In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  “You’ve come here before.”

  “What?” He was about to bellow at her that this was his house, bought and paid for, without a single dime of mortgage, but he held back.

  “I want to see my wife,” he said instead.

  “That’s what you said last time.”

  “What . . . are you talking about?” A blood vessel in his temple pulsed.

  “Last year. On this same day.”

  A wave of nausea washed through him. He’d gone “green around the gills,” as his mother would’ve said. What had happened to her? Why didn’t he know?

  “Listen,” he said, “I don’t mean to scare you, whoever you are. But this . . . is going too far.”

  “That’s exactly what you said then. I remember it clearly.”

  “I’ve never seen you before,” he said—but he suddenly didn’t think that this was true.

  Kevlar fairings . . . aluminum alloys . . . splintered windows and corridors filled with flames.

  He felt as if he might start to cry, and the shame of that fear made him shudder. Then the image of the Montblanc pen in midair unexpectedly softened him. The woman in the doorway’s face seemed to soften too. If she’d appeared tense or annoyed, or just disdainful before, her expression took on some crusted but noticeable form of sympathy.

  “Last year when you came, I was about to call the police. I asked you if were on medication. You did scare me. I’m not sure I understand, but I’m not scared now.”

  “I don’t know who you are,” he said. “I want to see Mrs. Connors, please.”

  “As I told you last year, Mrs. Connors’s husband died in the attack on the World Trade Center. She sold the house and moved to California. I believe she lives in the Los Angeles area now. I’m . . . very sorry.”

  A murky brown moment overcame him, a slippage of track somewhere inside. Then a puzzle of plate glass consumed in a roaring mess of light.

  “I . . . should . . . go . . .” he managed to wheeze, his ears ringing.

  The woman nodded, with a sad gentleness of expression that made her face look much younger. He realized her eyes were the same shade of the evening dress Sophie had worn that first night at the Zinc Bar. He turned to go, leaving the magnificent lakeside hideaway behind.

  This time the proud, pretentious iron gate opened for him, but for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to stride through. Instead, he stupidly scaled the fence like a clawing teenager after a bungled burglary, muddying his expensive leather Italian shoes in the manicured flower garden. Perspiration needle-stabbed his forehead and the back of his neck. The ringing in his inner ears intensified . . . the peculiar falling feeling. Something was terribly wrong.

  The flags along the roadway rippled, but the liquid gold of the autumn sunshine had turned cold and somehow menacing. He lost his footing for a moment and almost slipped into the pavement as a sleek silver Jaguar eased around. He felt the eyes behind the tinted windows examining him. He must’ve known them, but they were unfamiliar now. Alien. Everything decidedly strange. Wrong. Deeply wrong on Deep Valley Road.

  A bracing breath of wind off Upper Mianus Pond struck his face. Three ducks flew overhead—they reminded him of fighter planes against the bleak, otherwise barren sky. Then, a moment later, a lone duck followed frantically, as if lost, late. Nothing was the way he’d hoped it would be. No.

  His entire life had been a lie. From cheating at Yale, to defrauding his clients, and setting up his mentor and loyal business partner—to sneaking around on his wife, ignoring his son. And then there was that clear fresh September day when he’d done the right thing. He was early and prepared for an important meeting. Neatly tailored. Relaxed even. His whole being seized up, like a screwdriver thrust into a chain-wheel drive. He knew who he was—and where he could never be. Ever. The grave certainty was almost peaceful now, tinged with the scent of childhood honeysuckle and the still smoking candles of some lost birthday cake.

  He reached the Spyder and felt for the door handle. He noticed the bottle of Piper-Heidsieck. The box of delphinium lace lingerie lay beside it. At the last minute that morning, he’d changed his mind. The car began to gently vanish, melting into the air. His peripheral vision began to cloud and then dissolve . . . strips of film thrown into flame. Deep Valley Road . . . and the deep quiet started coming on again. The hideous trauma would pass, like another neighbor’s luxury sedan. Choking kerosene stench of 24,000 gallons of jet fuel ignited on impact. Rupture of glass. Dire crunch of concrete and steel . . . the shearing torn asunder ruination of perfect oblivion. But not so perfect that he couldn’t see a Montblanc fountain pen in flight, embedded in a wall that would implode like a dream . . . the screams he could never stop hearing. Then total silence.

