I thought of all the money I’d save on food.
He searched my eyes, my face, and I stared right through his in response. The world he offered me stretched out ahead so clearly. I could have sat down and written it as a script for a play with every word perfect in the first draft. There was zero reason to say no. There were infinite reasons to say yes. The biggest was somewhere in my abdomen, attached to my pancreas and growing in fits and starts, dumping poison into my blood.
“No.” I blinked a couple of times. “No.” I said it again before I could say yes instead. Then I said it a third time. “No.” That’s what the ancients used to say: three times makes it real.
Alejandro stared. He didn’t get up and walk away. He didn’t tell me I would never have a chance to change my mind. Instead, he swallowed air, his throat bobbing. We held hands, staring into each other’s eyes, while a big, wet tear rolled down my sallow face and off my jutting cheekbones and splashed in my empty cup.
“You said yourself I’m the sort of person who considers the consequences of my actions. I’m not ready to spend eternity ducking and weaving and wherever else this shit would lead. And I’m not going to let the reward for becoming a murderous vigilante be eternal life.” I licked my lips, as he had done, and I started to tremble a little. He tightened his fingers’ grip between mine, and I did the same. “The choices I’ve made, the life I’ve had, they need to matter. I killed that priest because someone had to, Alejandro, and I happened to be there to do it, not because I think I’m so fucking pure. If I bail out at the end and go, become someone I’m not—an eternal detective, an agent of the shadows in search of the light, stronger and faster and better than before—what am I saying? I’m ditching everything I’ve done, all the things I am. I’d lose my humanity. I’d lose the sense of…” I paused, closed my eyes, opened them again. “What if I forget the mortality that made me willing in the first place to kill so I could avenge those people in Splendor? What if having infinite life makes me think life isn’t valuable? I’m sorry, Alejandro, but no. I’d take you home and let you bed me every night until I die, yes, and I’d let you walk out that door without looking back because that is who you are, and who I am, and I don’t have to like your choices in order to live with mine. But my answer has to be no. I’m going to die, Alejandro, and I’m going to do it with what little honest humanity I can scrape together.”
He opened his mouth and started to say something, but I broke the moment by standing up and walking away without another word.
It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it hurt me more than I knew how to handle, so I went home and got drunk.
The next day I went and found Fiono and made him fuck me until my mind went blank. Then I gave him a key, and I told him he had to come back every day for a week, which he did and then some. Fiono became the medic I needed to live long enough to die without leaving an even bigger mess. He brought me some generic salve and fresh bandages, and with the skill of a street slicer who’s had at least a couple of fights end in a draw, he washed my arm wound and bandaged it every day.
Alejandro paid me because golems are creatures of their word. He paid me half in Imperial money and half in street scrip because he was smart enough to know that would be more useful. The official currency went to catch me up on rent and buy a new knob for the bathroom door. I hated my landlady, sure, but she had to eat, too, same as the rest of us. I figured dying on her property was enough of a fuck you for both of us.
The Imperial police took about five minutes to open and close the case on Solim’s murder. Blackie gave them Yuri’s description, and the rent boy slices up a priest story was too simultaneously messy and tidy to be worth questioning. Everybody likes a little scandal that solves itself that way. I went around and paid my tab at Misconceptions, which turned out to be rather larger than I remembered. Blackie backdated a bunch of drinks I never drank, and I didn’t really begrudge him skimming off the top of the end of my life like that. I owed him that and more for Solim alone. I couldn’t even begin to account for all the other times I’ve probably made much smaller messes in his bar. Too bad I couldn’t expense Alejandro for them since they were dated from before he hired me, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. Blackie had to explain his ledgers to the tax man like anybody else, and that was the price of keeping them clean.
Fiono wasn’t shy about why he kept coming around to check on my arm. I had food I couldn’t keep down anymore, and a little more money to spend—some official, some not—and we were both a little intoxicated by the taste of death we both got when he fucked me. That’s the snide version of it, though. In the quiet moments after, and when he ran his thumb across my arm to spread a little more salve on the slowly-healing wound, there was kindness there. Fiono never talked about himself or his life, but I didn’t imagine it had a lot of room in it for human vulnerability. If he was ever going to have a life beyond his twenties, he needed to figure out kindness and fast, and much to my surprise, I was flattered to be a part of him learning that lesson. It wasn’t love so much as Fiono learning that there was something between love and fucking, something not exactly like respect and certainly not friendship, but something that valued the humanity of each of us all the same.
I would always thank him when he was leaving, and he would take my hand, and he would look me in the eye before he let go and walked away.
