Resurrection Man

by Sean Stewart

  He glanced at Sarah, twenty-eight and smart and grown, and saw buried in her his baby sister: a chubby toddler gone missing, he and Jet the frantic babysitters running like madmen up and down the river trails for half an hour before Dante saw her at last, pelting down a path and laughing and waving her diaper overhead like the banner of a victorious legion.

  Sarah had stopped retching. She took a long moment to steady her nerves, and then forced herself to consider the body in the boat. A humorless smile flickered across her mouth. "Was it not Socrates who said, 'The unexamined death is not worth dying'?"

  Dante's heart hammered endlessly inside his chest. Up the hill, Grandfather Clock would still be ticking in the parlor, long after the last ember in the fireplace had smoked and died. Mother and Father would be lying in their twin beds; Aunt Sophie would be dreaming her unquiet dreams of crows and cigarettes.

  Sarah studied the white growth in the dead Dante's abdomen. "Maybe Dad can cut it out. If there's one of these in you, I mean."

  A nightmare image raced through Dante: his father, bending over him, slitting him open. The slide of the knife through his organs. His heart, beating in his father's hands.

  Dante shook his head. "It's got its hooks into too many vital systems. Liver. Kidneys. Spleen maybe. Heart maybe. It's too late for surgery." Dante shuddered, feeling the barbed world biting into him with thin, evil little hooks.

  "What do we do with the body?" Sarah asked.

  "Let's burn it," Dante said. "Burn the sac and the body both. Burn everything. Then I'll drink myself into a coma," he added. "Fabulous idea."

  Sarah ignored him. "We can't toss it in the river. What if it drifts ashore? ...I suppose we could cremate you—"

  "It!"

  "—It, so it wouldn't be recognized." Sarah paused, frowning. "Unless you think burning it would hurt you. Give you a fever or something. Of course, we already cut it open without you fountaining blood."

  At the word "blood," Dante felt his pulse with unnatural distinctness, throbbing in his neck and chest and at the base of his thumb. Goodbye, lovers: Mei's little white teeth and Tania's mound, firm as a peach beneath his hand. Goodbye, Laura my friend: thanks for the pots of green tea we drank in your tiny porcelain cups. Goodbye, Aunt Sophie, with your coins and cigarettes; Sarah with your embroidered vests and acid wit. Goodbye, Mom: with one Scots glance you could size me up to the last pound, shilling, and pence.

  Goodbye, Jet: I loved you too well to have done so badly by you.

  Ave, Pater: morituri te salutamus.

  "We should bury the body," Dante said at last. He glanced at it, slit down the middle, the skin pulled over the sharp ends of the ribs "to avoid puncture wounds during subsequent manipulations."

  Jet laid a thin hand on Dante's corpse, touching it on the hip, the groin, gently probing the edges of the slit belly. "I want to know why I'm different." Slowly he stood up, hands leaving the corpse. "I want to know why I wear this," he said, tracing the butterfly birthmark that spread over his cheek.

  "So we'll ask Mom and Dad," Dante said. "Sarah can tackle Mom while you and I are burying this... thing."

  "That's not enough," Jet said softly. "You can't just bury it and walk away, Dante. You're going to die if you don't find out what's going on. And then I'd never find out what happened to me."

  "For Christ's sake," Dante said heatedly. "I looked, didn't I? I looked at the damn body; I dragged it down and opened it up—"

  ("Sort of like a fortune cookie, when you think of it," Sarah murmured.)

  "—What the hell else do you want from me?"

  Without answering, Jet grabbed Dante's hand and pulled it down onto the corpse's open chest. A surge of dread crackled over Dante's skin as from a prison deep inside himself a forbidden memory broke free, rank with sweat and fear. The darkness. The heavy chopping of the fan in the next room.

  A huge hand on his leg.

  Dante snatched his hand away from the corpse.

  "Hey! Boys! Check your testosterone at the door," Sarah said sharply.

  Jet shrugged. "An angel is what you are, Dante. You'd better face up to that if you want to stay alive."

  "I don't think you know what you're asking of me," Dante murmured.

  The butterfly on Jet's cheek trembled. "Everything," he said.

