Dead Americans (9 page)

“Yeah,” Twain said uncomfortably, wanting to step back, but unable too. “I understand why you want one, but maybe you’ve looked at it wrong. Maybe things aren’t as bad as you say. At any rate, there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“That’s untrue,” the other replied quietly, an underlying menace in his voice. “You bring with you a culture that can be embraced. A symbol for a revolution that can wash away the old hatred, and bring a new beat to the city.”

“But—”

Cadi’s bony hand plunged into Twain’s chest before he could finish. The pain was immense: it spread through every fibre of his body, terrible, and inescapable. It was death. He knew that. He would never see his wife or daughters again, never write another word; it was all over . . . and then, through the pain, he felt the beat of his heart fill his body like the sound of a drum, beating the tempo of his life . . . 

It stopped.

Cadi pulled his bony arm out of his chest, the flesh and bone parting until it released the still beating heart of Mark Twain.

Seeing it, Twain’s consciousness failed, his legs went weak, and he began to fall.

“I will not let the English win,” said Cadi without remorse, his voice reaching through the pain and shock.

The ground rushed up to Twain. Black and solid, he could not avoid it, he could not escape it, and he did not want to escape. Let it be over, let it finish, let him go. He could still feel his heart beating, but it was no longer his own: it was stolen, ripped from him to be placed into a city he barely knew. It would do no good. The spirit was wrong: revolutions were not done with symbols and stolen cultures, they were seeded from within, grown from what was the land and people, created anew. Change would rise in Sydney only when the city was its own creature, when the people in it embraced it, when they understood all that had happened. Change could not be forced; to do so would result only in a cosmetic, shallow, tainted beast—the exact kind Cadi fought against. Realizing this, Twain wanted to cry it out, to tell Cadi that it was futile, that he was
wrong
, that he had to acknowledge the past, that he had to accept it and resolve the issues that arose from it; that only by doing this could he destroy the rotten hands that held Sydney in its stranglehold; but he could not cry out.

The black slab of the ground raced up. Mark Twain dreamed no more.

1.
In the story, Jigalulu’s spear does not kill the shark. Instead, the shark flees, breaking the spear but leaving the stingray spines imbedded, thus forming the fin that warns men of a shark’s approach. While this is most certainly an Aboriginal story, the notion that the Eora of Sydney believed the stingray to be a sacred creature is not. The idea can be found in Tim Flannery’s the Birth of Sydney, where he also informs the reader that the largest of the stingrays taken from the Harbour weighed, when gutted, 200 kilograms.

2.
The word means father, and in this case, applies to Governor Arthur Phillip. Phillip’s title was given because he was missing a front incisor, which, in one of the tribes native to that part of Sydney, would be knocked out of the mouth of a boy during the ritual of manhood. Therefore, it was assumed that Phillip, who led the returning spirits, was part of the Eora.

3.
Governor Philip officially named it Toongabbie in 1792, who took the name—and the land—from the Tugal clan living there.

4.
In 1791, Burramatta was renamed Parramatta by Governor Phillip, the name rising from Phillip’s spelling and pronunciation of the Aboriginal word.

5.
Historian Robert Hughes, in
The Fatal Shore
, notes a line of clay pipes that were made the week after Bold Jack Donohoe’s death at the hands of the authorities. They were modelled after his head, and came complete with a bullet hole in the temple, where he had been shot. They were bought, Hughes noted, by emancipated convicts and free settlers, but not in recognition of the lawfulness of Jack’s death. Rather, they were bought as part of the celebrity cult that surrounded the favoured outlaw, and highlighted the local resentment towards the English officers.

6.
About the Aborigines, King wrote, ‘I have ever considered them the real Proprietors of the Soil.’ Australian history, however, would not remember him, or these words. King would be remembered, instead, as a politically weak man who married his cousin.

7.
In 1808, the Rum Corps would depose of King’s successor, Governor Bligh, and rule the colony for two years while treating it as their own bank to become rich, landed gentry. When removed from power, none of the Corps would be executed or severely punished; their leader, John MacArthur, a common born Englishman, would instead be remembered as the man who laid Australia’s financial backbone with the wool industry he begun.

1. Benjamin Li.

2. 12/8/56.

