Complete Short Fiction, page 83
Rue and her sister-in-memory Kali walked slowly together through the drying grass, deep in some discussion. If they had been laughing it would have been bad enough, but they seemed to be serious and intent, something much harder to create as the outburst of temporary and local energies.
Lightly and casually, Paula dropped down a few rungs on the ladder, away from the window that loomed so darkly above her. The two young women had stopped and were looking at something. Kali pointed.
Paula had, of course, finally slept with the handsome Nate Krivitsky, he of the blond forearm hair and the nice smell. And what do you know—nothing bad had happened and Nate still looked at her and all seemed well. His father had proved to be an amusing old man with gigantic eyebrows. He’d admired Paula’s cabinet work.
Rue and Kali had crouched down. Something down in the high grass was fascinating. The quality of their attention was unusual. Did they realize that most of what they remembered was false? Did they long for actual experience? This one they shared for real. Did it seem clearer held against the false ones, or, instead, did it seem cheap, poorly made?
Was what Paula remembered of Nate true? Did he exist? Or had she gone back to Leo, back to that house, and had the gentle Nate put in over something else, so that she could look back on at least one decent thing in her life? She would have to go back into the house to check . . . that was right, he wasn’t there today. But his toolbox was. If she opened it and smelled the wood shavings, maybe she could convince herself it was all real. Reality, as Leo had said, was obdurate. She would have to hold on to it.
They were looking at a butterfly. Bright yellow, with black markings, a Tiger Swallowtail. At a butterfly and a dead squirrel. Paula could just see its ragged tail sticking out of the grass. The Swallowtail, perverse by human standards, was strongly attracted to carrion and manure.
Rue pursed her lips, staring at it. “I remember,” she said. “A Tiger Swallowtail. My . . . someone told me once. I remember that.”
“Rue.” Kali’s voice was serious. “Who is that woman?”
“What woman?”
Kali looked over her shoulder in elaborately obvious furtiveness. “The one who keeps looking at us.”
“Oh, her.” The Swallowtail, disturbed, fluttered up into the air, swirled lazily, was gone. “You’ll get used to her. She’s my guardian angel.”
“Oh?” Kali said, and turned away. “Well, I don’t think guardian angels should cry.”
1996
The Fury at Colonus
THE ONLY BLACK ambulance in the city stopped in the littered area at the rear of police HQ. The siren, unsuccessfully repaired many times, sounded like a sobbing infant, one too tired or despairing to cry properly. The dark-cloaked figure of the Fury rolled out of the back and fell to the pavement. Without seeing if his unwelcome passenger had landed safely, the driver gunned the engine, and the ambulance whimpered off.
“Nice to see you back, ma’am,” the desk sergeant said from behind his bulletproof glass, scrolling a schematic smile across the LEDs of the overhead announcement board. The Fury peeled a flattened Coca-Cola cup from her dark coat and dropped it on the floor. It was a hot day, the sunlight molten on the worn squares of the floor, but the Fury kept her ankle-length coat buttoned up to her neck. Only the ends of her thick fingernails stuck out of the overlong sleeves. Her hair was long and stiff with dried blood.
She walked past the rows of desks and the whispers followed her.
“Back?”
“Long one, this time. Rough. Maybe next time she won’t—”
“Shh! Bad luck. Did you hear what happened?”
“Popped Oedipus’s head like a watermelon, when she finally caught up to him. Don’t know why it took so long, with those bad feet of his. . . .”
“Popped his head?”
“Right between her hands.”
“Oh, come on. A watermelon’s impossible, much less a skull. Think you could do that?”
“Hey, I don’t know. Maybe those empty eye-sockets made it easier, gave a pressure release or something. I saw the autopsy photos. Here, I got ’em in my desk.”
“You are a swine. Can I see?”
The Fury opened the door to her office. She had already noted the absence of her name on the frosted glass, and so was prepared for the empty room with its cracked plasterboard and Burger King bag crumpled in a corner. Her heavy desk had left gouges in the floor. As she examined the abandoned space, the one fluorescent remaining flickered and went out, leaving a dismal residual glow, like crushed fireflies.
