Beyond the Doors of Death (15 page)

***

Christmas morning was chilly, sub-zero, snow crisp on the flattened ground where well-heeled local golfers had once swung their irons in more propitious weather. Klein and Francine met the others for a quick breakfast, dressed warmly, went out under a sky of cloud pregnant with more snow. Church bells rang in the distance, carried with sharp clarity under the clouds. In the traditional houses to the north of the Cold Town, the children of the warms no doubt did all the traditional things that drove their parents nuts: noisily tearing open boxes and plastic cartons, squabbling, shouting happily at the tops of their voices, jumping on parental beds, banging drums, blowing trombones.
Santa’s been here, Santa’s been here!
None of that for us, Klein thought, and was relieved. He recalled the pledge he and Sybille had made: no children for us, no rug-rats, no heartbreak and responsibility, no hostages to fortune. No joy, either. But now, he told himself, we have our own futures. We are our own futures. We need not fantasize an extended duration through offspring or in a magic afterlife where we wait in bliss to rejoin them; we are our own replacements, dead but deathless. Arrows flung into a future that surely would become ever stranger, decade by decade, in increments perhaps of centuries, millennia, years falling away and drifting like snowflakes…

“We did this when we were kids.” Mi-Yun let herself fall back in a mound of snow, ooffed, flung out her leather-jacketed arms and dragged them up and down. “Angel wings!”

“Not in California, land of the sun,” Klein said. “And not in Buenos Aires either. It did snow there once, thirty years ago, after I’d left for America with my Mom and Dad. None before that for another ninety years.” He found a curious impulse rising in his breast, bent, scooped up two handfuls of granular snow, crushed them into a ball, looked around. Tom stood looking across the Hudson, back to them; Klein flung his snowball, caught the man in the small of his back.

“Hey! No fair!”

Francine joined in, then Mi-Yun, with Tom pelting Klein so hard that his hat flew off. Distanced from himself, Klein marveled. These were deads? These crazy lunatics playing like kids, himself included? Well, why not? If the world was a vortex of meaninglessness, as it was, there was ample space for the
acte gratuit
. If all human activity was the empty capering of clowns in a plastic empty world, let us all be clowns at play, he thought.
C’est moi, Camus
—yes, regard that French existentialist’s childhood football fixation, his ferocious smoking, his daredevil and finally self-slaying driving, even though he was not at the wheel of the Facel Vega when he died. Could that intoxication with being and nothingness be the explanation? One worth copying? The deads as rebels, whose cause was to be without a cause. “When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself,” Camus had written, “and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical.”

But the playful impulse drained quickly. He dropped his handful of snow, walked away toward the naked deciduous trees and brush at the water’s edge. Shivering, he pulled his coat more tightly about him. His toes felt chilled through boots and heavy socks. Gloved fingers touched his arm. Francine, he thought, and turned, but it was Tom.

“Saw your interview on the
Times
gog. What an idiot. Where do they find these poseurs?”

“Brine was okay,” Klein said. “He was treading the party line. It’s up to us to change it.”

“Or stay out of the line of fire. Not that I’m criticizing you for—”

“Understood. The Conclave Elders anticipate a Reichstag fire followed by a
Kristallnacht
. I’m doing what I can to help avert it, but it’s a long trudge up the hill of fear and misunderstanding and guile and simple stupidity.”

“Yeah.” Tom gestured at the barricaded blockhouse structures of the Cold Town. “We country boys don’t know much about those old Krauts, Jorge, but we remember Ruby Ridge and…what was it called? Those crazy cultists the government torched to the ground?”

“David Koresh,” Klein said. “The Branch Davidians, in Texas.”

“Them too, I guess. No, those others down in Florida. Crazy as loons, but shit. Burned out the whole goddam town. Thousands of people killed, and no rekindling for them.”

“Clearwater. Yes. That’s what concerns us. That’s what I’m trying to head off.”

A hand touched his other arm. Francine. Very well. These were to be his closest companions, his pals, his affinity group. He touched her glove, nudged her shoulder.

“We should be getting back.”

