by Paula Guran
Jack threw his bottle against the wall. It didn’t break. He was shaking now, staring at his wife’s body.
Elvis said, “S’okay, man. There’s more in the fridge, right?” He brought Jack a fresh bottle. Jack stared at it for what felt like a long time, then took a swallow and began to talk about what it was like when Genie was born.
They went on until dawn, and then Elvis stood up, rolled his head on his neck, as if to loosen his ghostly muscles, and said, “Well, I guess my damn truck’s probably okay now. Maybe it’s time you called COLE.”
“Wait!” Jack said.
“C’mon, man. You can’t just stay here in a glammed house. You’ve got to let her go.”
Jack said “What do I do about her mother?” Elvis stared at him.
Nadia Nazeer had never liked Jack Shade. It wasn’t an ethnic thing, or at least not overmuch. As Layla had said to him once, if he were an Arab but still himself, her mother probably would have felt the same about him. Maybe if they could have told her who Jack really was, what he did, Nadia might have felt less disappointed in her daughter’s choice. Maybe not. Once, after a tense weekend at her mother’s house, Layla had done an impression of how her mother might react to the idea of a Traveler. “Sorcery?” she’d said, in Nadia’s cultured, scornful voice. “Seriously, darling? Does he go around trapping wayward djinn in old whiskey bottles?”
Jack had said, “Actually, Coke bottles work much better. So long as it’s not New Coke,” and the two of them had laughed so loud someone at a stoplight turned to stare at them.
Nadia never liked Jack. It wasn’t just that she considered him a selfish, lowlife gambler who needed to grow up and get a real job—for after all, what could they tell her except that Jack made his living playing poker? As much as she could barely tolerate her son-in-law, Nadia’s real problem was her daughter. A successful businesswoman who’d started out selling cheap jewelry, she’d wanted her daughter to “become something,” and considered Jack, and even Eugenia, as Layla’s retreat from the world.
All this, Jack poured out to Elvis, and more, things he’d never told anyone, not even Layla herself, like the day Nadia had summoned him to her grand office overlooking Lower Manhattan and tried to get him to leave her daughter. The whole time she was going on about “authentic love” and “sacrifice,” Jack kept thinking of things he could do to make her stop. Seal her mouth, of course, but less drastically he could summon a Momentary Storm to drown her out with thunder. Or maybe animate the intricate little metal animals she kept on her desk, and send her screaming from the room. But he’d done none of those things, just sat there through the whole speech, even agreed to “give it your full consideration,” because after all, she was his wife’s mother, and what would Layla say if her mother reported to her some very strange things that had happened when she was talking to Jack?
“You know,” Elvis said, somewhere around the sixth or seventh beer, “your pals in COLE could take care of it.”
Jack shook his head. “I can’t do that. Let them fuck with her mind, her memories? Even if I make up some lie—I mean, I have to, right, I can hardly tell her the truth—at least it will come from me, face to face. Not some fucking Traveler bureaucracy.”
Elvis took a swallow of beer. “If you say so, man.”
Only, when the time came, Jack couldn’t do it. He kept bracing himself, swearing he would do it the very next day, before the funeral, after the funeral, and yet he just couldn’t face her. Finally, he just decided to make a Duplicate.
There were two kinds of Dupes, “momentary” and “permanent.” Momentary Dupes were little more than illusions, like a glamour. They faded as soon as their task was done. For something as complicated as talking to a mother-in-law, you needed the real thing, a replicant that actually existed in the world. Still, the process was stressful but not that difficult, a bit like making a golem, except with more exacting standards, since a golem didn’t have to look or sound like anyone in particular. And where a golem could be made of pretty much anything—synagogue dirt, originally, but now garbage, junk mail, recycled cardboard, even plastic (but no Styrofoam), a Dupe needed “donations.” Bits of skin from the palms (you had to be careful not to draw blood), clippings from the fourth toe of the non-dominant foot, blood from the little finger of your dominant hand, hair clippings, dirt washed off the body at dawn, sexual fluids taken at midnight, small amounts of urine and feces.