Her new office was five levels down into the substructure of the building, behind a stack of dented filing cabinets with hand-lettered labels, the black ink faded almost to illegibility. There were two windows, which implied a rise in status, but both revealed nothing but twisted layers of bedrock. They were the sides of aquarium tanks, displaying trapped seas of stone.
They’d moved her collection and arranged it in order on her walls: dangling jump ropes, crowbars bent by the frantic force of their homicidal use, pieces of stained cloth, even her favorite, a more-than-man-sized execution device made of two perpendicular wood beams. The drawers of her desk were still full of teeth and finger bones, and racks of organs in jars filled the shelves. The morgue kept demanding them back, but she always refused to recognize the validity of their paperwork. She was too attached to her souvenirs to let them go. Each was the memory of an avenged wound.
The precise arrangement of the office was all of a piece with the new Director’s meticulousness, and indicated that the Fury’s effectiveness could, and would, be destroyed without ever violating departmental regulations.
The Fury sniffed her desk. Clean as a looted tomb. A key flick, and PENDING files appeared on the computer screen. Nothing flagged for her. Departmental statistics showed that a higher percentage of crimes was being solved. She wasn’t interested in solving crimes. That wasn’t her territory.
As a final indignity, her in tray held a stack of sheets explaining the Department’s new retirement plan. Glossy color photographs showed the green leaves of a place called Kindly Grove, with the legend Gracious and Exclusive! Using her fingernails, she spread them deliberately out on the ancient surface of her desk, tearing and shredding the paper. They would try to wall her in down here, she knew, until she was completely entombed in stone, as she had been before her existence.
As she sat, the trundle of document-laden carts, the flirtatious laughs, the anxious footsteps, the tense discussions, all the sounds of the office, continued, first abashed by her presence behind the door, then unrestrained, as her existence was forgotten.
A drop of liquid fell on the piled sheets, its smack loud in the silence of her office. She turned her head in time to see another blot of crimson appear on the investment options page. Then another, each drop thick, rounded, and shiny. The metallic scent of fresh blood filled the room. A desperate splatter obliterated most of the health benefits. The Fury put her fingernail in a drop, touched it to her tongue—and was out of the office and down the hall.
“Oh, an oversight, of course,” Athena said from behind her garishly painted desk. Her hair was swept up above her head and held in place by rusting metal spikes pulled from some distant battlefield. Her wide gray eyes regarded the Fury calmly.
“You should have been copied on it. An oversight, as I said.” Athena snacked on an ox’s thighbone wrapped in fat, but didn’t offer the Fury any. There had been a time, the Fury remembered, when sacrifices had been offered her as well. “It’s nothing. All taken care of. No need to trouble yourself, it’s just a family dispute, a problem stemming from the late war. . . .”
The Fury ran her fingernails across the desk’s elaborately painted surface. Ten parallel lines of blood appeared, and began to soak in, ruining the colorful scenes painted there. With a casual air, as if she’d just spilled a little tea, Athena shook out the linen napkin in her lap and wiped up the blood.
Athena was an Olympian, a member of the new administration. A lot of irrevocable changes were being made. But the Fury was a key member of the Old Service. Athena could fiddle with the details of jurisdiction all she wanted, but she could not stop the Fury from acting.
Athena swiveled her chair and stared out of the window. Her office was high up, and looked out over the bronze towers of the city. Their edges were rosy now with what was either dawn or sunset. Abruptly rising mountains held in the sky.
“Well, fine. If you want to go, I can’t stop you. As you obviously know. But . . . well, I do have to mention . . . there’s no free money left in the travel budget. None at all. I don’t know how it happened, something to do with how we calculate the quarter—” The Fury turned and left the office. She could walk.
Most of the storefronts were boarded up, the fiberboard panels bearing the spray-painted names of their suppliers, the only businesses thriving in the neighborhood. Behind the stores were endless rows of apartment blocks, curtains hanging dispiritedly out the windows. Children peered out of the darkness, momentarily distracted from TV screens by the false promise of the world outside. A hand dangled a one-armed doll over a dangerously low sill, as if checking its urge to suicide.