3. China.

4. Between Seattle and Beijing.

5. Divorced, two children, one dog, seven tropical fish.

6. I ran the Occult Research Division of BrandyCorp.

7. Eight years.

8. Before that I was primarily a freelance contractor, but I spent seven years in the employ of the Reagan Administration and, later, three in Fox Networks.

9. Nick Carlton was the owner of BrandyCorp.

10. Rarely.

11. I reported to the managing director, Amanda Tae.

12. As I said previously, I had very little contact with him, but it was obvious that Mr. Carlton was a Magician. I do not know what God or Goddess he took his power from, if any.

13. No. I watched Ronald Reagan cut the wet, bloody heart out of a living, virginal thirteen-year-old girl to feed an Astoteele demon at dinner. At the end of the night, the President had formed a pack with the demon’s family to ensure that a low-grade hypnotic suggestion would be processed through his voice whenever it was electronically played. So in comparison,
no
, I did not have any moral objection to Mr. Carlton.

14. BrandyCorp did not sanction any religion.

15.
Supposed
Son of God.

16. Well, three days after I dissected him, he did not get up.

17. Why would I want to eat the flesh of a fake messiah? Don’t be stupid.

18. John Doe (he refused to give his real name) was still alive when he was bought to me. He had a broken leg and bruises from the plastic bullets that had been used to incapacitate him. Otherwise, he was a healthy thirty-two-year-old Caucasian male.

19. Angry. We had stopped him from attending a sold-out faith healing event in Florida that had been organized to by the Republicans.

20. Mr. Carlton did visit him. Twice, in fact.

21. Their first conversation was about Johnny Cash. They shared a cigarette through the bars of Doe’s cell, and discussed the line in the song ‘the Man in Black’ about Jesus, Love, and Charity, and how Mr. Carlton thought it was out of place in a song he otherwise agreed with. But yet, he said, flicking the tobacco off his fingers after he rolled a cigarette, he still wore the black. The second conversation, a week later, was private, and ended with Mr. Carlton ordering his execution.

22. Only speculation.

23. Lethal injection.

24. Before his death, John Doe said quietly, “I have done so much wrong.”

25. The demon attacks began shortly after that. Employees of BrandyCorp were issued with various talismans: chicken feet charms, demon-touched crosses, braids made from the hair of murder victims, and hands of glory.

26. A memo from Mr. Carlton on the 19
th
was the last I heard from him, but Amanda Tae claimed to be in contact with him until the end.

27. The memo talked primarily about the goals of the Republican Administration, but also made a reference to the Johnny Cash music that was being piped into the building. I believe it was his entire oeuvre, including rare live covers, and on continual repeat. I read the memo while listening to Johnny Cash sing ‘Wanted Man’.

28. Amanda Tae instructed us to stay away from Texas and Washington.

29. No. She sent me to Texas.

30. It was the 20
th
of May, around two weeks before Reagan’s death.

31. Empty. There wasn’t a soul there.

32. I was sent to deal with the previously mentioned Astoteele demon family. The family was well kept and living in a fortified compound: two days later, with only three fingers remaining on my left hand, an empty bag of charms, every spell I knew used, and favours owing to a swamp witch, the demons were killed. Not banished, but killed: every black ounce of their family removed from
every
plane of existence. The result was that for the first time since Reagan, a President spoke to the country without a hypnotic suggestion in the back of his voice.

33. Redemption.

34. The White House retaliated with Reagan’s death.

35. It wasn’t a very subtle reaction. The Reagan funeral procession was so heavy handed that my eight-year-old son could taste the blood sacrifices tied to the body and coffin in Beijing. Still, it stopped a nation from paying too much attention to what the President said, and the fact that everyone in Texas was dead. I suspect that the funeral speeches from the remaining living Presidents would have ensured that whatever spell or summoning had been conducted would last.

36. I did not know that Mr. Carlton planned to visit the coffin, but in hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

37. Initially, there were no spells. He used a grenade.

38. At the time I was enchanting chicken feet and listening to Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire.’

39. That video was the last I saw of Mr. Carlton.

40. No.

41. I do not know where he is, but I doubt that he is dead. When the guards rushed him, you can see that he was smiling. He lifted those silver pistols, began firing, and smiled. In my experience, no man dies smiling.

42. The guns
were
the spell.

43. When you try to picture the events of that day, the two pistols are more important than anything else. That’s all you ever hear about in press releases or news reports, as there is no mention of a body. Just those American guns, speaking to an American audience.

