Finch by Jeff VanderMeer (8 page)

"Thank you," he said. The words came out a little ragged. "Long
day. I'll call when I take them. If the phones work."

"I'll come up and knock if I don't hear," she said. In return, he knew
he'd have to help push back the encroaching river one more time.
Each task had its own price with Rathven.

She shut the door, taking the light with her.

Finch's apartment was near the end of the hall. Had to negotiate a
hothouse wetness to get there. Tendrils and caps of red-and-green fungus
sprouted from the walls. Gray caps only cared about keeping the streets
clean. No help from his next-door neighbors, either. Almost like they
thought it gave them camouflage.

No one around, except his cat Feral, a big brute of a tabby, crying
to be let in. Bumping up against his legs while Finch made shushing
sounds. Feral was loud, always trying to trip Finch and bring him
down to eye level.

Sometimes the little old man in the apartment opposite heard Finch
and came out, but not tonight. A former accountant, the man liked
to sit in a shaft of sunlight from the hall window. Smile and talk to
himself and nod, and read from the same ragged book.

Two minutes to unlock and then relock. Only Sintra knew the
sequence. Still not comfortable with that idea. Had thought about
changing the key.

Flash of another dark room. A worn bed. White sheets dull in the
shadow. Didn't look like anyone had slept in it in months. Dusty floor. Two
corpses.

Flipped a switch. Relief when the lights actually came on. Faded
floral print wallpaper. Root-like edges to the frayed beige carpet.
Worn-out furniture.

Relief at being able to hang up the role of detective in the closet,
along with his jacket. To let the tough exterior come off like a mask
worn for a festival.

"Hold on for Truff's sake," Finch said to Feral as the cat ran to the
kitchen through the living room.

Feral had wide round eyes. They gave his owlish face a perpetual
look of surprise. Finch had rescued him as a kitten from a fungus that
had wound tendrils around the animal while he slept. Still had purple
patches on his flanks, sometimes growing, sometimes not.

No sign of Sidle, his windowsill lizard. Never really knew if it was
the same lizard anyway. Felt compelled to pretend for some reason.

After feeding Feral, Finch put the two memory bulbs on the kitchen
counter. Poured himself a glass of Trillian's Premium Whisky, aged
eighteen years. An F&L brand trading off a famous name. Something
no self-respecting H&S man would've drunk before the Rising. He
had six bottles left in the closet. Next to the boxes of cigars. These
had been his father's habits, his legacy. Nothing better had replaced
them. The smell of cigar smoke made him feel like his father was right
there, beside him.

Cigars. Whisky. Both working as a kind of peculiar clock or timer.
When they ran out, would his life as Finch run out, too?

Heretic's touch like wet, dead leaves sewn together and stuffed with meat.

Dinnertime, but he wasn't hungry.

A long, shuddering sigh as he sat in the old leather chair next to the
couch in the living room. Under the light of an old glass lamp shaped
like an umbrella that he'd taken from the lobby. Watched the dusk
dissolve into night.

On the far wall hung three of the hotel's original tourist scenes of
Albumuth Boulevard. A far better view than the one from the small
balcony abutting the kitchen. All the balcony could show him was
more of the night sky, a sliver of the two towers, and the alley below.
A view saved for emergencies. A second view could be had from the
bathroom by opening the small latched window and standing on the
toilet. Finch could look down into the courtyard whenever he wanted.
Between the two sight lines, he had as much forewarning as he could
expect. If what came after him was human.

Not a bad place. At least he had a separate office next to the kitchen
and extra bookcases, overflowing, on the wall closest to the door. He'd
made them from planks torn up from the rotting eleventh floor.

Even before the Rising, Finch had enjoyed reading. So many nights at
the old house in the valley he and his father had sat reading in silence,
separate yet together. To block out the night. The wars. Now the gray
caps' camps lay so close that a crushed foundation under a heap of
garbage was all that remained of the house. Nothing left but the books
and other things he'd rescued.

Some books had been bought during cease-fires. Before the
Rising destroyed the idea of bookstores. A few had come from his
grandparents, who had returned to the Southern Isles when he was
ten. Memories of them were like spent matches dull against a sudden
darkness. He leafed through the books for signs of them sometimes.
A folded letter. A note that never dropped to the floor.