Otherwise, my time was entirely my own, so I started to write this all down. I made Fiono promise to take it to Clodia once I was gone. I don’t expect her to do anything about this. But I need her to know. There were questions still to answer, and someone needed to ask them. Clodia wasn’t the person for that, but maybe she could find that person for both of us.
My body gave up two weeks to the day after my last breakfast with Alejandro. I started vomiting blood every morning, and Fiono was reduced to being my nurse. It was all I could do to write these few words as I lay on the couch in my office, my skin raw with sores, my vision blurring, my flesh jaundiced. I didn’t expect him to keep coming around but that empathy he was learning lingered, to both our surprise, beyond the point when I couldn’t even get fucked anymore. I considered not including his salacious liaisons in this memoir of my last days among the living, but I think at this point, I have to leave him in. To do otherwise would be to exclude one of my favorite instances of discovering kindness where I expected none, and that’s something the world can’t afford to dismiss simply because it doesn’t like how it got there.
I have heard stories of a burst of energy coming to those about to die: the invalid who rises for one last active afternoon, the mindless elder who becomes lucid and conversational the whole length of their final night on earth. I think today I must be feeling that, which means I’m about to go. I can sit up. I can write again. I can finish this story. And I can tell what a wreck my body has become: its curdled stench, its tattered feel, its flimsiness, like an old cobweb its builder abandoned when it captured no flies.
I can hear Fiono’s footsteps in the hall as he arrives for yet another session of showing more kindness than I probably deserve, more kindness than he probably knew he possessed.
No, those feet are not Fiono’s: they’re quiet despite the plaswood floor’s best efforts, as his are, but his are lighter somehow, closer together, quicker and nimbler. Fiono has the footsteps of a dancer with a knife. These are confident but not subtle.
Of course they are. Alejandro is here. He’s standing in the open door, staring at me as I finish writing this out. He does not disguise his sympathy and horror at my condition. My hair has become brittle, and my skin is yellow. I look like the ghost I’m shortly due to become. Alejandro has not yet spoken, and he does not need to do so. I know why he’s here: he’s come to repeat his offer of making me into a golem.
I hold up a finger and go back to writing.
To be honest, dying with dignity is possibly the least dignified thing I have ever done in my life. I have run away from parents who thought they sho
uld keep me trapped on their reservation because they loved me, hidden in the woods and lived like an animal to evade the search parties sent out for me, lived and worked in the most squalid sector of a City known for its easy filth, sold my ass in the streets, blown kids with knives to buy an hour of their time, and watched a monster die ten centimeters from my face, his eyes staring into mine.
I thought maybe this cancer eating me up inside would lend my death a sense of…not of purpose, but of causation. At least when it killed me, I wouldn’t have to ask why. Solim certainly knew why he was dying, and I think that made it easier for him somehow.
When I put down this pen and set aside this paper, Alejandro is going to ask me again if I am ready to join him in a body of plastic and mystery, to become a ghost of a different sort: one from his world, not from mine. I’ve spent the last few days watching myself slowly die and thinking about Solim’s last words, the last ones I remember: There are many of us who truly understand. More than you might imagine. And we are well-placed in the churches. We will one day, sooner or later, run the churches ourselves. After that, we’ll run the whole Empire.
There are precious few people who know that. And in a hundred years, or a thousand, there might be no one who thinks to question it.
When Alejandro asks me again if I’d prefer some facsimile of eternal life, I’m going to surprise myself.
I’m going to say yes.
About the Author
Michael G. Williams writes wry horror and science fiction noir: stories of monsters, macabre humor, alienation, subverted expectations, and the families we forge out of friends and allies. He is the author of three series for Falstaff Books: The Withrow Chronicles, including Perishables (2012 Laine Cunningham Award), Tooth & Nail, Deal with the Devil, Attempted Immortality, and Nobody Gets Out Alive; a new series in The Shadow Council Archives, SERVANT/SOVEREIGN, featuring time travel, modern-day witches, and one of San Francisco’s most beloved historical figures, none other than Emperor Norton I; and a new sci fi detective series debuting in 2019 with the novel A Fall in Autumn. He also writes short stories and contributes to tabletop RPG development. Michael strives to present the humor and humanity at the heart of horror, science fiction, and mystery.
Michael is also an avid podcaster, activist, reader, runner, cyclist, and gaymer, and is a brother in St. Anthony Hall and Mu Beta Psi. He lives in Durham, NC, with his husband, two cats, two dogs, and more and better friends than he probably deserves.
Copyright © 2018 by Michael G. Williams
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Also by Michael G. Williams
The Withrow Chronicles
Perishables
Tooth & Nail
Deal with the Devil
Attempted Immortality
Nobody Gets Out Alive (2019)
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