Dead Americans (17 page)

Without turning to me, he said, “You shouldn’t be here. Go home, William.”

“I don’t understand what is going on,” I said. “Mother didn’t do the things you said she did. I know that.”

“You don’t know.”

“Neither do you!”

He shrugged and began walking up the stairs into the main building.

I followed, trying to speak to him again, but he ignored me. His bruised face, which had once turned cold and impassive to shut me out, was no longer so. Now, it showed me nothing. It was as if I did not exist. As if I had never walked my fingers up and down his spine. As if he had never shaved me in the mornings. Around us the electric lamps of the building burned in thick buttery light, stripping back the emotions on each of us, allowing us, for the first time, the ability to see the other as we truly were. I saw the pride, the kindness, the ruthlessness, and he saw the hurt and pain and whatever else I revealed, but unlike me, Jonas was not moved. He kept walking until finally he began to descend into the bowels of the building where the operating theatres were kept.

I hesitated, but followed.

Until I left that narrow hallway, I had never seen a Surgeon’s theatre. My father had no faith, my mother more than enough, but the one thing they shared was a moral objection to returning, in your own body or another’s, made more so by our family history. Most returns were fashioned out of two or three bodies, with the skin being taken and preserved by those who had not died from disease. I grew up in a house that did not support returns, an anomaly, certainly, and one further raised due to the fact that Father home schooled all his children. So it was that when I stepped into the dim operating theatre, I did not know what I would truly encounter.

Jonas had already entered, shoving the double doors open, and stalking through the dim green light of the room.

On the ground lay an elderly Surgeon. He was tall and silver haired and wore the white and black edged gown of a Surgeon. And he was quite dead, his neck having been twisted sharply so that bones had pierced the skin.

I had seen too much death by then to let this anonymous corpse bother me at all. Instead, my attention was drawn to the hum in the room.

It was a background noise at first, a susurration, almost hypnotic once it was noticed. It was caused by the three large silver boxes on the wall. They were discoloured by the green light emitted from the two long tubes suspended in the air. Each tube was filled with bubbles—bubbles that obscured the inside as if a person had breathed into each. The two tubes were attached to a metal framework above that also kept the power boxes, hanging like pendulums, in place. From each pendulum, like thick tentacled hands, emerged black coils that pushed deeply into the tubes, deep into the green fluid that filled each.

To the right of the room sat Mother’s wheelchair, empty, but with her purse and Fiona’s postcards sitting on the seat.

“William.”

Fiona.

“William.”

Fiona’s voice, but my mother’s words, coming out of speakers on the ground.

Beneath the tubes, Jonas turned towards me. Above him the bubbles dissipated slowly but surely to reveal Mother and Fiona. Around each head was a crown of thin, black wires. Both their eyes were open and watching me. Each movement they made was in union. Two sets of eyes blinked. Two left arms twitched. Two sets of lips parted.

“I don’t want to die,” Mother’s voice began.

Fiona’s voice finished, “Don’t let him kill me.”

“Why have you done this?” I cried out.

“She can’t reply!” Jonas yelled over the hum of the machinery. “She can see you, but she cannot hear you!”

“Why did she do this?”

“There’s nothing but hate in her!”

I began to reply, but could not, and only shook my head.

“On the uniform of one of those men I fought was dried blood! William, who goes to work with dried blood splashed across their clothes?” Jonas reached up and grabbed one of the cables that connected the tubes, his long, black nailed fingers curling around it tightly in a grip that would not be broken. “Those are the men who came for your mother! Who killed your brother! Who killed Ellie! Those men who your mother had hired days ago—”

“Why are you saying this?”

“This cannot continue!”

“You have no right!”

“You would let this happen?” he shouted.

I hesitated. Would I?
Would I
? I heard again the faint murmur of her words emerging through Fiona’s vocal cords, given sound by a fuzzy microphone in the tube with her. Giving her the chance to plead for her life, to tell her son that she needed him. How did Henry react? With anger, I was sure. And Fiona? What would she say? Did it matter? We were family.
Family
. You didn’t do this to your family. Mother’s voice whispered my name, again.

“
Would you
?” Jonas demanded.

“She’s my mother!”

“It’s not enough!”

The Surgeon opened his shirt, revealing pale, pale skin and a long, jagged scar down his chest. Picking up an electric lamp, he shone the light onto himself, and revealed, in his chest, a network of gears and wires, each of them moving at a steady pace. Clicking, turning, powered in ways we could not comprehend, designed by a mind we could not know, but a gift to us. To all of us, should we want it.

