“Something old and strong and beautiful. But I don’t know if it will be the same for you, Philemon. The city drank my lifeblood. Absorbed me. But it didn’t devour me.” She tapped her temple. “There’s still a brain in here.”
I considered this fine distinction, fascinated.
“Then let it absorb me too,” I suggested at last. “And I’ll help you find new subjects. The two of us together will be able to accomplish twice as much.”
Lumière seemed taken aback. “You’d do that? As a policeman you’re pledged to protect and serve.”
“To protect and serve the city. That was both the letter of my oath and its spirit.”
Silence again. Lumière bowed her head and knelt in complete stillness for what felt like a very long time.
Then she looked up, and abruptly smiled. “She says yes,” she told me. “We’re going to be partners.”
She gathered me into her arms, which were as hard and cold as funerary monuments. Something woke inside me, and opened. I did not recognise it at first, because it had been so long since I experienced it.
It was joy.
* * *
So now, you see, I have given you—in telling you my story—the most circumstantial explanation of your fate. You say you are not French, but your accent is good and your grasp of idiom very convincing. You certainly have very recent and very vivid memories of the city.
I look forward to sharing them.
GOOD NIGHT, PRISON KINGS
by
CHERIE PRIEST
Holly crossed and uncrossed her legs at the knee, like her grandma always said she ought to. She cleared her throat, fiddled with her bracelet, and watched the man across the desk as he scanned the paperclipped contents of a manila folder. His salt-and-pepper eyebrows rose and fell as he read, but she couldn’t tell if he was impressed or confused. Maybe he was interested, or maybe he was going through the motions.
“It says here, you were a real estate agent.”
“That’s true, but I let my license lapse in 2007.” She laughed awkwardly, and tugged at the bangle on her arm. “The recession culled the field like crazy.”
“I’m sure it did,” he murmured noncommittally. Without looking up.
“After that, I went into business for myself. Internet consulting. Helping companies with their product content, that kind of thing. But I had to walk away when… when there was no one else to look after my grandmother.”
Finally, he graced her with eye contact. “How many siblings do you have? How many cousins?”
“There are nine of us, all together. Me and my brother, and seven… or eight…” she stumbled over the count. Suddenly, and for no good reason, she wasn’t sure. But no, she’d said it right the first time. “I have one brother, and seven cousins.”
“But you were the one tasked with caring for her. And for your great-aunt, as well?”
“Everyone else was… they had families of their own, is all. Or else they weren’t up to it, for whatever reason. I’m the oldest, anyway. It was fine. I left my business, and went to work at the courthouse. It gave me more stability. Good health insurance. Steady hours. And I’m not totally alone; my brother helps out, when I’m at work.”
“You support him, too?”
“He mostly earns his keep, looking after the ladies.” Another vaguely inappropriate chuckle escaped before she could stop it. “That’s what we call Grandma and her sister, my great-aunt Jean: ‘the ladies.’ Like they wear hats, or take tea, you know. But they don’t… they don’t do either of those things.”
The man closed the folder and put it down, then folded his hands on top of it. “Your grandparents raised you. All nine of you.”
“Not exactly, but kind of. It was complicated, and crowded. But it wasn’t bad, not usually. Grandpa was a preacher. He traveled, sometimes. My mom and my aunts took turns on childcare duty, rotating in and out of school, in and out of the house.” She wasn’t sure why she was telling him this. “But Grandpa died, a handful of years ago. Not long after that, we realized Grandma was slipping.”
“You were already here, in the city.”
Holly nodded. “It made sense for me to take care of them. But this isn’t about that, is it?”
He shrugged. “It’s hard to say. Is your brother equipped to take over? Now that you’re gone?”
She faltered. “I… I had a brother.” She stared down at the closed folder on the desk, like it might tell her something, if she could open it.
“No, no. Stay with me, dear. You have a brother.”
“We were the preacher’s kids.” She stared at the folder. “Preacher’s grandkids, whatever. Everyone always says preachers’ kids are the worst… nine little troublemaking PKs. But we weren’t that bad. Not really. Not most of us.” Holly drew up short. “Except for… except for those two.” Even here, she didn’t want to say their names. No, she couldn’t say them.
Gently, he drew her attention around again. “But lately, you’ve been working at the courthouse, filing records, and the like.”
She swallowed. It did nothing to soothe her raw, dry throat. Her head hurt. She stopped playing with her jewelry and wrapped her arms around herself. “That’s right.” What were their names? Those two stray cousins. She picked at the empty place in her memory, but found only coldness there. A barb, hard as an icicle.
She couldn’t take her eyes off the folder. “May I?” She gestured toward it.
“Of course. It’s yours, after all.”
She collected it. Opened it. Scanned the laundry list of facts. It was a resume in a single, large paragraph. No, that’s not what it was, at all. “This is an obituary.”
“Yes, dear.” He was kindly, but cool. Perfectly professional. Whatever his job was, he’d been doing it for a very long time.
She whispered, “What is this?”
He leaned forward, removed his glasses, and rubbed them fingerprint-free on the hem of his sweater. He put them back on. “This is an opportunity.”