Along with all these physical traces, you had to include some favorite article of clothing or jewelry, money that had been in your pocket or wallet for at least forty-eight hours, and what the manual called “a life token,” a photo from a special trip, a ticket stub, an old baseball cap, whatever you’d saved just because it was more than itself. There was a famous story of a woman from an abusive family who’d destroyed all the remnants of her childhood, only to become a Traveler and have to sneak into her parents’ house to find something they’d kept that she could use to make a Duplicate. Finally, you were supposed to write fragments of memory, fear, and desire on bits of paper and then cut them up to sprinkle over the mix.
Jack did the operation on the roof of the hotel an hour before dawn, careful to glam the stairway so that any insomniac who’d taken it in his head to look at the city would change his mind and go back to bed. Carefully, he undressed and folded his clothes according to exact instructions, then placed them on a small metal table in the northwest corner of the roof. The Act of Assembly, as the operation was called, was not difficult but had to be done correctly.
It was late August. The night had been cool, and now a sharp breeze tingled Jack’s skin as he set down his donations then drew a circle with blue chalk around the small pile and himself. He sat facing due east, his bits of self stacked in front of him. For a moment, he looked at the first glimpses of purple in the night sky, then sighed, and shut his eyes.
Step by step, Jack “closed the gates.” Legs and arms crossed, he pressed his lips together, curled his tongue back against the roof of his mouth, stilled his ear drums, narrowed his nostrils, squeezed shut his sphincters. After several minutes like this, a figure began to take shape in the world behind Jack’s eyes. The Unknown Traveler, this visitor was called, and even though you could never see him or her, you somehow always knew s/he had your face.
Wholly in the inner world, without actually moving his lips or tongue, Jack said, “I thank you for your Presence. I, Jack Shade, have assembled these donations and fragments of my true self, inner and outer, that they may serve my needs, without selfishness or blame, with all honor to the Founders of our practice, the First Travelers, who opened the way and laid down the paths.” There was a time when Jack might have wanted to roll his eyes at the language required for things like this. But not that day.
The Unknown faded, and something else began to take shape, little more than a shimmer of dull light. Now was the time to get to work. The raw form would assemble itself through the power of the donations, but it was up to him to shape it, to get it right. Jack had spent the past four hours staring at himself in the full-length mirror in his bedroom, noticing the tilt of his shoulders, the bends of his fingers, the length and roughness of his ropy hair, the turn of his nose, the left ear a bit larger than the right, the way his left big toe curled slightly inward, the dents in his rib-cage from old fights, the crease in his hips, the knife scar from his battle at the Bronx Gate of Paradise.
On the rooftop, he assembled his Duplicate step by step, detail by detail, getting everything exactly right—until the very end, when it came time to recreate the freshly formed scar that ran down Jack’s jawline. He started it, could see it taking shape, almost there. And then suddenly he dismissed it, so that when he abruptly opened his eyes the figure that stood before him was his old self, Johnny Handsome, as Layla had once called him.
It didn’t appear to make any difference. Jack spoke the Standard Formula to Activate a Duplicate, “I have assembled you and you will do my will,” and the Dupe answered corre
ctly, “You have assembled me and I will do your will.”
Now, sitting alone in his bedroom, an hour after the dream had woken him, a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue in his hand, Jack wondered why the hell he’d done that, leave off the damn scar. To make it easier to talk to Nadia was the simple answer. COLE’s cover story had indeed been a tragic car accident, and to keep things simple, Jack was supposed to have been far away when it happened, so how would he explain a scar? But he could have glammed the Dupe so that Nadia wouldn’t notice. COLE had already set Nadia and everyone else at the funeral not to notice Jack’s face, or wonder why Genie’s coffin was sealed before anyone could ask to see the supposedly mangled body.
So was it just vanity? The desire to see himself as unspoiled one last time? Jack grimaced, took a sip of whiskey. He didn’t like introspection, considered it an indulgence. “Schatje,” Carolien had told him recently, using the Dutch word for sweetheart, “no one will ever confuse you with Hamlet.” Now, however, he had no choice. If he was going to get out of this mess he had to know exactly how he’d gotten into it. Did he just not want to see what he’d become?