In the morning, I left for Issuer with Mother, Henry, and Fiona wrapped tight in white burial sheets. I was taking all three to the Ovens. I would hand each of them over to the clean skinned men and women who operated them, who had a different kind of faith than I, again. No longer an atheist, unable to believe in God, no words to mark myself with, no faith. I was lost and after handing over the bodies in Issuer, I would sit alone and wait, until the end of the week, when the dead were burned. Afterwards, I did not know what I would do. For the journey there, Jonas sent a young, red haired Mortician to Mother’s—my—house to prepare everything. Jonas would not come himself. I would never again see him, I knew. And so, in the morning, when the Mortician I did not know arrived in a carriage with my family, and sat there, waiting for me to step out, I did so with a feeling describable only as emptiness. I sat inside the carriage, surrounded by my silent family and own thoughts, while the Mortician drove us down an empty road beneath a red sky that had turned black.

Soon, ash would fall.

John Wayne leaned casually against the Empire State Building. Six foot four, with large, blunt features, he looked as if he’d been shaped by the hand of God on the day that He had forgotten His tools. He wore an expensive, but plain, dark brown suit with a simple, long sleeved, white shirt beneath it. His feet were encased in a pair of creased leather boots and the wide brimmed leather hat that he wore was sun-faded, its rich brown texture leeched away by the ritual rise of the sun. Wayne wore the hat pulled low to obscure his features as he waited and watched the crowd shift and twist its elongated form around him.

He had been waiting for nearly sixteen minutes. The worn out stub of a cigarette staining his fingers with faint, decay-yellow nicotine measured the time. Once he had been the kind of smoker that burned through a smoke with impatience, but now, in his forties, Wayne had changed his style. He smoked slowly, tasting the tobacco, nursing the hot sensation into his throat, allowing it to soak into the flesh. It took him eight minutes to make his way down to the end of his cigarette, until he had nothing more than a tiny nub in his fingers to drop onto the pavement and squash beneath the front of his boot.

A second butt crushed: sixteen minutes exact.

When he returned his gaze to the world, he found his companion crossing the road: Orson Welles. Younger than Wayne, and pressing outwards in a fleshy smear, Welles was still an imposing figure. He was supporting a short goatee around the chin of his boyish face, and wore a bone-coloured suit, a red handkerchief in the left breast pocket, and a dark grey shirt beneath the jacket. In his pale hands, he carried a long cane. Much to the irritation of Wayne, he held it as an accessory, rather than a necessity, and spun it in a circle as he crossed the road.

Wayne said nothing about it. Instead, he pushed himself off the wall, tilted back his hat, and grasped Welles’ hand in a friendly shake.

“I apologize for my lateness,” Welles said with exaggerated politeness, waving his cane at the traffic. “You know how Manhattan is.”

Wayne nodded and, without another word, the two men began walking, joining the pedestrian flesh that ran throughout the city in a long, sinuous vein.

In front of Wayne was a young, slowly fattening Indian couple who, when they glanced behind, began whispering quietly but excitedly to each other. On his right walked a black man in a green suit, holding a tiny blue radio (Wayne was sure it was a radio) up to his ear. To his left was Orson, and then the traffic, full of crawling yellow and black cabs.

“It’s good to see you, John,” Welles said, his cane taping out a disjointed rhythm.

“You too.”

“You look good.”

Wayne glanced at his companion slowly, then said, “You look like you’ve put a bit of weight on.”

“It comes and goes.”

Reaching into his jacket, Wayne pulled out a cigarette, followed by a box of matches. “Still, you ought to watch what it makes of you.”

“Indeed.”

Wayne followed Welles into a narrow alley. The buildings rose in a patchwork pattern of red and brown brick, laced with cement, while the pavement beneath was swept clean. At the end was a single door, without a sign, and through it a dimly lit anti-chamber. Welles nodded at the tall, lean black woman standing behind the counter in a tailored black suit, and Wayne expected her to speak in return, but she inclined her graceful neck and directed them to the door wordlessly. Beyond it was a long, dimly lit restaurant: the booths and seats were covered in rich crimson splotches of velvet, and down the middle was a line of black circular tables. In the dark, Wayne could not make out the patrons easily, though he could hear the scrape of their knives and forks and the inaudible whisper of their conversation.

