The man’s name was Eduardo, and he was a revolutionary, a major player in the movement to restore some integrity to the operation of Estkos, to provide medical care for victims of the plagues and demand accountability for the critical noot shortages and building collapses. Morton left the bathhouses the day Eduardo entered them, joining Ed’s band of rovers, sleeping with a dozen squatters head to foot on concrete floors or slumped together on piles of rags, crammed in the crannies of abandoned lofts or narcopads.
He and Ed never fucked where they slept, but on rooftops, or on the rails of abandoned subway tunnels, where the waste lay too thick for any train to plow. They fucked in closets and alleyways, in junkyards and the husks of cars, behind high towers of noot bags in the black-market bazaars or down on the floor of hoschurches. Never were they alone, but they didn’t care, and neither did most around them. On occasion, someone would hurl a bottle; sometimes a cop would give half-hearted chase, in the manner of someone trying to drive off a pigeon.
Tem took a sip of wine, disguising the tremble of his hand. He could picture Ed, just as Morton described him: slender and muscled, with black hair he wore buzzed and glasses he carried a repair kit for wherever he roamed, along with a straight razor and set of emergency candles, which he only lit in need but always decorated, winding bits of colorful trash around their bases, setting up small altars anywhere his band of invasores spent more than a few nights. Morton flashed into Tem’s mind, too, looking only slightly more baby-faced as he pulled Ed close, enveloping him in pillowy skin that blocked out the sounds and smells of the shit-mired city.
They’d been together two years when the rioting began in Nuyok. “The situation there was the worst I’d seen: the district was fresh out of even the most basic noot, never mind the high-grade stuff, and kids were dropping like dogs. Combine that with the fact that half the district washed away every time it stormed, and you had a powder keg rarin’ to spark.
“Ed told me he had to go, that this was the moment: they were gonna push for something big, right in the worst of it. Said he’d get in and out, that I should stay put, and that he’d call – I’d picked up these old cell phones a long while ago from these two oil execs who had come slumming in the bathhouses to find a good time. Now, that was a fun night – but I guess that’s not the story I’m telling.”
Ed called Morton on the seventh day, from deep in the densest center of Nuyok. “He told me the violence was getting worse, and they’d be shutting down the transit lines soon. ‘All right, Eddie,’ I said. ‘Take care of yourself.’ ‘Stay safe, Max,’ he told me. ‘See you on the other side.’”
Morton stared at his own glass of amber wine, held in his fleshy fist. “Couple hours later, word came over nobody in Nuyok was getting out of there alive. There’d been a series of explosions, and fire was spreading fast, with all the layers of the old city going up like kindling. I still don’t know – it could have been Ed himself that did it, just like they all said, though he was smarter than that – smarter, and better, even with how bad things were. It coulda been the cops, too, or it coulda been Coalition thugs. But there’s no one around to say, because all that remained when the storms came was ash.
“I bartered passage out of Estkos, just like Ed had always told me to do, and went to wait in Brixton’s, where we’d planned to meet and batten down the hatches if we needed to, survive off emergency noot and water. These towers are the tallest things around for miles – they’ll be the first thing anyone comes for if things go bad, so Pops had ways of locking them down the first day they were built. If Ed could get here, we’d have half-a-chance of riding it out, even if the world fell to shit around us. But he couldn’t. He didn’t exist. The man was dust, somewhere, and the world was already done.”
“But—” Tem’s tongue struggled against his teeth. “But it isn’t done. We’ve still got time. This might not be the end of the world. Not really.”
“Worlds end all the time, kid. All these people’s worlds—” Morton gestured towards the ceiling, towards the floors and floors of dead above them “—their worlds ended, often in fire and blood. And you can bet they left behind others whose worlds ended then, too. The end of the world’s different for everyone. I hope yours is far off, but the chances aren’t looking good.” He put a paw over Tem’s hand, and Tem examined his eyes for the first time: liquid brown, with light red ashes, spider-webbed around with deeper cracks than Tem had first seen. “You can stay, though. If you want to, and you don’t have anyone at home – and I could take one look at you, kid, and know that you don’t – you can stay. I’ve already talked to some of the regulars, and they’ll be waiting it out here too, if the worst happens. The safety of this place is wasted on me.”
