Beyond the Doors of Death

by Silverberg, Robert

  “Shotgun,” Sybille says to the closest porter.

  There is the bird, ugly, ridiculous, waddling laboriously through the tall grass. Sybille accepts a weapon and sights along its barrel. “Wait,” Nerita says. “I’d like to get a picture of this.” She moves slantwise around the group, taking exaggerated care not to frighten the dodo, but the dodo does not seem to be aware of any of them. Like an emissary from the realm of darkness, carrying good news of death to those creatures not yet extinct, it plods diligently across their path. “Fine,” Nerita says. “Anthony, point at the dodo, will you, as if you’ve just noticed it? Kent, I’d like you to look down at your gun, study its bolt or something. Fine. And Sybille, just hold that pose—aiming—yes—”

  Nerita takes the picture.

  Calmly Sybille pulls the trigger.

  “Kazi imekwisha,” Gracchus says. “The work is finished.”

  SIX

  Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to be now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions.

  Joan Didion: On Self-Respect

  ***

  “You better believe what Jeej is trying to tell you,” Dolorosa said. “Ten minutes inside the Cold Town, they’ll have your number. Five minutes.”

  Jijibhoi’s man was small, rumpled-looking, forty or fifty years old, with untidy long dark hair and wide-set smoldering eyes. His skin was sallow and his face was gaunt. Such other deads as Klein had seen at close range had about them an air of unearthly serenity, but not this one: Dolorosa was tense, fidgety, a knuckle-cracker, a lip-gnawer. Yet somehow there could be no doubt he was a dead, as much a dead as Zacharias, as Gracchus, as Mortimer.

  “They’ll have my what?” Klein asked.

  “Your number. Your number. They’ll know you aren’t a dead, because it can’t be faked. Jesus, don’t you even speak English? Jorge, that’s a foreign name. I should have known. Where are you from?”

  “Argentina, as a matter of fact, but I was brought to California when I was a small boy. In 1995. Look, if they catch me, they catch me. I just want to get in there and spend half an hour talking with my wife.”

  “Mister, you don’t have any wife any more.”

  “With Sybille,” Klein said, exasperated. “To talk with Sybille, my—my former wife.”

  “All right. I’ll get you inside.”

  “What will it cost?”

  “Never mind that,” Dolorosa said. “I owe Jeej here a few favors. More than a few. So I’ll get you the drug—”

  “Drug?”

  “The drug the Treasury agents use when they infiltrate the Cold Towns. It narrows the pupils, contracts the capillaries, gives you that good old zombie look. The agents always get caught and thrown out, and so will you, but at least you’ll go in there feeling that you’ve got a convincing disguise. Little oily capsule, one every morning before breakfast.”

  Klein looked at Jijibhoi. “Why do Treasury agents infiltrate the Cold Towns?”

  “For the same reasons they infiltrate anywhere else,” Jijibhoi said. “To spy. They are trying to compile dossiers on the financial dealings of the deads, you see, and until proper life-defining legislation is approved by Congress there is no precise way of compelling a person who is deemed legally dead to divulge—”

  Dolorosa said, “Next, the background. I can get you a card of residence from Albany Cold Town in New York. You died last December, okay, and they rekindled you back east because—let’s see—”

  “I could have been attending the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York,” Klein suggested. “That’s what I do, you understand, professor of contemporary history at UCLA. Because of the Christmas holiday my body couldn’t be shipped back to California, no room on any flight, and so they took me to Albany. How does that sound?”

  Dolorosa smiled. “You really enjoy making up lies, Professor, don’t you? I can dig that quality in you. Okay, Albany Cold Town, and this is your first trip out of there, your drying-off trip—that’s what it’s called, drying-off—you come out of the Cold Town like a new butterfly just out of its cocoon, all soft and damp, and you’re on your own in a strange place. Now, there’s a lot of stuff you’ll need to know about how to behave, little mannerisms, social graces, that kind of crap, and I’ll work on that with you tomorrow and Wednesday, and Friday, three sessions; that ought to be enough. Meanwhile let me give you the basics. There are only three things you really have to remember while you’re inside:

  “(1) Never ask a direct question.

