Noir

On the other side of the dust-mottled glass, a few slowly moving figures could be seen, going about their business in the rubble and ashes. The vaguely human shapes-they were so hunched over in their rags that it was difficult to make out their true forms-had devolved much farther down the scale than their beggarly counterparts in the cities elsewhere in the Gloss. The communard panhandlers and hustlers that McNihil usually encountered on his travels still had some detectable barrier between themselves and their surroundings, an envelope on one side of which was the however-loathsome definition of human, and on the other side was insentient matter. In this bleak territory, that border phenomenon had been erased: here, whatever looked and/or acted more-or-less human- usually less-did so as a point on a continuum that ran back down into the trash and rubble filling the streets and burnt-out building hulks. As if muck and sun-withered debris had become such a basic constituent of this part of the universe, the way hydrogen atoms abounded everywhere else, that it could have begun its own hobbled evolution, knitting together creatures from scraps of old, greasy fast-food wrappers and flaccid, discarded condoms. Instead of dead things, perhaps they were the yet-to-be-alive, lifting their soft faces from the rotting Eden they were to inherit, prepared for them by a God of Discards…

A sudden jolt snapped through the seat and into McNihil’s spine; the train lumbered into motion, as though pulling itself from the mire that had trapped other great beasts. The scene outside the window began to slide farther back along the rails. A small breath of gratitude eased from beneath McNihil’s breastbone. Another few moments and the rag-picking shamblers, the bottom stratum of this zone’s animated dead, would have looked up and spotted his face. They would have lifted their hollow-eyed gaze to his, then nodded slowly. Saying without words: Pass on, Traveler. As we are, so shall you be.

“How was your trip?” His dead wife looked up at him as he walked through the door. “Was it all right getting here?”

From his shoulder, McNihil eased the strap of the bag he’d brought with him. The train from the land of the nominally living to that of the officially dead had finally creaked and wheezed into the local station, like a senile long-distance runner clutching his chest and expiring as he collapses across the finish line. The station, the same one at which McNihil always disembarked when he visited his wife, was really just the place where the tracks came together from different directions, including the no-longer-functioning ones that ran into the east, into the center of the continent. Whatever came out of here, the pretty boys and girls who were the heartland gene pool’s only viable export, arrived on foot. As had McNihil at the place where his wife existed-the word lived was too cruel a misnomer to be applied in her situation.

“It was okay. About like usual.” He sat the bag down on the kitchen table, a rickety construct of plywood sheeting with reinforced fiberboard boxes for legs. As with most things in this territory, it survived from day to day, caught somewhere in the process of collapse and dissolution. The table wobbled and bent under the slight weight of the shoulder bag; the nails-which McNihil himself had hammered in-gave small, harsh cries as the loose joints twisted against each other. “Nothing happened on the way, at least.” He turned a minimal smile in his dead wife’s direction. “For me, that makes it a nice trip.”

She said nothing, but went on watching him with her ’d-out eyes. Empty, but not in the way that living persons’ eyes so often were, when they had let their souls ratchet down into a state of pure mercantile hunger. Hungry, McNihil had told himself more than once, is not her problem. Not anymore. In that sense, she had an advantage over both the living and the other dead. He could console himself with the notion that he’d done that much for her, at least.

“I suppose you brought me stuff.” She sat beside the table, in an only slightly less fragile chair. If she’d possessed more mass than was typical for the long-term, animated dead, the chair might have collapsed beneath her; as it was, she had no more effect on it than a ghost or living memory would have. “You always bring me these little things.” In one hand, held near her face, a cigarette slowly drifted a gray trail through the dusty air. The pack had been one of the gifts McNihil had brought her the last time he’d come down here. She didn’t smoke, not in the sense of drawing anything into her motionless lungs. But the spark and ash were reminders of her previous existence. And of mine, brooded McNihil. “I appreciate your thoughtfulness,” his dead wife said.

He would’ve preferred it if she had screamed like some sudden banshee and buried a knife in his heart, one of physical metal to match the invisible one whose blade he felt turning there. But perhaps that was why, he knew, she didn’t do any such thing. Besides not being her style, it would have made it all too easy-and over-for him. She still loved him enough to torture him.