Tem pretended to examine his glass, aware of how young his next words would make him sound. “I do have someone, but she’s not at home. I think she may be here, actually. With my father.”
Morton released Tem’s hand. “In here, huh?” He leaned back. “He look like you, your dad? But paunchier? Balding?”
“That sounds like him.”
“Oh, he was an easy one.” He grinned. “Nothing but a cut to the temple to patch up. It’s art, with some of the harder ones, but you like a break every once in a while. When they come in whole, you know you’ll actually be getting some sleep that night.” Morton chugged his wine, then set his glass on the table, wiping his mouth as he glanced up at Tem. “Oh…sorry, kid. I get carried away. You live around corpses long enough you forget they’re someone’s people, sometimes.”
“I don’t know if he was my people. I didn’t know him very well at all.”
Morton pushed himself up from the table. “Well. You want to see him?”
They made their way to the twentieth floor, with Morton stopping occasionally to catch his breath. He led Tem to a vault with green and pink flowers painted on its door, their strokes looking far fresher than any of Morton’s other decorations. “Your mother asked me if she could do that, if she got the paint herself. I said sure, but I don’t know where in hell she found it. Must’ve had to make quite a trade.” Morton rapped on the steel door with huge, hairy knuckles. For a moment they heard nothing, and then the panels began to creak and separate, released by a button inside the vault.
His mother appeared by slits as the panels parted, looking as rested as Tem had ever seen her, with her curly hair pulled atop her head and no bags under her sharp, green eyes. “What do you—” She stopped, her gaze moving from Morton to Tem. “Tem? How did you get here?”
“On the bus. A few hours ago. I thought you might be here, with—” He caught a glimpse of the room behind her: the low ceilings; the gold and rose wallpaper, peeling onto ecru carpet; the soiled bed and rumpled sheets; the dead man laying atop them, his fish-blue eyes half-lidded, his bleach-white skin pickled and orange, in spots: an occasional effect of the ‘corpsicle juice’, as Morton called it, with which all bodies were treated. “With…Dad.”
“I thought my privacy was supposed to be respected.” She was speaking to Morton now, still blocking Tem’s way into the tomb. “Why did you bring him here?”
“With all due respect, Ms Abulafia – he’s the guy’s son. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“I don’t want him to see this.” She looked at Tem. “Do you want to see this?” Tem hesitated, then shook his head: he’d seen enough. “All right, then. Is there somewhere we can go?”
“The vault at the end of the hall, I guess. On the right. No bodies in there, just odds and ends.”
She stepped out of the tomb and seized Tem’s wrist, pulling him towards the huge picture window at the end of the hallway and making a sharp right into the open vault Morton had indicated. Stacked furniture lined the walls, with discarded props from other vaults thrown under the small towers of couches and chairs. His mother extracted two plastic seats from the heap and set them in the room’s center, indicating that Tem should sit.
Tem remained standing. He watched the muscles of his
mother’s neck tense as she clenched her jaw, preparing to speak. He didn’t give her time: as she opened her mouth, he found questions tumbling from his. “Why are you here, Mom? Why is Dad here? Why didn’t you come home?”
“You seemed to be doing just fine, Tem. I thought you might enjoy the time on your own. Didn’t you always tell me that’s what you wanted?”
“No. Not like that. I didn’t know where you were, and there’s bad news from Estkos. I thought maybe you already knew – that you’d come here to hole up.”
“The fires?”
“The fires. And everything coming with them.”
She sat down, folding her arms. “We’ve talked about it, the mortician and I. I hadn’t decided what I’d do.” Her fingers drummed her bicep. “I was going to come and get you, if I stayed.”
Tem found, unsettlingly, that he didn’t believe her. She was acting as she had the night his father died, with the same confusing energy, veering into realms of reason he didn’t understand. “Okay. Fine. But you haven’t answered my question, though. About Dad.” He took a deep breath. “Did you put him in here because of my brothers and sisters?”