Snow was falling again, harder now. It squeaked and crackled under their boots.

***

Half reclining in his medical bed, Mick Dongan was reduced from the boisterous, vulgar monologist Klein remembered. The anthropologist was eaten out from within, it was plain to see, by cancer. In the final stages of cachexia, it seemed from his sunken etched cheeks and the knotted joints of his exposed wrists hanging like the lumps of bone they were from arms piteously atrophied.

“Come in, for Christ’s sake, Jorge. I know I look like shit. But at least I’m not dead, like some people.” Dongan emitted a ghastly croaking laugh, coughed for half a minute, breath rasping in his caved-in, bony chest. Oxygen went into his lungs from transparent tubes run to his nostrils, but it brought no flush to his face. “It’s not catching, dude.”

“It’s been some time,” Klein said, and drew a chair closer to the bed. “You’ll have heard about Sybille’s little adventure in the bombing at Zion.”

“Bloody nasty, that. Pour me some juice, there’s a good fellow. Bastards won’t let me have anything stronger.” He slurped a mouthful of pale lemon liquid through a bent straw, swirled it in his mouth, screwed up his face, spat it out into a kidney-shaped steel basin. “Looks like piss, tastes worse.” He sighed, lay back against the shaped pillow of his elaborate bed, closed his eyes.

After a time, Klein concluded that the dying man had fallen asleep, and stood. Dongan opened his eyes and grinned at him, like a man who has won a bet. Several of his teeth were missing. Lost from the shrinkage of the disease? Rotted inside his head? This was no traditional cancer, Klein knew. Bitter rumor-mongers were already blaming the rekindled for its origin and spread. Why would they do that? Pick up new customers, like funeral directors fallen on hard times in a place stricken by good health?

“Siddown, Jorge. I have to get this off my chest.”

A wave of weariness flooded through Klein. Last minute repentance, confession of misdeeds, pleas for forgiveness. Or could the man be about to declare a windfall for his old best friend, a bequest, perhaps his townhouse on leafy Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice?

“I’m not your father confessor, Mick. Not even the right faith. Not any faith, in fact, as you’ll recall.”

“It’s about Sybille. She and I—”

“Hush.” He made a quieting motion with one hand, irritated by this banality. “It was the time. We all slept around. I’ve known about your affair with my wife for years. We hid nothing from each other. Nothing of that kind, anyway.”

“Shit, Jorge, don’t make it harder than it already is.” Breath catching in his throat, shoulders hunching. Stopped. Restarted with a jolt. A deep breath, then slow, shallow intaking of air. Was this Cheyne-Stokes respiration? If so, the man was surely at the very edge of death.

“Have you made arrangements for rekindling?” Klein said. “I didn’t see a van outside.”

“Not doing it. Refused. World’s got enough damned zoms already. No, sorry, sorry, feeble humor. Made up my mind when Sybille asked for rekindling. Not for me.”

“You’d prefer to be ashes? Rot into slime in the ground? Don’t be absurd, Mick.” He hesitated. “I’ve never known a man with the appetite for living that you had.” And would lose, he acknowledged silently, in this resurrection into bleak forever. He wondered if he would have chosen it himself, had death and rekindling not been forced upon him.

Shameless in the proximity of his own nothingness, Dongan put the same thought into words.

“Doesn’t seem to have done you a hell of a lot of good, Jorge. Death warmed up.” Something caught again in his throat. His face went into rictus. Klein watched him, said nothing. “Still haven’t said it. Professor Klein, old chum, I’m making a clean breast of it. Your wife and I were going to abscond together.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know it goes against your fairytale romance. The one-and-onlies, despite the bed hopping. The magic dyad. Two souls as one.” More coughing. “Lovely fancy, I know, was same with me and Iris, for about five years. And you were heading toward what…a decade? Things change, pal. Christ, look at you. Walking definition of
mutatis
mutandis
. Hang on, that’s not what I mean. Whatever. But she’d lost that lovin’ feeling. The first fine careless rapture was well and truly over. So we made our plans. Then she fucking got sick and died. Don’t that beat all?”