  A tiny spider's leg began to clamber up from the body's slit throat. Dante bit his lip until it bled, until the spider crawled away, until he felt the vision seep back inside himself like water soaking into the earth.

  "Okay," he said.

  PRAYER INDEED IS GOOD. BUT WHILE CALLING ON THE GODS A MAN SHOULD HIMSELF LEND A HAND. —HIPPOCRATES

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  Even by the time Dante and his siblings were sneaking his dead body out to the boathouse at their family house a mile outside the City, Laura Chen was still at work. Long after lights had winked out in the buildings around her (glass and steel monoliths by I. M. Pei, with no feeling for the rolling hills or the river—what had the man been thinking of?), Laura remained behind, pondering the tricky question of remodeling Mr. Hudson's home. He wanted a solarium, and the logic of his house suggested that it be built on the southeast corner, but according to his geomancer the year was not propitious for building in that quadrant.

  Sometimes Laura stood hunched and still over the blueprints spread across her drafting table. Other times she prowled the office, gulping down cup after cup of strong black coffee as she considered her options.

  They could, of course, conduct purifying rituals to attract the influence of the two auspicious stars that Mr. Ling, the geomancer, said were in Hudson's ascendant. Mr. Ling was willing to do his best, but at heart he felt this would be a Band-Aid solution. Laura tended to agree. She had no particular talent for feng shui, though she had a good grasp of its principles, but her architect's sensibilities were enough to convince her that cosmetic quick-fixes were no substitute for building on a solid foundation.

  So—if the solarium wasn't to face southeast, where should it go? And how would the rest of the house have to be altered to allow its harmonious integration?

  It was at times like these—up late, weary, and struggling with another impossible feng shui problem—that she almost wished her great-uncle had been less famous. It was the exalted name of Chen Dai Fei, one of the Five Founders of the Permitted City, that caused Chinese clients to choose his niece to do their work. Though still only a junior partner at Jaundice & Park, Laura was by far the most at ease working in the interdisciplinary approach the Permitted City project had pioneered. Mr. Jaundice was only really comfortable with engineers and contractors. Ms. Taft had mastered the ergonomists' lingo, and Mr. Park spoke a smattering of sociologese but only Laura could sit down with a geomancer without feeling silly. Laura always remembered to bury a charm under the foundation stone of a client's house, and she alone in the firm knew how to counteract the inauspicious influence of a hard-lined building going up across the street by the careful placement of a few inexpensive 8-Trigram mirrors.

  Not that she believed everything the geomancers told her: divination, though getting better every year, was still an inexact science. Her attitude to the angels she worked with was much like her attitudes about God: clearly there was something going on. If she had her doubts from time to time that her priest or geomancer knew exactly what that something was, she still thought it foolish not to say her prayers, or listen to Mr. Ling's advice.

  What made this commission particularly delicate was that Mr. Hudson was not Chinese at all, but an eighth-generation American who bled Boston blue. Success in her projects for non-Chinese customers was critical; if these clients prospered, if they felt happy and serene in the houses she designed for them, she would have made her contribution to the work of Tristan Chu, Gary Snyder, and a host of others: convincing Americans that the Permitted City techniques worked. If the American public believed that, her presence would give her firm a decided edge in the marketplace. It had been hinted, even by so au
gust a luminary as old Mr. Jaundice himself, that if the number of wealthy clients seeking her services continued to swell, she might soon find her name appended to the firm's.

  Well, Great-uncle's name, she thought wryly. That's what the customers were really paying for.

  She poured herself another cup of coffee. Unfortunately, it was not Great-uncle who did the work. (Well—three times Uncle Chen had sent dreams to guide her, but those were exceptions, not the rule, and anyway she preferred to solve her problems on her own.)

  It was five cups of coffee past closing time when finally she sighed, rubbed her eyes, and flipped off the lamp over her drafting table. Opening her desk, she reached past her slide rules and mechanical pencils to a thin horsehair brush and a pot of red ink. On special yellow charm paper, thin and crackly as crepe, she inscribed two talismans, one for Chen Dai Fei and one for her father. These she burned in the small grate on her desk, offering up her daily prayer of thanks. Then she belted on her raincoat, locked up, and flipped off the lights.