44. No.

45. It was only a matter of time until BrandyCorp defenses were broken. Amanda Tae and I had been organizing the slow evacuation of the staff since my return from Texas. We replaced workers and families with flesh replicas, though the replicas were only good for six weeks after being taken from their plastic wrapping. They decompose like real flesh, eventually.

46. It was decided that Amanda Tae and I would be the last to leave. Captain of a ship, that sort of thing, though if I were to be honest, there was more to it. A loyalty. However, we planned to have the remaining staff out within three days, but then, mid-week, our defenses broke. The walls cracked. The smell of rotting flesh grew. Johnny Cash stopped singing.

47. I told you: Redemption.

48. I knew the girl that Reagan crouched over.

49. It’s an election year. Mr. Carlton was, I think, one of those men who believed in the people. You listen to enough Johnny Cash, and you begin to see it.

50. There was no success in the end. We failed.

Three days before Eliana Stein found the girl made from bronze, the stocky Botanist noted the passing of her twelfth year living in the Aremika Shaft, though she did not celebrate it. That was the kind of woman she was: pragmatic because she lived alone, modest because her vanity did not extend to her celebrating her own successes, and fatalistic because surviving the passage of time, she believed, was an act of submission, not rebellion.

The Shaft (so shortened by all who lived in it) was best described by what it was not: an immense absence of soil. On the yearly journeys Eliana made outside the Shaft and into the low, sprawling, ash-stained Aremika City that circled the Shaft, she told those few who asked that she could not describe the huge emptiness of the Shaft. Rather, she could explain only by its horrific absence. The Shaft, she said, was a deep, burnt scar, and was like the woman who had lost an arm: you did not describe the missing limb to friends, but instead noted its loss, and the way in which that loss cast a shadow over the remaining parts of the individual and rendered them out of harmony with the whole. That is what Eliana felt when she stood in the dark, endless, windy hole that dove through the Earth. The pressure of the disfigurement was always present in the hole: it was the walls, the ground, and the wide emptiness before her. She could feel it constantly, and knew if any part of the Shaft broke, that it would collapse and smother her. There would be nothing that she could do in that eventuality. Even the shifting collection of faint, glowing dots that were scattered further up along the Shaft—the dots that signalled other Botanists who, like herself, wore the luminous clothing of the trade so not to be lost or forgotten by the Botanist Counters outside—even they were nothing against the deep wound that was the Shaft.

For her part, Eliana felt it more than other Botanists did, since she had gone deeper than any other had. It had not been asked of her to do this, but she had chosen the depth through some not yet fully self-explained reason. Still, without knowing the reason, she performed her job of monitoring the soil and helping it heal and grow in density and strength with the pellets that she planted. At her depth, the soil around her alternated between dark, brittle burns and thick, healing brown of varying types; but if she could have gone down further, where there was less life and the soil was hard and brittle like tightly packed blocks of cinder, she would have. The Department of Botany had told her it was simply not safe to go beyond her depth, however, and that they could not lower the unit for her to live in or hook up a cable for her to leave, not until the soil further up was stronger.

On the day that Eliana found the girl made from bronze, thick black ash had fallen into the Shaft during the night. Smoke rose from the factories outside Aremika City daily, and it was perpetually in the sky and ground, but the ash was thick enough to bother her only when all these elements combined. When they did, the ash fell so prodigiously that when Eliana awoke, she found the pathway around her slim, bronze unit coated in black, and the pale fungi that grew across the walls, and which served as the only natural light, was dim beneath it.

It was the ash, however, that led her to the girl.

When Eliana stepped from the unit, she did so holding a thick-headed broom. A brass track ran around the Shaft’s circumference like a tarnished halo. Her unit was mounted on it, and from inside, a gear system allowed her to move manually along the track. However, at the moment, she walked and swept the paths with the broom. If she didn’t clean straight away, the ash would contaminate the soil and leave a horrid stink, especially since it took her a day to walk the circumference of the Shaft. She had no complaints, however, and dutifully followed the path that ran to a bronze plate that anchored a thick, taunt cable into the ground. The cable led up into the dark, joining hundreds of others that disappeared in thin lines up to the surface and the hint of a scabbed red sky that sat at the start of the Shaft. Through the cables, a Botanist received mail and food and, in a swaying, narrow bar that served as a chair, was raised out of the Shaft. Eliana had no mail, left the Shaft only once a year, and was not due a food drop for another two weeks, so it was only by her attention to the detail of sweeping that she found the girl, who had fallen next to the cable. The truth of it was, if the ash fall had not been so heavy, the girl might not have been found alive at all.

