The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  You could drive across the continent in this way, passed from hand to hand by local radio, and tuned in to the geography of the night.

  I went over that memory three times, polishing and refining it, before the branch line abruptly ended. One hand groped forward and closed upon nothing.

  I had reached the main conduit. For a panicked moment I had feared that it would be concrete or brick or even one of the cedar pipes the city laid down in the 19th century, remnants of which still linger here and there beneath the pavement. But by sheer blind luck, the system had been installed during that narrow window of time when the pipes were cast iron. I crawled along its underside first one way and then the other, searching for the branch line to the Widow’s. There was a lot of crap under the street. Several times I was blocked by gas lines or by the high-pressure pipes for the fire hydrants and had to awkwardly clamber around them.

  At last I found the line and began the painful journey out from the street again.

  When I emerged in the Widow’s basement, I was a nervous wreck. It came to me then that I could no longer remember my father’s name. A thing of rags and shreds indeed!

  I worked my way up the electrical system, searching every room and unintentionally spying on the family who had bought the house after the Widow’s death. In the kitchen a puffy man stood with his sleeves rolled up, elbow-deep in the sink, angrily washing dishes by candlelight. A woman who was surely his wife expressively smoked a cigarette at his stiff back, drawing in the smoke with bitter intensity and exhaling it in puffs of hatred. On the second floor a preadolescent girl clutched a tortoise-shell cat so tightly it struggled to escape, and cried into its fur. In the next room a younger boy sat on his bed in earphones, Walkman on his lap, staring sightlessly out the window at the burning transformer. No Widow on either floor.

  How, I wondered, could she have endured staying in this entropic oven of a blue-collar rowhouse, forever the voyeur at the banquet, watching the living squander what she had already spent? Her trace was everywhere, her presence elusive. I was beginning to think she’d despaired and given herself up to the sky when I found her in the attic, clutching the wire that led to the antenna. She looked up, silenced and amazed by my unexpected appearance.

  “Come on,” I said. “I know a way out.”

  ***

  Returning, however, I couldn’t retrace the route I’d taken in. It wasn’t so much the difficulty of navigating the twisting maze of pipes under the street, though that was bad enough, as the fact that the Widow wouldn’t hazard the passage unless I led her by the hand.

  “You don’t know how difficult this is for me,” I said.

  “It’s the only way I’d dare.” A nervous, humorless laugh. “I have such a lousy sense of direction.”

  So, steeling myself, I seized her hand and plunged through the wall.

  It took all my concentration to keep from sliding off the water pipes, I was so distracted by the violence of her thoughts. We crawled through a hundred memories, all of her married lover, all alike.

  Here’s one:

  Daniel snapped on the car radio. Sad music—something classical—flooded the car. “That’s bullshit, babe. You know how much I have invested in you?” He jabbed a blunt finger at her dress. “I could buy two good whores for what that thing cost.”

  Then why don’t you, she thought. Get back on your Metroliner and go home to New York City and your wife and your money and your two good whores. Aloud, reasonably, she said, “It’s over, Danny, can’t you see that?”

  “Look, babe. Let’s not argue here, okay? Not in the parking lot, with people walking by and everybody listening. Drive us to your place, we can sit down and talk it over like civilized human beings.”

  She clutched the wheel, staring straight ahead. “No. We’re going to settle this here and now.”

  “Christ.” One-handed he wrangled a pack of Kents from a jacket pocket and knocked out a cigarette. Put the end in his lips and drew it out. Punched the lighter. “So talk.”

  A wash of hopelessness swept over her. Married men were supposed to be easy to get rid of. That was the whole point. “Let me go, Danny,” she pleaded. Then, lying, “We can still be friends.”

  He made a disgusted noise.

  “I’ve tried, Danny, I really have. You don’t know how hard I’ve tried. But it’s just not working.”

  “All right, I’ve listened. Now let’s go.” Reaching over her, Daniel threw the gearshift into reverse. He stepped on her foot, mashing it down on the accelerator.

  The car leapt backwards. She shrieked and in a flurry of panic swung the wheel about and slammed on the brake with her free foot.

