SS Corpse Vision (v5.0)

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  He was thinking of blood, though. He wasn’t going to let his imagination win.

  Besides, he still had one clean shirt. He needed to take the bundle to the laundry, along with his suit, so that he could look pressed and sharp again, instead of rumpled and disreputable.

  He left his undershirt, boxers, and socks on, and tumbled onto the bed, the saggy mattress groaning beneath his weight. The bed hadn’t even stopped bouncing by the time he had fallen asleep.

  ***

  She was there in his dreams, her rich brown hair piled on top of her head, with a few curls cascading around her face. She sat on the edge of the bridge, feet dangling over the Seine, leaning back toward the road. Her eyes smiled, her lips—a perfect cupid’s bow, just like the drawings she mimicked—rouged darker than her cheeks. The makeup softened her living face, making her seem as unreal as the women in the advertisements.

  While her hair was old-fashioned, her clothing was not. No buttoned down shirtwaist for her with a long skirt that fell to her ankles. She wore a black skirt that grazed her knees, silk stockings with a perfect line up the back, and a blouse so soft that it seemed almost indecent. Around her neck, a simple St. Christopher’s medal, and a delicate gold cross with a tiny diamond in the center. A gold band on her right hand, a band she twisted when she saw him approach, a frown creasing her lovely forehead.

  He stopped beside her. She was American—he knew that without asking—and he held his reporter’s notebook in his left hand, a pen in his right.

  Her face shut down when he asked her name. And then her eyes clouded over, and her mouth opened ever so slightly.

  The St. Christopher’s medal disappeared and the gold ring too. But the expensive necklace, the gold cross with a diamond in the center, remained, as if it were her calling card.

  He woke up thinking about it, twisted to one side, the bottom of the cross bent slightly as if she had fallen on it against the stone walkway.

  She had worn no stockings when he found her body, and the sensible shoes, made for walking in a strange city (he knew that as clearly as if she had told him) had been replaced by thin heels, the kind flappers wore with their knee-length dresses and opera-length pearls.

  He woke up thinking of the difference between the smiling girl in his dreams and the dead woman on the walkway, her skin cold against his fingertips.

  He stared at his typewriter, his fingers itching to finish that sentence.

  …the…

  The.

  The woman discarded…

  Discarded.

  He got dressed, and stumbled out of his room, ostensibly searching for breakfast, but really on his way to get another drink.

  ***

  Still, that day, he made it to midnight without taking a nip from the bottle he kept at the bottom of his desk drawer. He didn’t take the glass of wine offered with dinner, nor did he drink the shot of vodka offered to him by the White Russian he’d met while waiting for the American tourists he was supposed to interview in Le Procope.

  He arrived at the Dôme exactly at midnight, sober as a judge. Decker had pressed his suit and worn his last clean shirt, mostly as an apology for the way he had looked the night before.

  He hadn’t examined himself in the mirror until this morning, but even then he had looked a fright—his hair standing on end, his nose bulbous, the capillaries in his cheeks bursting from too much drink. His eyes were red rimmed and he knew his breath was bad enough to kill any small rodent unfortunate enough to cross his path.

  So he cleaned up, although no one at the Trib noticed, except Whatsisname Shirer, the kid from Ioway or Illanoise. Whatsisname Shirer had raised his eyebrows, but hadn’t made a single remark, smart ass or otherwise, and so no one else seemed to notice.

  Thurber was busy making up the news. Root was working, trying to get someone at the copy desk to expand the notes his so-called reporters had turned in. Most everyone else was so bleary-eyed that they would think they were imagining Decker in his spiffed up clothes and slicked-back hair.

  Alcoholic wave indeed. It had become an alcoholic ocean, and he was seeing it for the very first time.

  The Dôme had customers this night, at least a dozen sitting on the terrace, with more inside. The interior was grayish blue from all the cigarette smoke—it looked like a fog had blown through Paris and gotten stuck only inside the Dôme.

