Beyond the Doors of Death (13 page)

“No, no, come in, come in, Jorge.” Beyond the stilted entry deck, the galaxy of Los Angeles stretched its massed blaze against the darkness. “How kind of you to visit. I must confess that until your call I had not expected the pleasure of your company following your…transition.” He added hastily, babbling, “Despite the recent rise in tourism, deads are sighted so rarely outside your gated domains, you know. The tables are turned; my secondhand knowledge bows to your immersion at the life-death interface. But oh dear—” and he forced himself after all to take the dead’s hand, “we were so sorry to hear of the attack on Zion and the death, the, the second death of Sybille.”

“She is recovering, Framji. Her injuries were severe, but not beyond the healing powers of rekindling. But thank you for your concern. Madam Jijibhoi, how good to see you again, and how generous of you to invite me. Here, I brought a little Chassagne-Montrachet from the Cold Town cellars.”

“You are welcome, welcome, sir,” she murmured, bowing, “Thank you, we do enjoy a nice Chardonnay,” and immediately departed for the kitchen with the cooler-wrapped bottle.

“I have a hundred questions, dear friend. I hope you will not object too much if I seek to remedy my ignorance? But come, sit down at the table, my wife has prepared something for our supper, I hope you still share our fondness for baby goat marinated in red chillies?”

“I look forward to it. I have to confess, though, that my taste buds have not survived the transition in great abundance. It is as you predicted. We eat and drink mainly for nutrition. But your wife’s chillies—yes, I’m certain they will brighten my mouth.”

Ushta came to the dining room with the Chardonnay in an ice bucket, another bottle, opened, breathing, of Cabernet Sauvignon which Jijibhoi poured, then swiftly returned with bowls of dhan daar patio, rich with the odor of turmeric, dhan saak, its basmati rice thickened with vegetable daal, eggs on potatoes and spinach. Wine flowed. They ate, Klein with every appearance of appreciation, and Jijibhoi spoke of university politics, hilarious scandals of the sociology department, Klein’s reassignment as professor mortuus. They finished with ranginak, its wheaten biscuit flavored with dates, walnuts, ground pistachio, cardamom, cinnamon, washed down with hot, dark tea. The specter of this happy repast stripped of its tastes, its odors, its evoked memories filled the Parsee with horror and a renewed determination to avoid rekindling at all costs. Far better to lie at last in the walled Tower of Silence, parching in the hot sun, gnawed to the bone by vultures, than to abandon all the joys of the flesh and live forever in the half-life seated across the table from him.

“Let’s clean up this midden and move into the living room. We’ve still got lots to talk about.” They each carried plates and bowls and cutlery to the kitchen, although it fell to Ushtavaity to rinse and sort into the cleaner. Jijibhoi found snifters and a darkly luminous cut crystal decanter. He lowered the living room lamps so the galaxy of street lights and the true sky were visible through the windows, activated a hushed performance of the madrigals the deads favored. He poured brandy, Klein sipped, set the glass aside, waited patiently with that long and meaningless stare.

“I hope you don’t mind if I’m frightfully direct, Jorge.”

“You’re dying to have me dish the dirt,” Klein said. “So to speak. It’s fine, speak freely. We are old friends.”

“All right.” He found himself fidgeting; Ushta came in and settled herself gracefully in an armchair. “Last time we met, Jorge, you were frantic. Obsessed. In despair. You vanished to Africa—”

“Zanzibar.”

“Yes, yes. And died as mysteriously as Sybille, the first time she passed. And now, not all that much later, here you are. Serene, or at least relaxed. Not the bundle of jumpy nerves I recall.”

“Framji,” his wife said, in a warning tone.

“It’s fine, Madam Jijibhoi,” the dead man said. “Framji and I have already agreed—”

“Ushtavaity,” she said. “Ushta.”

“I’m sorry?”

“My name. Do you know, it’s extraordinary, we have never formally exchanged names. Please call me Ushta.”

“Why, thank you, Ushta.” The bleak coolness in the man’s voice is an artifact of his condition, Jijibhoi told himself. He does not mean insult. Or does he? That desperate fool Dolorosa showed more passion than this, but of course he was an outcast from the Cold Towns. Who could say what such isolation might do to a man dead once to the living and rejected again by the dead?