“What?”
Tem swallowed. “The children you tried to have, after me. Eli always told me – he said they’d all died. That they’d gone to Morton’s.”
“Eli.” His mother laughed, throwing her head back and baring her teeth. Tem had only seen dogs on film, but his mother’s laugh always reminded him of these creatures, of their wide-open mouths and resonant woofs. “The little shit. No, I never had any other kids, Tem. If you want the truth, I didn’t want kids to begin with. It made no sense to bring anyone new into this world.”
Tem had always thought his mother was obscuring facts from him, guarding secrets of adulthood that she didn’t want to reveal. Now he suspected that he’d had it all wrong: maybe the only obstacle was that they had never been able to have a conversation without ten other people in the room. “So you and Dad – you didn’t plan me?”
His mother’s jaw softened. She waved again at the empty chair opposite her. This time, he accepted the seat. “I’m glad you’re here, Tem. I’m sorry for you that this is the state we’re all in, but I love you dearly, and in the end I’m glad you made it. But no, you weren’t planned. It was a bottle of a wine, and a thousand lessons about overpopulation and prophylactics out of our heads.” She sighed. “I was young. I never knew all the trouble a bottle of wine could bring.”
“But if it wasn’t what Eli said – why bring Dad here? Why not to Brixton’s, or the crematorium? I thought you hated the mortuaries.”
“Did I say that?” She ran her thumb absently over the silver band on her ring finger. “Maybe I did. But it wasn’t a choice, not really. When they pulled him out of the truck and confirmed nothing could be done, that his heart had failed and all that was left to do was sign papers for the burial, I just did what I had to do. That’s what living is, Tem. Thinking you’re one person, until you have to act and discover that you’re someone else entirely. It’s what I’ve always warned you about, smart as you are. Thinking won’t do you any good.”
She readjusted, crossing her ankles. “You know your father and me never got a room to ourselves, not in all those years? Not even for a night. Maybe I wanted to make sure we got something like our reward, even if there’s only one of us around to enjoy it.” Her laugh echoed in the vault once again. “Though I wouldn’t call this ‘enjoyment’, exactly.”
“You think it’s what Dad would have wanted?”
“All he wanted was out, Tem. I knew it. I don’t resent him for it. He was never as strong as I was.” Now her fingers worked faster at the silver ring on her hand, spinning it round and round. “I did hate him for it, when he was alive. Now there doesn’t seem to be much point. He’s gone. Edie’s gone. At least I can see him, here. Edie – she’s probably been dead for years, and I never knew. I just keep waiting for her to come back, like a fool. I keep thinking we’ll all get more time, another chance at this. But we won’t. This is it. And we ruined the world.”
She was crying now, tearlessly, her mouth twisting as she tried to keep it in. “We were meant to be immortal, you know. By now – they told us it would have happened. I remember from my classes in school. I remember Ms Erlen telling us – by the time we were grown, we would live forever. She wouldn’t, but we would. We were the future, then.” His mother looked at him, her eyes a mess of unshed tears. “What are we now?”
* * *
Tem spent the night in an empty vault, in a bed twice the size of his own, with frilled turquoise covers reaching down to the carpet and a princess canopy overhead. He didn’t ask who it was for, all he knew was that they hadn’t arrived yet, and wouldn’t be kicking him out any time soon.
Morton had offered to let him sleep in the basement, where he kept his own bed, but warned Tem that it would be loud, as he’d be working on new arrivals most of the night. Tem gratefully took his second suggestion of the room on sixteen: it was silent, and Tem’s body felt drained of all of its fluids, of its blood and tears and semen and bile. All he wanted was sleep.
He dreamed of Edie: of finding her, on every floor of the mortuary, wearing a different face, or no face at all. He found her as an old woman, skin purple and puckered; as a jaundiced man, eyes shot through with red; as a child, unmarked. He dreamed of Eduardo, who was Edie, even though neither of them looked the way they had when they were alive. He knew, though. He could find them anywhere.