  With a jolt and a crunch, the car stopped. There was the tinkle of broken plastic. They’d hit a lime-green Hyundai.

  “Oh, that’s just perfect!” Daniel said. The lighter popped out. He lit his cigarette and then swung open the door. “I’ll check the damage.”

  Over her shoulder, she saw Daniel tug at his trousers’ knees as he crouched to examine the Hyundai. She had a sudden impulse to slew the car around and escape. Step on the gas and never look back. Watch his face, dismayed and dwindling, in the rear-view mirror. Eyes flooded with tears, she began quietly to laugh.

  Then Daniel was back. “It’s all right, let’s go.”

  “I heard something break.”

  “It was just a taillight, okay?” He gave her a funny look. “What the hell are you laughing about?”

  She shook her head hopelessly, unable to sort out the tears from the laughter. Then somehow they were on the Expressway, the car humming down the indistinct and warping road. She was driving but Daniel was still in control.

  ***

  We were completely lost now and had been for some time. I had taken what I was certain had to be a branch line and it had led nowhere. We’d been tracing its twisty passage for blocks. I stopped and pulled my hand away. I couldn’t concentrate. Not with the caustics and poisons of the Widow’s past churning through me. “Listen,” I said. “We’ve got to get something straight between us.”

  Her voice came out of nowhere, small and wary. “What?”

  How to say it? The horror of those memories lay not in their bru-tality but in their particularity. They nestled into empty spaces where memories of my own should have been. They were as familiar as old shoes. They fit.

  “If I could remember any of this crap,” I said, “I’d apologize. Hell, I can’t blame you for how you feel. Of course you’re angry. But it’s gone, can’t you see that, it’s over. You’ve got to let go. You can’t hold me accountable for things I can’t even remember, okay? All that shit happened decades ago. I was young. I’ve changed.” The absurdity of the thing swept over me. I’d have laughed if I’d been able. “I’m dead, for pity’s sake!”

  A long silence. Then, “So you’ve figured it out.”

  “You’ve known all along,” I said bitterly. “Ever since I came off of the high-tension lines in Manayunk.”

  She didn’t deny it. “I suppose I should be flattered that when you were in trouble you came to me,” she said in a way that indicated she was not.

  “Why didn’t you tell me then? Why drag it out?”

  “Danny—”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “It’s your name. Daniel. Daniel Cobb.”

  All the emotions I’d been holding back by sheer force of denial closed about me. I flung myself down and clutched the pipe tight, crushing myself against its unforgiving surface. Trapped in the friendless wastes of night, I weighed my fear of letting go against my fear of holding on.

  “Cobb?”

  I said nothing.

  The Widow’s voice took on an edgy quality. “Cobb, we can’t stay here. You’ve got to lead me out. I don’t have the slightest idea which way to go. I’m lost without your help.”

  I still could not speak.

  “Cobb!” She was close to panic. “I put my own feelings aside. Back in Manayunk. You needed help and I did what
I could. Now it’s your turn.”

  Silently, invisibly, I shook my head.

  “God damn you, Danny,” she said furiously. “I won’t let you do this to me again! So you’re unhappy with what a jerk you were—that’s not my problem. You can’t redeem your manliness on me any more. I am not your fucking salvation. I am not some kind of cosmic last chance and it’s not my job to talk you down from the ledge.”

  That stung. “I wasn’t asking you to,” I mumbled.

  “So you’re still there! Take my hand and lead us out.”

  I pulled myself together. “You’ll have to follow my voice, babe. Your memories are too intense for me.”

  We resumed our slow progress. I was sick of crawling, sick of the dark, sick of this lightless horrid existence, disgusted to the pit of my soul with who and what I was. Was there no end to this labyrinth of pipes?

  “Wait.” I’d brushed by something. Something metal buried in the earth.

  “What is it?”

  “I think it’s—” I groped about, trying to get a sense of the thing’s shape. “I think it’s a cast-iron gatepost. Here. Wait. Let me climb up and take a look.”