  “(2) Never lean on anybody’s arm. You know what I mean?

  “(3) Keep in mind that to a dead the whole universe is plastic, nothing’s real, nothing matters a hell of a lot, it’s all only a joke. Only a joke, friend, only a joke.”

  ***

  Early in April he flew to Salt Lake City, rented a car, and drove out past Moab into the high plateau rimmed by red-rock mountains where the deads had built Zion Cold Town. This was Klein’s second visit to the necropolis. The other had been in the late summer of ’31, a hot, parched season when the sun filled half the sky and even the gnarled junipers looked dazed from thirst; but now it was a frosty afternoon, with faint pale light streaming out of the wintry western hills and occasional gusts of light snow whirling through the iron-blue air. Jijibhoi’s route instructions pulsed from the memo screen on his dashboard. Fourteen miles from town, yes, narrow paved lane turns off highway, yes, discreet little sign announcing PRIVATE ROAD, NO ADMITTANCE, yes, a second sign a thousand yards in, ZION COLD TOWN, MEMBERS ONLY, yes, and then just beyond that the barrier of green light across the road, the scanner system, the roadblocks sliding like scythes out of the underground installations, a voice on an invisible loudspeaker saying, “If you have a permit to enter Zion Cold Town, please place it under your left-hand windshield wiper.”

  That other time he had had no permit, and he had gone no farther than this, though at least he had managed a little colloquy with the unseen gatekeeper out of which he had squeezed the information that Sybille was indeed living in that particular Cold Town. This time he affixed Dolorosa’s forged card of residence to his windshield, and waited tensely, and in thirty seconds the roadblocks slid from sight. He drove on, along a winding road that followed the natural contours of a dense forest of scrubby conifers, and came at last to a brick wall that curved away into the trees as though it encircled the entire town. Probably it did. Klein had an overpowering sense of the Cold Town as a hermetic city, ponderous and sealed as old Egypt. There was a metal gate in the brick wall; green electronic eyes surveyed him, signaled their approval, and the wall rolled open.

  He drove slowly toward the center of town, passing through a zone of what he supposed were utility buildings—storage depots, a power substation, the municipal waterworks, whatever, a bunch of grim windowless one-story cinderblock affairs—and then into the residential district, which was not much lovelier. The streets were laid out on a rectangular grid; the buildings were squat, dreary, impersonal, homogeneous. There was practically no automobile traffic, and in a dozen blocks he saw no more than ten pedestrians, who did not even glance at him. So this was the environment in which the deads chose to spend their second lives. But why such deliberate bleakness? “You will never understand us,” Dolorosa had warned. Dolorosa was right. Jijibhoi had told him that Cold Towns were something less than charming, but Klein had not been prepared for this. There was a glacial quality about the place, as though it were wholly entombed in a block of clear ice: silence, sterility, a mortuary calm. Cold Town, yes, aptly named. Architecturally, the town looked like the worst of all possible cheap-and-sleazy tract de
velopments, but the psychic texture it projected was even more depressing, more like that of one of those ghastly retirement communities, one of the innumerable Leisure Worlds or Sun Manors, those childless joyless retreats where colonies of that other kind of living dead collected to await the last trumpet. Klein shivered.

  At last, another few minutes deeper into the town, a sign of activity, if not exactly of life: a shopping center, flat-topped brown stucco buildings around a U-shaped courtyard, a steady flow of shoppers moving about. All right. His first test was about to commence. He parked his car near the mouth of the U and strolled uneasily inward. He felt as if his forehead were a beacon, flashing glowing betrayals at rhythmic intervals:

