* * *
His father died in the back of his mother’s shit-glugging truck, expiring soundlessly as she rushed him to the plant for emergency care. There was no guarantee they would have treated him if she had made it: spouses of workers who served the city were entitled to limited care, but were hardly a priority. The only other option was the hoschurch, with its faith healers and rusty machines – more likely to catch a disease there than be cured of one, Tem’s mother used to say.
It cost the plant less to promise a Brixton’s burial if a worker’s spouse died: spaces in the mortuary were limited, however, so this policy was first-come, first-served. “Might be the first lucky break Zach got in his life,” his uncle David had muttered as Tem left the kitchen where the adults all sat in the dark, waiting for his mother to return. Tem, who had stayed with them until his mother’s call from the plant, could not bear the vigil any longer. Though he was no longer a child, he did not know the correct way to behave, and longed for the blamelessness of sleep.
He awoke a few hours later to the sound of shouting in the kitchen, and stumbled out to discover his mother, her face twisted, her mouth contorting as she raged at his aunts and uncles. He could not understand at first what she was saying, so mangled was her speech, so strange the sentiment—
“I told them where I wanted him, and if it costs me, then it costs me, and if it costs you, fine, because I’m what this family lives off of, I’m the one who brings home the noot, I’m the one who feeds all of your kids when I only have—” She stopped, sighting her son. “Tem. Go back to bed. This isn’t a discussion for you.”
“He should get a say, Esther.” David stepped forward. “It’s his father, after all. It’s him they’ll all talk about.”
“Talk,” his mother spat, her hair looped wildly around her face. “Talk means nothing. Bodies mean everything. Zach’s still got a body, and there’s only one place in this godforsaken town that understands why that matters.”
“Esther.”
“He’s going to Morton’s. It’s done.” The dark bags beneath his mother’s eyes came into sharp relief under the kitchen’s harsh light as she sank into the hard chair beneath her. “It’s done.”
“We won’t stay,” warned David. “Not if you do this.”
His mother barked out a laugh. “Oh, really? Where would you go? Where do you think you’ll find this kind of space?”
“I don’t know,” Tem’s uncle replied. “But I won’t have my children living under the roof of a madwoman.”
He turned, taking his wife by the arm. Tem’s mother called after him. “Better a madwoman’s roof than no roof at all, Dave! All the roofs are caving in. We’ve got to take what shelter we can get.”
Within the week, Tem’s relatives kept their promise, leaving Tem and his mother alone, in an obscene amount of vacant space. At first Tem walked around the three rooms of the apartment with exhilaration, but the empty bunks and chairs soon weighed him down: if the authorities found out they had spare room, they’d resettle strangers in the apartment with them, or move Tem and his mother elsewhere.
What Tem worried about most, however, was the way his relatives had departed. They had tried to take him with them, but his mother had bellowed until they gave up their half-hearted fight. Now that she’d secured him, though, she wanted little to do with Tem: she spent her time at the apartment in bed, or sitting in the kitchen, staring at the painted wine bottle adorning the table, its garish pink and green flowers chipped and misshapen.
He did not know if his mother still had a job. She left the apartment for long stretches of time at odd hours, never explaining her disappearance, and came back late, smelling of an antiseptic Tem could not identify. During her absences, Tem turned Edie’s forbidden radio on full blast. His aunt had given it to him before she’d left for the coast, telling him she had to go, despite all of the warnings. “People here don’t know how bad it is,” she’d said. “They’re all still pretending. They’ve got their noot, and they can see the sky, and they can make believe the mortuaries are something great, instead of a monument to everything that went wrong here. I’m going to change things. I’m going to help save Estkos, because if Estkos goes – we all do.”