The next morning, after rising in the dark, Tem walked back up to the twentieth floor, passing the closed door of his father’s vault as he made his way to the window at the end of the hall. Plumes of smoke bloomed across the early morning sky, rising above a mass, still hazy, spilling over the horizon. They were coming, the survivors of Estkos. They were nearly here.
He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, mesmerized by the nearing miasma, when Morton padded up beside him, panting slightly as he came to stand beside Tem. “Thought I’d find you here. See what’s coming in from the east?” Tem nodded. “Then that’s it. We lock down, or let ’em in. There’s no way to pick and choose – they’ll all be flooding in too fast. We gotta act soon.”
“Let them in.” Tem’s own voice, firm and fast, startled him. “I mean – if you’re asking me. I think we should let them in.”
“Doesn’t give us much of a chance, kid. They’ll overrun us in minutes.”
“But who will give them a chance, if we don’t? We can’t help anyone if we lock them out. They’ll think we’re their enemies, and the tower will come down anyway, once they surround us.” He looked at Morton, who was chewing his lip. “Isn’t it what Eduardo would have done?”
Morton ceased his biting, slowly running a thumb over the puffy skin. “Doesn’t matter what he would have done, kid. The truth is it’s your world now. It’s not mine, or his. Not anymore. If you want to open the doors, it’s your funeral.”
“Maybe if they see it – all the bodies – maybe they’ll understand. Maybe they’ll be peaceful. Maybe all they need to do is see.”
Morton didn’t give him the smile Tem hated: the smile of all the adults he had ever known; the smile that told him he knew nothing, that he couldn’t possibly understand the things they’d seen. Morton gave him a smile, sad and genuine, that tugged at Tem’s heart; Morton smiled like maybe Tem was right, but he couldn’t let himself believe it. “Your call, kid. You’ve got the most to lose of any of us.” He looked out toward the horizon. “I’m just here for the floorshow.”
Tem thought of his father, who didn’t stick around to see if the world was worth saving. He though of Edie, maybe out there somewhere, traveling, impossibly, at the front of the herd, bringing help instead of destruction, the flames he saw from the tower a beacon, not a threat. He thought of his mother’s hope, restored at the sight of her lost sister; he thought of Morton’s vigil on the stool outside the mortuary doors, ended by Eduardo’s return.
H
e reached for Morton’s hand. Here, with the rows of the naked and the flayed beneath them, with the mortician’s grip in his and the soured taste of wine still on his lips, with the morning sky stained with smoke and the useless breath in his lungs and the quivering muscle beneath his skin, Tem could almost grasp it: the lie at the heart of life. We’re all pretending, he thought. We’re all pretending we’re more than meat, that we’re doing something more than covering the world in meat and trash and noise. Yet pretending had always been more real to him than the world of flesh and dirt: if pretending was what it took to live, Tem knew he had the means. He wanted to live. He wanted to live as Edie had, as Eduardo had, as Morton and his mother had. He wanted to live, even if it meant he wound up dead.
“Open the doors. Let them in. Give them a chance.”
So Tem and Morton stood with the dead, and waited for the living to come.
* * * * *
Katharine Duckett coordinates book coverage and author features for Tor.com by day, and writes weird and speculative fiction by night. Her story ‘Sexagesimal’ was voted Apex Magazine’s 2012 Story of the Year, and has been produced as a live theatre piece by Daniel Flores Dance. She lives in Brooklyn.
DIVING INTO THE WRECK
VAL NOLAN
ILLUSTRATED BY WAYNE HAAG
1
Noon in La Jolla, on Voigt Drive, the university blistering beneath a July sun and the curled cinders of a thousand eucalyptus leaves crushed and crinkled underfoot. Overhead, Marine Corp F-22s stab at the sky in echelons and arrowheads. Students drift around the restaurant at Canyon Vista while high school kids in bright singlets troop in from the soccer camp on the arid fields beyond. The air is still and dry, thick like hot glass and an ever-present weight.
Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014 Page 6