Raising Stony Mayhall (16 page)

“Yet we can’t allow it to happen again. Mr. Blunt?”

Mr. Blunt raised a wooden hand. He held a pair of pliers. The LDs in the room stepped back, as if they were vampires and somebody had just whipped out a cross. Valerie shook her head and left the room. Elizabeth looked confused.

Delia said, “You can do this yourself, Roger, or I’ll do it for you.”

“Don’t I get an appeal? There’s some sort of appeal process, right?”

She put a hand on Roger’s shoulder. “You or me, Roger?”

The man took the pliers from Mr. Blunt. He stared at the device for a long moment. “All of them?” he asked.

Delia didn’t bother to answer. Roger lifted the pliers and opened his mouth. Half his teeth were missing, and the rest were black. He fastened the pliers on one of his remaining front teeth … and froze. Perhaps thirty seconds passed.

Delia said, “Roger?”

He shrugged and pulled. The tooth popped free. There was no blood. “I really like my teeth,” he said.

“You can keep them,” Mr. Blunt said. “Just not in your mouth.”

he bite. Everything in LD life politics came down to the bite.

Think it’s a sin? Then you were an Abstainer. Did you believe some biting was necessary to maintain the LD population? Ah, a Perpetualist. And if you believed it was high time to stop hiding and rain down the apocalypse on the breathing oppressors—well then, welcome to the Big Biters. They wanted an orchestrated attack on every continent, an outbreak that would spread too far, too fast to be shut down. Millions of humans would die, millions of LDs would be destroyed, but in the end, the dead would rule the earth. An undead utopia built on the bones of untold innocents—until the dead began to fall apart. Yippee.

As Delia tried to tell him the night after she’d rescued him, some of those factions would seize on the weirdness of Stony’s birth and childhood—“that magic fundamentalist shit”—and use it to their own ends.

After his first two months in the safe house, Stony still didn’t know what that meant. “
Why
should I be keeping this secret?” he asked her. He’d already gotten to know Valerie and
a couple of the other residents. Lying about his life made him feel like a spy, an imposter: un-undead. Delia told him to keep his voice down—and to keep quiet for a little while longer. “Somebody wants to meet you,” she said, as if this explained anything.

“Who?”

“Someone who’ll make this clear.” That’s all she would tell him. Then one afternoon a few days later, Aaron backed up the van to the Yellow house, and Delia and Mr. Blunt hustled him into the back.

“Okay,” he said. “
Now
will you tell me?”

“You’re a lucky boy,” Mr. Blunt said. “You’re off to see the Lump.”

Later, he would learn that the six hours in the van had taken them to a house in San Jose, but at the time they refused to tell him where they were going. When they climbed out of the van at 10:30 p.m. they were in a stunningly clean four-car garage, empty except for Aaron’s van and a gleaming black Chevy Suburban with tinted windows. He and Delia and Mr. Blunt started inside the house; Aaron shook his head and said he’d rather wait out here, thanks. They’d be here for less than an hour, and Aaron would have them back to L.A. by morning.

The door from the garage was unlocked and they entered a large space—living room or den or lounge, Stony didn’t have a name for this kind of room—with absurdly high white walls that bounced their voices against their ears. The white furniture and silver floor lamps looked like they’d been placed here solely for photographic purposes.

A tiny black woman, just over five feet tall, entered the room from a far door and closed it carefully behind her. She strode toward them, threw open her arms to Mr. Blunt, and said “At last!”

“Ah, sweet Rose, my riveting Rose,” he said. “As lovely as ever.” He removed his homburg and nodded at Stony. “I want you to meet the most polite dead boy of his generation. Stony Mayhall, this is—”

“Rose?”

“Excellent guess,” she said, and extended a small, thin hand. She was beautifully preserved. Only the gray pallor of her skin and the black of her fingernails signaled that she was LD. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

He glanced at Mr. Blunt. And next to him, Delia, watching. “I’m too polite to ask what he said,” Stony said.

