Worlds Seen in Passing

by Irene Gallo

  He staggered down to the yard and stood cliff side, looking at the ocean.

  Veronica Glass said, “It’s quite the party, isn’t it?”

  “It’s that all right. What madness have you prepared for tonight?”

  “You started this, Ben,” she said. “We chanced to meet on Vinnizi’s lawn, nothing more. You’re the one that wanted to talk about my work. You’re the one that showed up uninvited at my door.”

  The wheeling lasers painted her face in shifting arcs of green and red. They illuminated the sheer material of her dress, exposing the shadows of her hips and breasts. Against his will, he found himself aroused all over again, by her or by her work, he could not say for sure. Probably both, and as if to deny this truth about himself—and what else was art to do if it didn’t strip away our masks and expose us raw and naked to the world?—as if to deny this truth, he took a step toward her.

  “It’s anatomy, nothing more,” he said. “It’s cruelty.”

  “The world is a cruel place,” she said. “Perhaps you’ve noticed.”

  An image of the sectioned arm possessed him, its imploring hand lifted in adjuration like Vinizzi’s hand. An image of the flayed leg, the head on its pedestal, its mouth sewn shut against a scream. An image, most of all, of the ruined and dying world.

  His hand lashed out against his will. The blow rocked her. She wiped blood from her lip and held it up for him to see. “You prove my thesis,” she said. And turning, “You could have had me, Ben. You saw the truth and you could have possessed it. It was within your grasp. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. Isn’t that what you believe? Let me show you the beauty that lies at the heart of ugliness. Let me show you the heart of ruin. Let me show you truth.”

  She didn’t wait to see if he would follow. But he did, helpless not to. Up the stairs. Across the verandah. Into the great glassed-in room. She touched a switch. The music died. The lasers ceased to sculpt the dark. The lights came up.

  “It’s time,” she announced to the silent crowd.

  She led them murmuring through a cleverly disguised door, and down a broad stairway. A cold amphitheater lay at the bottom. Enormous flat-panel screens had been mounted overhead, at an angle facing the audience. On the floor below them, gently sloping toward a central drain, Veronica had readied the tools of her trade: an X-shaped surgical table, upholstered in black; bone saws and scalpels and anatomical needles for pinning back flesh; rolls of clear silicon.

  Even as Veronica began to speak, Ben knew with a sick certainty what she planned to do. “The body is my canvas,” she said, “the scalpel my brush.” Her audience mesmerized looked on. “I sculpt the living human flesh in ways that unveil to the unseeing eye both our fragility and our strength, our capacity for love and our capacity for cruelty. As ruin closes in upon us, let my art unfold on the canvas of your flesh: the glorious art of death—prolonged, painful, beautiful to behold.”

  She paused.

  “I have a friend”—and here she fixed Ben, in the third row from the bottom, with her gaze—“I have a friend who equates beauty with truth, who believes that art serves something other than its own ends. I did not always countenance this, but my friend convinced me otherwise. For there is beauty in pain and in our capacity, our courage, to bear it. There is beauty in death, and in that beauty lies a truth, as well—the truth of the ruin that every day engulfs us, that has awaited us from the moment we came screaming from the womb, when we were hurled into a world indifferent to our suffering. In these, the last days of Cerulean Cliffs, we have seen our little assays in the art of death. I propose that you transcend these small attempts. We are all artists here. I challenge you to pass from this world as you have lived in it, to make your death itself your final masterpiece.”

  She paused.

  Silence fell over the amphitheater, an undersea silence fathoms deep, the silence of breath suspended, of heartbeats held in abeyance. Ben scanned the crowd, searching for Lois—for Stan and MacKenzie, for Cecy—Cecy who had been born into a world of ruin and death. There. There. There and there. He feared for them every one, but he feared for Cecy most of all.

