Velveteen

by Daniel Marks

  Very Hitchcock.

  “Is that why you chose this scene?” she asked. “Are you tense?”

  Mr. Fassbinder shrugged and tucked a long lock of hair behind his ear with heavily bandaged fingers. “I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe it’s a statement about all the hustle and bustle we’ve brought into our afterlife.”

  Velvet cocked her brow. “If you say so.”

  “But you are one to talk about being tense.” Mr. Fassbinder’s eyes crinkled sympathetically. “You look wound up tighter than a grandfather clock.”

  “Do I?” Velvet flinched. She hadn’t meant to convey anything in her body language, but when she looked down, her fists were balled up tight. She spread her fingers quickly.

  Mr. Fassbinder shook his head, wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and led her toward the door. “Come inside and take a closer look. I have some parakeets today. These actually chirp.”

  “Really?” Velvet stopped, and her eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  “Would I lie?” he asked, a sinister but familiar grin twisting the corners of his mouth.

  They had played this game before, she the unwitting victim to his creepy shopkeeper—sick, considering Velvet’s history. But it was all in good fun. Mr. Fassbinder was the kindest man she’d ever met, and he always knew how to cheer her up. Better than anyone else, it seemed. He was definitely attractive—in that distinguished teacher sort of way—and when he was younger, was exactly the kind of boy Velvet would have sought if she’d lived to do so, but those thoughts were fleeting. He was, after all, super old, and thus thinking about him that way made her feel creepy.

  Creepier than usual.

  Velvet giggled, triggering wild guffaws from Mr. Fassbinder as they stepped inside.

  He hadn’t been kidding about the parakeets.

  The display tables, normally lined up in rows and packed to overflowing with birds of every imaginable variety, were pushed to the edges of the main room to make room for Mr. Fassbinder’s masterpiece. A huge globe made of densely gathered black spikes and needles hung from the ceiling, as though a giant sea urchin had made its way from the ocean and somehow invaded the place. Pocking the sphere were little round alcoves, each home to one or two green birds with yellow breasts. Hundreds of black eyes all seemed to stare in her direction.

  “Wow, that’s insane.” Velvet felt her hands creeping up to clutch her shoulders. The structure of the thing was really bothersome. It looked like a planet or a fortress. And the birds didn’t seem happy there.

  They seemed imprisoned.

  “But wait.” Mr. Fassbinder reached out—the bandages on his fingers spoke volumes about how much work had gone into the project—and tapped one of the spikes, sending a little quake through the nest. The birds responded by chirping wildly, tiny paper beaks quivering with their ululations.

  The sound rolled over her, giving her goose pimples. The birds sounded alive. Each of the parakeets rocked back and forth as it sang; some even ruffled their feathers. Despite her reservations about the nest, Velvet couldn’t deny the awesomeness. She applauded.

  “But what is it?” she asked. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “They’re a very specific type. They’re called monk parakeets, and they live communally. South American birds. The spikes are to defend against predators. It’s really quite genius.”

  “So that’s like their dormitory or something?”

  “Exactly.”

  Dorm. The thought pinged around her head and triggered a memory. Crap!

  Velvet stomped her foot. “Just remembered, I told a friend we would sit together at salon tonight, and I’m totally going to be late.”

  “Maybe you can come back tomorrow, then. Come by and I’ll make you a special bird.” Mr. Fassbinder’s smile and the offer of one of his magnificent paper birds stripped the horror from Velvet’s day.

  She rushed forward and hugged him. “Absolutely. And we’ll talk.” She turned to walk away, but stopped and added, “About movies.”

  “Perfect!” Mr. Fassbinder waved. The thin strips of cotton woven around his paper-cut fingers fluttered in the air like ribbons.

  Chapter 3

  If you ever find yourself walking down a street in purgatory, the first thing you’ll notice—once you stop sobbing—is a distinct lack of style, or maybe it’s an abundance of style.

  Too much style.

  The buildings are either ramshackle and slightly askew but made of the finest Corinthian marble, or majestic and perfectly constructed from dense packs of cardboard shipping boxes or rolled newspaper bricks. It’s definitely a hodgepodge of architecture, and the only constant is the color gray. Ashy mind-numbing gray.