  FRAUD INTRUDER INTERLOPER SPY

  Go ahead, he thought, seize me, seize the impostor, get it over with, throw me out, string me up, crucify me. But no one seemed to pick up the signals. He was altogether ignored. Out of courtesy? Or just contempt? He stole what he hoped were covert glances at the shoppers, half expecting to run across Sybille right away. They all looked like sleepwalkers, moving in glazed silence about their errands. No smiles, no chatter: the icy aloofness of these self-contained people heightened the familiar suburban atmosphere of the shopping center into surrealist intensity, Norman Rockwell with an overlay of Dali or De Chirico. The shopping center looked like all other shopping centers: clothing stores, a bank, a record shop, snack bars, a florist, a TV/stereo outlet, a theater, a five-and-dime. One difference, though, became apparent as Klein wandered from shop to shop: the whole place was automated. There were no clerks anywhere, only the ubiquitous data screens, and no doubt a battery of hidden scanners to discourage shoplifters. (Or did the impulse toward petty theft perish with the body’s first death?) The customers selected all the merchandise themselves, checked it out via data screens, touched their thumbs to chargeplates to debit their accounts. Of course. No one was going to waste his precious rekindled existence standing behind a counter to sell tennis shoes or cotton candy. Nor were the dwellers in the Cold Towns likely to dilute their isolation by hiring a labor force of imported warms. Somebody here had to do a little work, obviously—how did the merchandise get into the stores?—but, in general, Klein realized, what could not be done here by machines would not be done at all.

  For ten minutes he prowled the center. Just when he was beginning to think he must be entirely invisible to these people, a short, broad-shouldered man, bald but with oddly youthful features, paused in front of him and said, “I am Pablo. I welcome you to Zion Cold Town.” This unexpected puncturing of the silence so startled Klein that he had to fight to retain appropriate deadlike imperturbability. Pablo smiled warmly and touched both his hands to Klein’s in friendly greeting, but his eyes were frigid, hostile, remote, a terrifying contradiction. “I’ve been sent to bring you to the lodging-place. Come: your car.”

  Other than to give directions, Pablo spoke only three times during the five-minute drive. “Here is the rekindling house,” he said. A five-story building, as inviting as a hospital, with walls of dark bronze and windows black as onyx. “This is Guidefather’s house,” Pablo said a moment later. A modest brick building, like a rectory, at the edge of a small park. And, finally: “This is where you will stay. Enjoy your visit.” Abruptly he got out of the car and walked rapidly away.

  ***

  This was the house of strangers, the hotel for visiting deads, a long low cinderblock structure, functional and unglamorous, one of the least seductive buildings in this city of stark disagreeable buildings. However else it might be with the deads, they clearly had no craving for fancy architecture. A voice out of a data screen in the spartan lobby assigned him to a room: a white-walled box, square, high of ceiling. He had his own toilet, his own data screen, a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, a modest closet, a small window that gave him a view of a neighboring building just as drab as this. Nothing had been said about rental; perhaps he was a guest of the city. Nothing had been said about anything. It seemed that he had been accepted. So much for Jijibhoi’s gloomy assurance that he would instantly be found out, so much for Dolorosa’s insistence that they would have his number in ten minutes or less. He had been in Zion Cold Town for half an hour. Did they have his number?

  ***

  “Eating isn’t important among us,” Dolorosa had said.

  “But you do eat?”

  “Of course we eat. It just isn’t important.”

  It was important to Klein, though. Not haute cuisine, necessarily, but some sort of food, preferably three times a day. He was getting hungry now. Ring for room service? There were no servants in this city. He turned to the data screen. Dolorosa’s first rule: Never ask a direct question. Surely that didn’t apply to the data screen, only to his fellow deads. He didn’t have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer. Still, the voice behind the screen might not be that of a computer after all, so he tried to employ the oblique, elliptical conversational style that Dolorosa said the deads favored among themselves:

  “Dinner?”

  “Commissary.”

  “Where?”

  “Central Four,” said the screen.

  Central Four? All right. He would find the way. He changed into fresh clothing and went down the long vinyl-floored hallway to the lobby. Night had come; street lamps were glowing; under cloak of darkness the city’s ugliness was no longer so obtrusive, and there was even a kind of controlled beauty about the brutal regularity of its streets.

