNihil pushed open the window beside him, just far enough to fling the chain and the cross outside. The fading, crippled E-mail darted after it and was gone, vanished from sight like a fleck of ash churned up by the iron wheels below. McNihil rolled his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.
A few minutes later, he felt the train come to a stop, the outmoded diesels up ahead wheezing and shuddering. In this segment of the Gloss, on a local milk run, the Rail Amalgam didn’t put its shiny new or newish rolling stock, its sleek maglevs and other high-speed bullets. Transit for visiting the dead called for rolling antiques, bolted-together retrofits, rust and grime that could be sent along the tracks more or less in formation, the heavy ghosts of industrial society. Unmanned, either by passengers or crew; a few black boxes had been wired to the engines, the embedded piloting systems linking up with whatever sensors and bar-code readers were still operational along the right-of-way. That was enough for the job; if any of the trains ceased functioning en route and couldn’t be fixed with more than a change of fuses or a simple board-swap, it was bulldozed off the tracks and left as a long parallel corpse, to decay into the underlying mulch of corroded metal.
McNihil hoped that wasn’t going to be the case right now; he didn’t want to get out and walk the rest of the way to his destination. He could hear, rattling through the train’s loose-jointed steel bones, the various servo-mechanisms desultorily futzing around with the engines, trying to get them going again. Something clanked, metal on metal, one blow after another; the image came to him of some articulated iron arm, speckled with rust and oil spots, swinging a sledgehammer or a giant boilermaker’s wrench against the dented side of the ancient diesels, a last low-tech resort.
The clanging sounds continued as McNihil gazed out the window. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have minded the prospect of hoofing it the couple of hours it would take to get to his dead wife. Even in a depressing territory like this, the notion of seeing her again would have made the trek semibearable. Those were other times, Jack, he told himself. Coming down here before, he’d been on no other mission except seeing her, for no reason but to twist tighter the little knot of guilt that lay beneath his heart. If not pleasure, there was always a certain broken-tooth satisfaction to be gotten out of such a grim excursion, the confirming knowledge of just how much of a sonuvabitch one could be. And had been.
On the other side of the dust-mottled glass, a few slowly moving figures could be seen, going about their business in the rubble and ashes. The vaguely human shapes-they were so hunched over in their rags that it was difficult to make out their true forms-had devolved much farther down the scale than their beggarly counterparts in the cities elsewhere in the Gloss. The communard panhandlers and hustlers that McNihil usually encountered on his travels still had some detectable barrier between themselves and their surroundings, an envelope on one side of which was the however-loathsome definition of human, and on the other side was insentient matter. In this bleak territory, that border phenomenon had been erased: here, whatever looked and/or acted more-or-less human-usually less-did so as a point on a continuum that ran back down into the trash and rubble filling the
streets and burnt-out building hulks. As if muck and sun-withered debris had become such a basic constituent of this part of the universe, the way hydrogen atoms abounded everywhere else, that it could have begun its own hobbled evolution, knitting together creatures from scraps of old, greasy fast-food wrappers and flaccid, discarded condoms. Instead of dead things, perhaps they were the yet-to-be-alive, lifting their soft faces from the rotting Eden they were to inherit, prepared for them by a God of Discards…
A sudden jolt snapped through the seat and into McNihil’s spine; the train lumbered into motion, as though pulling itself from the mire that had trapped other great beasts. The scene outside the window began to slide farther back along the rails. A small breath of gratitude eased from beneath McNihil’s breastbone. Another few moments and the rag-picking shamblers, the bottom stratum of this zone’s animated dead, would have looked up and spotted his face. They would have lifted their hollow-eyed gaze to his, then nodded slowly. Saying without words: Pass on, Traveler. As we are, so shall you be.
“How was your trip?” His dead wife looked up at him as he walked through the door. “Was it all right getting here?”
