by Various
She dropped to her knees beside the liquor cabinet and fumbled it open. Glasses were on the top shelf. One of the wolfhounds came over and poked a cold nose into her ear while she rummaged; rather than pushing his head aside, she hooked her arm behind his ears and hugged his brindle-and-white neck. He huffed at her and pushed her over sideways, and while he stood over her, she lay on the floor on her back and scratched behind his jaw.
By the time she was halfway through her second breakfast Talisker, she was in the guest bath, eyeing the electric razor.
* * *
Ange clutched her forearms, forehead wrinkled hard enough to crack her foundation. “What on earth?”
“What, you’ve never seen a shaved head before?” Em smoothed a hand against the soft prickly bristles decorating her scalp. “I just wanted to see what it would look like.”
Ange glowered over crossed arms. Behind her, the backstage bustle redoubled. “Em. What is it that you’re not telling me?”
And dammit, Ange was not supposed to be that perceptive. She was supposed to be shallow and self-absorbed.
Em, Em realized, was not the only one who could pretend to be stupid when it suited her. “I came to LA to see you,” Em said. “Not to get quizzed about my haircut. Look, I was drunk, it seemed like a good idea at a time. At least I didn’t shave my eyebrows off.”
“So that’s one way you’re up on Bowie.” Ange stepped away. “If you’re not going to tell me, you’re not going to tell me. Graham’s gonna ask you to play again, you know.”
“I know,” Em said. “Anything to get on YouTube, right?”
“Right,” Ange purred, grinning. “What are you going to tell him?”
“I’m going to tell him yes.”
* * *
This time, Em watched the opening act from backstage. Objekt 775 was a five-piece: Sanya on keyboard and vocals, two guitars, bass, and the tall mixed-race boy on drums. They were loud and crude and they didn’t suck at all, and there was one other girl besides Sanya, even. Through most of the six-song set, Em surprised herself by paying attention.
Enough attention that she didn’t notice Graham at her shoulder until he cleared his throat with precise timing, in that fraught and ringing silence between songs. “Good, you think?”
“Good enough,” she said. “The rhythm section doesn’t fuck around.”
“You got that right.”
She turned to him. He was in stage clothes, except the flannel shirt buttoned over his bare chest for warmth he wouldn’t need when the spotlights hit him. The skull ring glinted on his hand. “Hey,” he said. “I like the hair. Or lack of it.”
“I said I’d play,” she said. Her fingers already ached from an hour’s fumbling, but she had surprised herself with how fast it came back. “One last time.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Look, about that—”
It startled her that her heart sunk. “I don’t have to. It’s alright.”
His stare, the twist of his lips, could not have been more nonplussed. “I talked to the guys,” he said. “We want you to do two songs at the top of the first half. One of ’em a Warlords tune.”
“Graham—”
He rolled over her as if she hadn’t even opened her mouth. “How do you feel about ‘Galleons Gallant’? Then we’ll jam on the Dylan while the band takes a piss break, and then you can hit the showers?”
“The band takes a piss break? What about you?”
“I don’t piss,” he said, and grinned at her. “Look, Em. I know you hate me—”
“Hate’s a strong word.”
“Shut up and let a man talk, would you?”
Startled, she held up a hand. Talk, then.
He took a breath, and held it in a longer time than she would have imagined. He touched her wrist. His hand was strong and cold. “Ange thinks you’re dying.”
And Em, who had been seven kinds of weak in her life, but never a coward, looked him in the eye and said, “I have a grade four astrocytoma. Inoperable. My doc wants to try radiation and chemo.” She shrugged. “I’ve gotta decide if I want to live that badly. And that poorly. If I lived.”
His eyes were bottomless in the backstage dark. “What are the odds?”
She turned her head and spit behind the Marshall stack.
He said, “Suffering for nothing.”
“Pretty much,” she answered. Oh, sure. There was hope. While there was life, her mother used to say, there was hope. And if hope seemed more like a punishment than a protection, that was hardly God’s fault, was it?
He let his hand slide away, soft as a breeze. Even in dim light, veins and tendons stood out like a relief map under papery crumpled skin.
“I died of an OD in 1978,” he said. “Heroin. It was after that concert at Hammersmith. Do you remember?”
“Jesus Christ, Graham,” Em said. “Don’t tell me the coke paranoia finally got you.”
He laughed, though, big and brash, and put his palm against her cheek. It was cool, room-temperature. He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. “Feel anything?”
And of course, she did not. Not even the rise and fall of his breathing.
Nothing at all.
She tried to say his name. Failed. Would jerk her hand away, if he would let it go, but he didn’t and so she stood shaking with her palm pressed to his cold self.
He shrugged and let her hand drop, finally. “Ange said she told you that you should take the cure. And me, I’m here telling you that you don’t have to—”
“Die?”
“No.” A dismissive snort turned into a much less dramatic laugh. He was half-yelling to be heard over the stacks. It didn’t matter; nobody who wasn’t standing right behind her would ever overhear them. “You have no choice about dying. But what happens after death—for most people, it’s just a candle snuffed out. All those pretty stories amount to nothing.”
