Interzone #267 - November-December 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  “Lucy Toohey,” she continues. “Dropped out of college and married a musician with more sex appeal than brains. Two kids. One was a boy who, in the fullness of time, got a girl pregnant. Kid was adopted, the papers sealed. That was your mother. Do you care about the details?”

  “Nope.” I consider how this new information changes the calculus of my life. Mom never told me she was adopted. She ran away from home pretty early and supported us with a series of shitty waitress jobs. My grandfather – not by blood, as it turns out – showed up at the third or fourth sleazy diner I remember. Mom screamed at him and threw coffee cups, which shattered the front window and got her fired. “Where do you come in?”

  She leans back, mimicking me. “Lucy got smart, divorced the musician, and married my great-grandfather. He didn’t much like Lucy’s kids, sent them away to their father. I won’t bore you with the rest, but I’m an only child and I married a trust-fund. He’s dead. Was bad at business, but I’m good.”

  Mom got a job at a crap roadhouse after the coffee cups. That’s where I learned I could make extra money giving the truckers blowjobs, even more if I roofied them and cleaned out their wallets. Maybe being good at business is genetic. Maybe not, considering Mom, always slipping behind no matter how much she tried, pathetically honest always.

  I didn’t love my mother. But she didn’t know that. I did kill for her, though. She didn’t know that either.

  “So now I’ve got more money than God,” continues Helena.

  “And?”

  “Pancreatic cancer.”

  Gamechanger. “Ouch.”

  She smiles with the other side of her mouth. “True.”

  “And you want to map yourself on my brainmeat.”

  “Also true.” Despite the smile I can feel the heat of her desire to live, and the anger that even with all the money in the world my own true, trashy, baby-killing self can deny her. The DOJ can’t force me either, much as they’d like their cut. They can fry me, everyone likes that, but God forbid they let someone hop my mind.

  I understand the satisfaction of taking a life. But a legal killing is so expensive, the ceaseless cycle of appeal, the sheer mass of salary-men required to make the machinery of a justified death grind on, and no-one turning the gears wants to spend money in a voting year. They went reality-show for a while, but despite tearful interviews with victims’ families and artfully edited black-and-white footage of crime scenes, the climactic three minute shot of someone twitching under a grey hood isn’t really all that interesting, and the ratings tanked after the first season.

  So they’re stuck again, with a public that howls for blood whenever a politician who needs a boost reminds them to, but saddled with a powerful need to pretend there’s justice in this process. I’ve seen plenty that wouldn’t be on death row if they could pay for a lawyer worth her salt. Even some who were innocent. But once you’re here you’ll stay here; the machine loves you too much to let you go, blacks your eye and kisses it better, heals you all twisted and grinds you small in the end, loving you to extinction.

  No way to monetize its beloveds in their little cages. Not until Dr Henri Jarndyce, playing around with gene therapy, engineered a virus that could strip away the weeds of one personality, with all her memories and inclinations and thinky-thoughts, and leave the field tender and furrowed for the seeds of another.

  See, personality’s all electric, anyway. If you really wanted immortality, you’d invest in software, downloading your blips and wavelengths to a computer. But everybody wants the fleshy life. Helps if the field and the seeds are related somehow. Helps more if your fallow field is a clone.

  But human cloning’s still illegal, mostly. So is the Jarndyce procedure, mostly. You can’t find a suicidal cousin and promise them oblivion. You can’t bribe a desperate nephew with three mouths to feed, clothe, and educate to let you take a ride in the body of the fourth. There’s only two ways. First: find a brain-dead match who signed her organ donor card and get her next of kin to agree. If you’re her next of kin yourself, congratulations to you.

  Second: find a match on death row and practice your rhetoric.

  Helena needs to practice her rhetoric.

