The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (67 page)

“Damn it to hell, Dana, I’m coming over!”

—
When you have been dead and buried you do not know desire.

Yet there is a change in the air between them.

The mind forgets but the body remembers. Bracelet glinting on my arm
. What’s the matter with me?
Zombies know, insofar as they know anything, that you extract the soul from a distance. Through a keyhole, through a crack in a bedroom window. Always from a distance. This is essential. This knowledge is embedded: get too close and you get sucked in. And yet, and yet! It is as though the bracelet links X to the past it has no memory of. Interesting failure here, perhaps because this is its first assault on the precincts of the living. Zombies come out of the grave knowing certain things, but this one is distracted by unbidden reminders of the flesh, the circle of bright silver around the bone like a link to the forgotten.

“Then what,” Dana cries as destiny closes in on her; she is laughing, crying, singing in a long, ecstatic giggle that stops suddenly as all the breath in her lungs—her
soul
—rushes out of her body and into his, along with the salty blood from her cut lip, the hanging shred of skin, “what will you take?”

—
Everything.

Dana … can’t breathe … she doesn’t have to breathe, she … Lifeless, she slips from his arms as her inadvertent lover—if he is a lover—staggers and cries out, jittering with fear and excitement as emotion and memory rush into him. Shuddering back to life, he will not know which of them performed the seduction.

“Oh my God,” he shouts, horrified by the sound of his own voice. “Oh my
God
.”

That which used to be Dana Graver does not speak. It doesn’t have to. The word is just out there, shared, like the air Dana is no longer breathing. —
Who?

My God, my
God,
I am Remy L’Heureux
,
and I miss my wife so much! For my sins, I was separated from my soul and with it, everything I care about. For my sins I was put in the grave and for my sins, my empty body was raised up, and what did I do that was so terrible? I ran away from the
hounfort
with the only daughter of the
houngan, God help me, I did!
We met at Tulane, we fell in love and believe me, I was warned! My Sallie’s father was Hector Bonfort, they said, a doctor they said, very powerful. A doctor, yes, I said, but a doctor of what? And without being told I knew, because this was the one question none of them would answer. I should have been afraid, but I loved Sallie too much. I went to her house. I told him Sallie and I were in love. Hector said we were too young, fathers always do. I said we were in love and he said I would never be good enough for her, so we ran away. I laughed in his face and took her out of his house one night while he was away at a conference.

My Sallie left him a note:
Don’t look for us,
she wrote
. We’ll be back when you accept Remy as your own son.
The priest we asked to marry us begged us to reconsider; he warned us. “You have made a very grave enemy, and I …” He was afraid. We went to City Hall and the registrar of voters married us instead. Silver bracelet for my darling instead of a ring. Hector did not swear vengeance that I heard, but I knew he was powerful. Nobody ever spelled out what he was. I knew, but I pretended not to know. Sallie and I were so much in love that I took her knowing he would come for me. God, we were happy. God, we were in love.

Sallie, so bright and so pretty with her whole heart and soul showing in her face, we were so happy! But we should have known it was not for long. When Jamie came he was the image of both of us. Our little boy! The three of us were never happier than we were in New York, as far away from New Orleans as we could go. I couldn’t stay at Tulane, not with Hector’s heart turned against me. In New York, we thought we could be safe. There are always flaws in plans cobbled out of love. Hector found out. Then he, it … Something came for me. I got sick.
I fell into a coma, unless it was a trance. I didn’t know what was happening, but Sallie did. She prayed by my bedside. She cried.

We were torn apart by my death, I could hear her sobbing over my bed in the days, the weeks, after I fell unconscious but I couldn’t reach out and I couldn’t talk to her. I heard her sobbing in the room, I heard her sobbing on the telephone, I heard her begging her father the
houngan
to come and release me from the trance. I tried to warn her but I couldn’t speak
. Whatever you do, don’t tell him where we are.
Then I felt Hector in the city. On our street. In my house. Deep inside my body where what was left of me was hiding. I felt the intrusion, and that before he ever came into my room. It was only a matter of time before his hand parted me down to the center, and I was lost. I was buried too deep to talk but I begged Sallie:
Don’t leave me alone!
Then Hector was in the room and in the seconds when Sallie had to leave us alone—our son was crying, Jamie needed her, she’d never have left me like that if it hadn’t been for him—when Sally left I felt Hector approaching—not physically, but from somewhere much closer, searching, probing deep. Reaching into the arena of the uncreated.

Sallie came in and caught him. “Father. Don’t!”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

“I know what you were doing. Bring him back!”

“I’m trying,” he said. It was a lie.

Then he put his mouth to my mouth, my
mouth
and my God with the sound of velvet tearing, my soul rushed out of me. “Father,” Sallie cried and he thumped my chest with his big fist:
CPR
. Then he turned to her.

“Too late,” he said. “When I came into the house Remy was already dying.”

She rushed at him and shoved him aside. Before he could stop her she slipped her silver bracelet on my wrist. I was almost gone but I heard her sobbing, “Promise to come back.”

The grief was crushing. It was almost a relief to descend into the grave with my sweetheart’s tears still drying on my face and the bracelet that bound us rattling on my wrist, forgotten. Until now. My God, until now!