  He pulled out his cell phone, but it evaporated in his hand. Another anniversary. Then his hand disappeared. A cranberry BMW drove right through him. There would be no more black Indian Ocean pearl necklaces or crab croquettes at midnight. No more explanations or incriminations. He was moving in that other way now . . . receding once again . . . like a sweat stain on a counter top . . . summoned back . . . into the darkness beyond the flags.

  Susan Palwick holds a PhD from Yale and is one of the founders of The New York Review of Science Fiction. Her novel Flying in Place won a Crawford Award in 1993 and her second novel, The Necessary Beggar, won the Alex Award. She is a columnist for HopeandHealing.org (an Episcopalian website). Reviewing her collection The Fate of Mice for Tor.com, author Jo Walton deemed Palwick a “major writer” and, while not prolific, she has continued to make major contributions to the genre for over twenty years.

  “Beautiful Stuff” features a koosh ball, a paperweight, two terrorists, and a slew of reanimated corpses. It is also the most directly life-affirming story in this collection.

  BEAUTIFUL STUFF

  Susan Palwick

  Rusty Kerfuffle stood on a plastic tarp in an elegant downtown office. The tarp had been spread over fine woolen carpet; the walls were papered in soothing monochrome linen, and the desk in front of Rusty was gleaming hardwood. There was a paperweight on the desk. The paperweight was a crystal globe with a purple flower inside it. In the sunlight from the window, the crystal sparkled, and the flower glowed. Rusty desired that paperweight with a love like starvation, but the man sitting behind the desk wouldn’t give it to him.

  The man sitting behind the desk wore an expensive suit and a tense expression; next to him, an aide vomited into a bucket. “Sir,” the aide said, raising his head from the bucket long enough to gasp out a comment. “Sir, I think this is going to be a public relations disaster.”

  “Shut up,” said the man behind the desk, and the aide resumed vomiting. “You. Do you understand what I’m asking for?”

  “Sure,” Rusty said, trying not to stare at the paperweight. He knew how smooth and heavy it would feel in his hands; he yearned to caress it. It contained light and life in a precious sphere, a little world.

  Rusty’s outfit had been a suit, once. Now it was a rotting tangle of fibers. His ear itched, but if he scratched it, it might fall off. He’d been dead for three months. If his ear fell off in this fancy office, the man behind the desk might not let him touch the paperweight.

  The man behind the desk exhaled, a sharp sound like the snort of a horse. “Good. You do what I need you to do and you get to walk around again for a day. Understand?”

  “Sure,” said Rusty. He also understood that the walking part came first. The man behind the desk would have to re-revive Rusty, and all the others, before they could do what had been asked of them. Once they’d been revived, they got their day of walking whether they followed orders or not. “Can I hold the paperweight now?”

  The man behind the desk smiled. It wasn’t a friendly smile. “No, not yet. You weren’t a very nice man when you were alive, Rusty.”

  “That’s true,” Rusty said, trying to ignore his itching ear. His fingers itched too, yearning for the paperweight. “I wasn’t.”

&
nbsp; “I know all about you. I know you were cheating on your wife. I know about the insider trading. You were a morally bankrupt shithead, Rusty. But you’re a hero now, aren’t you? Because you’re dead. Your wife thinks you were a saint.”

  This was, Rusty reflected, highly unlikely. Linda was as adept at running scams as he’d ever been, maybe more so. If she was capitalizing on his death, he couldn’t blame her. He’d have done the same thing, if she’d been the one who had died. He was glad to be past that. The living were far too complicated.

  He stared impassively at the man behind the desk, whose tie was speckled with reflections from the paperweight. The aide was still vomiting. The man behind the desk gave another mean smile and said, “This is your chance to be a hero for real, Rusty. Do you understand that?”

  “Sure,” Rusty said, because that was what the man wanted to hear. The sun had gone behind a cloud: the paperweight shone less brightly now. It was just as tantalizing as it had been before, but in a more subdued way.

