Dying Is My Business

put it aside.

Dragons, magic, worlds within worlds—it was all preposterous. There was no magic to protect you from the rich and powerful; if you didn’t learn to lie, cheat, and steal, you were ground down. There were no ancient prophecies that guided people toward their destiny; everyone just muddled along as best they could. There were no poor peasants who were secretly wealthy royalty; the poor stayed poor under the heels of the rich, and they always would. It was the way of the world. In this world, the real world, there were only cold cement walls and dangerous men who patted you on the cheek and smiled as they called you a dog.

And there was death. Death was everywhere. It lurked in the barrels of the countless guns that had been pointed in my direction, and behind black doors in rooms with drains in their floors. Death was a constant, the only constant—and yet even death had rejected me. For reasons it refused to explain, death didn’t want me any more than the world of the living did.

It brought me back to the same question I asked myself every day: Who was I? Like Armelle, did I have a family somewhere I didn’t know about? Parents, siblings, a wife and kids? If I did, then why was no one looking for me? I’d walked every inch of this city on jobs for Underwood and hadn’t seen a single missing-person flyer with my picture. Why had no one ever recognized me on the street, stopped me, called me by my real name?

Maybe I was more like the Ragana, who rose fully formed from the Sea of Miseries, a self-contained force that existed only to bring evil and suffering. A freak, just like Bennett had called me.

Or maybe there were no answers.

No, I couldn’t accept that. There had to be answers. They were waiting for me in a past I couldn’t remember. But every time I tried, every time I forced my mind to reach back beyond the previous year, I came up empty.

I lay back on the bed, folding my arms under my head. I stared at the cracks in the ceiling and the cobwebs that gathered in the corners. I tried to put my thoughts in order so I could make sense out of them. So much was lost to me, but these, at least, were the things I knew to be true:

One. I was a man. Okay, that one wasn’t too hard to figure out, but it was as good a place to start as any. Judging by my reflection, I was in my mid to late thirties, with dark eyes and dark hair, though that wasn’t much to go on. I’d spent hours memorizing my features, studying my hairline, the cut of my jaw and shape of my nose, every crease around my eyes and fold in my ears, but the truth was there was nothing distinctive about my appearance. I’d scoured my body for scars, tattoos, anything that might help someone identify me, but there weren’t any. It was frustrating, but not entirely surprising. If my body could heal bullet wounds then surgery scars, tattoos, or marks from childhood accidents weren’t likely to stick around either.

Two. My amnesia was retrograde, a word I’d learned when I researched my condition on the free computers at the Brooklyn Public Library. It meant that I couldn’t remember who I was or where I lived, but I could still talk, tie my shoes, drive a car, feed myself. I also learned that the condition most likely stemmed from one of two possible causes, either brain damage or a mental defense mechanism against a traumatic event. So had I suffered a brain injury or seen something my mind couldn’t accept? There was no way to know. My memory, up until a year ago, was like a frustratingly blank piece of paper. Which brought me to the final item on the checklist of what I knew.

Three. The brick wall. My earliest memory, and only a vague one at that. I remembered regaining consciousness lying on my back in front of a brick wall. I wasn’t sure how much I could trust that memory, since my mind was constantly trying to fill in the blanks with fabricated stories, but this one at least felt true. The wall in question seemed average, but there was something about it I still wasn’t sure if I’d really seen or only imagined. One of the bricks had a symbol scratched into it. In the fuzziness of my memory I thought it looked like an eye inside a circle. I remembered sparkles of light dancing along the wall and fading away like dying embers as I opened my eyes. I remembered a small, swirling wisp of smoke, as if someone had just put out a cigarette.

I figured the brick wall probably belonged to an alley somewhere in the city, only I had no idea where. My next memory was of running down an empty street at night, lost and confused. I found a hospital, but without any ID and with no signs of physical trauma they turned me away. After that I camped on park benches and under bridges, rummaging through garbage cans for food and shooing away the rats that came too close at night. In the mornings I would move on, hoping to find someone or something that would remind me who I was. But all I found was Underwood.

He’d been in one of his stash houses, off of an alley in Harlem, a small, concrete hut with a counterfeit Con Edison sign on the door to keep people out. I was ravenously hungry, and the smell of food lured me down the alley. The lights coming out of the hut’s windows had looked so warm that I couldn’t help myself. When I saw the door was slightly ajar I didn’t bother knocking, my hunger was too great. I just walked right in. They were all there, Tomo, Big Joe, Ford, Underwood, and the dark-haired woman, standing around a table loaded with stacks of cash and empty fast-food wrappers. The woman saw me first, her dark eyes widening with alarm. She didn’t say a word, but the look on her face was enough to alert the others. Tomo, Big Joe, and Ford turned on me with their guns drawn. Then I felt something hit me in the chest. That was the first time I died. The next thing I knew I was waking up in a Dumpster, my shirt riddled with bullet holes. Only I didn’t have any bullet holes in me anymore. As I crawled out, I stepped on something that crunched underfoot. I looked down and saw a shriveled, desiccated corpse lying beside the Dumpster. Ford. He’d been unlucky enough to get the order to carry my body out to the Dumpster, and being the closest living person had paid the price for it. Ford’s was the first life I stole. The first name on my list, and the reason Tomo and Big Joe wanted me dead. The three of them had been like brothers.

After that, Underwood knew someone like me could be useful. He took me off the streets, put a roof over my head, and filled my pockets with enough money to clothe myself and keep my belly full. He promised to help me find the answers if I worked for him in the meantime. He gave me hope. He gave me a purpose.

The hope remained. But lately, ever since the crack house, I’d been wondering if the purpose was the right one.

Four

“Bennett’s people have control of a number of properties around the city, mostly warehouses and shipping piers. Whatever they can rent out fast and cheap or use for themselves as stash houses,” Underwood said. It was the next night, and we were sitting at the table in the main room of the fallout shelter. I’d changed into a fresh new shirt and burned the one Maddock had put a bullet hole in. I’d burned nine ruined shirts so far. I hoped I could get through tonight, at least, without ruining another one. When your life is this messed up, you keep your goals simple.

The black door was closed. I wondered if Bennett had been released alive or if his bruised and beaten corpse lay on the other side of the door even now. I pictured the drain in the floor painted red with blood. I felt cold then, and turned away.

The second gray door was open, revealing a small room that was the mirror image of my own, except without a bed. Instead, there was a couch, a couple of chairs, and a floor lamp. The dark-haired woman sat on the couch, staring blankly into space while Tomo sat on a chair across from her, keeping an eye on her. She would go catatonic like this on occasion. More than once I’d seen her sitting with her eyes open but completely unresponsive—lights on but nobody home. Sometimes it only lasted a few minutes, other times she didn’t seem to come back to herself for hours. I wondered if she was a junkie and Underwood was selling stolen goods on the black market to feed her habit. It didn’t strike me as a good use of his time or money, but maybe that was what love did to people. I wouldn’t know.

Underwood continued talking, pulling my attention back to him. “Sometimes, when these properties sit empty, they get squatters. A certain object I’m looking for recently made an appearance at one of these properties, in the hands of some people who aren’t supposed to be there. I just didn’t know which property until I got it out of our good friend Bennett. This is where you need to go.”

He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and passed it to me. Even his hand reeked of cologne. He’d written down an address, 49th and West Side Highway, and beneath it he’d scrawled a