Good fences make good neighbors, but for a second, the hair on his neck stands up.
(Is it a message? Did she see him watching the night it burned? What is she waiting for, then?)
But it’s nothing. He gives people too much credit. She’s probably pretended she didn’t see the car at all. She’s not the type of neighbor to put herself out.
***
He gets home late. (Peter went to a meeting and never came back, and somebody had to close the month, so here he is, at ten at night.)
The teenagers aren’t under the broken streetlight. He might be able to get to sleep before midnight once he tackles work.
The car is still there. One of the tires has blown; it looks drunk, half-lurching its way out of the street.
He should be so lucky.
He closes the door behind him, locks it twice.
As he sits down at his desk there are little sounds that bother him, like someone outside is scratching a chalkboard half an inch at a time.
He doesn’t check. He has work.
He’s so tired that he can’t stop the shakes he gets after his second cup of coffee. (He gets this way sometimes when people assign him an unfair workload. He knows the signs. It’s out of his control.)
At midnight, there’s a metallic thud on the street outside.
The dropouts have knocked over the streetlight is the first thing he thinks, but when he gets to the window nothing’s there, and he realizes that something must have fallen out of the car.
Of course that’s what the noises were. What other problem is as awful as this one?
Only the headlights give away that there’s a car there at all. They’re still bright and clear, untouched by all the fire, and even without the streetlight they’re right where he thinks they are, as soon as he looks out the window.
It must have been something dropping out from underneath the car. The outside of it looks the same—the roof swollen like a boil, a lump of melted trash in the backseat, the windows with a few jagged fingers left clawing at the empty centers, the scorched paint job so flat that it’s invisible in the dark, vanished like a secret just for him.
He doesn’t know how he knows what the rest of the car even looks like. The streetlight’s still out. It’s not like he’s been looking at it. That car is the last thing he wants to see.
He pulls the curtains shut.
***
Around midnight, he wakes up from a dream that he called the cops. One hand’s already fumbling for the phone.
(He laughs, when he has himself together. What sort of phone call was he planning to make?
“Yeah, hi, a car burned up over the weekend and I didn’t do anything then, but the teenagers aren’t under the streetlight any more and I think the car is staring at me, so can you tow it?”)
But the longer he thinks about it, the more unfair it gets. Where the hell is the person this car belonged to? Wouldn’t someone have noticed by now that his transportation habits have been suddenly and violently altered? Hasn’t anyone on the street clued him in?
Hasn’t anybody said anything?
When he looks out his window, he sees the scorched-out roof, the half-melted grill like a grimace, the headlights gleaming like eyes.
***
The car’s still there in the morning.
All day he thinks about it—knocking on some doors in his building, or even talking to Mrs. Christensen.
(“Forget it,” says Peter when he brings it up. “Too late now. You’ll just be the twitchy asshole who’s way too interested in the burned-up car. I’d call the cops on you if you knocked on my door. Where the hell is the P&L I gave you?”)
Still, he thinks about it, on and off.
It’s not worth it—Peter’s right, and besides, his neighborhood is full of creeps, it would probably just end with him in a fight about insurance fraud with the asshole who lit up his own car—but he just wants someone to fucking take care of it already.
***
On the bus, he’s going over invoices, and he looks up too late to see if the old man’s in the window again.
Probably was. Things are always happening to make him feel badly.
***
When he turns the corner for home and sees that the car is still there, his stomach sinks.
(He’d hoped for better, from somebody.)
On his way up the street, he passes Mrs. Christensen. She’s raking leaves with her eyes on the ground.
He’s so angry he nearly asks her about it—he opens his mouth to say, “So, am I the only one who can see this fucking car?”
(He could swear it’s a foot closer to his building. He could swear the tires are blown on the opposite side now, like it really is moving, like it saw him coming and is crawling to reach him like a dog.
Jesus Christ, he’s shaking.)
But the words won’t go past his throat, so he just coughs and keeps his gaze on his feet as he walks, and tries to take comfort that he’s not the only one who can’t bring himself to look at it.
***
At some point after, the television is nothing but infomercials, he gives up on sleep and settles by the window.
The car is the only other thing that’s awake. Might as well have company.
It’s a lovely night, cool and clear, and he’s not surprised when two of the high-schoolers appear as if by magic in the flare of a cigarette lighter.
(I knew it, he thinks. I knew it, you little fucks.)
They pass a cigarette back and forth, talking just low enough that he can’t hear what they’re saying. They don’t look at the car, not even a glance over. How can they be so casual about what they did?
One of the boys takes the cigarette and shoves the other, dances away with a laugh. He’s never understood what’s so funny about that stuff that you have to go wake your neighbors playing around about nothing.
The second boy swings for a punch and misses, and the dropout with the cigarette laughs again, pretending to smother it in his sleeve, but the sound echoes off the walls in the apartment.