  The streets were unmarked, though, and deserted. Klein walked at random for ten minutes, hoping to meet someone heading for the Central Four commissary. But when he did come upon someone, a tall and regal woman well advanced in years, he found himself incapable of approaching her. (Never ask a direct question. Never lean on anybody’s arm.) He walked alongside her, in silence and at a distance, until she turned suddenly to enter a house. For ten minutes more he wandered alone again. This is ridiculous, he thought: dead or warm, I’m a stranger in town, I should be entitled to a little assistance. Maybe Dolorosa was just trying to complicate things. On the next corner, when Klein caught sight of a man hunched away from the wind, lighting a cigarette, he went boldly over to him. “Excuse me, but—”

  The other looked up. “Klein?” he said. “Yes. Of course. Well, so you’ve made the crossing too!”

  He was one of Sybille’s Zanzibar companions, Klein realized. The quick-eyed, sharp-edged one—Mortimer. A member of her pseudo-familial grouping, whatever that might be. Klein stared sullenly at him. This had to be the moment when his imposture would be exposed, for only some six weeks had passed since he had argued with Mortimer in the gardens of Sybille’s Zanzibar hotel, not nearly enough time for someone to have died and been rekindled and gone through his drying-off. But a moment passed and Mortimer said nothing. At length Klein said, “I just got here. Pablo showed me to the house of strangers and now I’m looking for the commissary.”

  “Central Four? I’m going there myself. How lucky for you.” No sign of suspicion in Mortimer’s face. Perhaps an elusive smile revealed his awareness that Klein could not be what he claimed to be. Keep in mind that to a dead the whole universe is plastic, it’s all only a joke. “I’m waiting for Nerita,” Mortimer said. “We can all eat together.”

  Klein said heavily, “I was rekindled in Albany Cold Town. I’ve just emerged.”

  “How nice,” Mortimer said.

  Nerita Tracy stepped out of a building just beyond the corner—a slim, athletic-looking woman, about forty, with short reddish-brown hair. As she swept toward them, Mortimer said, “Here’s Klein, who we met in Zanzibar. Just rekindled, out of Albany.”

  “Sybille will be amused.”

  “Is she in town?” Klein blurted.

  Mortimer and Nerita exchanged sly glances. Klein felt abashed. Never ask a direct question. Damn Dolorosa!

  Nerita said, “You’ll see her before long. Shall we go to dinner?”

  ***

  The commissary was less austere
than Klein had expected: actually quite an inviting restaurant, elaborately constructed on five or six levels divided by lustrous dark hangings into small, secluded dining areas. It had the warm, rich look of a tropical resort.

  But the food, which came automat-style out of revolving dispensers, was prefabricated and cheerless—another jarring contradiction. Only a joke, friend, only a joke. In any case he was less hungry than he had imagined at the hotel. He sat with Mortimer and Nerita, picking at his meal, while their conversation flowed past him at several times the speed of thought. They spoke in fragments and ellipses, in periphrastics and aposiopeses, in a style abundant in chiasmus, metonymy, meiosis, oxymoron, and zeugma; their dazzling rhetorical techniques left him baffled and uncomfortable, which beyond much doubt was their intention. Now and again they would dart from a thicket of indirection to skewer him with a quick corroborative stab: Isn’t that so, they would say, and he would smile and nod, nod and smile, saying, Yes, yes, absolutely. Did they know he was a fake, and were they merely playing with him, or had they, somehow, impossibly, accepted him as one of them? So subtle was their style that he could not tell. A very new member of the society of the rekindled, he told himself, would be nearly as much at sea here as a warm in deadface.

  Then Nerita said—no verbal games, this time—“You still miss her terribly, don’t you?”

  “I do. Some things evidently never perish.”

  “Everything perishes,” Mortimer said. “The dodo, the aurochs, the Holy Roman Empire, the T’ang Dynasty, the walls of Byzantium, the language of Mohenjo-daro.”