Klein stood up. He felt nothing. Not resentment, not bitterness, not a wish to shout or deny or plead or to beat the man’s face in. Without a word, he turned and left the room. A racking laugh followed him, and perhaps feeble words, but he could not make out their meaning.

S
IX

Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen so much worse….He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times.

Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”

***

Rain was sleeting down when Klein was driven into Moshi town in Tanzania in June, 2039, his non-autonomic taxi piloted by a wizened black man with gleaming teeth, presumably genomic implants courtesy of the Gates Foundation. The deads had selected this shooting season for its dry but moderately cool weather, halfway between the northern monsoonal downpours of the year’s start and the southern monsoon in its latter months. Climate change, that universal chaotic disrupter, ruined the forecasts again. Their plane had staggered through dense clouds that blocked any overhead view of the gigantic, hardened, ash-coated mudpie that was the all-but-extinct stratovolcano. A sky island, geologists dubbed this immense mountain, tallest in all of Africa; it was only 150,000 years (would he and his companions live that long? perhaps!) since it erupted last, spewing from its Kibo cone boiling lava that hardened into immense scarps and valleys.

From his room in the New Livingstone Hotel, he gazed now into the rain and saw nothing but a darker shadow, its peaks some twenty miles distant.

The deluge had abated, then stopped, by the time the party of deads arrived in a hired van: the old crew, Zacharias, inevitably in charge, Gracchus the white hunter in all his antique Hemingway glory, Mortimer, Nerita Tracy in a fetching safari suit. And, as arranged, his former wife Sybille. Seeing her step from the van, still young, still beautiful, fully restored, Klein felt washed with grace. Now she was nothing to him. The last remnants of desolation were fled, or, rather, desiccated and swept away by the winds of time.

In the clearing sky, pterodactyls—or were they pteranodons, with those imposing 20-foot wingspans—flurried like black umbrellas caught in an updraft. At their back, high above rolling remnant clouds, the great mountain jutted toward the vacuum of space. Nineteen thousand feet and more above sea level, three and two-thirds miles, the Kibo peak almost a mile higher than this elevated ground. Reports were accurate. No trace of frozen white about its upper reaches. Famously, the legendary snows or glaciers of Kilimanjaro were gone entirely, melted and evaporated or run off for good. Or at least until the bitterly contested spread of cool fusion generators forced the final replacement of carbon fuels and reversed the ruin that warms were inflicting upon their planet. His planet, too, he grudgingly admitted.

Klein withdrew from his window, lay down on the simple bedding. Time enough to greet the other deads when they were rested after the uncomfortable trip. Did this faint ache indicate that he missed the presence of his new crew? No. Those three had their own concerns and interests. Mi-Yun had laughed in disbelief when he mooted the trip to Africa. So be it. Let this be closure.

Alcohol was not advised at altitude, but he found them in the bar off the lobby drinking whiskey sours. When you are dead you are dead all the way, he hummed to himself, and ordered one to be companionable. They greeted him with a knuckled nudge to the shoulder, a bow, a quick comradely hug from Sybille.

“You have become prominent,” she said. “Your face on TV rivals the President’s.”

“And I’m not even running for reelection.”

“Still, you’ve acquired your own share of abuse,” Nerita said. The Brazilian was not as lovely as Sybille: sweeping red hair this year, a pert freckled young-middle-aged face, trim as a gym addict. Somehow she did not have the look of a hunter, even of dead animals. But then neither, after all, did Sybille.

“Oh yes. Raskolnikov Klein. Dr. Kevorkian Klein.” He laughed. “They manage to get everything muddled and reversed. We’ve died, so we are a cult of murderers rather than saviors. We are no longer fated to perish and rot, and so we are obsessed by death. Then again,” he said, with a sardonic pause, “some of us do seem to be.”

“You have not been without your own obsessions, Klein,” said Laurence Mortimer. If the words were biting, even sinister, his tone was guilefully innocent.