  She’s here, so she already knows somehow we’re a likely match. She’s here, so she got permission from the Rimbaughs and the Alcotts. They must’ve liked the idea of the Jarndyce virus wiping my brain, every memory, every tiny electric jolt that makes me me disappearing one by one, and then a stranger’s electricity mapped out in that blank space. But why should I make them happier by leaving this world now, not later? For now I can live appeal to appeal. I have my routine. I like thinking my own thinky-thoughts.

  “You got nothing I want,” I tell her. “I don’t know why anyone gets suckered into doing this.”

  “Jarndyce candidates? They’ve got people they care about,” she says. She’s careful to make her grammar just a little better than mine with her careful “they’ve gots”. “Someone who’ll get the money. Last Jarndyce set up a trust fund for the children of the woman he killed. Made him feel better about himself, I suppose. You could do something like that. Fund some charity.”

  There’s a pause before we both start laughing.

  “Oh Mrs McGraw, cousin of mine, I almost like you. Can’t you fight on a little longer? Clone a new pancreas? Adrenal mods?”

  She coughs and shakes her head. “Did and done. Anything else will kill me.”

  “Well, bless your heart, but I think you’re gonna die,” I drawl, enjoying her wince. “Because I got no reason to leave this earth any sooner than I have to.”

  She coughs harder. “There’s your daughter.”

  I laugh again. “Nice try, but I’ve always been a crap mother. And Cece’s too stupid to know what to do with the money.”

  “There’s the baby.”

  I open my mouth and shut it.

  She chuckles. “Oh, you didn’t know? She didn’t tell you? You are perhaps not as close as you once were?”

  Cece’s not the brightest bulb, but for some reason she’s a good kid. Much better than I deserve. For a long time she thought I was a good person.

  The trial was remote jury, with only the judge and officers present: family and witnesses on closed circuit feed. I was watching her screen the moment the sheer weight of the evidence coalesced. I saw her face melt from when everything came together for her – she was one person, then another. A small change, but nothing would be the same for her. All I could think was poor stupid little bitch. I wish I could be sorry I broke your heart.

  There are a lot of people on death row who shouldn’t be here. I’m not one of them. I can’t blame Cece if she doesn’t want a monster for a mother.

  But I’m kind of hurt she didn’t tell me.

  My cousin leans forward, hands spread on her knees, like a football coach about to give a pep talk. I see the faint trace of a nicotine stain on the front and middle finger of her right hand.

  “Here’s my proposition,” she says, moving quickly, while I’m still a little off-balance. Good technique. “I’m going to set up a trust for your daughter. You find someone, anyone you trust, as a third-party administrator, and I’ll pay for that too. Choose someone to vet the agreement. She’ll get her needs met, medical, anything, and a generous allowance. We both know better than to let her touch the principle.”

  “You met her.”

  She shrugs. “I do my research. That’s good business.”

  I play for time. “Give me a minute to think.”

  She’s relentless. “And the baby. He, she, it…”

  “How did you find out about the baby?”

  She grins. Her teeth aren’t as white as they might be. “Let’s say ‘she’ for now, shall we? It’s nice to think about having a granddaughter, something you can dress in pink. We’ll make sure she gets everything you and Cece didn’t. Private school, college fund.”

  Deliberately, she eyes my face. “Braces. Dermatologist. Come on – a big middle fin
ger to anyone who ever called you trash, and I know they did. Your kid, your grandkid will have it all while theirs are clipping coupons and making a block of American cheese stretch the week. Just for letting me have something you’re going to lose anyway. What’s it worth to you?”

  I can’t help it; it comes out a snarl. “All your money. That’s what it’s worth. Everything.”

  A mistake. I let her get to me when she hit all my soft spots. Now she knows I have a price.

  “We know that’s not going to happen. I’m not unreasonable. A third.”

  I call her bluff. “All of it. I’ll sign right now.”

  She hesitates, then shakes her head. “Half. I’m not going to a new body and not have the cash to enjoy it. And remember Justice won’t let this happen without their cut.”

  “You look like shit walking,” I observe. “What if I agree, and you die on me?”