“You know that my central interest is the social structure of rekindled society,” Jijibhoi said. “Less so the nuts and bolts. But really, it’s becoming clear that the mysteries quite literally embodied in the deads are the key to this emerging, parallel civilization in our midst. Yet we are denied knowledge of these mysteries and the technique by which dead warms are transformed into, well, living deads. I mean, the simplest things. Do you really age slowly, or not at all? The rumor accepted by the intelligentsia is that of course you are just slowed, aging retarded by a factor of 10 or 20, even as the crackpots of church, mosque, and gog shriek that you are deathless zombies and vampires. Obviously it’s too early to decide the matter by simple inspection. Yes, we’ll have our answer in a century or a millennium. But it would be much more obliging if you could just, you know,
tell us
.”

Coolly, Klein said, “In the last seven years, fifteen rekindled have been kidnapped and vivisected, according to our information.”

“These were the acts of unhinged rogues and terrorists,” Ushtavaity said, wringing her hands. “They were butchered on camera. We’ve all watched the stereos.”

“Eleven were butchered on camera. The other four were abducted and taken, according to our information, to black ops labs here and in Qatar. The governments involved are now familiar with the results of our advanced medical technology. They are certainly attempting to reverse-engineer it.” Klein sighed. “It won’t do them any good, of course.”

Jijibhoi doubted that or perhaps, he thought, he was stung by Klein’s arrogance. “Come now. They have access to the finest minds in the world. Neuroscientists, genomicists, specialists in epigenetics and the thermodynamics of nanotech. It can’t be that difficult. You are…living proof…of the technology.”

“True in principle. But it would take hundreds of years to digest what they’ve peeled out of our comrades.”

“But this is just assertion. Whistling, if you’ll forgive the expression, past the graveyard. Moore’s law, Jorge. Yes, it’s slowed to a snail’s pace, but the power of technology does still double and redouble. What could possibly prevent us from learning—”

“You don’t even know where the information came from, or who developed it. And it’s been fifteen years now.”

Jijibhoi felt his shoulders slump. Stalemate. It really was like quizzing a cultist. A wave of sadness moved through him.

“The Venter labs, presumably. Gates and Allen funding. NSA connectome cryptographers. Something like that. What matters is—”

“What matters, dear Framji,” Klein said with glacial certainty, “is the source of the information, not its implementation.”

Abruptly, the sour mood of exhaustion was dispelled. Fire rushed through his limbs. Jijibhoi leaned forward, and from the corner of his eye saw that his wife was also intent. “What source? What are you talking about?”

“I could require you both to sign a non-disclosure agreement with hefty penalties, but what I’m about to disclose would make such penalties chickenfeed. So I’ll simply trust you both,” Klein said. “They decrypted a message signal from space.” His dead eyes glittered. “From deep space.” He watched them closely, as if judging and recording their reactions. “From a star in the Andromeda galaxy.”

F
IVE

“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.”

Philip Roth,
The Dying Animal

***

Hester Solomon and her husband Moshe collected Klein at Heathrow and they took an autonomic limo into London. Moshe was a British investment banker, specializing in South American stochastic arbitrage. His doctorate was in a field of mathematics so rarefied Klein could not even begin to understand its uses or principles. Hester, of course, was a good upper middle class Jewish wife and mother, as striking as her mother had been as a young woman. Sybille had introduced her to Moshe Solomon.

“Marjorie Morningstar,” Klein said, with a smile. They had both loved the literature of the mid-20th century as children: Wouk, Chaim Potok, Malamud, Roth. He waited until she stepped forward for a hug and quick kiss on the cheek.

“Asher Lev,” she retorted. Said warmly, he could not help thinking. Warm, a warm, a female warm. Far, a long long way to go. But that was
Sound of Music
, a different tale of love and persecution entirely.

“No artist I,” he demurred, as tradition required. “An apostate, that I’ll confess.”

In the spacious back of the limo, the eldest son, Eliezer, sat shyly beside his uncle Jorge and said almost nothing, in a refined transatlantic accent. The boy was in Harrow uniform, sans top hat and cane: pale gray trousers, white shirt with black silk tie, and dark blue jacket. In his lap was what Klein surmised was the classic straw boater. The very model of an upper-middle-class English schoolboy. If he was freaked out by the proximity of a dead, he did not allow his discomfort to show.

The adults exchanged mandatory words of sympathy, explanation and conjecture concerning Sybille’s state and its cause—had the fire-bombing been a venomous sectarian attack? A work of political terrorism? The expression of some internal factional dispute among the deads themselves? Klein quickly put an end to that. Police forces and security were looking diligently into the atrocity, but no, emphatically there was no slightest reason to suspect fractures within the closed world of the rekindled. This was no more than a slanderous attempt by media jackals to blacken the victims. “Like Hitler and the Reichstag,” suggested Eli, and an uncomfortable silence fell. Hester said, quickly, “Mom and dad are waiting for us at the hotel, Jorge. They flew in yesterday. It’s quite the meeting of the clans.”

