The Dead Town

my patience. I didn’t ask you how long, I asked you why?”

For some reason he didn’t know, Nummy was half hypnotized by the hands of the Martian Boze, how they seemed to float across the keyboard, barely touching the black notes and the white, in fact seeming not to touch them at all, seeming instead to draw the music out of the piano with magic.

The Xerox said, “This morning … in the kitchen … during memory transference, as his life experience was being transmitted to me … he died of a brain hemorrhage.”

“I know he’s dead,” Mr. Lyss said, and spat on the floor. “That copper is as dead as Wyatt Earp, deader than a freaking rock. What the hell is wrong with you? All you do is tell me what I already know, not what I want to know.”

The hands floated across the keys like they were searching for something. To the left together, then apart, then together in the middle, then both to the right, like they lost something important, they were trying to find it, and the music was just something that happened during the search, the way music just happened in movies when the actors needed it. Whatever the hands were searching for, they were sad because they couldn’t find it, and that was why the music was sad.

The Xerox Boze still didn’t look up from the keyboard. He said, “When he died, our minds were twined. I saw exactly what he saw in the moment.”

“In the moment?” Mr. Lyss asked impatiently. “In the moment? What moment?”

“In the moment between.”

“Damn it all and damn it twice!” Mr. Lyss exploded. “Are you a Martian dummy? Do I have two dummies to contend with, neither of you able to speak so that more than other half-wits can understand you? The moment between what and what?”

“Between life and death,” the Xerox said. “Except it wasn’t death.”

“More double-talk! I could just pull this trigger and blow your head clean off your body, and maybe that would kill you or maybe it wouldn’t, but it would for sure at least be a big inconvenience for a while.”

Usually music itself couldn’t make Nummy cry, it needed to be music in a certain kind of movie, but this music was getting sadder and sadder, and he was worried that he was going to cry. He knew — he just knew—that if he cried, Mr. Lyss would make fun of him and say really mean things, call him “sissy boy” and worse.

“The moment between life and life,” the Xerox said.

Now his hands looked as sad as the music sounded, but beautiful, too, beautiful sad hands floating back and forth on the music.

The Xerox piano player said, “For just a moment, as he slipped away, I saw the world beyond the world, where he was going, where my kind can never go.”

Mr. Lyss was silent. Watching Mr. Lyss be silent was almost as hypnotizing as the hands floating on the music. He was silent for a long time, too, longer than seemed possible in a situation like this.

Finally the old man said, “Your kind. What kind are you? Not a Martian, I know.”

“A Communitarian.”

“And what might that be?”

“Not born of man and woman,” said the piano player, and now the soft notes came as sad as drizzling rain in a graveside-funeral scene in a movie where good people die in spite of being good.

“If not from man and woman,” the old man said, “then from what?”

“From laboratory and computer, from genetically engineered flesh combined with silicon nerve paths, from inert materials programmed with something that pretends to be life, and then programmed further with something that resembles consciousness, something that imitates free will but is in fact obedient slavery. From nothing into the pretense of something and from there … eventually to nothing again.”

Those words were to Nummy what his conversation sometimes was to Mr. Lyss: gibberish. Yet his heart must have understood part of what was said even if his brain couldn’t make sense of it, because a big feeling came into him, a feeling so enormous that he seemed to swell with it. Nummy couldn’t give a name to the feeling, but it was like sometimes when he was walking through a meadow with trees along one side, and suddenly there was a break in the trees so he could see the mountains in the distance, mountains so big and yet he had forgotten they were there, mountains so big that the tops of them poked through a layer of clouds and reappeared above, mountains so high and beautiful and strange that for a moment he couldn’t get his breath. This feeling was like that but many times more powerful.

Mr. Lyss was silent again, as if he was remembering mountains of his own.

The sad music played into the silence, and after a while, the Xerox Boze said, “Kill me.”

Mr. Lyss said nothing.

“Be merciful and kill me.”

Mr. Lyss said, “I’ve never been a man known for his mercy. If you want to be dead, be merciful to yourself.”

“I’m what I am, and have no mercy in me. But you’re human, so you possess the capacity.”

After another silence, Mr. Lyss said, “Whose laboratory?”

“Victor’s.”

“Victor who?”

“He calls himself Victor Leben. And Victor Immaculate. But his real name, of which he’s proud, is Frankenstein.”

Nummy knew that name. He shivered. Those were the kind of movies he never watched. He’d seen part of one some years earlier, turned it on not knowing what trouble he was getting into, and it so upset him that Grandmama came in the room to see what was wrong, and she turned it off. She hugged him, kissed him, made him his favorite dinner, and told him over and over that none of that stuff was real, it was just a story, the same way that a nice and happy story like Charlotte’s Web was just a story, what Grandmama called fiction, and no fiction story could ever be real.

If the Xerox Boze wasn’t lying, Grandmama was wrong. She had never been wrong about anything before. Not any blessed thing. The possibility that Grandmama could have been wrong about even one thing was so disturbing that Nummy decided never to think about it again.

“Frankenstein? You think I’m a fool?” Mr. Lyss asked, but he didn’t sound angry, just curious.

“No. You asked. I told you. It’s the truth.”

“You said you’re an obedient slave. You were made that way. Why would you betray him?”

“I’m broken now,” said the Xerox Boze. “When I saw what Bozeman saw in the moment between, something broke in me. I’m like a car and the engine runs all right but the gears won’t shift anymore. Please kill me. Please do it.”

The piano player still didn’t lift his gaze from the keys, and Mr. Lyss watched those floating hands as if they fascinated him as much as they hypnotized Nummy.

The tune sort of slipped into a new tune, which was even sadder than the first. Grandmama said great composers could build mansions with music, mansions so real that you could see the rooms in your mind. Nummy could see the room that was this one song. It was a big empty space without furniture, and the walls were dull gray, and the windows were gray because they looked out on nothing.

“Frankenstein,” Mr. Lyss said. “If men from outer space, then why not this. But I won’t kill you. I don’t know why. It just doesn’t feel right.”

Surprisingly, the old man lowered the long gun.

Nummy worriedly reminded him, “Sir, he killed the Boze. He’ll kill us. He’s a monster.”

“He was,” Mr. Lyss said. “Now he’s just what he is. He saw too much through Bozeman’s eyes, too much … beyond. It finished him. I’m just damn glad I didn’t see it. At least he’s got the piano. If I’d have seen it, whatever it was, I’d probably be lying on the floor, just talking baby talk and sucking on my toes. Come on, Peaches, let’s find that snowmobile.”

The old man turned away from the piano and crossed the room toward the hallway.

Nummy backed out of the room, keeping his eyes on the Xerox.