  Someone stirred and coughed. A chorus of murmurs echoed in the chamber. A man shifted, braced his hands upon his armrests, and subsided into his seat. Veronica Glass stood silent and unmoved. Another moment passed, and then, because Cerulean Cliffs had long since plunged into desperation and despair, and most of all perhaps because ruination and devastation would soon overwhelm them every one, a woman—lean and hungry and mad—stood abruptly and said, “I will stand your challenge.”

  She walked down to the arena floor. Her heels rang hollow in the silence. When she reached Veronica Glass, they exchanged words too quiet to make out, like the wings of moths whispering in the corners of the room. The woman disrobed, letting her clothes fall untended around her feet. Her flesh was blue and pale in the chill air, her breasts flat, her shanks thin and flaccid. Silent tears coursed down her narrow face as she turned to face them. Veronica strapped her to the table, winching the bands cruelly tight: at wrist and elbow, ankle and knee; across her shoulders and the mound of her sex. Her head she harnessed in a mask of leather straps, fastened snugly under the headrest.

  “What you do here, you do of your own will,” Veronica said.

  “Yes.”

  “And once begun, you resolve not to turn back.”

  “Yes,” the woman said. “I want to die.”

  The screens lit up with an image of the woman strapped to the table. Veronica turned to face the audience. She donned gloves and goggles, a white leather apron—and began. Using a scalpel, she drew a thin bead of blood between the woman’s breasts, from sternum to pubis, and then, with a delicate intersecting X, she pulled back each quarter of flesh—there was an agonizing tearing sound—to unveil the pink musculature beneath. The woman arched her back, moaning, and Cecy—Cecy who had known nothing but ruin in her short life—Cecy screamed.

  Ben, startled from a kind of entranced horror, held Veronica Glass’s gaze for a moment. What he saw there was madness and in the madness something worse: a kind of truth. And then he tore himself away. Lurching to his feet, he shoved his way through the seated masses to scoop Cecy up. He clutched her against his breast, soothing her into a snarl of hiccupping sobs. Together, his arms aching, they stumbled to the aisle.

  “You have to walk now,” he said, setting her on her feet. “You have to walk.” Cecy took his hand and together they began to climb the steps of the arena.

  There was a rustle of movement in the stands. Ben looked around.

  MacKenzie, weeping, had begun to make her way to join them, Lois too, and Stan.

  They were almost to the cliffside when the screaming began.

  * * *

  So ended the last suicide party at Cerulean Cliffs—or at least the last such party attended by Ben and his companions. Over the next few days they gradually shifted back to a diurnal schedule. Stan dug up an old bicycle pump to inflate Cecy’s soccer ball, and they spent most afternoons on the lawn, playing her incomprehensible games. There was no more talk of trading partners. Their drinking and drug use dwindled: a beer or two after dinner, the occasional joint as twilight lengthened its blue shadows over the grass.

  Late one morning, Ben and Stan made another pilgrimage inland. They traded off carrying a small cooler and when they reached the edge of the devastation—they didn’t have far to go—they stretched out against the trunk of a fallen tree and drank beer. Ruin had made deep inroads into the driveway by then. The weeds on the shoulders of the rutted lane had crumbled, and the gravel had melted into slag. Scorched-looking trees had turned into charred spikes, shedding their denuded branches in slow streamers of dust. Ben finished his beer and pitched his bottle out onto the baked and fractured earth. Ruin took it. It blackened and cracked as if he’d hurled it into a fire and began to dissolve into ash.

  “It won’t be long now,” Stan said.

  “It will be long enough,” Ben said, twisti
ng open a fresh beer.

  They toasted one another in silence, and walked home along the winding sun-dappled road under trees that would not see another autumn. Ben and Lois made slow, languorous love when he got back, and as he drowsed afterward, Ben found himself thinking of Veronica Glass and whether she had fallen to ruin at last. And he found himself thinking too of the poet, Rosenthal, who’d chosen ruin over discipline in the end, who’d surrendered up his art to death. “I write the truth as I see it,” he’d said, or something like that, and if there was no ultimate truth here in the twilight of all things—or if there never had been—there were at least small truths, small moments worthy of preservation in rhyme, even if it too would fall to ruin, and soon: Cecy’s cries of joy; and the sound of breakers on a dying beach and the gentle touch of another human’s skin. Art for art’s sake, after all.