  Or it used to be.

  The Departurists’ bloodred handbills scarred the walls like gory bread crumbs trailing in the angry mob’s wake. Velvet could hear the crowd still, their shouts echoing down the narrow streets like crows’ cawing.

  Talk of the revolution had been around for a while, mostly as bitter grumbling in district courtyards and as bad poetry and spoken-word performances at nightly salons. But whether the protests had become as visible in districts beyond the Latin Quarter was unknown—news traveled slowly between the boroughs, due in no small part to the large walls separating the districts. Velvet wasn’t particularly interested in what was happening in other parts of purgatory anyway. What filled her with piss and vinegar—to use one of her mother’s sayings—was that the disenfranchised and obviously bitter had started to gather, organize, make a huge ruckus, and vandalize her street.

  “I’m the vandal around here,” she mumbled. “If anyone is going to tag up the place, it’ll be me.”

  Of course, it’d been months since she’d seen a spray paint can this side of the veil, so that kind of fun was totally out of the question.

  The whole district clung to the side of a massive, nameless mountain looming on the horizon, as dark as night. At its top, a grand old station stood, stony and gray, where a snowy cap might have been. Hundreds of sets of rails trailed from openings around the circumference of the building, like the tentacles of a Portuguese man-of-war. Wooden cars rattled up and down the tracks at all hours of the darkness, filled to overflowing with souls, old and new. So Velvet wasn’t surprised when an abrupt rattle and clang echoed off the buildings and interrupted her growing anger toward the Departurists.

  She stepped away from the pair of quivering rails embedded in the cobblestone as one of the wooden railcars rumbled into view. The souls inside the car were new arrivals. Frightened glowing eyes gave them away; so did the poorly smeared, amateurish ash application on their faces. Rays of internal light shone from patches of un-ashed flesh as though they’d been spotted with mirrored tiles.

  She didn’t have time to dwell on what the arriving souls might be feeling. And besides, she knew all too well. She’d been where they are now, and it wasn’t so great. Sure, they should just be happy there’s an afterlife at all, that they get to go on in some fashion. Even if they’ve moved on to a place known for an eternal night and constant reminders that they aren’t good enough for heaven, at least they weren’t made into human bacon frying in Satan’s big nonstick skillet.

  She shook her head. It didn’t do any good to be so judgmental.

  They’d all been held back, after all. Velvet included.

  These new souls would be met by their dormitory supervisors soon enough. Most of the buildings in purgatory were dorms of some kind, each filled with people who shared the same kind of work, or experience, or interest—salespeople, constructionists, paper workers, and the like.

  In her case, Velvet lived with the rest of the small Salvage team in the Retrieval dormitory, a massive building that had a courtyard in the middle and that also housed the Collector crew’s dorm. Her team was in charge of the search and rescue of wayward souls, whether held back in the daylight by accident or, as so often happened, by nefarious circumstances. A great deal of notoriety came with being a member of the Salvage te
am, and a little glory, which didn’t help pass the time any but was nice, Velvet had to admit.

  The Collector’s job was—there’s no delicate way to put it—to steal from the daylight so that souls in the darkness could have clothes on their backs, to snatch the very stuff purgatory was made of: stones, some metal, paper of all sorts, and random other stuff. Velvet didn’t know the specifics of Collecting, but she’d been told that the Collectors have access to the largest cracks in purgatory, large enough to pull tangible objects through. Where these cracks were located was a closely guarded secret.

  One Velvet would love to know, if only to be able to cross through with her Fluevog boots. Of course, there was a talent involved. In purgatory and in Retrieval, whether Salvaging souls or Collecting stuff, it always seemed to boil down to skilled labor and not merely simple tricks.

  Nothing was ever simple.

  Velvet pressed on down the hill, past massive facades of stone and paper and past gaslight globes that hung over the bustling souls’ heads like lightbulbs of ideas. She quickened her pace, feet gliding over the sometimes slick stones. As the street opened up onto a plaza of activity, a giant square that she’d have to cross to reach her dorm, Velvet caught the edge of a cobblestone and took a header into a magazine stand. The rack nailed her in the chest with a jarring thud, and a flock of tabloids took flight around her and landed noisily on the ground.