“I’m not too polite to say.” Hanging from her neck on a silver chain was a nobbly gray rock the size of a marble. She said, “Have a seat. He’s finishing up a letter.”

Delia and Rose did not hug, or even shake hands. Delia said, “Could you tell him to speed it up? We’re on a tight schedule.”

Rose laughed, not unkindly, and said, “You know nobody can hurry him.” Stony couldn’t decide if the women liked each other or not. They might have been enemies, or they might have been friends who’d known each other so long, and saw each other so frequently, that they didn’t need to demonstrate their affection.

Stony sat in a chair of white leather and chrome, in front of a glass coffee table the size of a shuffleboard court. Blunt and Rose sat together on a white love seat, conferring, while Delia paced the perimeter of the room, eyeing a line of small framed photographs. The one closest to Stony was of a dark-haired woman, evidently naked, sitting backward on a triangular-backed wooden chair, crossed arms coyly covering her breasts. The other pictures, also in black and white, seemed to be of the same woman and chair, in different poses.
Stony was suddenly sure that this colorless house had never been inhabited by a living person. It had been built, furnished, and abandoned, and Rose and her crew were squatters. Maybe they were staying only for the night. They’d shut the door behind them and the whole place would collapse into a box the size of a Chinese food container.

“You all right, my boy?” Mr. Blunt asked.

“I’m fine,” Stony said. “It’s been a while since I’ve been in a room that didn’t smell of cigarettes.” In his experience, that was the smell of the dead: cigarettes and old clothes. “I’ll be right back.”

He went back out to the garage. Aaron sat in the front seat of the van, with the door open, pulling at his beard and reading a copy of
Omni
magazine. Stony said, “We’re just sitting around in there. There’s some nice couches.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“I feel weird that you never come inside,” Stony said.

Aaron looked at him.

Stony said, “I mean, I don’t want you to think … that
I
think you’re just some chauffeur. Because you’re not. Not to me.” Aaron didn’t say anything. “I think what you do for us is so important. Because really, the LDs and the breathers—the living people? There’s not really any difference between us.”

“You don’t think there’s a difference?” Aaron asked. He put down the magazine.

“Not a
fundamental
difference. We’re all people.”

“Kid,
your
people are
dead
. And you creep me the hell out.”

“Then why do you—? I mean, how can you keep helping us if we …?”

“Would you like a persuasive backstory? A two-minute anecdote that explains my personal motivation for joining the
cause? Maybe something about a beloved family member shot in the head by cleanup gangs that makes a man question his values and prejudices.”

Stony thought about this. “That would be good. Sure.”

Aaron laughed. “Your appointment’s ready, kid.”

A shriveled, dark-skinned LD man, wearing a shiny green tracksuit with white stripes, stood in the doorway. Stony thought, The great and mysterious Lump wears a tracksuit? The man nodded at Stony and said, “This way.”

Stony followed him back inside. In the living room, Rose took his arm and they walked toward the far door that Rose had come through earlier. The man in the tracksuit went through the door, and Stony realized that Delia and Mr. Blunt had made no move to follow; he was going in without them.

Stony and Rose went inside. In the moment before Rose shut the door he made out a king-sized bed crowded with pillows and a couple of end tables. Then suddenly the room was dark, illuminated only by a green Lava lamp glowing on a side table. Stony looked at Rose, thinking, Lava lamp? Really?

The man in the tracksuit crawled onto the bed and sat down, facing them. From somewhere he produced a game board that he unfolded across his lap.

Rose sat on the foot of the bed and patted the space next to her. “Stony, this is Rajit, and of course the Lump. He’s been wanting to meet you.”

Stony said, “I’m sorry—what?” Did she mean that Rajit was his name, and the Lump was his title, or—

Then something next to the man moved. Stony sat back, startled, and nearly slipped from the bed. What he’d taken in the dark to be another pillow was a mass of tissue and bone: an eyeless skull without a jawbone; a left shoulder; a torso. It had no right arm, no pelvis, no legs.

