Resurrection Man (6 page)

Dante said, "I can't tell you that."

Jet jumped off the bureau with a tight laugh, tense with fury. "You're an angel, damn it! You can find out."

"I can't. I don't know how."

"Well
learn
!" And with a savage jerk, Jet yanked the bedspread off Dante's bureau to leave the white marble top bare.

Dante's body lay under the mirror's cold unblinking eye. He was dead.

Dante couldn't scream. He couldn't move.

Helpless, he stared into the mirror. Helpless, he saw himself bending over the corpse. Only he was wearing his father's face, and he held a scalpel in his hand.

*   *   *

"The autopsy is like the third movement of a sonata," his father once said. "The Body; the Life; the Body Reconsidered."

*   *   *

Dante reconsidered himself, lying dead and mutilated in the boathouse. An autopsy is all about time, he thought. Alive we stand against the stream and hold our shape; dead, we drift with the current, carried from the land of the living and lost at last even to memory.

Holding the tissue apart with the thumb and index finger of his left hand, he peered down into his own dead abdomen at a white, fibrous sac, of the sort spiders fill with their eggs. It was half the size of a football, engulfing most of his liver and half a kidney.

"Dear God," Sarah whispered. She grabbed for a bait pail and retched.

Standing beside Dante, Jet reached down with one finger to touch the sac, ever so gently. "Still warm," he said.

*   *   *

Hands shaking, Dante stripped off his rubber gloves and looked away from the white sac growing in his body cavity. He conld feel the growth inside him now, a sticky alien mass webbed around his vital organs. Threads of it like cobweb tangling his heart.

He didn't want to die. Not yet. Please, God.

The sudden blank uselessness of his life yawned under him like a pit. Thirty-one years old and what had he done? Nothing. Never finished his degree, never fell in love.

Oh, he had felt affection for women—lots of women. But love? Love was something else again. What he felt for Jet and Sarah, Mom and Dad and Aunt Sophie, was not an emotion, but a fact: something as real as a stone.

He had never let a woman get that close to him. He had never made a family of his own. Never would.

He glanced at Sarah, twenty-eight and smart and grown, and saw buried in her his baby sister: a chubby toddler gone missing, he and Jet the frantic babysitters running like madmen up and down the river trails for half an hour before Dante saw her at last, pelting down a path and laughing and waving her diaper overhead like the banner of a victorious legion.

Sarah had stopped retching. She took a long moment to steady her nerves, and then forced herself to consider the body in the boat. A humorless smile flickered across her mouth. "Was it not Socrates who said, 'The unexamined death is not worth dying'?"

Dante's heart hammered endlessly inside his chest. Up the hill, Grandfather Clock would still be ticking in the parlor, long after the last ember in the fireplace had smoked and died. Mother and Father would be lying in their twin beds; Aunt Sophie would be dreaming her unquiet dreams of crows and cigarettes.

Sarah studied the white growth in the dead Dante's abdomen. "Maybe Dad can cut it out. If there's one of these in you, I mean."

A nightmare image raced through Dante: his father, bending over him, slitting him open. The slide of the knife through his organs. His heart, beating in his father's hands.

Dante shook his head. "It's got its hooks into too many vital systems. Liver. Kidneys. Spleen maybe. Heart maybe. It's too late for surgery." Dante shuddered, feeling the barbed world biting into him with thin, evil little hooks.

"What do we do with the body?" Sarah asked.

"Let's burn it," Dante said. "Burn the sac and the body both. Burn everything. Then I'll drink myself into a coma," he added. "Fabulous idea."

Sarah ignored him. "We can't toss it in the river. What if it drifts ashore? ...I suppose we could cremate you—"

"It!"

"—It, so it wouldn't be recognized." Sarah paused, frowning. "Unless you think burning it would hurt you. Give you a fever or something. Of course, we already cut it open without you fountaining blood."

At the word "blood," Dante felt his pulse with unnatural distinctness, throbbing in his neck and chest and at the base of his thumb. Goodbye, lovers: Mei's little white teeth and Tania's mound, firm as a peach beneath his hand. Goodbye, Laura my friend: thanks for the pots of green tea we drank in your tiny porcelain cups. Goodbye, Aunt Sophie, with your coins and cigarettes; Sarah with your embroidered vests and acid wit. Goodbye, Mom: with one Scots glance you could size me up to the last pound, shilling, and pence.

Goodbye, Jet: I loved you too well to have done so badly by you.

Ave, Pater: morituri te salutamus.

"We should bury the body," Dante said at last. He glanced at it, slit down the middle, the skin pulled over the sharp ends of the ribs "to avoid puncture wounds during subsequent manipulations."

Jet laid a thin hand on Dante's corpse, touching it on the hip, the groin, gently probing the edges of the slit belly. "I want to know why I'm different." Slowly he stood up, hands leaving the corpse. "I want to know why I wear this," he said, tracing the butterfly birthmark that spread over his cheek.

"So we'll ask Mom and Dad," Dante said. "Sarah can tackle Mom while you and I are burying this... thing."

"That's not enough," Jet said softly. "You can't just bury it and walk away, Dante. You're going to die if you don't find out what's going on. And then I'd never find out what happened to me."