  “Good. Because if you don’t come through, if you say the wrong thing, I’ll tell your wife what you were really doing, Rusty. I’ll tell her what a pathetic slimebag you were. You won’t be a hero anymore.”

  The aide had raised his head again. He looked astonished. He opened his mouth, as if he wanted to say something, but then he closed it. Rusty smiled at him. I may have been a pathetic slimebag, he thought, but I never tried to blackmail a corpse. Even your cringing assistant can see how morally bankrupt that is. The sun came out again, and the paperweight resumed its sparkling. “Got it,” Rusty said happily.

  The man behind the desk finally relaxed a little. He sat back in his chair. He became indulgent and expansive. “Good, Rusty. That’s excellent. You’re going to do the right thing for once, aren’t you? You’re going to help me convince all those cowards out there to stop sitting on their butts.”

  “Yes,” Rusty said. “I’m going to do the right thing. Thank you for the opportunity, sir.” This time, he wasn’t being ironic.

  “You’re welcome, Rusty.”

  Rusty felt himself about to wiggle, like a puppy. “Now can I hold the paperweight? Please?”

  “Okay, Rusty. Come and get it.”

  Rusty stepped forward, careful to stay on the tarp, and picked up the paperweight. It was as smooth and heavy and wonderful as he had known it would be. He cradled it to his chest, the glass pleasantly cool against his fingers, and began swaying back and forth.

  Rusty had never understood the science behind corpse revival, but he supposed it didn’t matter. Here he was, revived. He did know that the technique was hideously expensive. When it was first invented, mourning families had forked over life savings, taken out second mortgages, gone into staggering debt simply to have another day with their lost loved ones.

  That trend didn’t last long. The dead weren’t attractive. The technique only worked on those who hadn’t been embalmed or cremated, because there had to be a more-or-less intact, more-or-less chemically unaltered body to revive. That meant it got used most often on accident and suicide victims: the sudden dead, the unexpected dead, the dead who had gone without farewells. The unlovely dead, mangled and wounded.

  The dead smelled, and they were visibly decayed, depending on the gap between when they had died and when they had been revived. They shed fingers and noses. They left behind pieces of themselves as mementos. And they had very little interest in the machinations of the living. Other things drew them. They loved flowers and animals. They loved to play with food. Running faucets enchanted them. The first dead person to be revived, a Mr. Otis Magruder who had killed himself running into a tree while skiing, spent his twenty-four hours of second life sitting in his driveway making mud puddles while his wife and children told him how much they loved him. Each time one of his relations delivered another impassioned statement of devotion, Otis nodded, and said “Uh-huh.” And then he ran his fingers through more mud, and smiled. At hour eighteen, when his wife, despairing, asked if there was anything she could tell him, anything she could give him, he cocked his head and said, “Do you have a plastic pail?”

  Six hours later, when Otis was mercifully dead again, his wife told reporters, “Well, Otis was always kind of spacy. That’s why he ran into that tree, I guess.” But it turned out that the other revived dead—tycoons, scientists, gangsters—were spacy too. The dead didn’t care about the same things the living did.

  These days, the dead were revived only rarely, usually to testify in criminal cases involving their death or civil cases involving the financial details of their estates. They made bad witnesses. They became distracted by brightly colored neckties, by the reflection of the courtroom lights in the polished wood of the witness box, by the gentle clicking of the clerk’s recording instrument. It was very difficult to keep them on track, to remind them what they were supposed to be thinking about. On the other hand, they had amazingly accurate memories, once they could be cajoled into paying attention to the subject at hand. Bribes of balloons and small, brightly colored toys worked well; jurors became used to watching the dead weep in frustration while scolding lawyers held matchbox cars and neon-hued stuffed animals just out of reach. But once the dead gave the information the living sought, they always told the truth. No one had ever caught one of the dead lying, no matter how dishonest the corpse might have been while it was still alive.