  Outside, a group of men crowded around one of the tables. Decker recognized some of them from the transatlantic review. They spoke earnestly to each other, one of them shaking the stem of his pipe at a bespectacled man in an American felt hat.

  Decker avoided them, just like he’d taken to avoiding Know-it-all Hemingway. Instead he circled to the other side of the terrace, near the taxi stand. This evening, one of the ubiquitous uniformed policemen paced, hands clasped behind his back.

  The Dôme seemed normal, not like something out of a painting, the way it had the night before.

  Because Decker was concentrating on its normality, he almost missed the old man, sitting at the same table, his back against the café’s glass windows. Another man sat with him, younger, sharply French with his narrow face, black hair, and up-to-the-minute gabardine suit.

  Decker wandered over toward them, as if they weren’t his destination at all. When he reached the table, he pulled out the only other chair and sat.

  “You’re lucky I remembered,” he said.

  “I knew you would.” The old man wore the same suit. His eyes were as clear as Decker had thought. “You have not had a drink.”

  Damn that incontinent English. Decker couldn’t tell if the old man had asked a question or made a statement. “I told you I’d be sober. You told me you had story.”

  The younger man stared at Decker as if he thought he was rude. Maybe he was.

  “I said, I had a story for you.” The old man emphasized the last two words.

  Decker looked at the younger man. “Maybe some introductions would be a good place to start.”

  “Maybe not,” the old man said. “We shall perform the—how do you say?—niceties after we have determined what disturbs you the most.”

  “What disturbs me the most,” Decker said, “are people who waste my time.”

  He shoved the chair back, about to stand, when the old man touched his arm. The old man’s skin was cold. In spite of himself, Decker shivered.

  “Americans are impulsive,” the old man said to his companion. “And somehow they have come to embrace a lack of politeness as if it is a virtue.”

  “Look,” Decker said, almost adding “old man” like he had done last night when he was drunk. That had been rude, but not intentionally rude. “I deal in hard, cold facts. The first hard cold fact you learn about damn near anybody is his name, which you’re not willing to tell me. So I’m not willing to stick around. See ya, pal.”

  This time he did stand. He was going to repeat the same walk he’d made the night before, up the Boulevard St. Michel. Maybe he should walk around the Luxembourg Gardens instead, meander instead of go directly.

  He was nearly to the group of transatlantic review writers when the old man said, “The students, they will be in the street tonight. And tomorrow, the flag will fly over the Arc de Triomphe.”

  Decker stopped in spite of himself. A shiver ran down his spine. He hadn’t told anyone about those waking dreams. Not even when he was drunk. Probably not even when he was black-out drunk, since he got quieter and quieter—a man who knew how to keep secrets, Root used to say, when he was the one who poured Decker into a taxi.

  Decker pivoted. He walked back to the table, as the old man had known he would. But the old man did not smile like a man who had won an argument. Instead, he remained grimly serious. The younger man continued to stare.

  “The soldiers leaning out of the Hôtel de Ville, do you not notice how blond they are?” The old man’s voice was soft.

  The other man watched Decker avidly, as if everything depended on his response.

  The
Hôtel de Ville was Paris’s city hall. And he’d only seen soldiers there once, in the middle of a summer afternoon, as heat shimmered on the boulevards and he sat outside, trying to find a bit of air in a city not used to extreme warmth.

  “They wore helmets,” Decker said, knowing that was an admission.

  “But they were fair-skinned, no?”

  “Stocky,” he said, wishing he hadn’t responded. But that was what he had noticed, how stocky and square they were, as if the uniforms they wore with their unrecognizable helmets made them as solid as a boxer in the beer halls near Milwaukee.

  “And they wore this symbol on their arms.” The old man pushed a piece of paper forward with a Fylfot drawn on it.

  In spite of himself, Decker sat back down. “Who are they?”

  “A nightmare,” the old man said. “One we pray we will not have. But our prayers will be for nothing. Because only strong nightmares leach backwards.”