  A shrug. “We’ll put it in the paperwork – a deed of gift. Once you sign it, it’s hers, whatever happens to me.”

  I tap the Formica for the guard. The door opens behind me, and I raise my hands shoulder-high, as far as the thin chain that attaches my wrists to my waist will let me.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Not too long.” She breathes deep and braces herself to get up.

  I nod. The guard lays her hand on my shoulder, tightens her grip when I don’t move.

  “Did you quit smoking yet?”

  It catches her on the way to the door; she turns, disconcerted. She expected the last word. “What?”

  “Did you quit? I don’t want you crapping up my lungs.”

  Her thin face is powder-white; she tamps down the anger. “Yes, I quit.”

  The guard’s fingers dig in: a last warning before a baton in my belly. They’re no meaner than they have to be, the women, anyway. I obey. The yawning doorway leans darkly into the bowels of the prison, like an old badger’s den going perpetually down between the roots of ancient oaks. I like that. It makes me feel safe, like I’m indwelling within my own mind, coiled up inside the body that Helena McGraw wants so badly.

  I always sleep sounder than a monster should, but that night I can’t sleep, because my memory dredges sound. Thick diner china mugs breaking. Cece’s cry as she drew her first breath, and how it startled me. The hiss of air bubbles breaking the surface as a baby tries to breathe underwater.

  ***

  Library time, next day, I search Jarndyce Procedure on YouTube and get a stack of hits that make it through prison filters, a handful of greyed-out links that don’t. I click on barnes chicago grimes, surprised it wasn’t screened since the footage was some unlicensed freelancer with a flipcam. Reg Barnes was the last Jarndyce client out of this region, got mapped on the cerebral cortex of a rapist-turned-murderer named Grimes. I’d seen Grimes a few times in solitary exercise as I was passed between buildings, his dead-man’s walk in an empty yard. Just a couple glances, but I remember the way he moved. I look for that now, in the few seconds of jumpy footage: Grimes’s broad face and narrow nose, medium-build body in a bespoke suit walking down the street, speaking intently to a young woman who leans in to hear him, glancing at the camera, brows contracting in anger as realization strikes, vanishing quickly behind the corner of a building. Grimes’s face, but does any of Grimes remain? He’s not supposed to. Jarndyce wipes the furrows clean, neutralizes every electric memory. But what is a brain after all? Three pounds, give or take, of flesh connected to neurons. A thing connected to a thing connected to a thing. How can you say what ends where? Maybe Grimes doesn’t exist in his brain any more, but in his fingers and toes, in his dick and the top layer of his skin, a thin layer of Grimes over the client. Maybe I could do that – predator-stalk from the outlying regions of my body, swoop down on my newly-seeded brain, make sure a piece of me grows back.

  I play the footage over and over, looking for Grimes’s walk, the way he held his shoulders. It’s useless. If it’s there I can’t see it, and if I start seeing it it’s from a desire to see it – nothing I can trust. I close out YouTube, then on impulse open it again and repeat the search. This time the barnes chicago grimes link is greyed-out, forbidden, and I laugh.

  ***

  Cece’s the closest I’ve ever come to loving anyone. And I sure don’t love her enough to sacrifice myself for her. Like I said, I’m a crap mother. But does anyone love their children as much as they say they do? Can you love something that’s simply a wandering offshoot of your own body? I think it’s all part of a great pretending, bolstered by the endless flow of Christmas specials and Lifepic streams howling about the preciousness of children. Because if it’s not a grand old lie, how terrible a thing. What an obscenity, to weave your joy so intimately to a mewling snotrag of a child. I would burn out such a thing to the root.

  But now I know I’ll have a grandchild. Does this make me love Cece, my good, dumb kid, a little bit more?

  No. But it makes her more interesting, knowing that through her my blood and flesh could rise. And what a glorious fuck-you to that bitch who ditched her kids for a shiny new husband, to my mom’s fake dad, who fucked her up so badly she broke a shift’s worth of china chucking it at his face, to every sanctimonious bitch who looked at my photo on the front page of their newsfeed and thought bad breeding.

