“Yes, and before you ask, I don’t know why, but I was sure that life continues.”
“Did you consider what would have happened if you had been wrong?”
“Nothing. I would’ve died in good shape.”
“I’ve got to say, I’ve heard my fair share of stories but this one … how long were you married?”
“Eleven years. Happy ones.”
“And in the previous world, what line of work were you in?”
“I was a righter. An epilogist. I wrote endings for books, screenplays…”
“Interesting. I’d think someone like you might take death as something absolute. The grand finale, if you like.”
“Bit simplistic, don’t you think?”
“We’ll only be able to know that in the future.”
“Look, I’ve come to you because in the two days I’ve been in this strange place, I’ve tried desperately to find Marian and failed. I went to her apartment; she doesn’t live there anymore. I went to the multilingual labs; she doesn’t work there.”
“The labs?”
“She was an English teacher. She was … she’s in love with language.”
“I see. Kids?”
“No.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Under the circumstances I suppose it’s for the best.”
“Because if you had a kid you wouldn’t be sitting here opposite me, asking for help?”
Ben nodded and watched the quick strokes of the Mad Hop’s pen across his pad.
“How did she get here?”
“Sorry?”
“How did your wife die?”
“An accident.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“A car accident.”
“A car accident. I see.”
Ben heard a strange purring sound emanating from under the desk. He bent down, expecting to find a cat, but saw nothing. The deep purr only got stronger and, as fear started to whirl inside him, he watched the Mad Hop’s facial muscles quiver like jelly. Before he could make any sense out of the situation, the investigator’s cheeks inflated like Dizzy’s before a long blue note, and in front of his disbelieving eyes the fat man broke into laughter, shaking the desk with his full-bodied cough, pounding it with his fleshy fist, while he kicked the horrified righter’s armchair.
Ben shot up from his seat. “Samuel, is everything alright?”
The Mad Hop, his flabby cheeks coated in tears of mirth, pointed to a drawer by Ben’s side and rasped “Take it … take it out.”
Ben opened the drawer and stared at the gun. He pulled it out and set it on the desk.
“No,” the Mad Hop yelled, his voice rising, the color of his cheeks deepening from crimson to purple, “Pick it up! Fire it … fire!”
Ben took the pistol and aimed at the Mad Hop’s feet. Groaning, choking on his own laughter, he said, “The head, you idiot, the head.”
Ben set the pistol’s sights right between the Mad Hop’s wispy eyebrows and pulled the trigger. His fat head hit the table with a thump. Ben threw himself onto the armchair, let his head fall back, and closed his eyes.
Less than a minute later, the bass voice resurfaced from the opposing couch. “I apologize, Ben, for the poor taste I’ve exhibited.”
Ben opened his eyes and sighed. He thought his rest would last longer than a minute, but the Mad Hop shoved the gun across the desk and ordered him, in a dry voice, to put it back in the drawer.
“What was so funny?” Ben asked.
The Mad Hop sighed, too. “The human soul has its way. When you grow up in a conservative home, terrorized by your parents, who have given you nothing but a strict diet of discipline, you develop certain habits that come back and bite you in the ass. You asked why I laughed. Ever since I left home on my twentieth birthday, I’ve picked up certain neuroses, such as uncontrollable bouts of laughter. Are you with me? From me you can expect devotion, attention, understanding, but not, alas, tact. You’ll tell me that your wife died in an accident, and I’ll cackle like a poop. You have no idea how many times I’ve been thrown out of funerals, booted out of weddings, tossed out of beds. At least here there’s a way to put an end to these attacks … till the next time.”
“Have you tried to get treatment?”
The Mad Hop blinked twice, flipped through the scribbles on his pad, and answered without raising his head. “Too late. Ben, last question. Do you by any chance have a picture of Marian?”
Ben smiled. “I wish.”