  “Backwards?” Decker asked, thinking of the woman. Was that a backwards nightmare? He had seen her six months after he arrived—years ago now—and he dreamt of her every night, awakening from those dreams unsettled.

  “The soldiers,” the old man said. “They are little boys now, playing with battered tin soldiers from before the War. If, indeed, they are healthy enough to play. Most are hungry. Some are starving.”

  Decker frowned. Even when he was sober, Decker didn’t understand the old man. The old man spoke nonsense. But a nonsense that Decker found enticing, in spite of himself.

  “Starving?” Decker said. “Then why don’t you do something?”

  “Why don’t you?” the old man asked. “Your country pushed for reparations. Your President Wilson. Somehow he knew how to cure the world. He made it sicker.”

  “Congress never ratified that treaty,” Decker said, wondering why they were talking about the Treaty of Versailles conference from six years ago, from before he even arrived in the City of Light.

  “And that makes it all better, no?” the old man said. “Leadership provided by your president here in Paris failed at home, so the fact that the other countries—”

  “Grand-pére,” the young man said, touching the old man’s arm. “That is enough. He is not responsible for his country’s follies.”

  “They are all responsible,” the old man said.

  Decker was frowning now.

  “You were telling me about soldiers and little boys,” Decker said, trying to get past this confusion. “Soldiers, little boys, and backwards nightmares.”

  “They are not nightmares,” the younger man said. “They are visions. The future, haunting us here and now.”

  Decker frowned. “The future?”

  The young man nodded. “Events so powerful they reach backwards to us. We have seen the soldiers for generations now. We have not understood them until—what is it you call it?—the Peace of Paris.”

  “You understand it now?” Decker asked.

  “We understand that they are Germans.”

  “Marching into Paris.” Decker snorted. “Are you hoping for this?”

  Three men from nearby tables stared. Most everyone here served in the War or had lost someone who had.

  “No,” the younger man said, holding up his hands. “It is the worst kind of tragedy. But we do know, from the students who are also a vision leaching backwards, that Paris herself will stand.”

  “The students.” Decker wasn’t going to ask any more and he wasn’t going to reveal what he had seen. He was assuming the younger man meant the grubby students he had seen some nights as he walked up the Boulevard St. Michel.

  “St. Sulpice stands. Notre Dame stands. Le Tour Eiffel stands. In the distance, away from the shouting, you can see Sacré Coeur. The bridges remain. If the Germans were to destroy Paris, they would bomb the bridges so that no army could follow. Then they would destroy the monuments to destroy our souls.”

  Decker couldn’t resist any longer. “How do you know the students appear later?”

  “They are less solid.”

  “You can’t touch them?” Decker asked.

  “No,” the younger man said. “You have not tried?”

  He had avoided everything. He had avoided the students and the soldiers and the flags. He heard the whispery voices, and figured they had come from his own drunkenness.

  “Can you touch current nightmares?” Decker asked.

  “Only reality,” the old man said.

  Her skin, cold against Decker’s fingers. So she had been real. Had he spoken to her once? Holding his notebook? Wanting to know who she was?

  Why would he have spoken to her? He wasn’t yet working for the Trib. He was playing at being a famous writer, the American James Joyce, yet to publish his Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.

  “Ah,” the old man said, peering into Decker’s face. “Something precipitated your visions. You did not see them when you first came to Paris.”

  Decker looked at him. The old man’s skin was papery thin, his eyebrows so bushy they seemed to grow toward his scalp.

  Paris had been clean. Paris had been pure. Truly the City of Light, all beauty and glistening stone, history calling to him.

  Not like Milwaukee. Milwaukee had turned dark, especially near the lakefront. He had seen corpses of sailors, washed against the rocks, their uniforms still sodden with the waters of Lake Michigan. He had screamed the first time, and people had run to him, not to them, not even when he pointed….