Nodding slowly, McNihil zipped open the shoulder bag and started pulling its contents out onto the flimsy table. The items were all bright and shiny and new, things from the land of the living. They didn’t have to be expensive, he knew, though sometimes he spent the money anyway, just as one of the milder forms of self-laceration available to him. Stuff that wasn’t even anything his wife had cared for when she’d been alive:

• fast food in self-heating structural-foam containers, with full-motion figurines from this week’s disnannie dancing on top;

• collect-the-set chocolate bars with the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh installments of an updated Story of Job on the wrapper, the little 3-D panels filled with images of a multi-car pileup on some anachronistic freeway and garishly bright blood pooling on the floor of a hospital triage room;

• postliterate romance novels with audio chips sighing and moaning in synch with the nearest ovulation cycle that the built-in hormone sensors could pick up.

Downscale consumer goods, effluvia from the cheap-’n’-nastiverse, glittering with an enticing pseudo-life. Which was already dying, even before the tiny microbatteries, lightsucks, and other power sources could be exhausted. McNihil looked at the bright things that he had carried down here, and saw them visibly fading, the little dancing figures hobbled in their paso dobles and quadrilles, slowing down and going inert in hunched-over postures, like a miniature gallery of terminal osteoporosis.

He gazed down into the illusory depth of the romance covers, like windows into a nobler, more sun-filled world, tilted ninety degrees and laid out flat. The optic traps caught sight of his irises and responded by deepening the images, the red-streaked oceans stretching out even farther to impossible sunsets, the great doors of the Regency ballrooms swinging open to reveal curve-swept grand staircases, high arched windows overlooking Capability Brown gardens silvered with perfect moonlight. Designed to entice: a part of McNihil wanted to dive into those soft vistas and fall gravityless through them forever. But even as he looked into them, the liveried, bewigged footmen holding back the brocade curtains were growing old and shriveled, their faces crepe-paper masks. The buccaneer oceans filmed over with toxic oil slicks, the slow waves washing anoxic, aborted creatures against the ships’ rotted wood. Lovers gazed into each other’s hollow eye sockets, yellowed skull-teeth visible through the papery skin of their withering faces. Their embraces had become huddling refuges from the chill winds sliding through broken glass and brownly corrupted palm fronds; their kisses had been delayed too long, and now could only be consummated in the skin-deep grave between their hearts.

McNihil’s dead wife brushed a hand across the once-bright things he had brought her. ”I don’t really know why you do this, though.” The cigarette in her other hand continued to burn on its own, maintaining its brief spark of life. “It must be sad for you. You come all this way, and you give me this stuff… and look.” She pushed one of the fast- food containers with the tip of a thin finger. Its imbedded power sources had already run out of juice, leaving the cartoon images gray and drained of what little pseudo-life they’d had. A slow shake of the head: “That’s what happens down here.” McNihil’s dead wife looked up at him. “That’s what happened to me. Isn’t it?”

He said nothing to contradict her, though technically she was wrong. The once bright and now fading bits of the other world-their life, or imitation of such, had still been in motion when McNihil had crossed the border of this territory. Whereas she’d been dead already when she’d been brought here, her lungs gutted out by viral mesothelioma to the point where that other world’s life-support machines-what a laugh-hadn’t been doing anything more than inflating, deflating, reinflating a cold flesh balloon with her empty-eyed face attached.

“It didn’t happen to you,” lied McNihil. “You didn’t fade.” The impulse hit him, to sweep the rapidly dulling trash from the table with his forearm. “You’re still beautiful.”

She smiled indulgently. “In my way, I suppose.” She put the cigarette to her pale lips, though the smoke wasn’t drawn in, trickling slowly by her ashen cheek instead. “How does the old poem have it? The Coleridge-is it ‘Life-in- Death’ or ‘Death-in-Life?’”

“I don’t remember.” Though in fact, he could hear some of the lines being recited in his head. Her lips were red, her looks were free, / Her locks were yellow as gold: / Her skin was white as leprosy, / The