Looking at a copy of yourself is hard enough in normal circumstances, not at all like looking in a mirror. When we look in a mirror we automatically compose ourselves, turn or tilt our heads the best way, smile or open our eyes. Looking at a Dupe is like seeing yourself on video, only worse.
He got up and went to the window. The antenna on the Empire State Building flared red for a few seconds then returned to anonymous metal. No, not vanity. Because he remembered how after it was all over—or so he thought—he’d gone back to the house, to his and Layla’s bedroom, where she’d kept her old-fashioned framed photographs on top of the dresser, and he remembered how he’d picked up a vacation picture of the three of them, back when Genie was seven, all of them laughing as they posed with some guy in a Batman suit. It wasn’t vanity to make the Dupe like he used to be. It was nostalgia. Looking at Handsome Johnny, Jack could pretend, for just a moment, that none of it had ever happened. That it was all a dream.
And at the time it had seemed like no harm had been done. He’d taken care of Nadia, given her an outlet for her anger and grief, and then he’d gotten rid of the Dupe—or so he thought—and everything was good. Only—
The working to destroy a Dupe is called the Act of Dissolution. It’s complicated but fairly straightforward, easier than the Assembly, for the Dupe is just a copy, with no will of its own, and cannot help but cooperate in the operation to collapse it into a kind of dust that will simply blow away. Unless the practitioner makes a mistake.
If you don’t do it exactly right, if you leave even a shred of the construction untouched by the working, there’s a chance the Dupe can reconstitute itself. Coalesce, people called it. Once it re-formed on its own, it became a Revenant, a very different creature entirely, with a will to survive all its own. Revs sometimes tried to take over the lives of dead people, not realizing how disturbing that would be. More commonly, they attacked their originals, showed up at their homes, or work, and claimed they were the real thing. In rare cases, they killed the originals to make it easier. “Shit,” Jack said out loud. As far as he knew, no Rev had ever hired the original to kill himself.
He took another sip of Scotch, vaguely aware he was hardly tasting one of the world’s most expensive whiskeys. Down in the street, people rushed back and forth with that purposeful New York stride that never changed, day or night. They all looked the same. Maybe they were all Duplicates, Jack thought.
Jack made a noise, rolled his head around to loosen his neck muscles. He’d been up all night, partly to try to figure it all out, and partly to avoid any more dreams.
Why in a dream? If his Dupe had reassembled and wanted to attack its maker, why not just go at the body, Jack-in-the-world? Maybe the Rev wasn’t strong enough. He might still be forming, and a dream body was the best he could manage. In that case, the answer was simple. No more dreams. Never go to sleep. Jack laughed and drank some Scotch.
There was another reason the Dupe might be using dreams, and it was one Jack didn’t really want to think about. Two months before, Jack had broken up with a woman named Elaynora Horne. He and El had dated for nine months or so, after meeting outside a Traveler safe house in Red Hook, New York. It wasn’t a nasty break up. No broken plates, no yelling, no spells directed at anyone’s genitals. Just a generic two adults—this isn’t working out—no hard feelings—standard issue. It made things a little complicated that Jack was a Traveler. It made them a little more so that Elaynora Horne was a Dream Hunter.
Elaynora’s father was a dispossessed sun god. The tribe that had worshipped him had died out, their lands taken over by outsiders who’d brought in their own gods and astronomical spirits. The lost tribe must have spoken a weird language because Dad’s true name was so filled with impossible noises that Jack just called him “Papa Click and Whistle.” He had a human name, however, Alexander Horne. It was a professional name, really. Unlike some of his ilk, he did not just ascend to some higher realm to sulk for a few thousand years. And because the tribe who’d worshipped him had believed that dreams came from the sun (true, as far as it went, but they had to pass through the moon to reach us), Mr. Horne now ran a dream agency.