  A little Cece. And then a littler Cece after that. Smarter than me. Better educated than me. More money than me. Better tools. That’s interesting. That’s why we have kids, isn’t it? And why some people love their kids – just to see what they’ll do.

  If I take Helena’s offer, I might not see it. But then I might. I didn’t see the shadow of Grimes on the face that Reg Barnes bought. But I didn’t not see it, either.

  So I call Bernie, my court-appointed unfortunate, and he sets up a remote with Helena. Bernie uses his Pad and props it between the bars of my cell; the image quality’s good between his poor old shaky paws. Poor bastard’s worn himself out defending the unforgivable. I kind of like him; he reminds me of my mother.

  Helena looks worse. Downright yellow. But eager. She can’t hide that.

  “Not doing too well, are you? Put in that deed of gift and I’m game. But what if I sign and back out?”

  “You can’t.” There’s a fraction of a second’s delay between her lip movement and the sound. “Once you sign you belong to me, and the Justice doesn’t get their share until you go under. They’re not going to let anything get in the way.”

  I shrug. “What if I kill myself?” Behind the Pad Bernie frowns.

  “You’re not going to starve yourself to death in three days. I suppose you could slam your head against a wall. But you haven’t done it so far, and you’re not going to now.”

  “How do you know?”

  She leans forward and someone on her side moves back to keep her centered. “Because part of you thinks you can win. You’ve been thinking that you’ll be able to keep a piece of your brain, that you’ll ride along with me like a tick on a dog’s ear, see the sights, enjoy some freedom and my money. That’s the only way you’d agree. You don’t think the rules apply to you.”

  “Can’t blame me for trying.”

  “Not at all.” She starts to cough again and makes a sharp gesture. The image winks out.

  “I consider the Jarndyce option a form of coercion,” says Bernie, his voice full of fog. “I’m advising you to refuse.”

  “Of course it is. Tell Cece to come after we sign. Will they let her in short notice?”

  He’s the picture of resignation in a badly-tailored suit. “Of course, since there’s money on the table and you haven’t signed yet.”

  “Tell her I’m stopping the appeals.”

  “I don’t like…”

  “Shut up, Bernie,” I tell him gently. He hates being called that. “Just tell her.”

  ***

  For the signing they let me and Helena occupy the same room, no barriers. Two guards march me down Death Row’s shabby corridor, each cell shuttered against the
sight of me. At first I think they’re going to take me out of the prison, into the city perhaps, but they just take me through a maze-like arrangement of hallways, up an elevator, and down another corridor. One wall is entirely glass, and outside, spread beneath like the sea, a green mass of trees.

  I stop and stare at it for the four-odd seconds the guards will let me before they shove me onward. This floor must be four or five stories aboveground; at this distance the forest beneath looks soft, like I could leap and land safely in the trees. From the exercise yard there’s no hint that this exists. Something round and hard rises in my throat and my eyes prickle, surprising me.

  My four seconds are up and I’m yanked away. At the end of the corridor a door, tall and sturdy, and behind that door a mass of dark-suited men, a woman in a pencil skirt, and my cousin in a green pantsuit, impeccably tailored. At my appearance the men and the woman surge around her like a confused tank of fish.

  Bernie’s there too, a grey sadness. I convinced him to be the third-party executor, representing Cece’s financial interests in exchange for a nice little retainer. He still hates all of this but I convinced him he’s the only one I trust. Made him think he was doing this for more than the money.

  For some reason I expect Helena to be short, but instead she’s got an inch or so on me. She looks so fragile I’m almost afraid to take a deep breath, in case I use up all the oxygen before she can sign.

  I study this woman who’s decided she’s too rich to die. I don’t blame her – everyone thinks they’re the most important character in the book. Her skin is loose over her stick-bones, barely any meat beneath it. Her face is like an overripe plum that’s beginning to prune. Next to her I feel like an Amazon.