From his shoulder, McNihil eased the strap of the bag he’d brought with him. The train from the land of the nominally living to that of the officially dead had finally creaked and wheezed into the local station, like a senile long-distance runner clutching his chest and expiring as he collapses across the finish line. The station, the same one at which McNihil always disembarked when he visited his wife, was really just the place where the tracks came together from different directions, including the no-longer-functioning ones that ran into the east, into the center of the continent. Whatever came out of here, the pretty boys and girls who were the heartland gene pool’s only viable export, arrived on foot. As had McNihil at the place where his wife existed-the word lived was too cruel a misnomer to be applied in her situation.
“It was okay. About like usual.” He sat the bag down on the kitchen table, a rickety construct of plywood sheeting with reinforced fiberboard boxes for legs. As with most things in this territory, it survived from day to day, caught somewhere in the process of collapse and dissolution. The table wobbled and bent under the slight weight of the shoulder bag; the nails-which McNihil himself had hammered in-gave small, harsh cries as the loose joints twisted against each other. “Nothing happened on the way, at least.” He turned a minimal smile in his dead wife’s direction. “For me, that makes it a nice trip.”
She said nothing, but went on watching him with her ’d-out eyes. Empty, but not in the way that living persons’ eyes so often were, when they had let their souls ratchet down into a state of pure mercantile hunger. Hungry, McNihil had told himself more than once, is not her problem. Not anymore. In that sense, she had an advantage over both the living and the other dead. He could console himself with the notion that he’d done that much for her, at least.
“I suppose you brought me stuff.” She sat beside the table, in an only slightly less fragile chair. If she’d possessed more mass than was typical for the long-term, animated dead, the chair might have collapsed beneath her; as it was, she had no more effect on it than a ghost or living memory would have. “You always bring me these little things.” In one hand, held near her face, a cigarette slowly drifted a gray trail through the dusty air. The pack had been one of the gifts McNihil had brought her the last time he’d come down here. She didn’t smoke, not in the sense of drawing anything into her motionless lungs. But the spark and ash were reminders of her previous existence. And of mine, brooded McNihil. “I appreciate your thoughtfulness,” his dead wife said.
He would’ve preferred it if she had screamed like some sudden banshee and buried a knife in his heart, one of physical metal to match the invisible one whose blade he felt turning there. But perhaps that was why, he knew, she didn’t do any such thing. Besides not being her style, it would have made it all too easy-and over-for him. She still loved him enough to torture him.
Nodding slowly, McNihil zipped open the shoulder bag and started pulling its contents out onto the flimsy table. The items were all bright and shiny and new, things from the land of the living. They didn’t have to be expensive, he knew, though sometimes he spent the money anyway, just as one of the milder forms of self-laceration available to him. Stuff that wasn’t even anything his wife had cared for when she’d been alive:
• fast food in self-heating structural-foam containers, with full-motion figurines from this week’s disnannie dancing on top;
• collect-the-set chocolate bars with the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh installments of an updated Story of Job on the wrapper, the little 3-D panels filled with images of a multi-car pileup on some anachronistic freeway and garishly bright blood pooling on the floor of a hospital triage room;
• postliterate romance novels with audio chips sighing and moaning in synch with the nearest ovulation cycle that the built-in hormone sensors could pick up.
Downscale consumer goods, effluvia from the cheap-’n’-nastiverse, glittering with an enticing pseudo-life. Which was already dying, even before the tiny microbatteries, lightsucks, and other power sources could be exhausted. McNihil looked at the bright things that he had carried down here, and saw them visibly fading, the little dancing figures hobbled in their paso dobles and quadrilles, slowing down and going inert in hunched-over postures, like a miniature gallery of terminal osteoporosis.