“Am I still in the city?” she asked. She wasn’t confused. She wasn’t even surprised.
“You’re still in a city.”
“What does that mean?”
“This is where everyone comes, when there’s unfinished business.”
She frowned. “Doesn’t everyone have unfinished business? By the time they have one of these?” She held up the folder, the obituary.
“No. Not like yours.”
“What’s different about mine?”
“Yours is broken. This is where you come to fix it.”
Her throat closed tight. She opened the folder again and read the last line, the one that said she’d fallen, and hit her head. It said that she’d frozen to death in the snow. “I am angry,” she admitted. The words barely squeaked free. “Can you help?”
Again he was so kind, so calm. He sat back in his chair. “I can tell you this much: you should do what you’ve always done. Go where you’ve always gone. Find your way back to the end, and decide what you wish to do about it—but do it quickly. Your time here is limited.”
Holly did not understand. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She took the folder under her arm, pulled her coat around her shoulders, and left the office. Outside on the street, she stood on the sidewalk and said, “Okay,” again, in case it would make any difference, to herself or anyone else. “Okay,” she exhaled the word with its own white puff of chilly air.
She remembered the way home, more or less. The ladies were at home, one comfortably baffled, one grumpy and none too mobile. Holly didn’t have her own room, but she had her own couch and it was an easier sleep than any dorm room bed or futon she’d ever had.
She could go home. She had to start somewhere.
The city was made of twilight and ashes, with midnight-sharp shadows lining up like soldiers between the buildings. They stood sentinel in the alleys, inscrutable and faceless. The skyscrapers buffered the places in-between, and when Holly looked up, she couldn’t see their to
ps. All of them disappeared into that gray-dark cloudland overhead, their details all lost, or scrubbed clean.
She usually took a bus home from work. The thought blipped through her head like a reflex—not a memory, but a force of habit.
A bus appeared. It must be the right one; it was the only one, and it was unmarked. Even the sides were free of advertisements, and graffiti. Maybe it wasn’t the right bus. She got on board anyway, walking past the driver and reaching out to pay her fare before remembering that she didn’t have any money.
The driver ignored her. Or else he couldn’t see her? Holly didn’t know how being dead worked, except that now she was in a city that was both familiar and unfamiliar, remembering and forgetting things that should’ve been certain.
The bus was empty, except for a man in a suit. The man was soaking wet, staring straight ahead with a briefcase on his lap. Holly thought he must’ve been dead too. She walked past him, and he made no move, no deliberate sound. Only the soft drip, drip, drip of water sliding from his clothes and onto the floor.
She sat down in the back. The bus lurched forward, and rolled silently through the haze that blurred everything on the other side of the windows. She opened the folder, and read her obituary over and over again, milking every word for any ounce of extra meaning.
The prose style was formal and refined, so her brother probably didn’t write it. Maybe her mother did. Maybe someone just shoved all these details into the lap of some poor editor at the newspaper, and said, “Here, make some sense out of this. She was alive for thirty-eight years, and now she isn’t. These are some of the things that happened in the meantime.”
The obituary didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know, but it reminded her of a few things she no longer remembered. Her father was dead, but he’d been dead for years. Would she run into him, here in the city? The man at the office said her time here was limited. Was everyone’s?
Grandpa was dead, too. And who else? The obituary didn’t say. No one else of importance, then, if it didn’t make the papers.
The bus stopped, and it stayed stopped until she stood up and left. She hadn’t pulled the cord, but this was the right place. Everyone was waiting for her, or at least the driver and the wet man up front. They were waiting for her. Waiting for something.
She took the handrail and the three steep steps down to the sidewalk. The door closed behind her with a hydraulic whoosh… the only noise she’d heard from the bus at all… and she was alone outside the walkup she’d called home for the last three years. “Or however long,” she muttered, pushing the door open like there wasn’t a callbox, and who needed a key, anyway? She pushed. It opened.
The interior hall was just as it always had been—floor to ceiling with period details that could be called charming, if they weren’t so dirty. Micro-tile designs, mostly intact on the floors. High ceilings and dusty fixtures that halfway worked. Doors pointed in arches that deco had borrowed and streamlined from gothic.
If there were voices behind those doors… living, breathing people who talked and fought and laughed… Holly couldn’t hear them. Everything was far away, on the other side of that miasma outside—the one that wasn’t made up of smoke, smog, or mist.
The stairs were the same. Watch the handrail for splinters. The apartment door was the same, only now there weren’t any numbers on it. It was the right one, though. She knew it when she turned the knob and let herself inside.
Eau de old lady.
Funeral flowers in perfume bottles, the contents gone yellow and pungent. Lilies and gardenias, and the sharp sourness of crushed pills, the eucalyptus lies of ointment. Old books and newspapers. Tea left steeping too long. Decaf coffee from a packet.
Grandma was sitting on the couch, the one she always called a davenport. “It’s a shame to see you, dear.”
Holly mustered a smile, and raised it half-mast. “What a weird thing to say to your granddaughter.”
“They told me you died in the snow. An accident.”