  Relinquishing my grip on the pipe, I seized hold of the object and stuck my head out of the ground. I emerged at the gate of an iron fence framing the minuscule front yard of a house on Ripka Street. I could see again! It was so good to feel the clear breath of the world once more that I closed my eyes briefly to savor the sensation.

  “How ironic,” Euphrosyne said.

  “After being so heroic,” Thalia said.

  “Overcoming his fears,” Aglaia said.

  “Rescuing the fair maid from terror and durance vile,” Cleta said.

  “Realizing at last who he is,” Phaenna said.

  “Beginning that long and difficult road to recovery by finally getting in touch with his innermost feelings,” Auxo said.

  Hegemone giggled.

  “What?” I opened my eyes.

  That was when the Corpsegrinder struck. It leapt upon me with stunning force, driving spear-long talons through my head and body. The talons were barbed so that they couldn’t be pulled free and they burned like molten metal. “Ahhhh, Cobb,” the Corpsegrinder crooned. “Now this is sweet.”

  I screamed and it drank in those screams, so that only silence escaped into the outside world. I struggled and it made those struggles its own, leaving me to kick myself deeper and deeper into the drowning pools of its identity. With all my will I resisted. It was not enough. I experienced the languorous pleasure of surrender as that very will and resistance were sucked down into my attacker’s substance. The distinction between me and it weakened, strained, dissolved. I was transformed.

  I was the Corpsegrinder now.

  ***

  Manhattan is a virtual school for the dead. Enough people die there every day to keep any number of monsters fed. From the store of memories the Corpsegrinder had stolen from me, I recalled a quiet moment sitting cross-legged on the tin ceiling of a sleaze joint while table dancers entertained Japanese tourists on the floor above and a kobold instructed me on some of the finer points of survival. “The worst thing you can be hunted by,” he said, “is yourself.”

  “Very aphoristic.”

  “Fuck you. I used to be human too.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Apology accepted. Look, I told you about Salamanders. That’s a shitty way to go, but at least it’s final. When they’re done with you, nothing remains. But a Corpsegrinder is a parasite. It has no true identity of its own, so it constructs one from bits and pieces of everything that’s unpleasant within you. Your basic greeds and lusts. It gives you a particularly nasty sort of immortality. Remember that old cartoon? This hideous toad saying ‘Kiss me and live forever—you’ll be a toad, but you’ll live forever.’” He grimaced. “If you get the choice, go with the Salamander.”

  “So what’s this business about hunting myself?”

  “Sometimes a Corpsegrinder will rip you in two and let half escape. For a while.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno. Maybe it likes to play with its food. Ever watch a cat torture a mouse? Maybe it thinks it’s fun.”

  From a million miles away, I thought: So now I know what’s happened to me. I’d made quite a run of it, but now it was over. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the hoard of memories, glorious memories, into which I’d been dumped. I wallowed in them, picking out here a winter sunset and there the pain of a jellyfish sting when I was nine. So what if I was already beginning to dissolve? I was intoxicated, drunk, stoned with the raw stuff of experience. I was high on life.

  Then the Widow climbed up the gatepost looking for me.

  “Cobb?”

  The Corpsegrinder had moved up the fence to a more comfortable spot in which to digest me. When it saw the Widow, it reflexively parked me in a memory of a grey drizzly day in a Ford Fiesta outside of 30th Street Station. The engine was going and the heater and the windshield wiper too, so I snapped on the radio to mask their noise. Beethoven filled the car, the Moonlight Sonata.

  “That’s bullshit, babe,” I said. “You know how much I have invested in you? I could buy two good whores for what that dress cost.”

  She refused to meet my eyes. In a whine that set my teeth on edge, she said, “Danny, can’t you see that it’s over between us?”

  “Look, babe, let’s not argue in the parking lot, okay?” I was trying hard to be reasonable. “Not with people walking by and listening. We’ll go someplace private where we can talk this over calmly, like two civilized human beings.”

  She shifted slightly in the seat and adjusted her skirt with a little tug. Drawing attention to her long legs and fine ass. Making it hard for me to think straight. The bitch really knew how to twist the knife. Even now, crying and begging, she was aware of how it turned me on. And even though I hated being aroused by her little act, I was. The sex was always best after an argument; it made her sluttish.