He gazed down into the illusory depth of the romance covers, like windows into a nobler, more sun-filled world, tilted ninety degrees and laid out flat. The optic traps caught sight of his irises and responded by deepening the images, the red-streaked oceans stretching out even farther to impossible sunsets, the great doors of the Regency ballrooms swinging open to reveal curve-swept grand staircases, high arched windows overlooking Capability Brown gardens silvered with perfect moonlight. Designed to entice: a part of McNihil wanted to dive into those soft vistas and fall gravityless through them forever. But even as he looked into them, the liveried, bewigged footmen holding back the brocade curtains were growing old and shriveled, their faces crepe-paper masks. The buccaneer oceans filmed over with toxic oil slicks, the slow waves washing anoxic, aborted creatures against the ships’ rotted wood. Lovers gazed into each other’s hollow eye sockets, yellowed skull-teeth visible through the papery skin of their withering faces. Their embraces had become huddling refuges from the chill winds sliding through broken glass and brownly corrupted palm fronds; their kisses had been delayed too long, and now could only be consummated in the skin-deep grave between their hearts.
McNihil’s dead wife brushed a hand across the once-bright things he had brought her. ”I don’t really know why you do this, though.” The cigarette in her other hand continued to burn on its own, maintaining its brief spark of life. “It must be sad for you. You come all this way, and you give me this stuff… and look.” She pushed one of the fast-food containers with the tip of a thin finger. Its imbedded power sources had already run out of juice, leaving the cartoon images gray and drained of what little pseudo-life they’d had. A slow shake of the head: “That’s what happens down here.” McNihil’s dead wife looked up at him. “That’s what happened to me. Isn’t it?”
He said nothing to contradict her, though technically she was wrong. The once bright and now fading bits of the other world-their life, or imitation of such, had still been in motion when McNihil had crossed the border of this territory. Whereas she’d been dead already when she’d been brought here, her lungs gutted out by viral mesothelioma to the point where that other world’s life-support machines-what a laugh-hadn’t been doing anything more than inflating, deflating, reinflating a cold flesh balloon with her empty-eyed face attached.
“It didn’t happen to you,” lied McNihil. “You didn’t fade.” The impulse hit him, to sweep the rapidly dulling trash from the table with his forearm. “You’re still beautiful.”
She smiled indulgently. “In my way, I suppose.” She
put the cigarette to her pale lips, though the smoke wasn’t drawn in, trickling slowly by her ashen cheek instead. “How does the old poem have it? The Coleridge-is it ‘Life-in-Death’ or ‘Death-in-Life?’”
“I don’t remember.” Though in fact, he could hear some of the lines being recited in his head. Her lips were red, her looks were free, / Her locks were yellow as gold: / Her skin was white as leprosy, / The nightmare Life-in-Death was she, / Who thicks man’s blood with cold… If McNihil looked at her in a hard way, without the blurring overlay of memory, that was what she reminded him of. It wasn’t pleasant; he preferred to let his mental vision go subtly out of focus, to turn his head and see, from the corner of his eye, something closer to the woman who was alive in the unforgotten past.
“You didn’t come down here to discuss poetry. At least, not this time.” McNihil’s dead wife leaned an elbow on the wobbling table. Gray ashes drifted across the stricken lovers on the romance novels. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”
That was how it was, dealing with the dead; they always knew stuff. The virtue, the advantage of death; their vision wasn’t occluded, betrayed by simple things like memory, dreams, hope. McNihil wasn’t the first to discover that the dead were wired into cold reality, in a way that the living could never be.
The entire economy of the dead-the indeadted-and of the dead territory in which they existed, depended on that relationship. Which varied: there were high-functioning corpses such as McNihil’s wife, and low-level scrabblers such as the ones he had seen from the window of the train coming down here. A lot resulted from whatever shape the particular deceased was in when the reanimating transition was made. If some poor bastard had scoured out his neural pathways with various pharmaceuticals, reduced the cortex in his skull to a red sponge squeezed down to its last endorphins and catecholamines, then all the batteries and add-on sensors and motivational prods that could be retrofitted onto his chill-cased spinal column weren’t going to make him into anything more than a shambling scrap-picker. The little scattered herd of unfortunates out along the tracks used their low-grade but effective skills to pluck out recyclable metals or anything else of possible value from the rubbish heaps that the garbage-laden trains dumped off twice a day. Cheaper to let the idiot dead scavenge and collect, in their slow, hunched way, than spend the money for automated scanning machinery to do the same thing.