  He shook his head. He did not want to think of this. He did not want to remember it, how each street had something, someone, who sprawled along a road or had been shot on apartment steps or had been squashed flat by a new-fangled motorcar.

  Sometimes two, sometimes three per block. He had walked with his eyes closed, and his mother—his beautiful tiny mother—whispering that he had to do something else, something that took him away from death.

  Write your novel, she had said. I will tell people of my son, the famous writer.

  And she had given him all of her pin money, money he knew she relied upon to get away from his father.

  His father, who drank.

  “What was that precipitated these visions?” the old man asked. “A drink, perhaps. You like your drink.”

  Decker stared at him, feeling his gaze go flat with anger.

  “No, it could not be drink,” the younger man said. “Or he wouldn’t continue drinking. It’s got to be hereditary. Let me see your hands.”

  Decker closed his hands into fists. He didn’t want these people to touch him. He looked at the old man.

  “You said you had a story for me.”

  “I have a city of stories, if you’re willing to listen,” the old man said. “But first, we must see the root of your vision.”

  Decker stared at him, then slowly, reluctantly, extended his right hand.

  ***

  He had first seen her on the Champs Elysées, a vision in white. She looked like the old world blending with the new, her Gibson Girl hairdo, the wide-brimmed hat (with ribbons trailing it) that she carried in her left hand. Her dress was narrow, with a flip just near the knees, her stockings perfect, her shoes solid, old-fashioned, buttoned-up leather.

  He had seen no Parisians woman dressed like that—mixing styles. Parisian women had their own style, a lot more fluid, a lot more suggestive, and all of them wore cloche hats (if they wore hats at all). She smiled when she saw him, a broad, wide American smile, the kind that held nothing back.

  He tipped his hat to her. She laughed and continued onward as if she had known they would see each other again.

  Of course they had. She had been looking at the sights, such a tourist, and he had been moving from park bench to park bench, staring at the monuments.

  He had talked with her on Pont Neuf, more than once. She had laughed and flirted and never once told him her name. No one seemed to want to tell him names.

  The thought disconcerted him for a moment, and the image of her laughing face wave
red. He heard voices all around him, male voices mostly, and the air filled with tobacco smoke. An old man was peering at the palm of his hand as if it held the secrets of the universe.

  And then she was back, looking at him sideways. She was holding his hand, palm up, as if she could see his future in it. She was young, enjoying Paris. He hadn’t enjoyed Paris until her. Not like this—climbing the Eiffel Tower and going to Versailles to see the gardens, wandering through the Louvre, and eating bread and cheese for lunch in the Tuileries.

  And he wrote. How he wrote. The novel, abandoned, he didn’t care about Lincoln. He wrote instead about—

  …the woman, discarded, like abandoned laundry at the base of the bridge. Her killer, dark, darker than anything Edgar Allan Poe could imagine in his darkest Rue Morgue dreams. The man carried her from the bridge itself, down the side, preparing to dump her in the Seine when someone called out…

  He looked up, saw the younger man staring at him with something like horror, the old man with eyes full of compassion.

  “Corpse Vision,” the young man said. “You have Corpse Vision.”

  ***

  Decker wasn’t sure he wanted them to tell him what Corpse Vision was, although he had a hunch he knew.

  The memories scrolled backwards—like the nightmares the old man had mentioned—the first homicide call on the police beat, near one of the speakeasies by the lakefront. The dead man wore spats and a snazzy hat that blew toward Decker in the wind. He caught the hat, knew enough to carry it back to the detective, and as he did, his foot brushed the corpse, his ankle actually hitting the dead man’s elbow.

  A little bit of nothing—a bit of a shiver, a bit of a chill—but not much more until he returned to the Journal’s city room. He found a typewriter and banged out his recollections, handing the paper to the copy desk for expansion. He went back to the desk to type a few impressions, like he used to do, for the novels he would someday write. But first, he rested his cheek on his fist and closed his eyes.