  A paper job, she thought, a little lonely with the lateness of the hour. Drawing paper houses. And my family reduced to paper dolls and shriveled into ash.

  Her mother had adamantly refused ever to go back to Kansas. Laura had never even met her cousins there; she talked to her grandparents on the phone twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. They were polite. How could they be more, when they had not been allowed to be part of Laura's family? In some ways she was too Chinese to be American, and yet she had lived all her life under the Stars and Stripes; could still quote the preamble to the Constitution and chant the Pledge of Allegiance, that great charm every American child had to learn. What could China mean to her? She had never been there. Never seen her father in his own country. Never even met the great Dai Fei.

  Laura shook her shoulders and gave an angry, horsey snort. She despised self-pity.

  Lost Child or Treasure Child, she told herself sternly. Depends on how you look at it. Now stop moping and go to bed!

  She looked back at the talismans smoldering in the grate. A thin advancing emberline gleamed and softly crackled where black ash overwhelmed the yellow paper. Good night, Uncle Chen.

  Good night, Father.

  Goodbye.

  * * *

  Perhaps it was the five extra cups of coffee that made her sleep so lightly; that made her snap awake in the middle of the night, and made her left eye tremble. She glanced at her bedside clock: 2:48 A.M.—the hour of Ch'ou. A tic in the left eye foretold... What was it again? Something will happen to worry you. Or was it Someone is thinking of you. Unable to remember, she groped for the 1992 T'ung Shu dangling from its red silk tassel at the head of her bed. She was flipping through the pages of the almanac, trying to remember where the section on Fortune-telling by Physical Sensations was, when she heard a noise from upstairs.

  Immediately she knew what must have awakened her. There were footsteps moving around in the apartment overhead. But it wasn't Dante Ratkay: he was spending Thanksgiving weekend at home with his family. Besides, she knew his sleepy tread as he headed for the refrigerator in the middle of the night, or bumped through the darkness to pee. Often enough there were other footsteps overhead—lighter, feminine ones from Dante's traveling circus of lovers—but never footsteps like these: sure, methodical treads that paused moved a step or two, paused, moved another step...

  Searching.

  Laura sat up in bed, strung tight as a bow. Probably it was just a thief, she told herself. Just a B&E artist hitting an empty apartment.

  On the fourth floor?

  It would be an inefficient cat-burglar who couldn't find better pickings closer to the ground. Those footsteps belonged to someone who had chosen Dante's apartment in particular. Probably had even known Dante was away and the coast would be clear.

  Or—and this thought scared her—the intruder hadn't known Dante was away; had crept up to his room in the middle of the night, expecting to find him there.

  Gently Laura reached for the telephone beside her bed and dialed 911. The clicks as the dial spun back seemed deafening, like machine-gun fire.

  Overhead the footsteps suddenly paused.

  Laura huddled under her blanket with the phone beneath her. She dragged a pillow over her head to help muffle the sound of her voice.

  "Emergency. How can I help you?"

  "I think there's an intruder in the apartment above me. The guy who lives there's away—"

  "I'm sorry, but I can't hear you. You'll have to speak up."

  Laura cringed. "Intruder!" she hissed. "There's an intruder in apartment four-o-six, eighteen eighty-eight Green Street."

  "Are you able to get out of the apartment without being seen?"

  "I'm not in the apartment, I'm downstairs," Laura grated.,

  "Then how do you know there's an intruder?"

  With enormous restraint Laura kept herself from hurling the phone across the room. Giving up on the cops, she placed the receiver delicately back on its cradle and crept out of bed.

  It's ridiculous for me to sneak, she told herself; whoever is up there can't hear my footsteps. But she found herself walking on her toes anyway, calves tight as if she were sparring in her Wenlido class.

  She prowled through her apartment, trying to think, winding around the silk panels that separated each area from the next, ducking automatically under the brass lanterns. Either the cops would send someone out or they wouldn't. Even if they did, whoever was upstairs burgling Dante's apartment would be long gone before a patrol car arrived.

  They had shared a lot of cups of tea, Dante and Laura; it made her mad to think of someone tearing up his place. Someone... or Something.