But she was.

The girl made from bronze—the Returned, since she was not a real girl—this artificial girl had a loud, irregular moan in her chest: a broken machine whine that announced itself in a grinding of gears. It was loud and troublesome to the woman who held her and every now and then it stopped, as if in death.

When Eliana, holding the heavy, broken figure, first experienced the pause, she did indeed think of it as death, so long and final did the lack of life seem. She stepped to the uneven edge of her path in the Shaft, ready to release the body. To dump the refuse. But with a ragged howl that gargled and coughed life back in a spasm through the girl’s body, her heart returned to its stuttering, moaning journey. Still holding her, Eliana watched as the girl’s eyes flickered open, met the Botanist’s, and then drifted shut.

She was pretty, Eliana thought as she turned, and continued down the rough path, even now. It was a created beauty, however, for Eliana doubted that she had been born with such a cute face, and such smooth, white skin and large, dark eyes. The girl’s short black hair did not feel right against her skin, either: it was too dry, too hard to be real hair, even if it was tangled and dirty, and a patch on the back of her head had been torn away to reveal the bronze skull underneath. There were cuts down her pale face and neck and her clothing was torn, though neither cuts nor clothes showed sign of blood. Not all the Returned bled, however, and in this case, Eliana was pleased. The girl had lost her legs in the fall: they had splintered and broke upon landing, leaving a sharp, twisting mess of jagged bronze, and internal silver and bronze wiring dangled out of her open thighs. Eliana had left a single, preserved foot back at the cable. There was no way to reattach it, and the girl weighed so much already that there was no point in bringing it. In addition to the loss of her legs, the girl had also lost her left hand. It had been torn off from just above the wrist, perhaps as she had grabbed at something, perhaps the cable that ran down to Eliana’s level, the cable that the girl frantically reached for as she fell, as the desperation forced her to struggle to touch it, to grab it, but where the speed of her descent—

Well, who knew?

A cold fluid from the girl was staining the Botanist’s hands, but Eliana ignored it. Worse had touched her hands in her life, but still, she hoped it was not urine. There was no smell to the girl, but the Returned ate, drank, pissed, and shat, simulating the life that they had once been born into, so it would be only a matter of time before the internal parts of her body began to fail if they were as broken as the external parts.

Ahead of her, the slim, pale-lit outline of her unit drew closer. Eliana thanked the God That Could Not See Her that she knew the narrow tracks of the Shaft’s circumference so well that she need not look down, that she did not need her gaze to direct every step. Though she did wish, squat, and strong as she was, that she had not aged so much in the Shaft; that she still had the strength of the thirty year old woman who had descended so long ago and who could have carried the girl without the strain she felt.

In the end, Eliana was forced to set the girl down to gain her strength before continuing. She sat for a few minutes on the path, in the pale glow of her uniform and a brighter cluster of fungi. She was used to seeing things in that eerie glow, but even so, the girl did not look healthy, or functional, or whatever other term you might use for a made person. Did a Return die? Did they go pale and cold? Well, perhaps not cold. The Returned were always cold to touch. With a grunt, Eliana resumed her sure walk with the girl. If she had not been so close to the tarnished, bronze door of her unit when the strain began to tell again, she would have had to rest a second time. Instead, her muscles burning, the Botanist shouldered her way into the narrow unit and, thankful for once that she did not keep her bed upstairs, placed the girl down on the dark blue sheets.

In the bright, yellow light inside the unit, Eliana could see that the girl was made, not just from bronze, but brass as well. The darker and lighter colouring that shone through the tattered remains of skin around her arms and legs suggested imperfection and sickness that had existed long before her fall. The girl’s clothes, which were made from red and brown, likewise hinted at blood and defecation. As if listening to her morbid thoughts, the sick machine moan of the girl’s heart grew louder, as if threatening to burst from its casing, struggling, pushing . . .  and then silent, silent,
silent
, before with a spasm and a cough, it started again.