Klein groaned. “So much for leaving the dead to bury the dead, as the Christians so prophetically put it. The parents declined to convey their bereavement when I called them with news of Sybille’s second death. That
shiksa
. Father all but hung up in my ear.”

“Well.
Shiva
was sat. You’re not only dead, Jorge, you’re
dead.
I’m sorry, it’s awful.”

“And yet they’re here, you say.”

Moshe told him in his rumbling voice, “They have seen you on TV, read your interviews. You have become a notable part of the cultural landscape, you know.”

“And they want to shut me up.”

Hester glanced at the 12-year-old. “This should wait.”

“Don’t mind me,” Eli said with a crafty grin. “The other chaps and I can’t see what all the fuss is about, really. Well, Luton had a few snarky things to say but I soon set him straight.” He rubbed the knuckles of his right fist on his trousered knee, and gave his uncle a bland look. Klein laughed softly.

“Good for you, kid. We deads need a few more people like you in our corner.”

The driverless car dropped them at the Montagu Place Hotel, where a slender Pakistani porter took his minimal luggage.

“Not five star, Jorge,” Moshe said apologetically, “but those are getting rather stuffy about…”

“Dead Jews.”

“Not quite. Live Jews have no trouble getting a suite at Claridge’s or the Langham. It’s an old-fashioned city in many respects. The traditional bigotries pass eventually, making way for the new.”

Moshe checked them in and took the boy up to the Solomons’ small suite. Hester led Klein into a snug bar where his parents sat drinking vodka and trying not to look uncomfortable. Sybille’s parents sat across from them, utterly at ease. British consular diplomats interfaced with the Foreign Service of the Department of State, George and Anna Palmer were currently binational attaches at Brussels. He had not seen them during their quick visit to Zion Cold Town following their daughter’s medical crisis, but he had exchanged brief messages, explaining that Sybille would probably recover completely from her brutal ordeal. Now he shook their hands as everyone rose, hugged his mother, bowed to the cold countenance of his unyielding father.

“I’m glad to find you well, sir.”

“Since you’re here, you might as well find a seat.” It was closest the old man could come to a concession.

“Thank you. Mother, you look lovely.”

“My handsome son!”

Formulae, unreeling the clichés. Clowns, it was true, they were all clowns. Endless emptiness. Sundered. Yet the pain was gone, he realized. If there was no joy in this reunion, neither was there grief nor anger nor the old demand for acknowledgment. Alive, he had been broken until Sybille healed him, or rather he and Sybille colluded in a mutual embrace that excluded the sting of such rejection. She died, impossibly she died; he was not merely broken again but desolate, driven by a need that choked his heart and made him a mad thing, obsessed and futile. And now, he saw finally, all that anguish was drained away. He felt nothing for these people, no love, no yearning for acceptance, even as he felt no animosity nor resentment. He was free.

And it meant nothing at all.

“Can I get anyone another drink,” Klein said.

***

In an atmosphere at once chilly and desperately contained, Moshe called them a limo and instructed it to bear all eight of them the 16 kilometers to Gants Hill. “Not Orthodox, Reformed—but they keep kosher,” he promised. There was a palpable breach in the lowering mood when the name of the restaurant-pub was revealed, antique gold against smoky oak:
Bangers & Mashugana
. Eli laughed out loud. “Bangers and mash! What an outrage!”

“I don’t even know what that is,” Klein told the boy. “Not kippers steeped in their own haggis, I hope.”

The boy laughed harder, tears running down his face. The strain had wound the child up more than any of the adults had cared to notice. “It’s just sausages and whipped potato, with lashings of gravy and tomato sauce. Like, ketchup. Yummy!”

Dubious, the Klein parents followed their daughter’s husband into a low-ceilinged, noisy, smoky cavern. A great bar-counter made a polished horseshoe in the center of the beamed room, and men and women shamelessly drank together, laughing, nudging each other, calling their orders. It might have been a stage set. Perhaps it was, a calculated tourist trap. In one corner a pair of Jews with payot curling down before their ears, and dark felt hats, played chess, ignoring the innocent vice on every hand. Small tables were scattered along one wall. Three of these awaited their party, squeezed together, cutlery and linen already in place.

“They know you here?” Klein asked.

“They know me everywhere, dear chap. Come come, take our seats, the girl will be along in a moment for our orders so make up your minds quick-smart, they don’t mess about in this pub.” Moshe gestured; a waiter brought them beer, stout, wine in a tall flagon, a soda for the boy.