  “Crap!” she yelled, and then she fell to her knees and started stacking the magazines. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t be in such a hurry. So clumsy, it’s ridiculous!”

  An elderly soul with knitting needles stuck like antennae from a charcoal hair bun knelt beside Velvet, shuffling the rest of the magazines into a tidy pile. “It’s fine, dear. Falling on the ground doesn’t make them any less used than they were when the Collectors brought them back, does it?”

  “I guess not.” Velvet gave the woman a polite smile.

  A dull ache in her chest where she’d smacked the rack brought her attention back to her injury, and she pulled the neck of her shirt open, just in time to see a squiggle of memory slip from a tiny wound like a worm. It flared brightly for the tiniest moment and then burned to ash. The gray husk floated in between her and the magazine seller before drifting into the crowd of night shoppers visiting the many kiosks around the square.

  “So hard to hold on to,” the old woman whispered.

  “What?” Velvet asked.

  “The memories. At least the pain reminds us of what it was like to be alive.”

  Velvet guessed that was true. But it still hurt like crap. She rubbed her chest and nodded, then rushed through the throng of souls toward her dorm.

  In keeping with the deranged construction of the city, the columns on the facade of the Retrieval dormitory were askew. She imagined the Collectors breaking them from some forgotten ruin far off the beaten path of civilization and smuggling them here a long time ago, or not so long, or last week, even. Time was a strange thing when you were living in the same city as people who’d died hundreds of years ago and yesterday. Like one of Dalí’s melting clocks, it seemed to stretch beyond the limits of believability into forever.

  Sections of the dorm were littered with graffiti in all different languages. Cyrillic mingled with English lettering. Thai battled with Sanskrit for tag supremacy. There were even some bright pink kanji characters, as though the column pieces had made an around-the-world trip before settling in to decorate and hold up four floors of balconies.

  Smoky windows spotted the facade like hundreds of little eyes, though you couldn’t see into a single one. Not that there weren’t plenty of people trying. Gossips and town criers always haunted the square in front of the dorm, sitting behind newspapers with ridiculously obvious eyeholes cut into them, or wearing sunglasses even though the City of the Dead was never brighter than a swampy pool on a moonless night. They waited for the most famous of the Latin Quarter’s citizens, the Salvagers and the Collectors, to go in or out or to screw up, have arguments, anything that they could report on at any of the hundreds of nightly salons taking place around purgatory.

  When she climbed the stairs to the enormous front doors, she found another flyer plastered there. On it, in big crimson letters: THE DEPARTURE IS COMING! And underneath, something Velvet hadn’t noticed before—small, spidery handwriting, a tiny a and a c. Initials, maybe. The sight of them triggered the edge of a faint memory that vaporized like a puff of dust from a fallen hollow acorn husk before she could get ahold of it.

  She tore the flyer from the door and crammed it into the pocket of her jeans, intent on bringing up the Departurists’ demonstration to the station agent the next chance she got. A clamor of voices rushed out as Velvet pulled open the tall double doors into a darkened alcove that led to a bustling courtyard. The nightly salon was already in progress.

  “Dammit,” she sighed. Luisa was going to be pissed.

  The courtyard was packed with souls all facing a small stage at the far end. Someone—Bethany Cloud, she thought, though it was hard to tell from where Velvet stood in the shadows—was bleating out “Pretty Vacant” along with the Sex Pistols. Ironic, considering the girl was as dumb as a stick. That Bethany could drown out Johnny Rotten’s violent vocals was less a testament to her talent than to the fact that her voice sounded like a rusty funicular. Just behind her on the stage, a boy rode a bike connected by a system of rods and gears to an old-time gramophone.

  No one could ever accuse purgatory’s souls of a lack of ingenuity.

  Without electricity, the Collectors had to focus on finding simple entertainments. They couldn’t play CDs, obviously, so along with clothes and books, you’d often find stacks of vinyl record albums on the returning wagons. Their house was the proud archive of a library of some really great punk and Goth music from the seventies and eighties.