  She stopped dead. Maybe the thing searching Dante's apartment wasn't human at all. This building wasn't in the slums, but it was only a few blocks from the dreariest part of downtown. If minotaurs had made it as far as Westwood, they could easily be prowling here. And Dante had a bit of angel in him. He tried to ignore it as much as possible, but she had seen him flinch while walking by a mirror. Once, when he wasn't looking, a butterfly had struggled damply from the tea leaves at the bottom of his cup. Laura had said nothing at the time, knowing he wouldn't want to hear about it.

  Could Something have been forming in his room? Or had a Minotaur wandered in, following the scent of magic up the stairs, tracking its ghostly efflorescence to Dante's door?

  Laura stood a long moment in the darkness, six lanky feet of frustration in a plain pink nightgown. She had carried on her father's work, but she never had mastered his easy disposition. Her mother was a big raw-boned woman from a Kansas farming community, and along with her size, Laura had inherited her stubborn temperament. ("Tough as nails"—the phrase had enchanted Laura's father; a wonderfully poetic description of his wife, he thought. Her pet name, Sally Tough-As-Nails, he chanted lovingly in the last soft breath before he died.)

  Still fuming over her abortive call to 911, Laura had a sudden inspiration for how she might drive out the intruder, be he minotaur or man. Belting on her silk kimono (the one with the lucky dragon on it—good!), she grabbed a box of wooden matches from a shelf above her refrigerator. From the little cedar votive cabinet beneath the eastern window she grabbed a pack of firecrackers, left over from the New Year, packed together like so many bullets in a paper bandoleer.

  Letting herself out of her own apartment, she headed down the corridor for the stairs, striding over the dingy carpet like an angry stork. She was working hard not to think, working just to maintain her anger. She knew that if she faltered, fear would set in. At first she climbed the stairs two at a time, but at the landing caution kicked in and she went more slowly, watching Dante's door and ready to run if a minotaur came out of it, or a man with a gun.

  She took the corridor very quietly indeed, stopping a couple of feet from Dantes door, and listening. There: the smooth wooden grumble of a drawer being pulled out.

  Laura's heart bumped painfully in her chest.

  She suddenl
y realized how much noise striking her wooden match was going to make. But it was too late to worry about that now. Better get it over with before I sneeze, she thought. Or panic.

  Closing her eyes, she mouthed a quick prayer to her ancestors—Uncle Chen, if ever you look out for me, look out for me now!

  Quickly she struck a match and held it to the firecracker's fuse. When it caught, she dropped the matches, opened Dante's door a crack, and pitched the firecrackers in. There was a grunt of surprise followed by an instant of total silence. Then the firecrackers went off like gunshots in the darkness.

  Inside the apartment someone squawked and crashed heavily to the floor. Tripped over Dante's bedside table, Laura thought, hearing the thump and clang as Dante's telephone and old brass alarm clock clattered to the floor. Whoever was inside swore and scrambled up. Didn't sound like a minotaur, Laura thought. Relief surged through her like whiskey.

  Now hold on, she told herself. A normal guy with a normal gun could still fill you full of ordinary holes.

  Hesitating outside the door, she heard a shattering crash from inside the apartment.

  She inched the door open, and a moment later heard the sound of footsteps clanging on the fire escape. Cursing herself for a coward, she ran inside and fumbled for the dimmers; couldn't find them; lost another few precious seconds until she remembered Dante only had old-fashioned switches for his lights. She cursed again and slapped them on.

  A cool breeze eddied from the kitchen, thick with the stink of gunpowder. The window that led out to the fire escape must have been latched. The intruder had smashed it and swept out the glass at the bottom with a wooden cutting board that now lay discarded on the floor. Picking her way to the window in bare feet, Laura just caught a glimpse of a dark figure clattering down the fire escape. "Hey! Stop!" she shouted. Then, "Fire!"— that was supposed to work better.

  Her neighbors were not convinced. A couple of them looked curiously out their windows, but no one seemed in the least interested in dashing outside and running down the intruder. He had too much of a start for Laura to have any hope of catching him, and frankly she didn't like the idea of cramming her gangling frame through a window still glittering with broken glass along its top and sides. There was nothing she could do but watch and hope the mysterious intruder would choose to amble under a street light so she could get a nice long look at him.