But most of the books had been his father's, rescued from the old
home. About a dozen Finch knew from long repetition, part of his
father's home-schooling when it was too dangerous to go to class.

His father had started out as a brilliant engineer. In his youth, he had
served in the Ambergris military in that brief, bright window when they'd
taken on the Kalif's empire. He was with the troops as they advanced
into a desert strewn with oases and hunched trees with gnarled black
branches. As they took the Kalif's lands, and contemplated their own
vision of conquest. As they were pushed back.

With Finch's mother dead in childbirth, his father had raised him
after the war. A strange life, seesawing between wealth and poverty.
Father's many important yet strange friends. His connections with
Hoegbotton & Sons. And yet sometimes things had been bad enough
Finch's father had supported them doing odd jobs and trading books
for food. Or burning books for fuel.

Back at the old house, there had been many photographs of his father.
The broad-chested muscular form of the man, tight in that characteristic
Ambergrisian uniform of olive green. Wedge of a hat tilted to the side as
was the fashion. On a hill or in a city or atop a tank. Surrounded by fellow
soldiers or alone. Always smiling. Eyes dark dots looking into the camera.
Seeming aware of future fame, but not of how it would come. Nor of how
far he would fall.

Finch had chosen "John" for his new identity because it was
his father's name. "Finch" was just a common bird, a creature no one would ever notice. He'd burned all photographs except
one the night he'd changed his name. Displayed on the mantel,
it showed his grandparents just arrived from the Southern Isles.
At the docks with their suitcases beside them. Looking faded,
remote, and confused. Grandpa had been a carpenter. Grandma
a homemaker. There were no relatives on his mother's side. His
father was four years old in the photo. This image was all Finch
was willing to risk.

Once, Sintra had asked about the people in the photo. He'd said
he didn't know them. That he'd found the photo on the street and
liked it. True, to a point. Hadn't known the four-year-old. Never
really knew his grandparents. Just another nonmemory from a lost
life, and most days he didn't regret that.

On the back of the photograph, his father had scrawled a few
lines: "Sometimes a man will see in his own image a desert, and it
is the need to make that desert bloom which drives him again and
again to action, as hopelessness compels us to our end. Sometimes,
too, a man will flee in the enemy's direction, eager to weather any
punishment-physical or mental-that proves he is still alive. Or,
he does so from a pride that lies to him, tells him he can change
what seems unchangeable." From a book? His own thoughts? Finch
would never know.

Feral jumped up on his lap. Began to purr as Finch petted him.

The rough-smooth taste of the whisky scratched and soothed his
throat. He sank further into his chair. Maybe Sintra would come by
tonight.

Never lost.

"Yes, I know, fat boy," Finch murmured. Could sit there all night.
Forget what he had to do and pull out a book that he'd read three or
four times already. Pretend he lived in a better world.

Turned on the small radio on the table next to him. Feral
stopped purring for a second. Only one station across the dial:
the gray caps' station. Gone any cacophony of voices and music.
Usually just a single signal, filled with cryptic clicks and whistles.
Punctuated by propaganda delivered in flat tones by human
readers. ". . . A spy is caught and killed just outside the Zone ... Sector 509 has been scheduled for renovation. Anyone living there should
relocate immediately."

But, tonight, nothing. That made thirty-seven days of static. What
did it mean? Was it just another slackening of attention? Or something
more serious? Finch had noticed a pattern. The new dislodged the old.
A puppet government in place for six months dissolved when the gray
caps turned to building the camps. Electricity no longer reliable since
they'd started in on the two towers. These failings brought a twisted
optimism. Maybe they can't do everything at once. Or maybe there was a
purpose to all of it that he just couldn't see.

He pushed a complaining Feral off his lap. Walked back into the
kitchen.

The memory bulbs lay on the counter. Vaguely round. Pitted and
whorled. Smelling of both salt and offal. Already rotting?

Finch looked down at the cat, which had followed him expecting a
treat. Wondered what would happen if he fed a bulb to Feral.

"You want to eat one of these and I'll eat the other?" he asked Feral.

The cat walked back into the living room. Finch laughed. "Smart
choice." Picked up the phone receiver, dialed Rathven's number. A
crackling interference. At least it's working.