Though her arms still ached from carrying the girl, Eliana descended to the bottom level of her unit. It was, like all single Botanist units, made from three narrow floors, linked by a set of rungs down the middle. The centre floor was where she slept: there were tall, narrow closets and a comfortable chair that she sat and read in. The top floor held a small kitchen and the single, narrow table that she ate at. The knives and forks and cooking utensils were suspended from the ceiling and dangled like a pit of spikes reversed. When strong winds buffeted the unit, they swayed dangerously and occasionally fell—she had been hit more than once, though thankfully she sheathed all the blades. There was an opening up there that she could push to release smoke and odours from cooking. On the bottom floor was the workbench where she kept her samples, notes, and where she could manufacture pellets. There was also a tiny shower and toilet, the drains of which opened out into the Shaft in what she considered a small contradiction to her work of healing. In the opposite corner was a large cage that ran from floor to floor and which held a single, medium sized crow, all black and smooth, and who watched her with cold glass eyes.

Under those eyes, she sat at her workstation and pulled free a piece of paper. In a thick, bold script, she wrote to the Department of Botany and explained what had happened. In her opinion, Eliana stated, she did not believe the Returned had much time left. She did not ask how the girl had come to be at the Shaft, or how she fell, though she might have, since it was difficult to do either without help; but she did not ask because she was afraid of upsetting someone, which would result in aid not being sent. In her own mind, Eliana had decided that a Botanist had let her through, and the resulting theories of murder and mystery flowered in her mind. Who knew if they were true?

Once she had finished the letter, she placed the note in a small brass case and walked over to the cage. The crow slipped out and perched on her arm with cold claws. It waited patiently as she attached the case to its leg. Once that was done, she climbed up a floor, and released it into the dark of the Shaft.

When Eliana could no longer see the crow, she turned and regarded the girl who lay on her bed, slowly staining her sheets. A smell had begun to emerge: an oil machine mix of urine and shit and something as equally unpleasant. The girl’s body was still moaning, though it reminded her of growling, now, as if it was fighting for life while the rest of it lay dying.

When the girl made from bronze awoke that night, she did not scream.

Eliana had expected her to. She spent the evening in her narrow kitchen, expecting the cry at any moment. Returned or not, the Botanist believed that the sight of shattered limbs and torn skin would be reason enough for horror. At the very least, she had expected tears. But the girl gave neither. Instead, she pushed herself into a sitting position and waited, quietly, until Eliana descended from the kitchen. Having placed her flowing, luminous Botanist uniform in the closet, she now wore a blue shirt and a pair of comfortable, faded black pants. Her tattoos, words and patterns made from red and black ink, twisted along her thick left arm, and around the exposed left-hand side of her neck and foot. It was not until that foot, with its slightly crooked toes, and the nail missing from the smallest, touched the cool bronze floor of the unit, that the girl spoke:

“I appear to be broken.”

Her voice was faint, but purposefully so, rendering it a pampered girl’s voice, the quality of which instantly annoyed the other woman. “Yes,” Eliana replied, curt where she had not planned to be. “You fell.”

“This—this is the—”

“Shaft, yes.”

The girl spoke slowly, each word a chore, the stuttering moan in her chest causing her to pause after every short sentence. “Yes, I fell.”

“You remember falling?”

“Yes.”

“Landing?”

“No.”

Eliana approached the bed. The noxious odour grew, and she struggled to keep it from showing on her face. Folding her thick arms in front of her, Eliana gazed down at the girl, but the latter did not return her gaze. Finally, she said, “I have sent a bird to my department, telling them of you—”

“What?
No!
”

It was her turn to be cut off now, her turn to pause. Her thick eyebrows rose in her only hint of surprise. Before her, the girl, the fragile, lost girl who had fallen, and who had sat before Eliana in a confused haze, disappeared. Evaporated like water beneath the hot red sun. In response, the pity that Eliana had meant to be feeling, but which she could not for reasons she had not been given time to explore, was no longer required, and her dislike, her hostility, which she had been ashamed of, had sudden reason for purchase inside her.

The girl spat out, “Why did you do that?”

“Who are you?”

“
Why?
”

“You’re dying.”

“Ha!”

“You are.”

“Of course I am!”

Eliana had no reply, had not expected that.

The girl made from bronze gave a coughing splutter of a laugh. It was caught between self-pity, self-hate, and desperation, and it ended raggedly as the struggling moan in her chest choked it off. Finally, pushing her single good hand through the tattered remains of her hair, she said, “I won’t be thanking you for this.”