A black man in a crimson jacket directed the two to their booth. He had an ethereal quality about him, suggesting that his station, dictated by the matching jacket, was more important than his personality. To Wayne, it was the nature of the service industry, though he was surprisingly irritated when the waiter tilted his head and smiled in his direction and, ignoring Welles, uttered the only words he would say throughout the entire meal, “I’m a big fan, sir. It’s my pleasure to serve you.”

Once seated, Wayne dragged the ashtray towards him and ground out his cigarette in the glass bowl, leaving black stains. “Strange place,” he observed, removing his hat.

“Always the obvious statement, I see. But I like it,” Welles replied. “It’s unlisted, and very quiet about what one orders.”

“Really?”

“The press is a pestilence.”

“Has its uses when movies come out.”

“Indeed it does, but we’ve had this conversation before, I think.”

“True,” Wayne replied. He fell silent as the waiter placed a menu in front of him. When he had left, Wayne said, “Guess we’ll need a new topic.”

Welles leaned forward and whispered, “How about the Soviet Union?”

“What?”

“Or Joseph Stalin?”

“Christ,” Wayne muttered sourly. “That ain’t funny, Orson.”

Welles leaned back, smiling faintly but without mirth. “I’ve got to warn you, John. I’ve heard that Stalin himself has put a price on your head.”

“Best of luck to him.”

“It’s not a joke. You’ve been quite public with your hate for communism.”

“It ain’t no democracy,” Wayne replied, his voice rising. He hesitated, not wanting to speak politics, but gave in. “There ain’t nothing right and decent in the way Stalin runs his people over there, and I ain’t going to be quiet about it.”

“You won’t hear me defending Stalin. I’ve heard of awful things done in his name.”

“Damn right,” Wayne muttered. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a red and white cigarette packet, and a brown box of matches.

“
But
,” Welles continued, “but he isn’t to be taken lightly, either. The man
does
run a country.”

“The man’s a beast.”

“He’s just a man, John.”

“No.” Wayne flicked his match and brought the flame to the end of his cigarette where, after drawing in his first breath, he waved it out. Smoke trailed in a grey, indistinct wisp over Wayne’s sun-browned face, then evaporated. He said, “No, he ain’t. Maybe everyone who follows communism ain’t bad. I’ll allow that. But the face of it nowadays is that of a rabid beast, and the leader of that pack of beasts is Stalin.”

“Still, you should watch yourself—”

“No,” he replied shortly, cutting Welles off. “I know you say it out of friendship, Orson, really I do, but no. You’re wrong. You can’t be no coward ‘bout what you believe, and a man has to say what is right when it is so. Especially men like you and me, since we got louder voices that most other folk. And one of them responsibilities of having that voice is exercising it. That’s the notion this very country is built upon. That’s what democracy
is
.”

“This democracy is not perfect,” the other replied. “Or are you forgetting that it stole this country from the natives?”

“It’s two different things,” Wayne replied angrily. “We didn’t do anything wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and them Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves. Maybe we weren’t right in the way that we did it, but without us, this land would’ve stayed nothing but mud and tents.”

“It must be lovely to see everything so black and white.”

“So long as you make sure you’re on the white side. Now lets change the subject. I didn’t come out all this way to argue with you.”

They ordered. The food arrived and settled wordlessly. After the waiter had left, and in the dimness of their booth, Wayne tried to warm to his companion; but Welles’ words had dug beneath his sun-browned skin and laid a tiny egg into his mind. No matter how he tried to brush it off, tried to smile that dismissive half smile of his, his thoughts kept returning to the egg and its suggestion that it
was
true.

After the meal, Wayne and Welles stepped out into the overcast afternoon. The city’s fragile shadows fell over them like thin sticks of crumbling ash. Welles, leaning on his cane, said, “It was a pleasure, John.”

“Yeah, it was nice,” Wayne replied, pulling out his cigarettes.

Welles nodded, motioned to speak again, but stopped.

“What?”

“Remember what I said,” he advised quietly, leaning forward. “A red menace is not to be taken lightly.”

Wayne frowned around his cigarette, but before he could press Welles, the other man shook his hand and left. It was strange, but then Welles
was
strange. He had been ever since Wayne had first met him—it was a strangeness that resulted in people not wanting to work with the man, despite his talent. Still, it was not Wayne’s problem.