Through the static: "I'm taking one now. Give it an hour. If I don't
call back, check on me."

"I will. Be safe."

"Thanks."

Finch put the receiver down. Be safe. Don't slip on the carpet. Don't
fall out the window.

Which poison first? Finch picked up the orange one. Get the worst
over with first.

Each time he ate a memory bulb, he became someone else. Different
when he returned.

These would be his fourth and fifth. The first had belonged to a girl
of ten and had given him nightmares for a year. Montages of a ragged
doll. Soup made with dog bones. A bleak apartment without even
wallpaper. Turned out there'd been no foul play. Her parents dead,
she'd starved to death. The second had been a young man, the third a
young woman. A double suicide unspooled in his head. Left him with longings he didn't know he had. Regrets that weren't his. Memories
of people he didn't know. Or want to know.

Finch had never eaten two in one night.

How many would change him by just a little too much?

Fuck it.

Opened his mouth wide. Placed the bulb on his tongue. The taste
of the gray cap bulb was dry. Like dirt and sand. The worst part was
you had to eat them whole. Crunch down on the ridiculous size of it
until your jaw ached. No good cutting them up, grinding them down to
paste, adding them to food or water. Ruined the effect. His skin prickled
as his mouth took in the strange texture, the taste. An odd, sickening
blend of cinnamon-pepper-lime. Sour breath.

Dread, and yet also a thin layer of anticipation. To be taken out of
his own life. If only for a little while.

He stumbled into the chair. Feral butted his head up against his
slack arm.

Memories didn't come out the way one might expect. Nothing logical
or ordered about them. Almost as if you were standing on a street corner as
a motored vehicle raced by. As it passed you, a thousand pieces of confetti
flew up. You had to try to catch as many of them as you could before they
hit the ground.

Finch closed his eyes.

Leaned back.

Let it hit him all at once.

Come to:

At the bottom of a well. Layers of rough stone spiraled up to a
distant pale light. A wriggling mass of worms or insects or something
thick and strange pushing down through the light, extinguishing it.
Sudden image of a monstrous City, balanced atop a single building
greater than anything ever built in Ambergris, and it all housed in a
cavern so huge that the ceiling is lost in blue-tinged darkness.

Come to (faster now):

A stumbling, jerky run through a tunnel. A surrounding mob of
gray caps click and whistle with insane speed. A glimpse of blue sky,

winking out. A burning motored vehicle, ancient model. A parade
with a huge black cat caged and orange-yellow-green lights spread
out along the route. Superimposed: an enormous grub drowning in a
sack of its own liquid skin. A dark-green frond of fungus five stories
high. Blood, lots of blood, pooling out across the ground. A man's
face, in extreme agony, suddenly gone black in silhouette, turning
into a huge door made half of volcanic rock and half charred book
cover. And on top of the door a smaller door, and a small door set
into that one. Hand on the doorknob. Opening ...

Come to (slower now):

A stone fortress in a desert. Spinning out into open space-falling,
falling, falling. And then a face Finch recognizes, the dead man's,
smiling. Beatifically. More mud and dirt and the smell-sound of a
river nearby. Side view of water flowing, ear to the grass. Something
licks the moisture from his eyes before huffing and going on its way.
Falling again, through black fabric studded with stars. The dead man
falling, too, staring right at Finch, expression oddly calm. Words
from the man's mouth in the clicks and whistles of the gray caps'
language. And then, a sudden and monstrous clarity that can never
be put into words.

Come to:

Moving slowly among a thousand swaying fungal trees in a
thousand vision-shattering shades of green. Nearby, a rotting
tank with the insignia of the Houses on its side, asleep under
the fruiting bodies. The sound of footsteps. A hint of movement
other than spores, strained through the heavy sky. Hunting for
something. But what? A man. Moving in front of them. Night.
Strange numbers and words spilling out emerald against a field of
darkness. Shadowing the man. The orange sky dominated by the
shambling hulks of floating fungal fortresses. Things crawl and fly
and swim between the fortresses. Running now, just yards behind
the man. But the man was turning to face them. The man was
looking right at him when he disappeared. Winked out. Leaving
only the smile. And that only for an instant. An intense feeling of confusion and surprise. Then: falling through cold air and couldn't
feel his legs.