  It had been very difficult for the man behind the desk to break through Rusty’s fascination with the paperweight. It had taken a lot to get Rusty’s attention. The sheer numbers involved—the numbers of the dead, the amounts of money required—hadn’t done it. Intelligence about Rusty’s affairs and insider deals hadn’t done it. None of that mattered anymore. It was a set of extraneous details, as distant as the moon and as abstract as ethics, which also had no hold on Rusty.

  Rusty’s passions and loyalties were much more basic now.

  He stood in the elegant office, rocking the paperweight as if it were a baby, crooning to it, sometimes holding it at arm’s length to admire it before bringing it back safely to his chest again. He had another two hours of revival left this time; the man behind the desk would revive him and the others again in a month, for another twenty-four hours. Rusty fully intended to spend every minute of his current two hours in contemplation of the paperweight. When he was revived again in a month, he’d fall in love with something else.

  “You idiot,” said the man who had been sitting behind the desk. He wasn’t behind a desk now; he was in a refrigerated warehouse, a month after that first meeting with Rusty. He was yelling at his aide. Around him were the revived dead, waiting to climb into refrigerated trucks to be taken to the rally site. It was a lovely, warm spring day, and they’d smell less if they were kept cool for as long as possible. “I don’t want them.” He waved at two of the dead, more mangled than any of the others, charred and lacerated and nearly unrecognizable as human bodies. One was playing with a paperclip that had been lying on the floor; the other opened and closed its hand, trying to catch the dust motes that floated in the shafts of light from the window.

  The aide was sweating, despite the chill of the warehouse. “Sir, you said—”

  “I know what I said, you moron!”

  “Everyone who was there, you said—”

  “Idiot.” The voice was very quiet now, very dangerous. “Idiot. Do you know why we’re doing this? Have you been paying attention?”

  “Sir,” the aide stuttered. “Yes sir.”

  “Oh, really? Because if you’d been paying attention, they wouldn’t be here!”

  “But—”

  “Prove to me that you understand,” said the dangerously quiet voice. “Tell me why we’re doing this.”

  The aide gulped. “To remind people where their loyalties lie. Sir.”

  “Yes. And where do their loyalties lie? Or where should their loyalties lie?”

  “With innocent victims. Sir.”

  “Yes. Exactly. And are those, those things ov
er there”—an impassioned hand waved at the two mangled corpses—“are they innocent victims?”

  “No. Sir.”

  “No. They aren’t. They’re the monsters who were responsible for all these other innocent victims! They’re the guilty ones, aren’t they?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “They deserve to be dead, don’t they?”

  “Yes sir.” The aide stood miserably twisting his hands.

  “The entire point of this rally is to demonstrate that some people deserve to be dead, isn’t it?”

  “Yes sir!”

  “Right. So why in the name of everything that’s holy were those monsters revived?”

  The aide coughed. “We were using the new technique. Sir. The blanket-revival technique. It works over a given geographical area. They were mixed in with the others. We couldn’t be that precise.”

  “Fuck that,” said the quiet voice, succinctly.

  “It would have been far too expensive to revive all of them individually,” the aide said. “The new technique saved us—”

  “Yes, I know how much it saved us! And I know how much we’re going to lose if this doesn’t work! Get rid of them! I don’t want them on the truck! I don’t want them at the rally!”

  “Sir! Yes, sir!”

  The aide, once his boss had left, set about correcting the situation. He told the two unwanted corpses that they weren’t needed. He tried to be polite about it. It was difficult to get their attention away from the paperclip and the dust motes; he had to distract them with a penlight and a koosh ball, and that worked well enough, except that some of the other corpses got distracted too, and began crowding around the aide, cooing and reaching for the koosh ball. There were maybe twenty of them, the ones who had been closest; the others, thank God, were still off in their own little worlds. But these twenty all wanted that koosh ball. The aide felt like he was in a preschool in hell, or possibly in a dovecote of extremely deformed and demented pigeons.

  “Listen to me!” he said, raising his voice over the cooing. “Listen! You two! You with the paperclip and you with the dust motes! We don’t want you, okay? We just want everyone else! You two, do not get on the trucks! Have you got that? Yes? Is that a nod? Is that a yes?”