  “We’re vacant!” Bethany growled. The crowd nodded, agreeing that, at least, Bethany most certainly was as blond as they come. Some of them even danced, glowing eyes bobbing in the dim light like lighters and cell phones at a real concert.

  “You ain’t kiddin’,” Velvet mumbled, clipping off a giggle too silly for her social status in the room. She’d already drawn nods from the few people who’d seen her apparently not so stealthy entry.

  She scanned the crowd of faces until her eyes fell on her best friend, Luisa, a raven-haired girl of about twelve sitting on her hands at a table near the stairs to the Salvage wing and watching the entry door intently, her eyes afire. She sat as far from the Collector wing as possible, which was their way. Salvagers and Collectors mixed about as well as oil and water. Salvagers didn’t go near the other set of stairs—not because it was off-limits but because the Collectors were really douchey.

  Particularly Isadora Lawrence and her gang of professional judgers.

  As Velvet sidestepped chairs and excused herself through the courtyard, she not so surprisingly caught the devil-eyed glare of Isadora herself. Even while applauding Bethany in slow lazy claps, Isadora managed her patented sneer. Like a dog protecting its bone, she curled her vermillion-smeared lips back from her teeth. She even rolled her eyes.

  Multitasking. That Isadora could manage facial expressions and complex hand movements at the same time was miraculous; any more than that and the girl would probably short a circuit.

  Not conventionally beautiful by any sense of the word, Isadora did have some exotic qualities, and they drew nearly every boy to her. Something to do with her long blond hair (white in purgatory) and the fact that she’d supposedly sleep with just about any guy who’d look at her.

  Isadora leaned in toward Shandie Charles, a pretty black girl with long curly hair tucked up inside a satin top hat, and whispered something, pointing at Velvet. Both girls laughed riotously. Whispered. Laughed again.

  Velvet wanted to launch herself over the rows of tables and beat them both until their nerve endings spilled from the wounds like escaped goldfish flopping on the floor, but just as her fingernails were s
tarting to bore holes into her palms, the music stopped and she felt a tug at her sleeve.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Luisa’s eyes were cinched into threatening slits.

  “I’m so sorry. I was walking. I lost track of time.” She glanced back at Isadora, in time to see the putrid girl blow a snarky kiss. Velvet groaned.

  Luisa was far too embittered to notice. “Seriously? Walking where?”

  She had to think quickly; Luisa could smell a lie like a dog smells a bone. “To the park.”

  “Cherry Tree or Stationside?” The girl’s eyes narrowed even more with scrutiny.

  “Cherry Tree.” Velvet knew a simple answer wouldn’t be enough to stop Luisa’s interrogation and quickly added, “I got to thinking about my mother and all the movies we used to go see. Are you through nagging?”

  Luisa sucked at her teeth. A tiny menacing squeak escaped. “No.”

  Velvet shrugged, puffed out her chest like she’d seen boys do when they were ready to fight. “Bring it.”

  Luisa slipped deeply into the chair, her legs dangling and her back straight with annoyance. She continued to glare at Velvet with those chiding, angry eyes. “You better quit it with that crap. I don’t save seats for just anyone, you know.”

  “Sorry,” Velvet replied, instantly sheepish. “I’m totally a dumb-ass.”

  Luisa smirked and nodded. “Well, you’re not normally late, so I’ll let it slide this once. Next time, I’m whoopin’ your butt.”

  Anyone else might have tasted Velvet’s fist with a comment like that, but Luisa was her closest friend and was probably smarter than the rest of her whole team combined. Despite the girl’s brains, she and her brother acted as the crew’s poltergeists, the muscle of the team. Badasses. And more than any possibility of being beaten senseless by the girl, Velvet just didn’t want to disappoint her.

  She pulled a chair from under the table and eased into it. “So what did I miss up in this den of iniquity?” she asked with a wink.

  “The usual. Readings, gossip, and … singing, if you call it that.” Luisa flipped her hand toward the stage nonchalantly. “That one girl—the one whose name I can never remember—was on before brainiac up there.”