The old station from Estkos no longer worked, so Tem gleaned bits of news from the other channels, ignoring the official reports and classical music, focusing on the fuzzy pirate stations. He was listening one evening when a female voice, not so different from Edie’s, stilled his finger: “…the fall of the city. Communication with Estkos has been severed, and no help is forthcoming. Fires and storms have pushed astronomical numbers of people out of Estkos, flooding the inland cities with caravans of survivors. They’ve come by car, by motorbike, and by foot, but as the waves continue, all remaining population centers will be inundated by new, insupportable masses of the displaced, exacerbating the unstable conditions already faced in the Lakelands, New Bayannur, and Los Monjes, which have all experienced noot shortages and frequent wildfires in recent months. With water scarce and resources badly strained, the safest place to hide may be underground.”
Or far above it, Tem thought. He needed to warn his mother, to form a plan – but if his hunch was right, she was already in the safest place in Andersenville.
He took the bus to school the next day, but got off a stop ahead of his usual one on the way back, heading from the center of town to Lykeway, the long road to Morton’s. The man from so many years ago was still there, wearing his red tie and rumpled black suit, ill fitting over the lump of his torso.
He grinned as Tem approached, the same conspiratorial grin that used to redden Tem’s cheeks. “Looking for something?”
“Can I take a look inside?”
The mortician shifted off his stool. “Can you ever. As long as you like. What’s your name, kid?”
“Tem.”
“Tem. Well, Tem, my name is Maxwell Brixton.” Tem accepted the man’s ursine hand, his fingers vanishing within its warm grip. “Son of the infamous H.G. You can call me Morton, though – everybody does. This your first time here?”
“I’ve been to Brixton’s, but here, yes.”
Morton grinned again. “Then we gotta give you the grand tour.”
To enter Brixton’s, Tem had always taken an elevator up and made his way down the tower. In Morton’s, they went from the bottom to top, climbing a narrow stairway that opened into a grand, faded foyer.
Tem gaped up at the dim sunlight filtering down from twenty floors above: the center of Morton’s was open, with once-gilded balconies rising to its smudgy glass ceiling. Before them stood a fountain, its water gray, though still running, with stone benches at its corner.
The man gestured to one of the benches. “The first graves at Morton’s. We built this mortuary on a cemetery. Lutheran, I think it was. They took away the markers, but the bodies are still there.”
Tem felt the cold seeping up from the marble floor, and wrapped his bare arms around himself, nodding up at the balconies. “Why is it all open? I mean – why isn’t it like Brixton’s?”
The man raised a shaggy eyebrow. “No one ever told you?”
Tem tightened his arms, defensively. “Told me what?”
“This place doesn’t have a thing to do with Brixton’s, kid. I was born a Brixton, but I won’t die one. They wouldn’t have me, and good riddance to ’em. They may have claimed Pops’s body for their freak show, but they’ll never get mine.”
He began walking toward the archways lining the open foyer. “It’s just me here. No attendants, like at the big blue shithole next door. I’ve got some automatons to help out, but I do all the plastination myself, and this place runs like a dream.” He thumped his fist against the wall of the arch. “Dad built this place to last.”
They came to another stairway, wide and dimly lit, twisting out of sight. The mortician flourished his hand toward the entrance. “Elevator’s been down six months. After you.”
The stairs creaked as they ascended, th
e frayed carpet scratching at Tem’s shoes. The man was following behind him, too closely: Tem stopped short. “My father died. That’s why I came. I mean – part of it.”
“My condolences.” Morton was close enough that Tem could see his pores, and didn’t look sorry at all.
Tem took a breath. “A boy in my class died, too. I saw it. But I don’t know if… He was in bad shape. He may not be on display.”
The man chewed his lip. “Came in a month or two ago?” Tem nodded. “Come with me, kid.” Morton sidled past Tem, his stomach brushing the younger man’s hip. “I think I know the one you mean.”
They passed a few floors before emerging onto the fifth. Morton trundled along before him, leading Tem past closed vaults until they stopped before a tomb at the end of the hall, its crimson doors adorned with gold fleur-de-lis.
Morton turned to face Tem, his bulk blocking the tomb’s entrance. “I’m surprised you came by without knowing what was in here, kid. We don’t get many unexpected visitors, not down here, and of course we’ve got very strict guidelines for who can use the private vaults. I know all the regulars.”
“Regulars? Why do they come here, and not to Brixton’s?”