“Mary, who are you talking to?” Aunt Jean was there, too. When Holly squinted, she could see the younger, fatter woman perched in the La-Z-Boy, clutching the TV remote. She was shouting. She always shouted, because Grandma’s hearing had gone to shit long before her mind did, and she never liked wearing her hearing aids.
“I’m talking to Holly.”
“Whatever makes you happy, then.”
“Grandma…” She blinked, in case her eyes were wet. They should’ve been. She should’ve been crying, but somehow she wasn’t. Did anybody cry here? Was that a thing that ghosts could do? “It wasn’t an accident.”
“I know.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“I have my guesses. They think I don’t know, see. They think I haven’t heard, about those boys and what they did. Seven pretty kittens… and two prison kings.”
“Pretty kittens Or piglet kissers. That’s what you called us.”
She nodded solemnly, and said the same thing she’d said a thousand times, when the cousins were small. “Letters can mean anything. They don’t have to hurt.”
“I love you, Grandma. I should’ve said it more.”
“You said it every night.”
Holly stopped smiling. She didn’t feel like it, anymore. “Still.”
Aunt Jean butted in, like always. “Mary, I’m gonna ask you one more time…”
“Settle down. She’s leaving.”
Yes, she was. Backing away, because there wasn’t anything here that could help her. Grandma knew about the boys, about the terrible cousins whose names she dare not think aloud, lest they appear. They lived with their mother, in part of the city where no one wanted to go, because it wasn’t nice anymore. It was one of those last addresses people ever have, before they give up and live out of their cars.
(The boys couldn’t live just anywhere, not anymore. The law got that much right.)
You could get there by car, or you could get there by a combination of bus and walking. You wouldn’t want to go there, but if you had to, that’s how you’d do it.
Holly had a car. She didn’t know where it was, but it was usually parked under the building, in the garage. She took the service elevator down, and yes, it was in her spot. She couldn’t read the license plate and she couldn’t find her keys, but the door opened when she pulled the handle. She climbed inside, and put the manila folder on the passenger seat.
The engine turned over, and she pressed the button on the visor clippie that would open the garage’s wide, rolling door to let her outside.
On the way to Aunt Patty’s place she thought about the proper kernels and perfect kites, because those were nicer things that started with PK. Not preacher’s kids, spoken with a sneer. Not the built-in curiosity about what bad thing they’d do next, or what embarrassment they would be, for whichever church where Grandpa worked.
Seven pretty kittens out of nine.
So Grandma knew about the other two, despite everyone’s best efforts to keep her in the dark. It should’ve been easy to keep her in the dark. She was more than half deaf, and teetering on the edge of Alzheimer’s.
But somehow she must’ve seen, or picked up the truth from things spoken too loud, too close. She might’ve caught some bit about making bail, or raising money for better lawyers. It was even possible that late at night, on her tiny grandma feet, she tiptoed throughout the house, opening drawers and turning on laptops. She liked the Internet. She liked seeing pictures of the great-grandkids. She wouldn’t like finding the links that no one wanted her to see, or the frantic emails between the seven pretty kittens who did their best to protect her.
What could you do, against cunning like hers?
What would Grandpa have done? That’s what everyone wanted to know, when word first got out about the brothers. Thank God Grandpa is gone, or this would’ve taken him. That’s what everyone said. Thank God he isn’t here to see this.
It was hard to say what he might’ve done. Some of t
he seven PKs remembered his guns. Would he have marched right over there, and shot them both dead? Would he have fallen right over, succumbing to heart attack number four? Unless Holly could find him, there in the city, no one was ever likely to know. So instead she said the same prayer the other six said—thank God, yes. Thank God that the third attack took him.
The more she thought about it, the angrier it made her. She shouldn’t thank God or anybody else for taking him sooner, rather than later. That shouldn’t be the silver lining. Grandma being out of it, as far as anybody else knew—that wasn’t a silver lining, either. Even if she didn’t know whatever it was she knew.
Fuck those boys, and their terrible habits. Fuck them both, and fuck their mother too—for all the excuses she made, and all the crocodile tears she cried. Fuck her for stealing what was left of the money.
Something whispered to her, No.
She almost panicked, almost hit the brakes.
No. Not that, either.
Holly kept driving. “Grandpa?” she asked. She hoped so. She reached for the hope that it might be him, then swallowed it all down. Ghosts don’t haunt the dead, she was pretty sure of that much. But she talked to him anyway, as she paused at stoplights, and checked the street signs, even though she couldn’t read them through the fog.
“Last time I saw you, we were sitting on the couch watching football. It was Sunday, and your team was winning.” She stopped for a school bus. Traffic on all sides froze, and unfroze when the stop sign retracted, and the bus moved on. “Then you looked at the front door, and I watched you watch something… your eyes tracked from the door to the dining room, and into the kitchen. Then you watched… whatever you were watching… as it headed back out the door. So I asked you, what were you looking at? And you didn’t answer. You looked at me with your eyes as big as I’d ever seen them, and you asked me who that man was—the one in the black hat. You said he was carrying a Bible.”
She was almost there. Aunt Patty’s place was up on the right, a basement flat with bars on the small windows that stuck up far enough to catch a few drops of light for a few hours every afternoon.
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