"For Christ's sake," Dante said heatedly. "I looked, didn't I? I looked at the damn body; I dragged it down and opened it up—"

("Sort of like a fortune cookie, when you think of it," Sarah murmured.)

"—What the hell else do you want from me?"

Without answering, Jet grabbed Dante's hand and pulled it down onto the corpse's open chest. A surge of dread crackled over Dante's skin as from a prison deep inside himself a forbidden memory broke free, rank with sweat and fear.
The darkness. The heavy chopping of the fan in the next room.

A huge hand on his leg.

Dante snatched his hand away from the corpse.

"Hey! Boys! Check your testosterone at the door," Sarah said sharply.

Jet shrugged. "An angel is what you are, Dante. You'd better face up to that if you want to stay alive."

"I don't think you know what you're asking of me," Dante murmured.

The butterfly on Jet's cheek trembled. "Everything," he said.

A tiny spider's leg began to clamber up from the body's slit throat. Dante bit his lip until it bled, until the spider crawled away, until he felt the vision seep back inside himself like water soaking into the earth.

"Okay," he said.

P
RAYER INDEED IS GOOD.
B
UT WHILE CALLING ON THE GODS A MAN SHOULD HIMSELF LEND A HAND.
   —H
IPPOCRATES

CHAPTER
FOUR

Even by the time Dante and his siblings were sneaking his dead body out to the boathouse at their family house a mile outside the City, Laura Chen was still at work. Long after lights had winked out in the buildings around her (glass and steel monoliths by I. M. Pei, with no feeling for the rolling hills or the river—what had the man been thinking of?), Laura remained behind, pondering the tricky question of remodeling Mr. Hudson's home. He wanted a solarium, and the logic of his house suggested that it be built on the southeast corner, but according to his geomancer the year was not propitious for building in that quadrant.

Sometimes Laura stood hunched and still over the blueprints spread across her drafting table. Other times she prowled the office, gulping down cup after cup of strong black coffee as she considered her options.

They could, of course, conduct purifying rituals to attract the influence of the two auspicious stars that Mr. Ling, the geomancer, said were in Hudson's ascendant. Mr. Ling was willing to do his best, but at heart he felt this would be a Band-Aid solution. Laura tended to agree. She had no particular talent for feng shui, though she had a good grasp of its principles, but her architect's sensibilities were enough to convince her that cosmetic quick-fixes were no substitute for building on a solid foundation.

So—if the solarium wasn't to face southeast, where should it go? And how would the rest of the house have to be altered to allow its harmonious integration?

It was at times like these—up late, weary, and struggling with another impossible feng shui problem—that she almost wished her great-uncle had been less famous. It was the exalted name of Chen Dai Fei, one of the Five Founders of the Permitted City, that caused Chinese clients to choose his niece to do their work. Though still only a junior partner at Jaundice & Park, Laura was by far the most at ease working in the interdisciplinary approach the Permitted City project had pioneered. Mr. Jaundice was only really comfortable with engineers and contractors. Ms. Taft had mastered the ergonomists' lingo, and Mr. Park spoke a smattering of sociologese but only Laura could sit down with a geomancer without feeling silly. Laura always remembered to bury a charm under the foundation stone of a client's house, and she alone in the firm knew how to counteract the inauspicious influence of a hard-lined building going up across the street by the careful placement of a few inexpensive 8-Trigram mirrors.

Not that she believed everything the geomancers told her: divination, though getting better every year, was still an inexact science. Her attitude to the angels she worked with was much like her attitudes about God: clearly there was something going on. If she had her doubts from time to time that her priest or geomancer knew exactly what that something was, she still thought it foolish not to say her prayers, or listen to Mr. Ling's advice.

What made this commission particularly delicate was that Mr. Hudson was not Chinese at all, but an eighth-generation American who bled Boston blue. Success in her projects for non-Chinese customers was critical; if these clients prospered, if they felt happy and serene in the houses she designed for them, she would have made her contribution to the work of Tristan Chu, Gary Snyder, and a host of others: convincing Americans that the Permitted City techniques worked. If the American public believed that, her presence would give her firm a decided edge in the marketplace. It had been hinted, even by so august a luminary as old Mr. Jaundice himself, that if the number of wealthy clients seeking her services continued to swell, she might soon find her name appended to the firm's.

Well, Great-uncle's name, she thought wryly. That's what the customers were really paying for.

She poured herself another cup of coffee. Unfortunately, it was not Great-uncle who did the work. (Well—three times Uncle Chen had sent dreams to guide her, but those were exceptions, not the rule, and anyway she preferred to solve her problems on her own.)

It was five cups of coffee past closing time when finally she sighed, rubbed her eyes, and flipped off the lamp over her drafting table. Opening her desk, she reached past her slide rules and mechanical pencils to a thin horsehair brush and a pot of red ink. On special yellow charm paper, thin and crackly as crepe, she inscribed two talismans, one for Chen Dai Fei and one for her father. These she burned in the small grate on her desk, offering up her daily prayer of thanks. Then she belted on her raincoat, locked up, and flipped off the lights.