  I clenched my anger in one hand and fisted my pocket with it. Thinking how much I’d like to up and give her a shot. She was begging for it. Secretly, maybe, it was what she wanted; I’d often suspected she’d enjoy being hit. It was too late to act on the impulse, though. The memory was playing out like a tape, immutable, unstoppable.

  All the while, like a hallucination or the screen of a television set receiving conflicting signals, I could see the Widow, frozen with fear half in and half out of the ground. She quivered like an acetylene flame. In the memory she was saying something, but with the shift in my emotions came a corresponding warping-away of perception. The train station, car, the windshield wipers and music, all faded to a murmur in my consciousness.

  Tentacles whipped around the Widow. She was caught. She struggled helplessly, deliciously. The Corpsegrinder’s emotions pulsed through me and to my remote horror I found that they were identical to my own. I wanted the Widow, wanted her so bad there were no words for it. I wanted to clutch her to me so tightly her ribs would splinter and for just this once she’d know it was real. I wanted to own her. To possess her. To put an end to all her little games. To know her every thought and secret, down to the very bottom of her being.

  No more lies, babe, I thought, no more evasions. You’re mine now.

  So perfectly in synch was I with the Corpsegrinder’s desires that it shifted its primary consciousness back into the liquid sphere of memory, where it hung smug and lazy, watching, a voyeur with a willing agent. I was in control of the autonomous functions now. I reshaped the tentacles, merging and recombining them into two strong arms. The claws and talons that clutched the fence I made legs again. The exterior of the Corpsegrinder I morphed into human semblance, save for that great mass of memories sprouting from our back like a bloated spider-sack. Last of all I made the head.

  I gave it my own face.

  “Surprised to see me again, babe?” I leered.

  Her expression was not so much fearful as disappointed. “No,” she said wea
rily. “Deep down, I guess I always knew you’d be back.”

  As I drew the Widow closer, I distantly knew that all that held me to the Corpsegrinder in that instant was our common store of memories and my determination not to lose them again. That was enough, though. I pushed my face into hers, forcing open her mouth. Energies flowed between us like a feast of tongues.

  I prepared to drink her in.

  There were no barriers between us. This was an experience as intense as when, making love, you lose all track of which body is your own and thought dissolves into the animal moment. For a giddy instant I was no less her than I was myself. I was the Widow staring fascinated into the filthy depths of my psyche. She was myself witnessing her astonishment as she realized exactly how little I had ever known her. We both saw her freeze still to the core with horror. Horror not of what I was doing.

  But of what I was.

  I can’t take any credit for what happened then. It was only an impulse, a spasm of the emotions, a sudden and unexpected clarity of vision. Can a single flash of decency redeem a life like mine? I don’t believe it. I refuse to believe it.

  Had there been time for second thoughts, things might well have gone differently. But there was no time to think. There was only time enough to feel an upwelling of revulsion, a visceral desire to be anybody or anything but my own loathsome self, a profound and total yearning to be quit of the burden of such memories as were mine. An aching need to just once do the moral thing.

  I let go.

  Bobbing gently, the swollen corpus of my past floated up and away, carrying with it the parasitic Corpsegrinder. Everything I had spent all my life accumulating fled from me. It went up like a balloon, spinning, dwindling…gone. Leaving me only what few flat memories I have narrated here.

  I screamed.

  And then I cried.

  I don’t know how long I clung to the fence, mourning my loss. But when I gathered myself together, the Widow was still there.

  “Danny,” the Widow said. She didn’t touch me. “Danny, I’m sorry.”

  I’d almost rather that she had abandoned me. How do you apolo-gize for sins you can no longer remember? For having been someone who, however reprehensible, is gone forever? How can you expect for-giveness from somebody you have forgotten so completely you don’t even know her name? I felt twisted with shame and misery. “Look,” I said. “I know I’ve behaved badly. More than badly. But there ought to be some way to make it up to you. For, you know, everything. Somehow. I mean—”