“We have a very open visitation policy.”
“So does Brixton’s. You can go there any time.”
“No.” Morton reached to his right, pressing a button next to the vault. “We have a very open visitation policy.”
The red doors opened, but there was no glass. No pane separated Tem from the body, which stood alone, its gray eyes locked on his.
The boy’s bloody clothes were gone, replaced by fresh cotton garments. They had washed his face, applying a preserving glaze to the wound in his skull, perceptible only by the slight sheen to his exposed brains. He looked natural, for all that was wrong with his form, like he’d been born this way, still and whole, covered in the juices of the womb.
“Why didn’t you—”
“Clean ’im up? Stamp the Brixton’s seal of approval on his ass?” Morton leaned against the wall. “These poor bastards are past all that. The ‘violent dead’, we call them. They who died screaming. Over there—” he jerked his finger toward the back wall, in the vague direction of Brixton’s “—they need you to die pretty, or at least pretty enough that they can fix you up. They stitch open wounds and stuff cavities with rags, break bones to make ’em fit their poses – they taxidermy them, over there. That’s no way to treat the dead. No way at all.”
Tem walked up to the boy, whose mouth hung open, frozen in the expression with which he had died.
“You know him well?”
“No. Not at all.” He reached out a hand. The boy’s skin felt clammy and slick under the orange corpse-lamps. “Are they…are they all like this?”
“Nah, the residents up in the private rooms are whole – mostly. Those are the ones that get brought here by choice.”
“People bring them here so they can – visit them? Without glass?”
“Without rules.” Morton lowered his voice, though no one but the bullet-headed automatons, gliding by to spritz the corpses with refreshing chemicals, were around to hear. “There’s a man who’s been coming in every week for seven years to eat a piece of his wife. Keeps him young, he says, and she agreed to it, though the family didn’t. Died at thirty-one. Used to be quite the looker, she was. Now I suppose she’d still turn heads, and more than a few stomachs.” He let the joke land, then guffawed at his own punch line.
“And the ones here? The…‘violent’ ones? Do people—”
“No, we’ve got more restrictions down here. I can’t be everywhere at once, of course, so it’s hard to say nothing ever happens. We used to rent these ones out, back in the old days – for birthday parties, concerts, you name it – but the fourth or fifth round of Perestroika reforms put a stop to all that. Guess they kept the world from falling apart, for a little while, but it sure made things less fun.”
“But your dad – H.G. Brixton – he built this place? And Brixton’s, too?”
“Twenty years apart. I was barely born when Brixton’s rose, but I’d been living in Estkos, oh, three or four years by the time this place went up. His third wife died violently, y’see. Car wreck. He wanted to put her on display in Brixton’s, but the rest of the family wouldn’t let him. It was too big a brand by then. So he used all his money to build her somewhere new, somewhere he could sleep by her side, hold her hand. He said we’d been short-sighted. Here he’d perfected this amazing thing, this way to preserve bodies so they won’t decay, and we were using it to – what? Build a museum? No, that was a waste. Why not let the living be with the dead, if the dead still felt like the living?
“Her last name was Morton. First name Marj. Pops liked it for the place because he wanted to honor her, and because it was the name of some village his grandparents lived in back in England that’s far underwater now. I just liked that it wasn’t ‘Brixton’, so when I came from Estkos and started helping to run the place, I let people start calling me ‘Morton’ too. Guess it stuck.” He thumbed toward the door of the tomb, like a man eager to show off the treasures of his house. “Wanna see some more?”
Morton took Tem from vault to vault on the top floor of the violent dead, sponging the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. The bodies here were broken, bloodied, limbs bent backwards, teeth splayed inwards, fingernails torn from hands, noses ripped from cartilage. Some of them could barely be called bodies at all: they came to one tomb that merely contained a raw, muscled stump with bits of tangled flesh hanging from its roots, propped upright only meters from where Tem and Morton stood.
Tem shuddered as he ran his eyes over its exposed husk, his every tendon twinging in sympathy. Morton steadied him, placing a solid hand on Tem’s back. “You all right, kid?”