  “Maybe I’ve been wasting my time,” he told Lois.

  “Of course you have,” she said, and that afternoon he sat at a sunlit table in the kitchen, licked the tip of his pencil, and began.

  DALE BAILEY lives in North Carolina with his family, and has published three novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.). His short fiction, collected in The Resurrection Man’s Legacy: And Other Stories, has won the International Horror Guild Award and has been twice nominated for the Nebula Award.

  Breaking Water

  Indrapramit Das

  Krishna is quite unsettled when he bumps into a woman’s corpse during his morning bath in Kolkata’s Hooghly River, yet declines to do anything about it—after all, why should he take responsibility for a stranger? But when the dead start coming back to life en masse, he rethinks his position, and the debate around how to treat these newly risen corpses gets a lot more complicated. Shirley Jackson Award nominee. Edited by Liz Gorinsky.

  1. Breaking Water

  At first, Krishna thought the corpse was Ma Durga herself. A face beneath sun-speckled ripples—to his eyes a drowned idol, paint flaking away and clay flesh dissolving. But it was nothing so sacred as a discarded goddess. The surface broke to reveal skin that was not painted on, long soggy hair that had caught the detritus of the river like a fisherman’s net. Krishna had seen his mother’s dead body and his father’s, but this one still startled him.

  Krishna dragged the body from the shallows to the damp mud of the bank, shaking off the shivers. He covered her pickled body with his lungi, draping it over her face. He returned to the winter-chilled waters of the Hooghly naked and finished his bath. The sun emerged over the rooftops of Kolkata, a peeled orange behind the smoky veil of monoxides, its twin crawling over the river. Morning reflections warmed the tarnished turrets of Howrah Bridge in the distance, glistening off the sluggish stream of early traffic crossing it.

  Other bathers came and went, only glancing at the body. When Krishna returned to the bank, a Tantric priest was crouched over the dead woman. The priest, smeared white as a ghost with ash paste, looked up at Krishna.

  “Is this your wife?” the priest asked.

  “No,” said Krishna. “I don’t have one.”

  “Then maybe you should be her husband.”

  “What’re you on about?” Krishna snapped.

  “She needs someone, even in death.”

  “Maybe she already has a husband.”

  “If she does, he probably argued with her, then beat her dead, maybe raped her while doing that, and tossed her in the river. Shakti and Shiva, female and male, should be at play in the universe. One should not weaken the other. This woman has been abandoned by man,” said the priest, gently touching the dark bruises on her face, throat, and chest. Krishna thought about this. The priest waited.

  “Fine. I’ll take her to the ghat and see her cremated,” said Krishna.

  The priest nodded placidly. “You will make a good husband one day,” he said.

  “Your faith in strangers is foolish,” muttered Krishna. Not to mention his sense of investigative protocol, Krishna didn’t say. The priest smiled, accepting this rebuke and walking away. Krishna didn’t know much about how washed-up, likely murder victims were handled, but he was sure just cremating them without a thought wasn’t how it usually went.

  Still.

  Krishna looked at the corpse. If he left her, someone would eventually call the police, and they would take her to a refrigerated morgue where her frightened soul would freeze. Her killer would remain free, the case unsolved, because since when did anyone really care about random women tossed into rivers? He thought of his mother cooking silently by lantern light, her face swollen.

  He remembered asking a policeman on the street to take his father to jail for hitting his mother. He was laughed at. He remembered playing cricket on the street with the other slum boys, doing nothing to stop the beatings, waiting years until his father’s penchant for cigarettes and moonshine ended them instead. Not that it mattered, since his mother faithfully followed him not long after.