By the time Wayne was on his second cigarette, he was on the Avenue of the Americas and behind three Korean men in identical dark blue suits. Behind him walked two black women, and their conversation, high pitched and full of unnecessary hyperbole, reached over him: one of their children had enrolled in the US Army, and was currently sending them postcards from France, telling them of a world they had never seen. It was beautiful, they said, though it took Wayne a moment to register that he heard
she
instead of he in relation to their child in the military—a mistake on his part no doubt.

He bumped into the Korean men.

“Sorry there,” he began, the words dying in his throat as the three turned to face him.

Red
. The first thing he noticed was the red handkerchief in their pockets; each folded just like the one before it. Then their eyes: dark still pools that reflected his frozen face back at him. With a hesitant step—why was he hesitant?—he tried to croak out his apology, to force it through the sudden chill that ran down his back and caused the Welles egg to crack ever so slightly open.

The middle Korean pointed a long finger at him and spoke sharply in his native language. Around him, the crowd stopped and swelled, bloated with curiosity.

Wayne took a second step back. “There ain’t no need for that kind of language,” he said quietly, holding up his hands in a show of peace. “It was just an accident.”

The Koreans stared at him, their bodies still, their eyes never wavering, that hint of
red
in their breast pocket never evaporating—that red over their
hearts
.

“Christ,” he muttered, anxiety rushing through him. He tried to push it away, but couldn’t. The cracks in the Welles egg splintered, the shell parted, and tightness grew in his chest. His palms began to sweat. He glanced around him, but too quickly, and couldn’t make out any of the features about the people around him.

Frantically, Wayne ploughed through the people to his right, bursting out of the flesh ring around him. Free, he stood isolated upon the footpath. Next to him was a large open window belonging to a florist, its display patterned in red, white and purple. The distortion of the final colour registered with a slither up his spine. It wasn’t
right
. Something was
wrong
. People flowed around him in tiny isolated droplets, but he remained, he realized, out in the open, where anyone could see him.
Anyone
.

The thought was ridiculous. More, it was stupid. Wayne knew it. It was utterly stupid, but before he could cast the thought away—as if following some other directive than his own—his gaze followed the rim of his hat up into the grey sky and along the rooftops that were mapped out in a jagged line.
Some man could’ve made his way up the stairs. He’d want a fine perch, so he could pick his moment; he’d have to organize it so that there wasn’t a crowd around me, he’d have to make sure that I was suddenly in the open and that his shot wouldn’t be missed.

Nonsense.

Yet he turned in fear.

His gaze ran over the crowd around him, catching a hint of red. The Koreans. They were quiet and still, watching him, stripping back his flesh with their gaze, squeezing the Welles egg and cracking it further . . . 

The middle Korean stepped forward and slapped his hands together.

Wayne didn’t wait to see what happened: he fled into a side street, away from the Avenue of the Americas.

As he ran, Wayne’s mind fought to be rational. He pushed together the Welles egg, made the cracks tiny and indistinct, though he could not remove its foul presence entirely.

His run slowed, turned into a striding walk, and a new cigarette burnt away as he tried to orientate himself internally. Externally, he didn’t recognize the narrow and empty street he was on. 43
rd
? 35
th
? The sky failed to reveal his position to him: the buildings looming around him were identical to hundreds of others throughout Manhattan.

There was only one difference to the streets he had just run through. It identified itself along the street with a bright splotch of neon red light that ran along the top of the building, spelling out
Wal-Mart
.

Wayne approached it slowly. A fractured voice in his subconscious questioned the presence of the store. It wasn’t right. Yet, in contradiction to the tiny, isolated thought, the sign remained with its bright electric red and blue beacon. The glass windows were papered in advertisements from the inside, offering chocolate for ninety-nine cents, six rolls of toilet paper for two dollars, bourbon for seven, and an endless run of colourful items that Wayne had never seen before, their prices bursting out in red and yellow.

Dimly aware he was doing it—and without knowing why—Wayne dropped his cigarette to the ground and entered. Inside, the light was bright. So bright that it would have been in competition with the big spot lights used on movie sets; but unlike those, which worked with one huge, bright, hot focus, the lights in Wal-Mart ran along the roof and gained strength by reflecting off the white floor and ceiling. It gave the building’s presence a hazy, indistinct quality as if it were constantly shifting in and out of focus until finally it did settle, and a sense of calm settled over Wayne.