The arm reached out to the board on the man’s lap. Only
two fingers remained on the hand, an index finger and pinky. The index finger came down, and the man—Rajit—quietly said, “Enn.” The finger bobbed up and down, and Rajit murmured, “Oh, ess, ee, eye.”

Stony whispered to Rose, “Is that a Ouija board?”

“We’d tried to get him to use a Speak and Spell,” she said. “He likes Rajit’s voice better.”

“Nose itches,” Rajit finished.

“Oh!” Stony said. He glanced at Rose. “Does he want me to …?”

The skull and shoulder swayed left and right, creaking.

“The Lump jokes with you,” Rajit says. “He has no nose.”

“Oh, right.”

Rose said quietly, “You’re supposed to ask, How does he smell?”

The Lump’s hand moved, and Rajit spelled “T, E, R—”

“Terrible!” Stony said, and laughed. Rajit looked annoyed to be interrupted. The Lump swayed and creaked. Stony couldn’t imagine how the Lump managed to move at all. He seemed to be a collection of bones held together by scraps of skin as dried and wrinkled as beef jerky. Was Rajit moving him somehow? Was this an elaborate puppet show?

It seemed to take forever for the next sentence to make its way down the Lump’s arm to his assistant’s lips. Rajit seemed in no hurry to jump to the end of whatever word was being spelled, no matter how obvious. After a torturous three or four minutes, the Lump said, “I hear you are a scientist.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Stony said. “Though I do like science. I’m just … curious.”

“Show me your hands,” the Lump eventually said.

“My hands?”

The Lump’s arm gestured toward him, and Stony held out both his palms. The torso shifted, and the skull dropped forward
with a crack! Stony thought that the head had snapped from the neck and was about to drop into his hands, but no, it stayed attached, bowed in an attitude of close inspection, studying him with those empty sockets.

This is ridiculous, Stony thought. How the hell can it see? What would the photons bounce off of?

The Lump’s arm reached back, and Rajit began to spell again. Stony looked at Rose, thinking, This could take forever.

“The dead stick moves in the wind,” Rose said.

“Pardon?” Stony asked.

“It’s something the Lump said once—you don’t mind if I repeat it, do you, Lump? ‘The dead stick moves in the wind, and believes it moves itself.’ I think we all suffer under that illusion, LDs and the living alike.”

Eventually Rajit said, “I hear that in Iowa you did a lot of digging.”

Stony smiled, out of nervousness he supposed. How much did the Lump know about him? Was it okay for him to talk about his past here? “Yes, I suppose I did do a bit more shoveling than most kids my age,” he said. “It turned into a kind of hobby.” He faltered, because the arm was moving again, but he decided to keep talking. “I excavated my entire basement and a little extra besides. I had a lot of time on my hands.”

Several minutes passed as the Lump said, “Sounds like you worked your fingers to the bone.”

“You could say that,” Stony said, then suddenly realized, he should have worked his fingers down to the bone. He looked at his palms again, and his smooth, unmarked fingers. All that work with the shovel, all that friction. In a living body, skin blistered, cells died and flaked off, and had to be replaced with living tissue. But Stony’s hands were fine.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Stony said.

Rose said, “We’re all impossible.”

“Bee,” Rajit intoned.

Stony sat still, spelling along with the assistant.
Be you
, he said to himself.
Bee you tee. Beauty
. The long gaps between sentences seemed to stretch his thoughts. Why were his hands so beautiful? If he was dead—and despite what Alice had told him the day Kwang shot him, he
was
dead, at least metabolically speaking—why wasn’t he decaying? Why weren’t any of them rotting? Given that, was the Lump’s bizarre persistence in the world, despite the absence of 80 percent of a body, any more unlikely than his own?

Finally the Lump stopped moving his arm, and he spoke. “But some of us,” he said through Rajit, “are more impossible than others.”