“Now resolved, I’m happy to report.” He sent Sybille a bland, assessing look, returned his gaze to Mortimer. “At least some of us are not trapped in repetition and neurotic recurrence.”

“What’s that? Nietzsche or Freud?” Now Mortimer drew his lips tight. “Both con men, wouldn’t you agree, and seriously out of date?”

The alcohol was working on them, fuming in their brains despite the dehydrogenase and catalase mimic ’cytes stripping down the ethyl molecules before they could thoroughly poison their higher capacities. There would be no fisticuffs. The deads, despite their fondness for controlled genocide of the extinct, were a placid lot.

“I can’t argue with that. But I do have in mind one suggested change in routine. A small addition, you might say, to the fun of slaughtering quaggas and aurochs and dodos. Of course, I’m looking forward to some shooting. I’ve even taken lessons.”

“A change?” Kent Zacharias glowered at him. “And what would that be? A singsong round the fire with the local chapter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Extinct Animals?”

“A little more arduous than that.” Klein put down his empty glass precisely in the center of its mat. “I’ve engaged a guide and a team of porters. After the sport’s done, we’ll go up Mt. Kili. Quite the view from the top, I’m told.”

He looked around at faces betraying consternation, derision, curiosity.

“Boring,” said Zacharias. “Ridiculous,” said Gracchus. Nerita Tracy glanced up at that; she had been shredding her mat. “I think it sounds interesting, Anthony. Sybille?”

His ex-wife was tranquil. She met Klein’s eyes. “An amusing idea. I wish I’d thought of it myself. Perhaps we’ll find Hemingway’s leopard.”

“Long defrosted,” Mortimer said, smiling. “And chewed up by pterodactyls.”

***

The first three days trudging and sometimes clambering up the rocky slopes of the mountain were arduous, exhausting even for the renovated bodies of the deads. Already they were above the cloud line. Fortified by hot chocolate and popcorn, lashings of food prepared by the tireless native porters who carried their supplies, filament tents, fusion heaters, and endless quantities of purified water, they slogged through alpine desert terrain that grew ever more alien. Icy rain blew in their faces; Klein reluctantly pulled on a heated mask. On the fourth day, ambient at freezing point, they moved upward through rock pitted like coral, a lunar landscape without trees, plants or animals. The rock tore at their gloved hands, seized and twisted their walking poles. The air thinned. Rebreathers mounted on their backs fed oxygen to their respirocytes, easing the difficulties that caused one gasping porter, without the benefit of high technology, to collapse. These toughened locals had been known to perish on the trail, shaped though they were by conditioning and perhaps evolved adaptation to the heights. In the main they kept out of sight, forging ahead with the tents and sleeping bags and nourishment. They would line up for their tips only at the end of the climb. Klein watched them when he could. If the law allowed, he reflected, this crew of deads would happily shoot into their dark bodies, hack off a head or two, bear the trophies back down in their packs, with customary displays of boredom, to the lands of human habitation.

The Kibo huts, at 15,600 feet elevation, were plain green boxy structures with steep roofs and no windows, mist gusting about them. Other groups were congregated there, as they had been in the base camps lower down, destroying the isolation of hours of brutal climbing. Late in the day, after a rest that seemed to spread pain throughout his body, Klein readied himself for the final assault. Three quarters of a mile into the raw sky.

“This is completely insane,” Sybille said, standing beside him in the afternoon sunshine. “I can’t believe I agreed to this.”

“I believe because it is absurd,” Klein said.

“Tertullian, eh. Do you expect to meet God up there, Jorge?”

“
Tat Tvam Asi
,” he said. “Thou art god.”

“‘That Art Thou,’” she corrected him, pedantically. Always the scholar. Even when she playfully invented her scholarship to mock him. “No need to invoke Yahweh. Or did you mean me? I thought you were over that.”

“I never thought you were a goddess, Sybille,” he told her. “I thought you were my wife. My loving wife, as I was your loving husband.” He shushed her interruption. “But yes, I am over that. Come along, we have a mountain to climb.”