The Mad Hop raised his head slowly, pinning him with a grave look. “I apologize up front for the cliché,” he said, “but she’s a needle in a haystack. It’s hard for me to turn down this kind of challenge, but I’m not making any promises. Finding missing persons in this world is ten times harder than in the previous one, which is precisely why I’m willing to take this case.”
* * *
After a brief pause, he continued, “Back there, in the old world, I worked for thirty-seven years as an investigator, and the truth is, despite all the experience, I never really made it up to the Premier League. I had a job, a small office in Manchester, a moderate caseload, mostly dead boredom, the dullest cases imaginable. When I moved to London, I couldn’t compete with the big offices. The clients started to thin out. From eighty-three to eighty-four I didn’t have a single case, believe it or not. I learned my lesson well. When I got here, I vowed to myself I’d be the best private investigator the Other World had ever seen, and, over the past fifteen years, I’ve established a reputation most wouldn’t even dream of. I unraveled cases where the victims had no idea who would ever want them gone; I found missing persons in places that nobody—alive or dead—would ever consider; and I changed my name. Few people know that Mad Hop is actually an acronym, comprised of my favorite detectives—Marple, Dalgliesh, Holmes, and Poirot.”
“I had no idea” Ben said.
“What’s important,” the Mad Hop said, getting up and walking toward the door, “is that money never meant much to me. I’ve always investigated for the right reasons, unadulterated curiosity. Nothing satisfies me more than the clean annihilation of question marks. The path from question to answer, though, winds through a dark and bewildering forest. Every good investigator needs to take his cues from the helicopter.”
“From the helicopter?”
“Yes, to hover above, to see the full picture. To see the forest and not just the trees.…”
“I get it, I get it.” Ben smiled. “So is that how you plan to find my Marian?”
The Mad Hop opened the door and pulled the godget out of a side drawer nearby. “For starters let’s exchange prints.”
After they’d done so, he put a fat finger to his lips and hummed an unrecognizable tune. Then, speaking authoritatively, he said, “You said you’re forty and that she died a year and a half ago. I want you to go to the nearest Vie-deo, take out tape thirty-nine and come back here. We need an updated picture of her.”
“When do you want me back?”
“As far as I’m concerned, come back here in three hours. You can do that, can’t you?”
“I suppose.”
Noting the haze of confusion settling on Ben’s face, he smiled and pointed down at the godget. “If you press the telefinger once, you’ll get the time.”
“Hold on a second, I thought it was noon now…,” Ben said, staring at the little screen, which posted the time as a quarter to eight.
The Mad Hop giggled, a cuddly form of malice. “And I thought the dead don’t lie.”
Ben left the office, pretending not to have heard the Mad Hop’s remark. “So we’ll see each other in three hours?”
The Mad Hop nodded and shut the door. All the way to the Vie-deo, an inner voice nipped at Ben’s mind, wondering, “How, in God’s name, did he know I was lying?”
11
Extracted Wisdom
“What are you doing?” the tall uprooter asked, taking in the hideous gyrations of his coworker’s behind.
>
The short uprooter soured his face and pulled his head up from the ground. “It’s none of your business.”
“Like hell it isn’t…,” the tall man said, stomping his foot. “I never seen you move around like that before. Looks like something’s stuck.…”
“Don’t say it,” the short man said, cutting him off and resuming the side-to-side motion, his eyes locked in concentration.
“Why you moving like that?” the tall man repeated.
“I told you it’s none of your business!” the short one said, making sure his hips kept time. His colleague stomped down the first row of plot 2,605,327, pulled binoculars out of his backpack, surveyed the path, and spat, “nothing.”
The short uprooter waddled up the opposite path, inspected it through his own binoculars and said softly, “nothing here either.”
* * *
Six hours later, at the end of an ordinary day that included 1,256 broken branches, two terminal tree extractions, and a hefty dose of nerves, the two positioned themselves at the foot of the five-hundredth row and updated the day’s 1,256 new dead, marking their spots on their family trees, and jotting down the names of the two families that would be filed away as officially uprooted. Waiting for the arrival of the clean-up crew from the New Leaf factory, they grew silent.