“You’re quite certain this is kosher?” Mrs. Klein said, quite certain that it couldn’t possibly be.

“Absolutely. We’re in the middle of London’s Jewish district. Forget Golders Green. I’ll have Yorkshire pudding,” he told the plain middle-aged woman in an apron that reached to her knees. “Jorge, I recommend the steak and kidney pie with vegetables. As for you antique folks, you might care for something you recognize—a rare steak with a baked potato, some grilled bream, order anything but pizza or burgers, they’d throw us to the wolves.”

Voices rose, plates were piled high and then a moment later, it seemed, miraculously emptied. Desserts made the same magical transition from being to nothingness. No words of substance were exchanged. Klein stolidly munched his untasting way through the provender, pretending enjoyment. He was not unhappy, nor was he happy. He thought of Arthur Schopenhauer: “The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.” Here and now he felt no pain, and not really boredom either, but the absence of those two enemies did not clear any space for happiness. He shoveled up his sweet, washed it down with a half and half, a mix of mild ale and bitter. Inside his altered body, nanocytes tore the molecules apart, sorted them, broke down the alcohol before it could reach his brain. Could it be, he thought, that I am at least…content? It seemed impossible. Well. He prepared to tell these people, his relatives and former in-laws, some truths of that altered condition, and what it meant to be a dead on the hoof, no longer living but assuredly still kicking. I am the Apostle, he thought, to the Gentiles. To the Genitaled. To the Gendered. I am the dickless, ball-less wonder come to bear improbable testimony to the very humans least likely to pay me any attention. Except the kid, he thought. Except the boy, Eliezer.

For the first time in his life, he felt the poignant stab of a wish for a child of his own.

***

BBC Gogcast transcript

1 October 2037

Our Science & Society mavenette, Dr. Jane Makwe, speaks with Professor Jorge Klein, spokesperson for the Conclave of the Rekindled, and himself a dead for four years. Jane spoke with Jorge from her den in Edinburgh.

JANE:
Welcome to the rant, Jorge. You don’t mind a bit of informality?

JORGE
: It might be more professional, Dr. Makwe, if you addressed me as Professor Klein.

JANE
: Oooh, stuffy! Let’s keep it friendly and light, shall we, Jorge? I mean, we’re dishing some pretty gruesome shit here.

JORGE
: As you wish.

JANE
: Jorge hails from Argentina, clubbies, and you’d think looking at the way his name’s spelled he’d go by “Georgie.” Nup, “Whore-hey” it is.

JORGE
: I was born in Buenos Aires, Jane, but we moved to California when I was four. I hold joint citizenship.

JANE
: Cool—a citizen of the world! Highly fash! But hey, don’t you like lose your citizenship when you like die?

JORGE
: No. My passport is still active. But it’s certainly a question currently under review in both our countries.

JANE
: But us Brits don’t have any deads. It’s a Yank thing. Why’s that? Isn’t it like restraint of trade or something? Not to mention human rights.

JORGE
: I understand your concern, Jane, but the rekindling process was developed by Americans in the United States, and the process is proprietary.

JANE
: Protected by megacorp patents, you mean?

JORGE
: Actually, no. The matter is vexed. The Conclave have their hands tied at the moment because the Supreme Count of the United States has declared all the relevant techniques to be a munitions issue, and anyone selling or transporting that information to other nations would be subject to trial for treason and the most extreme penalties.

JANE
: They get offed?

JORGE
: At the very least.

JANE
: Ha ha. I like that. You mean they’d be executed with no chance of getting reborn as a dead.

JORGE
: Precisely.

JANE
: Grim. Ironic, then, that Jules Lagrange, notorious secret-blower from the early years of the mill, is now a dead hiding in San Diego Cold Town.

JORGE
: That’s the kind of nonsense retailed on the crackpot gogs. Mr. Lagrange is not an American citizen. He was born in Belgium and so is not eligible for rekindling. As far as I know, he remains in custody in Guantanamo.

JANE
: Maybe they don’t tell you everything, Jorge.

JORGE
: Do they tell
you
everything, Jane? By the way, what kind of doctorate do you hold?

JANE
: Snippy now! Well, I’ll tell you, it’s not like I’m hiding some dirty secret that would excite Jules and his gang. I’m a haematologist, with a degree from St. Andrews and postdoc studies at Baylor. For the sports fans watching, a haematologist is an expert in blood. Which handily leads me to my next question: what can you tell us about heterochronic parabiosis?

JORGE
: I’m sorry, what?