Dinner first. No water to wash with. Klein stank, encased in his protective shell. They would climb the rest of the way as the sun sank, and then forward in darkness, step by painful step up the steep path through desolation. Ah yes, thought Klein. Once again, the Dark Night of the Soul. With a glimpse of heaven at the summit, and a view of hell below, with fumaroles.

Mist. Congealed lava. Dust. Temperature below zero. Altitude sickness had them all bowed and head-whirling. Dark, dark. For six terrible hours they clambered like Sisyphus, their own dead flesh the stone they carried upward. Scree tumbled beneath his boots, throwing him off balance. At any moment, Klein thought, I am going to release my grasp on this burden. I will allow gravity’s victory. I will crash backward and down, downward to the earth, mutilated by sharp knives of stone. No, he told himself. No, no. This is your clownish challenge to the clowns who held your wife’s affection and loyalty. May it kill them all again, he thought, with unaccustomed venom. The thin air is getting to me. Christ. Onward. Upward.

At five in the morning, they attained Gilman’s Peak, the first summit. The sun remained below the edge of the world, but the sky was gray with its masked light. They stood like myths above clouds. Nerita was weeping.

The crater stretched out beneath them, empty of its fabled ice, a vast pocket into the throat of the dormant volcano. Wisps of vile gas rose from its fumaroles. If this is not the dried asshole of hell, he thought, it will serve as its apt figuration.

And the sun rose, red and gold, a glory, dispelling Klein’s sour mood. Light flooded across Africa, across the birthplace of his species, of the species from which he was born and died and returned. Yes, he thought: returned, as the sun returns. No natural cycle without its tendentious parable, its encouraging metaphor. He caught himself. Enough. This was the moment. Sybille stood touching Ken Zacharias in the tender, evasive way of the dead. Laurence Mortimer placed an arm across Nerita’s shoulders. Alone, Klein squeezed his eyes tight.

And still their journey was not complete. Up the blighted, tilted world they struggled for an hour, two hours, more. And here finally was Uhuru Peak, 19,300 feet above the world, the top of Africa. The sky a hard blue. Porters released a swarm of stereo bugs that spun a sparking jeweled haze, memorializing this moment of achievement. All done. Klein fell from his brief moment of epiphany. All emptiness, like the botched landscape. No meaning beyond necessity. I am a philosophical zombie after all, Klein told himself. Thus I refute…everything.

They trudged down the vast mountainside. Down, down, down, would it never come to an end. But Alice had been dreaming her Wonderland; this was brute reality. They were joined at last, on the open grass, green, green, by the crew of porters, many men and youths, caps and brown faces and wide ingratiating or joyfully grinning faces, clapping,
Jambo, Jambo
,
Kili-man-jaro
, and the tipping began, dollars swiped into paypads, expressions of disbelief, Is
this
all you’re paying me? But they had been warned, it was a routine gambit, one must doubt even the rheumy tears in the eyes of an old porter surely too aged and frail to undertake such hazardous work. Gracchus, surprisingly, weakened and swiped the old fellow’s pad once more, dollars flowing down from satellites, devalued currency but worth plenty in this landscape haunted by the creatures of the dead. In the far distance, an elephant trumpeted, and at the edge of the grasses Klein watched a pack of running quaggas, white legged, striped at the front like zebras while the colors had run together murkily in the rear, creatures from before the dawn of history. As are we all, Klein told himself, remembering secret messages from the sky.

They returned mile after humming mile to the hotel in a van driven by their guide. Covered in dust, they stank like what they were: death warmed up. Klein refused a whiskey sour toast and headed to his room. Before he left, though, he thanked each of them, touched them lightly in the way of his kind. To Sybille, embracing her lightly, he said, “Thank you for coming.”

She moved to place a soft kiss on his cheek; he stepped aside.

“Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.”

He never saw her again.

***

His passport was seized as he moved through Customs and Immigration at JFK International Airport.

“Your name?”

“Jorge Amadeus Klein. Professor mortuus in the Department of Hist—”

“This document shows a date of death. Are you a rekindled, sir?”

“Yes.” No sense in making a fuss about the inane routines, the pretended niceties of the law.