What have I done?

I was better off when I was no more than a
thing
, like that beautiful, cold woman rising from the bed but it’s too late to go back. Where I felt no pain and no desire, desire is reawakened.

I want to go home!

I have to go home to Sallie, the love of my soul, and I want to see Jamie, our son. I miss them so much, but I can’t! I have been dead and buried and I don’t know how long it’s been. I would give anything to see them but for their protection, I have to stay back. Sallie wants to see me again, but not like this. The hand
I bring up to my face is redolent of the grave and when I open my mouth I taste the sweet rot rising inside of me.

I can’t go back to them, not the way I am,

I won’t.

I have to. I can’t
not
go because with the return of life comes the awful, inexorable compulsion. Better I throw myself in front of a train or into a furnace than do this to the woman I love. I know what’s happening, the rushing decay because to live again means you’re going to die, and when you have been dead and buried, death comes fast. I have to stop. I have to stop myself. I …

The creature on the bed does not speak. It doesn’t have to.

—
Have to go home.

I have to go home
. In a return of everything that made him human—love, regret, and a terrible foreboding and before any of these, compulsion—in full knowledge of what he has been and what he is becoming, Remy L’Heureux turns his back on the undead thing on the bed, barely noting the fraught, anxious arrival of Billy Wylie, who has no idea what he’s walking into.

That which had been Dana Graver sits up, its eyes burning with a new green light and its pale skin shimmering against the black nightgown. —
Then go.

I’m going now.

—
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, 2004

Grand Opening

It’s brilliant. The Bruneians have bought Yankee Stadium. The team went bust last year—it was the boredom. There’s nothing at issue in baseball, face it. Where’s the suspense? It’s only a game. Today we expect more from our entertainment: love and death, fire and blood. Lives at stake. Who wouldn’t get tired of going out to see people in the same old outfits going through the moves? Fans did, even the most committed ones. The times demand narrative. We do! If the Yankees can’t supply it, someone better will.

The team failed and with it, commerce in the city: restaurants and hotels went under and with them all those providers who brought you baseball caps and Yankees mugs and diamonds and furs, filthy pictures and china Statues of Liberty and high-end leather jackets that rich foreigners paid too much for because it’s important to travel but even more important to take something home. Like dominoes falling in a Japanese stadium, businesses went under, threatening the infrastructure, and the Sultan’s advisors saw the opportunity and pounced. Face it. Without the revenue from Brunei your metropolis would be a tent city in a parking lot. All praise to the Sultan.

Unlike the national imagination that stopped short at baseball, the Sultan had a dream. A vision that would beggar Kubla Khan. It’s enough to point to the models the Bruneians sent ahead to prepare us for the offer, and the projections they sent when we refused and they tripled it. Magnificent, even in the miniature it took the imperial architects weeks to complete. Imagine it now. Before the deal was even struck, advance teams took down the stands and leveled two miles surrounding for the armature and the diorama, as well as excavating for parking. While New Yorkers made a desperate last-minute pitch for all-American backers, crews moved in to complete
UNIVERSE
, the Bruneian Mall of the World, which opens tonight at the outskirts of the bankrupt city.

For months,
UNIVERSION
has telecast the preparations to a rapt audience of billions. We all watched the story unfold. Would
UNIVERSE
be done in time to save our bacon? Would we be among the first to see it? The suspense is unbearable and remember, we live for suspense.

We have been waiting for months for this day.

We don’t know it yet, but Ahmed Shah has been waiting all his life.

Ah, but when the time is right we’ll see it on
TV
. We have been watching from our homes and the luckiest of us are watching on the monitors lining the way in from the parking lots where we have been waiting for so long. When we first catch sight of Ahmed, it will be on
TV
. And the rest? Soon. We will see everything soon. The grand opening is almost upon us. It’s today.

Last night at midnight the Sultan’s emissary and the Mayor of New York City broke the seal on the main gates, although only the Sultan’s party will enter there. The thousand special delegates are entering through designated portals. The Sultan’s dream is so vast that they won’t reach the Grand Glass Escalator at the heart of
UNIVERSE
much before noon. It will take hours for them to find their places inside the ceremonial dome—and longer still for the rest of us to filter into the rotunda. The best seats will be gone! What if we get stuck behind some overweight New Yorker who’s too big to see over or peek around!

Meanwhile the privileged, the invited delegates—Ahmed!—pad happily along miles of Bokhara runners, gasping at the sights of the surrounding diorama. They pass through exquisite landscapes where great moments of history bloom like gaudy flowers—everything from the fall of the Tower of Babel to the showiest nuclear explosions replicated in polyvinyl resin, a magnificent panoply that beggars Singapore’s previously renowned Tiger Balm Gardens. Excited by the World’s Fair with its glittering visions of the future? Regard the monstroplex!

In RVs and trailers, in massed sleeping bags and hastily erected tents outside
UNIVERSE
, the public waits. The crowd has been gathering for weeks. We want to be first! Every one of us!

But none so much as Ahmed Shah, who is here on a sacred mission. Ordinary people wait like sheep. Through a combination of luck and trickery, Ahmed has made his way inside.