Silence, though, was rare and short lived in this dynamic forest, which was alive twenty-four hours a day with the slow crackle and pop of branches tearing free of their trunks, hanging at impossible angles, dancing in the toss of the hollow wind, linked by an unseen string—a strand of a spider’s silk, a filament of lace, a filigree of sorts—to stronger, intertwined branches that, stooping, yearned to graze of the earth and yet still craved another last drop of life, draping the uprooters with the dying throes of tens of thousands, who clung, just barely, to the cords of their existence.
The tall uprooter never got used to the screeching music of disengagement. More than anything else, it reminded him of a jungle predator’s padded shuffle as it prepared to pounce on its prey. He always talked, whistled, or hummed something to himself, in the vain hope that the ceremony of decay, which he witnessed daily, would not infiltrate his mind. Today, too, he had a song in mind. He was ready to mangle the tune when he realized there was no way he could get into it with his buddy gyrating his hips like a girl in a hula-hoop trance.
He knew his curiosity would never be satisfied if he approached his buddy through the usual channels, so he looked to both sides, made sure the horizon was clear of clean crew workers, and began swiveling his hips, perfectly mimicking his colleague’s charm-free performance. The short uprooter noticed what he was doing, froze, and asked, “Why you ridiculing me? What kind of an alias are you?”
“Who’s ridiculing you? Look how nicely I can spin it…”
“Spin it? What are you talking about?”
“I’m spinning an imaginary hoola-hoop around my waist.”
“Why would you be doing something so silly?”
“Because swinging your hips without one, like you’re doing, is way worse.”
“But I have a reason.”
Finally.
“Well, why you been shaking your butt like that all day?”
The short man buried his face in his hand and burst into tears. The uprooter lay a knobby hand on his friend’s shoulder and asked softly, “57438291108, why are you crying?”
The short uprooter raised a pair of moist eyes and in a crushed voice said, “I hate him. He’ll ruin everything.”
“Who?”
“Elvis.”
“Elvis?”
“Presley.”
“The singer?”
“The singer!”
“What do you want with him?”
“You seen him dance?” the short one said, kicking the ground hard. “You seen the man dance? You’re lucky you weren’t at the show last night. He moves his hips in a way that makes the ladies lose their minds. They went wild, pulled their hair, cried, screamed, hit; I thought I wasn’t seeing straight. As soon as he started to dance the women in the crowd lost it. Totally! The aliases guarding the stage had to keep an inflamed group of savage women at bay, but one of them managed to break free, got to him, and wrapped herself around him. He laughed and sang her “Love Me Tender.” When the song was over, he tried to break away from the yellowish woman. No dice. The crazy woman had rubbed something like ten jars of peanut butter all over her body. When he realized there was no shaking her free, he started to lose it, screaming at the aliases to get her off of him. In the end, he went backstage with the groupie still stuck to his body. Broke the show off early. I couldn’t stop laughing, but 88888888 whipped around and scolded me, ‘When you can move like him, then you can laugh all you want!’ She told me I was immature and then gave me that iceberg-melting glare of hers. ‘And you never take me out dancing anymore…’ An hour later I found myself in some funky club with the hottest alias in 2000 shaking her thing in my face as I bopped from side to side like a robot in need of recircuiting. She forced me to dance the whole time we were there and then sprang an ultimatum on me—learn to move like Elvis, by next week, or be gone forever. In the morning I woke up and saw she had left.”
The tall uprooter’s smile held shades of compassion and jealousy. “Look, 57438291108, what are you going to do? You picked a tough alias. If she was just an ordinary alias, maybe, but 88888888 is amazing. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but the fact that she left you twelve times over the course of the past decade is flattering.”
“Flattering?” he squawked.