He wishes this kid had burned up in the car, just to shut him up.
The kid looks up and sees him.
(He doesn’t know how, it’s dark outside and it’s dark in the apartment, but he can still see the car, so maybe it’s just never as dark as you think.)
The kid gets a weird look on his face, and reaches for his friend without looking behind him, so now the other one’s looking at him, too.
He doesn’t move. He’s a citizen worried about vandalism. They should be afraid of him, after what they did.
They edge away from the building, down the street and past his line of sight, and then he hears two pairs of footsteps running.
The carcass was facing them, too, and just for a second one of the headlights disappears, like a shadow moved across it, or it moved.
***
Peter goes to lunch with the Project Manager without telling him.
His own P&L is still sitting on the copier, where Peter fucking copied it to take to lunch to show off and forgot to cover his ass and put it back.
Maybe he didn’t forget. Maybe Peter just figures that he’s invisible, and knows he won’t say anything.
Maybe Peter figures he doesn’t have the spine; he doesn’t have the balls to call the cops and tell them Peter burnt out a car on his street and to come talk to him about it, just so some uniforms would come in and scare some respect back into Peter.
At least then the cops would know that the car was there. After that it wouldn’t matter what happened—Peter would be innocent, that was fine, he didn’t need Peter to go to jail. Just so long as he could make someone else see the car and tell him what happened.
(He sits with the phone in his hand for three minutes, trying to work up the courage.)
***
For lunch he buys a greasy burger, garlic fries, and a newspaper. He’s going to sit in the cube by himself, stink the place up, and read the entire fucking paper, no matt
er how long it takes, just so that whenever Peter gets back, he can sees how little he cares about the shit that Peter’s pulled.
He skims, mostly, because the sports section goes on forever and world policy is kind of depressing.
It’s an accident that he sees the obituary at all.
The man in the photo is a stranger, but he pauses and looks at the face for a long time.
Then he looks at the date of birth, the address.
It’s the old man from the window.
The face is twenty or thirty years younger in this picture, but he knows. The eyes are the same, and that jowly face is the same, even from a window three floors up.
It doesn’t say how he died.
(Jesus, he thinks, please say it’s not jumping.)
There’s nothing about who he’s survived by.
It doesn’t mean he died alone. People leave things out of obituaries all the time.
He throws the burger away.
***
He wakes up from a nightmare (fire everywhere, he wakes up gasping, someone needs to get this car off the street or he’s never going to get to sleep again).
As soon as he can breathe, he runs to the window to make sure the maple’s all right.
The roof of the car has fallen in. The sound must have woken him.
It collapsed so completely that there’s no sharp edges left, no tears where the metal held on. It looks like someone lifted it out clean—it’s just gone.
Now he can look right into the back seat of the car, at the thing he’s never brought himself to really look at.
The body.
It’s curled in the backseat of the car, cocooned in the shell of the headrests that melted across it to protect it from falling to pieces. The streetlight’s still blown out—it’s too dark to see anything, unless you know what you’re afraid to see—but he can make out the line of a spindly arm, the curve of a hand, an arch that must have been a leg, laid out across the back of the beast, and even in the pitch black he knows the body’s there.
It’s bone-pale, now, burned out to ashes.
(Its mouth is open; he can see it from here. That man died alone and screaming.)
And no one’s called the cops, in all this time. No one’s said a thing. They left it for him to find, because they knew, they knew what he’d be finding now.
(Or they hadn’t seen it, not one thing, and he’s the only guy awake and gripping the windowsill until his knuckles pop.)
He wonders what those dropouts will say when they show up tonight to drink and smoke and see that the car isn’t hiding their secret any more.
Maybe it was one of them who died in there, he thinks. It makes it a fraction easier to breathe, thinking of the body in that car being one of them, thinking of them having to really look at that car, with the spine arching up from inside it, and be fucking sorry for what they did. That’s better than anything else he can come up with.
It’s ashes now, anyway. Too late to do anything. The dead are dead.
(Survived by, he thinks, before he can help himself.)
He closes the window tightly and pulls the curtains shut so the street noise is muffled and he can get some sleep.
It’s almost midnight, and he has work in the morning.
© 2012 Genevieve Valentine
29 Union Leaders Can't Be Wrong, by Genevieve Valentine
The doctor gives him an orange as soon as he wakes up.
"Careful," the doctor says, curling someone's fingers around the waxy skin. "It takes a little getting used to. Can you feel this?"
Stephen realizes he can feel the orange, it's too ripe, but it's still someone else's hand.
"Take your time," says the doctor, pressing his thumb against Stephen's new wrist to find the pulse. "Just do whatever you can."
Stephen squeezes the orange, tries to imagine the fingers are his fingers.
"This is normal," the doctor says, and, "Give yourself time, it's key," and, "The hospital psychiatrist will be speaking to you about some support groups."