Tem swallowed. “What happed to…?”
“Her. It’s a her.”
“…Her?”
“Burned. Other things, too. The burning was the worst.”
“But…why keep it? Why…why show this?”
Morton’s fingers ghosted over Tem’s spine. “I knew a man in Estkos who died like that. Burned, in the Nuyok explosions. Or maybe—” He nudged Tem to the right, towards another open vault: he’d revealed them all with a flourish when they’d come to the fifteenth floor, keying in a single code that opened every door. “Or maybe he was drowned, in the storms that came right after. Or trampled, like your friend. I don’t know; I never saw the body.”
He turned Tem to face him, his hands gripping Tem’s shoulders. “It’s better to know. Remember that, kid: it’s always better to know. It’s why I went to Estkos and left this shit-pit of a town behind, at least for a while. I wanted to see the corpse of this world as it rotted, or I thought I did. I wanted to see the end.”
“And what did you see?”
Morton didn’t reply. Standing face to face, Tem could feel the animal warmth of him, and longed, suddenly, to confirm that he was not like the things in the vaults: to bury his face in Morton’s furred and flabby stomach, to sink into the body inches from his own, to press his tongue into all its red slicknesses. He shuddered, overcome by these strange visions; Morton took his hand, and led him through the hall, down the darkened stairs, to the basement of the mortuary, where, he said, they could find something to eat.
* * *
No one remembered the dead in Estkos.
Used-up bodies tumbled into landfills, or burned in mass crematories, or crumbled to dust under the rain and sun. The few who could pay once had their bodies frozen, but as the states of things worsened the practice fell out of favor, the state-of-the-art facilities shuttered and cannibalized for their valuable parts. No one believed there would be a world to return to anymore in fifty, sixty, a hundred years; no one wanted to see what remained if there were.
After the city’s frequent storms – the sudden, sky-shattering tempests that flooded the city’s lower levels, filling the shelters of the indigent, kicking the city’s
routine mass migrations into high gear – bloated bodies lay in the streets for weeks, turning black and bilious, until someone finally threw them on the trucks meant for retrieving the corpses of the fierce, feral dogs who had lived through the gassings of Perestroika. These dogs were used for noot: Edie had told Tem long ago how many people in Andersenville had slaughtered their pets and animals when she was a young girl, driving them off cliffs or breaking their necks rather than see them ground into jellied food.
“My aunt went to Estkos,” Tem told Morton, as he described his time in the city on the coast. “She never came back.”
“Most people don’t.”
They were sitting in the basement of the mortuary, in a small kitchen next to the white preparation tables and silver tube of the vacuum chamber, where Morton had prepared for Tem a meal of spring onion salad, with crab apple jam and dandelion wine for dessert. Morton grew his own food in a small garden on the tower’s roof: Tem relished every bite, marveling at the textures, so different from the slimy sameness of noot.
Morton – “Max, in those days” – lived in Estkos for six years, making a living in the bathhouse district, pimping out boys fresh from the ruins of Texico or Calirado, in cracked-tile steam rooms where water never ran. He’d started out as one of those boys himself, telling men sad, invented stories of radiation and the quakes, but saw how quickly the boys around him grew worn, the circles around their eyes darkening, their cheeks caving and foreheads creasing until it became impossible for them to pose as 15- or even 25-year-olds. “So I became management – upped the rates, protected the boys, kept the clients in line. Guess I got something of the Brixton business sense, after all.”
“Couldn’t you have ended up in trouble? With all of those men, I mean?”
Morton laughed. “I was meaty enough to handle any of ’em, even back then. Now, you—” His eyes ran down Tem and back again. “You they’d have eaten alive.”
Only one thing, it turned out, could throw a wrench into Morton’s career plans. A man came to the bathhouses one day, advocating for the rights of the sex workers in Morton’s care, with a contract he demanded that Morton sign. “It was crazy to think that a piece of paper could mean anything to anybody, but I signed it anyway. I would have done anything for any man, woman, or automaton with that face.”
Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014 Page 5