“How do you know?”
He smiled.
He knew.
And while she was processing that—the O.D., the idea that maybe you didn’t even need to put the ring on before you died—he shucked off his flannel, leaving the shirt slumped on the boards like a discarded skin. Em looked away from his withered pecs. He cleared his throat and said, “You don’t have to stop existing, is what I mean. Actually, all in all, I expected undeath to be a bigger deal.”
“Jesus, Graham.”
But he was holding out a hand, and she reached out and lifted hers up underneath it, open, flat, and expectant.
He laid a silver ring across her palm. It was cool to the touch.
“When you put it on,” he said, “you’ll seize. It’s pretty awful. You’ll want to be someplace safe and easy to clean. You’ll heal damage after, better than before, but it still takes a while. Give yourself a few hours for the transformation.”
“Uhm.” She stared at the ring, and it stared back, unwinking. “Ange too?”
“1981,” he said. “Sorry. We would have told you—”
“No,” Em said. “It’s all right.” She weighed the ring on her palm. “What’s it cost?”
Oh, that grin, and all the lines on his face rearranging themselves. “You lose weight,” he said. “Mostly desiccation. It’s not great for your facial tone.” With one hand, he rubbed slack cheeks. “Ange has had her face pinned a couple of times.”
“That’s not a cost.”
He shrugged. “Life isn’t Hollywood. Everything doesn’t come with a price. Hey, I gotta get my hair fixed. See you onstage?”
“See you onstage,” she said, and held out the hand with the ring in it. But he brushed past her, making a dismissive gesture with one long hand. Keep it.
So she slipped it into her pocket and did, pausing to congratulate Objekt 775 as they came off.
Sanya beamed at her, and gave her a quick, sweaty, distracted, euphoric hug. She ran her palm across Em’s scalp and laughed, but the noise from the audience was too loud for talking. The hug was sincere, and she leaned in and shouted �
��That was for you, Em!” and kissed Em on the cheek.
A pretty girl kissed me, Em thought. She blinked back the sting of tears, but the embrace made it easier to contemplate the blood blisters from the Strat. That hour warming up didn’t make calluses miraculously grow back. Neither would lubing the fretboard and her left hand from an aerosol can of Finger-Ease.
Those new Trial songs just weren’t getting any better, no matter how many times she listened to them. And it was Graham, all Graham. His playing was technically great, better than ever.
But he might as well have been dead up there. She thought about that as she heard her name, and strode out to a roar, swinging the strap of the borrowed guitar over her head.
She might be out of practice, but she still had her ear. When she jammed with the band, they took fire.
* * *
When Em got back to the house in Carlsbad, the dogs were waiting on the cool marble of the entryway. She scratched chins and fondled ears, and they pushed one another out of the way to lean against her thighs. She picked her way through them, moved to the living room, and raised a hand toward the dimmer switch.
The silence in the big house stopped her. The whole place was sealed up and alarmed; she couldn’t hear the swish of the sea, far below. And suddenly, she needed to.
So she was outside on the deck that cantilevered out above the cliffs when Ange found her, tossing stones over the rail into the hissing ocean forty feet below.
Ange had the key and the codes, of course, because somebody other than Em and her business manager had to. In truth, Em would have been surprised if Ange hadn’t followed her home.
Ange sat down on a cedar recliner beside Em, and put her feet up. “Did you put on the ring?”
“Can’t you see in the dark?”
“Not that well,” Ange said, and reached out to take Em’s wrist. Her touch was as chill as the night air, and Em bit her lip, forcing herself not to pull free. Instead, she reached out and folded Ange’s hand in her other one, her sister’s silver ring like a cool nugget against her palm. “And I’m not tired either,” she said. “I don’t sleep any more, before you ask.”
“It’s a mug’s game, Ange.”
Ange shuffled her chair closer, near enough that Em would have felt her warmth at hip and shoulder if Ange had any to give. “You live forever.”
“And cut the same old fucking albums.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ange said. “At least Graham’s cutting albums.”
“And at least you had the integrity to put down your axe when you figured out you couldn’t play worth shit any more. Isn’t that right? When was the last time you picked up a guitar?”
Ange stared at her. And then she sat back in her chair, released Em’s wrist, and swung her feet up. “Not since I broke up the Sisters. You figured that out?”
Em nodded. Far below, the sea fluoresced. The sky behind them was graying; they were facing the wrong way for sunrise. She tossed another pebble. “You died, and that broke up the Shock Sisters. And I’m sitting on my ass and drinking myself to death because Seth broke my fucking heart and I never got over it. You could just say it.”
“Do you want me to say things you already know?”
“Hell. Nobody could ever tell me shit. Why should anything change now?”
“It’s because you already know everything,” Ange said.
Em laughed.
Family. Damned if they didn’t know you.
Ange sighed and plucked a stone from Em’s pile. The first one she selected glistened silver; she placed it back atop the pyramid. The second she kept, rolling it between her fingers. “Hell, Robert Plant made a comeback.”
“Yeah, but it’s easier to live off your fucking royalties forever.”