“Of course. She came back to you twelve times. There’s no doubt about it. If she ever goes for good, she’ll be turning her back on a super alias.”
“There’s something to that,” he said, his eyes coming back to life. “The first time she left me it was ’cause I couldn’t swim. The second time was ’cause I didn’t know how to paint. After that it was cooking, chess, massage, the tuba, mimicking animals during sex, meditation, floral arrangement, ambidexterity, effective use of metaphors, and now dance.”
“And, since you were able to master the others, you’ll do the same with dance.”
“I don’t think so,” the short one said, shaking his head. “You saw how ridiculous I looked. I’ll never manage to dance, not like the King. She’s not coming back this time.”
“You love her?”
“You know I would live for her.”
“Then don’t say you won’t learn to dance.”
“Who’s going to teach me to dance?”
The tall uprooter smiled. “My alias has a friend who teaches a two-week course in lower body dance.”
“Lower body dance?”
“Yeah, I think it’s called Bootyriffic. My alias says there’s this guy, Ricky Martin, that’s been driving the women in the old world crazy and that he’s got this new technique for shaking the bottom half of the body. From what I understand, half the course is devoted to his hip-thigh connection. I’ll get you the rest of the details tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” the short one said, spreading a smile over a layer of anxiety. Worried about his noncooperative pelvis and dreading the thought of returning to an apartment without 88888888, he obsessed about his silent telefinger, longing for the sound of her fabulous voice in his ear.
“She’s harassing me,” he said out loud.
“What did you say?”
“Passive harassment. That‘s what she’s doing to me. She’s not calling, despite, and maybe because, she knows how badly I want to hear her voice. She’ll disappear now for a week or two until I prove to her that I know how to dance. Then we’ll have a happy period where all seems wonderful, and then she’ll come up with a new requirement. I live in permanent fear of the next ultimatum. Maybe we weren’t meant to be together. She’s perfect and I’m in constant need of upgrading like some sort of defective alias.”
“You think my alias doesn’t try to change me? Like hell she don’t. Only difference is she’s
not trying to turn me into a copy of herself. I think 88888888 might be a little too in love with herself. Who can blame her, right? But instead of arguing, you’re always off trying to add another link in your long chain of skills. What I don’t get is, why you don’t ask her to put some new links in her own chain.”
“She gives me her love…”
“Ha!” the tall one cried, lifting a satisfied finger in the air. “And you give her your love. But you know what the problem is with your love? It’s unconditional! Maybe it’s about time you lay down some conditions.”
“Conditions? What kind of conditions am I going to lay down on perfection!”
“There ain’t no perfection. And even if there was, you got to put some holes in it.”
“How do you put holes in perfection?”
“You look for a weak spot and zero in on it.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime?” the tall one said, flashing a toothy smile. “You need to teach your ass how to dance.”
The short uprooter nodded sullenly, surveying the busy horizon. The clean-up crew arrived, packed the severed branches and the two additional trees onto their electric wheelbarrows, and hovered over to the next plot.
“Okay, we can go now,” the tall one said, striding out of plot 2,605,327. Thirty seconds later he noticed that only a single shadow accompanied him. He furrowed his brow, turned around, and called out in surprise, “What’s keeping you?”
12
The Charlatan
Turning the tape over to the Mad Hop, Ben couldn’t rid his hands of apprehension. The investigator, all too aware of the repercussions of what he was about to do, pointed Ben in the direction of a nearby room, showed him to the sofa, and Ben, lowering himself, stared blankly at the widescreen TV.
The Mad Hop sat down beside Ben, ran his hand over the smooth surface of his head, and cleared his throat. “Any questions before we begin?”
“You bet,” Ben said, pulling his eyes away from the screen and toward the small man’s somber face. “During the introductory lecture they mentioned these life tapes. If you were alive for forty years, you have forty tapes, right? So, one tape contains a full year of my life?”
The World of the End Page 11