  “Why don’t you take her to the ghat, you self-righteous bastard? You’re as much a man as me,” Krishna said aloud, looking at the priest, who was sitting quietly by the water. He was too far away to hear Krishna, not that Krishna cared. He shook his fist at the priest for good measure, then he peeled his lungi off the body, leaving the woman naked again. Sullen, he threw the lungi in his bucket and tied another around his waist. He always brought an extra in case he lost one in the water. He kissed his fingertips and touched them to the body’s clammy forehead, nervously keeping them away from her parted blue lips. For five minutes he sat next to her, as if in prayer, wondering how he might take her to the cremation ghats. Did the priest expect him to call a hearse, pretend to be a husband, and have her driven there? He shook his head and thought some more.

  The priest had disappeared, but Krishna stayed there and thought and thought. Then he shook his head, got up, picked up his bucket, and walked away. The sun had risen higher, and the crowds were beginning to gather like flies by the golden water. They looked at the woman lying there on the bank, but, blinded by her nakedness, by the ugly bruises that painted it, they all looked away and went about their day. They ignored her until the moment she got up and started walking across the shore, clumsy but sure, water-wrinkled soles sinking into the trail of footsteps Krishna had left in the mud.

  Even then, they didn’t look for long, save for one man, who cried out in surprise from afar. An unsurprising reaction, since he’d just seen what he had presumed to be a dead body crawl a few paces, stand up and totter across the mud like a drunk madwoman. But no one else reacted, and he refused to let people think that he too was mad, so he pretended his cry was a prelude to his singing while he bathed, and tried to ignore the sight of the naked woman. Some others left the ghat in haste. The rest of the men took the first observer’s cue, looking away from the woman on the shore as they bathed, just as they would look away from a beggar with stumps for limbs hobbling across the ghat. She had gotten up, so she couldn’t be dead. Simple as that. Whatever her problem, naked women didn’t belong here, where men bathed, parading their lack of shame.

  In the morning air, flies clothed the woman. Hesitant crows perched on her shoulders and head, forming a feathered black headdress, bristling with flutter. She gave no regard to her beaked guests nor their violence as they haltingly pecked at her flesh, somewhat confused by her movements, but not enough to keep from tasting her ripe deadness.

  The spectators stole quick glances at the woman while studiously ignoring her, horrified. This was a very mad woman. Undoubtedly sex-crazed, too, judging from her lack of modesty. Probably drunk. Crazy, for sure. And a junkie, and homeless, and a prostitute. So filthy that the birds were pecking at her. So high, she couldn’t feel the pain. Surely someone would call the police.

  Carrying her hungry crows unwitting, she staggered on down Babu Ghat, wandering by the slimy stone steps that led to the rest of the city, as if unsure of how to climb them. She eventually found the garbage dump down the ghat and st
arted eating from it.

  * * *

  Next morning, when Krishna heard that the dead were waking up all over the city—maybe even the state—his first thought was of the dead woman he had left behind on the ghat. He was at a paan shop on Gariahat, near the apartment building where he cooked meals for a few middle-class families in their posh homes, in their fancy kitchens with ventilation fans and shining tiles and big fridges. He was idly spitting betel juice at the footpath when the paanwallah mentioned history happening elsewhere in the city, pointing to a tiny television on top of his little Coke storage fridge.

  The paanwallah seemed bemused by the news on the TV, not quite believing it. “No wonder traffic’s hell today,” he muttered, scratching his whitening moustache. “All morning, this honking, I’m going deaf.” He waved at the street and its cacophony of cars, buses, lorries, and auto-rickshaws stuck bumper-to-bumper like so many dogs sniffing each other’s exhaust pipes.

  Krishna believed the news instantly. It couldn’t be coincidence that he’d discovered a corpse during his morning bath the week corpses started getting up and walking.

  His second thought—accompanied by a bit of guilt for it not being the first—was of his mother; then, with some measure of fear, his father. But his parents were cremated and gone, safe from this mass resurrection, unless ash itself was stirring into life to fill the wind with dark ghosts. He also had to look up at the sky to make sure there were no clouds of ashen ghosts raging across it. Thankfully, there was only sunlight suspended in winter smog, pecked with the black flecks of crows.