Dream hunters were an odd group. Some of their work was as simple as leading people to solve a problem or be inspired while they slept. Sometimes they helped Travelers get to places they couldn’t reach awake. Or they acted as bodyguards against Nightworld mercenaries. Or took on mercenary work themselves. El insisted that she and her father never did that kind of job. “Why should we, Jack? We have a long waiting list.”
Maybe El would not stoop to battle-for-hire, but what if she had a personal reason? Jack sighed. There was no way around it, he had to know.
He went over to the hotel desk and opened his laptop to log on to Jinn-Net. When the familiar flashes of fire and wisps of vapor appeared, he clicked on an app titled Teraph.wiz. Soon a child’s head appeared, milky face crowned ostentatiously with golden curls. It looked amazed, and frightened, as if it had just turned a corner and seen an angel, or worse. Except it couldn’t have turned any corners, for there was just a head. No blood appeared—why be gruesome?—but vague tendrils hung down from the neck.
Originally, long before computer graphics, a teraph was an actual severed head. The action was so old no one knew its origins, but if you knew the spell—and had the stomach for it—you could find some kid at the cusp of puberty, behead it, and keep the poor head alive as an oracle. In 1434 the Travelers, and the Powers, and the Renaissance version of COLE had banned the practice. Jack knew of only one modern attempt to create a genuine teraph. In 1927, a sorcerer from La Societé de Matin kidnapped a twelve-year-old girl in Lyon. Though the Societé are an order of gangsters, they tracked down the renegade before he could really harm the girl—the spell takes nine days—sent her home glammed up to forget everything, then stuck the magician’s own head on a pike outside the Lyon Gate of Paradise.
So no, there were no actual teraphim. But that didn’t prevent computer simulations. Jack stared at the revolving image. Like its inspiration in the human world, the AI version of a teraph existed half in this world (or at least the online version) and half in the NL, the Non-Linear. Even though it was just a face on a screen, you had to catch its eye, which meant hitting control/enter the instant it looked at you. It took Jack three tries but finally the head stopped spinning.
Jack thought he saw the mouth turn up slightly as a high adolescent voice said, “Jack Shade. Time has passed since you saw us last.” Like all oracles, physical or virtual, the teraph spoke in the “divinatory we.” And was given to bad poetry.
“Yes,” Jack said. “I rejoice to see you, and beg the blessing of your wise sight.”
“Very well. You may speak your question.”
Jack took a breath. “Is Elaynora Horne helping my Duplicate to attack me?”
The eyes rolled back, and a clic
king sound came from the animated mouth. Jack waited for the inevitably vague answer, but when the face focused on him again it said simply, “No. New grass grows clean.”
“Thank you!” Jack said. The eyes closed and the head began to spin, the signal that Jack’s audience had ended. He turned off his computer. Okay, he thought. Whatever the hell was going on, El wasn’t behind it.
Suddenly Jack was exhausted. He hadn’t gone to bed until 2:30, and of course had woken up at 4:17. He squinted out at the sky. The sun had not made it over the buildings yet, but it was definitely morning. If you were under attack by dreams, mornings were a lot safer time to sleep than at night. Jack had no idea why. Maybe dreams were photosensitive and couldn’t find their targets during the day. Or maybe they followed strict union rules and clocked out at dawn. Jack didn’t care, he just hoped that with daylight, and the protection he’d put around his bed, he could sleep safely for a couple of hours.
Like most Travelers, Jack had aligned his bed on a strict polar axis, with the head at north. Four thin silver poles bolted to the floor at the corners created invisible walls around the bed. Now Jack had made those walls real by running copper netting from pole to pole. Dream net, it was called, and looked like mosquito netting, but with an even finer mesh. Some people said dream net was the origin of those New Age toys called “dream-catchers,” but instead of trying to grab hold of a spiritual dream (whatever that might be), dream net was meant to block hostile or dangerous dreams from getting to you.
Jack tossed off the hotel robe he’d been wearing since he woke up, then went to the closet to remove his carbon blade knife from its hidden sheath in his boot. A knife resting on your solar plexus, with the blade pointed up toward the heart, gave you added protection. He moved aside the netting on the west wall and laid himself down. Hands loosely on his knife, Jack closed his eyes.