"What about Marlene?"
"She's speaking with one of our counselors," the doctor says. "Full transplant is usually something of a shock to the loved one, at first."
"How long until I can see her?"
"That's up to her," the doctor says. "Can you squeeze the orange for me?"
As long as he doesn't look, it's fine.
***
For two days he gets used to walking, yawning, holding a fork.
Modern Love has an FT fireman. The guy works out way too much to be a fireman, and he can't act. No wonder the poor volunteers downtown can't get laid, Stephen thinks.
"It's like—it's like a part of me will always wish I had died," the fireman says, and the music swells.
A nurse knocks, asks if he's ready to see Marlene.
When the door closes behind Marlene, she's still trying to blink back tears like he doesn't know that trick after seven years.
"Hey, babe."
She winces at his voice, smoothes it over. "Stephen. Hi."
After a long time he says, "How bad is it?"
She shakes her head. Her hands are gripping her purse, the knuckles white.
"Got a Golden Plus in there?"
After a moment she says, "You have asthma. You shouldn't smoke any more."
He didn't know people still got asthma.
She cries a little more, reaches out her hand to him and stops herself, and when Callahan comes in without knocking Marlene looks at her gratefully and leaves.
He must really be ugly, Stephen thinks. First time Marlene's ever been grateful to Callahan.
Callahan stops at the foot of his bed, hands in her pockets. Somewhere behind her, the door closes.
"Something's different," Callahan says, and he laughs.
He knows it's a different laugh now, but she doesn't say anything.
Callahan makes a nurse bring in a mirror, and when he gets a look at the new body he doesn't know what to do.
"I'm not ugly, anyway," he says after a while.
"Speak for yourself."
He's not, though; no better and no worse. He looks like someone he would know. He touches his cheeks, runs his finger down the bridge of his new nose.
When he cries Callahan stares at the cabinets until he's got hold of himself.
"I have asthma," he says after a while.
"Yeah, they told us. There wasn't time to find a healthier donor. You get it treated for a while. Pills or something."
"What happened?"
She shrugs at the cabinets. "You died."
***
While he's still in bed the Chief comes by with the tech guys from the 41st, and they take his new fingerprints and retinals and ask him the questions on his IDV list. He forgot about that thing (it was three years ago and he thought it was a stupid test and made Callahan write most of his questions), but it's still him, so all the answers are right.
His signature is wobbly. The doctor tells him he'll get used to the new fingers.
The Chief shakes his hand. "It's a victory for the unions," he says, "you should be very proud."
They put the new ident chip under his skin, and when he grips the orange he can see the little square outline against the bones of his wrist.
***
The brass makes the guys at the precinct go to LOFT meetings; Stephen only finds out when Callahan calls him after the first one.
"We're not supposed to tell you," she says.
He pushes hospital food around on the plate, thinks about the guys at the precinct sitting through a day of sensitivity training. "How'd it go?"
There's a pause that tells him everything.
"They showed us clips of Modern Love. Have you seen that fireman?"
He laughs, because he doesn't know what else to do.
***
After he's had a week with the trauma counselor, Marlene takes him home from the hospital, and they manage to have a conversation before Stephen realizes it's beca
use she's looking at the road and not at him.
How did I die? he'd asked the doctor, and the doctor had said, That's the least of your worries now.
She's put fresh sheets in the guest room, a stack of towels on the chair, like she does for all their visitors.
"I'm sorry," she says, rearranges the towels.
He understands. It's weird for him to see himself in the mirror. He can't imagine looking at him.
After she showers, he goes into the bathroom while the mirror's still fogged. He washes his face six times, trying to memorize the new planes of his skull.
The shower still smells like her soap.
***
The psychiatrist at the hospital told him about this other guy—Roger Barron, he was forty, he fell off his motorcycle, and Stephen can feel the dent in the skull where it struck the pavement and shattered, there's a plate there now, and he sat up all night and thought about the doctor telling Barron's mother that their son was dead, that she might see him next week on the street and he'd still be dead, and he called Callahan to get pictures of Barron's family so if someone ever saw him and burst into tears he would know who they were.
***
He and Marlene sift through brochures that the counselors gave them. They get sick of the graphics of people holding hands on beaches with captions like FIND YOUR OLD INTIMACY ALL OVER AGAIN, and eventually they pick Full Transplants, Full Donors, because the people in the brochure looked a little less enthusiastic.
The group leader is a fat woman with curly black hair and a pink sweater a size too tight, and when they come in she shakes their hands and looks at each of them keenly, as if she can divine which one of them is in the borrowed body.
"It's me," he says, and the woman says, "Well, of course," ushers them to their seats.
They all repeat some bullshit about affirming the soul and thinking of the body as a vessel, and Stephen begins to wonder if he should have picked a brochure with happier people on it.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 486