And that got Ange to laugh. “You don’t want to be the girl who sang ‘Rose Madder’ forever, do you?”
“No,” Em said. “I don’t. And that’s pretty much it. And if I die now that’s all I’ll ever be.”
“You have a legacy. So does Graham. It’s more than me.”
The ring had found its way into Em’s hand, this time. And Em held it up to the light. “Fuck me. Do you make art or do you make life?”
“You opted out of both already. Which is more important?”
“Art,” Em said. Then she shook her head. “Life. It’s not an easy fucking question.”
“If it was,” Ange said, “somebody would have answered it by now.” She tossed another rock. “You only get asked once, Em. I don’t want to lose you.”
“I don’t want to lose me either,” Em said. “Look, there’s always chemo.”
Ange snaked a long arm out and stroked Em’s shaven head. “Well, then the hard part’s done already.”
* * *
Em wandered down the long hallway to the music room, accompanied by toenail-clicking dogs. The door was keypad-locked; it took a minute to remember that the code was Seth’s birthday, then a longer minute to remember what that birthday was.
Dim gray light, filtered through the June gloom, soaked through big windows. To Em’s dark-adapted eyes it was enough. She found the old maple and mahogany Gibson Black Beauty by touch and let her fingers curl around the neck, lifting it into her arms like a sleeping child. Slowly, she ducked over the guitar, smelling skin oil soaked into the fingerboard, and lay her cheek against the glossy black-lacquered surface.
She had strings, somewhere. She’d probably need to turn on a light to find them. She closed her eyes, imagining she inhaled the acetone and cherry scent of Finger-Ease. The blood blisters on her left hand throbbed. She was hungry.
Her oncologist’s office didn’t open until nine. She had time before she called.
It would take at least a month to grow her calluses back.
Copyright © 2008 by Sarah Wishnevsky
Cover art copyright © 2008 by Brad Holland
Books by Elizabeth Bear
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Undertow (Spectra, 2007)
A Companion to Wolves (with Sarah Monette) (Tor, 2007)
New Amsterdam (Subterranean, 2007)
Seven for a Secret (Subterranean, 2009)
Bone and Jewel Creatures (Subterranean, 2010)
THE JACOB’S LADDER TRILOGY
Dust (Spectra, 2008)
Chill (Spectra, 2010)
THE JENNY CASEY TRILOGY
Hammered (Spectra, 2005)
Scardown (Spectra, 2005)
Worldwired (Spectra, 2005)
THE EDDA OF BURDENS
All the Windwracked Stars (Tor, 2008)
By the Mountain Bound (Tor, 2009)
THE PROMETHEAN AGE
Blood and Iron (Roc, 2006)
Whiskey and Water (Roc, 2007)
Ink and Steel (Roc, 2008)
Hell and Earth (Roc, 2008)
STORY COLLECTION
The Chains That You Refuse (Night Shade, 2006)
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“Speaking of livers,” the unicorn said, “Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.”
—Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
* * *
My mother doesn’t know about the harpy.
My mother, Alice, is not my real mom. She’s my foster mother, and she doesn’t look anything like me. Or maybe I don’t look anything like her. Mama Alice is plump and soft and has skin like the skin of
a plum, all shiny dark purple with the same kind of frosty brightness over it, like you could swipe it away with your thumb.
I’m sallow—Mama Alice says olive—and I have straight black hair and crooked teeth and no real chin, which is okay because I’ve already decided nobody’s ever going to kiss me.
I’ve also got lipodystrophy, which is a fancy doctor way of saying I’ve grown a fatty buffalo hump on my neck and over each shoulder blade from the antiretrovirals, and my butt and legs and cheeks are wasted like an old lady’s. My face looks like a dog’s muzzle, even though I still have all my teeth.
For now. I’m going to have to get the wisdom teeth pulled this year while I still get state assistance, because my birthday is in October and then I’ll be eighteen. If I start having problems with them after then, well forget about it.
There’s no way I’d be able to afford to get them fixed.
* * *
The harpy lives on the street, in the alley behind my building, where the dumpster and the winos live.
I come out in the morning before school, after I’ve eaten my breakfast and taken my pills (nevirapine, lamivudine, efavirenz). I’m used to the pills. I’ve been taking them all my life. I have a note in my file at school, and excuses for my classmates.
I don’t bring friends home.
Lying is a sin. But Father Alvaro seems to think that when it comes to my sickness, it’s a sin for which I’m already doing enough penance.
Father Alvaro is okay. But he’s not like the harpy.
The harpy doesn’t care if I’m not pretty. The harpy is beyond not pretty, way into ugly. Ugly as your mama’s warty butt. Its teeth are snaggled and stained piss-yellow and char-black. Its claws are broken and dull and stink like rotten chicken. It has a long droopy blotchy face full of lines like Liv Tyler’s dad, that rock star guy, and its hair hangs down in black-bronze rats over both feathery shoulders. The feathers look washed-out black and dull until sunlight somehow finds its way down into the grubby alley, bounces off dirty windows and hits them, and then they look like scratched bronze.