One entire block had been torn down for an optimistic parking lot, now abandoned, grass coming up through the cracks, ailanthus trees growing against the wall of windowless brick next door. The Fury stared across it and imagined it covered with trees. She could see the roots shoving their way through the asphalt, cracking it and revealing the old soil beneath.
The Fury turned away, disturbed by this image of retirement, and crossed the car-tormented street. The funeral home had once been a comfortable mansion, from a time when people had lived here as a choice. It was the only structure preserved from that time. With its white columns and high windows it was solemnly beautiful. Its porch wrapped around two sides. Bright red awnings had been unfurled against the summer sun.
Right next door was a garbage-strewn vacant lot. Men in brightly colored warm-up suits squatted there, injecting drugs through disposable syringes from a pink box stolen from some hospital storeroom. The fat one in the canary yellow, his sneakers as clean as if he had been carried into the lot by slaves, seemed to be the leader. The others aped his gestures, desperate for his approval. The vacant lot ended in a corroded and half-toppled wrought-iron fence, beyond which was the overgrown cemetery.
Inside the funeral home, there were no mourners, no sign that anyone knew that Clytemnestra of Argos was dead. After she finally managed to pry the front door open, the Fury found herself there alone. She walked to the rear of the room, undid the catches, and slammed back the lid of the massive bronze coffin.
The embalmer had been careful to restore Clytemnestra to her appearance just before her death. Her gown was fine and looped with silver, jewels glittered around her neck and in her ears, her hands were raised up to ward off the blows, a look of terror deformed her face.
The Fury undid the gown and slid her fingernails into the body through the wounds. It took only a few minutes to determine that all relevant information had already been removed from the body during autopsy and embalming. The liver was a plastic child’s purse filled with colored seahorses. The heart was a can of spackling compound. The ovaries, in a cruel joke by one of the male Olympians, were charcoal briquettes.
The actual autopsy results were closed to the Fury by the new regulations. The Olympians meant for her to be stymied, to scream out her impotent rage here, tear this irrelevant place apart.
But the Fury was not entirely without resource. She stood for a moment until the air from her nostrils no longer smelled like burnt hair. She stripped Clytemnestra’s dress away completely, to reveal the knife-slashes through her sagging skin, so tattered that the embalmer had been forced to attach it to the underlying fat and muscle with safety pins. The attack had been brutal and unrelenting. Her neck was almost severed.
The Fury pushed her lips down on Clytemnestra’s and exhaled gently. The wounds cried out in agonized chorus: “Orestes!” The name of her only son was a curse, Clytemnestra’s last, and it was that curse that had brought the Fury out from her subterranean imprisonment. The Fury sucked in, tasted death and vengeance, and teased Clytemnestra’s tongue out of the nest of her mouth. The taste was bitter, more bitter than the Fury remembered. As she inhaled, the wounds gasped, “Oedi—” She pulled her mouth back, and the wounds fell silent. She yanked Clytemnestra’s tongue and flipped it out across the chin. She scraped a bar code across the pale, white-coated flesh, so that Charon would take Clytemnestra across the Styx without argument, payment provided by the Old Service.
“Are you ready?” someone said behind her. It was the leader of the warm-up suit-clad drug addicts from the vacant lot. His belly swelled proudly in his canary yellow. She stepped aside, already feeling the breath of loss. Clumsily, pupils dilated, muscles twitching, they picked up the heavy coffin and hauled it out the rear of the funeral home.
The sun was blinding after the darkness of the house. The Fury preceded the coffin through the cemetery, mourning, weeping desperately, the tears streaming down her face, carving paths through the ancient dried secretions on her cheeks. Clytemnestra now lived on within her, and she was sorrowing for her own death.
The pallbearers toppled the coffin off their shoulders. They had not bothered to dig a grave, but the bronze hulk sank down into the earth like a whale diving. Soon the weeds and grasses would grow over the spot, and it would be as if nothing lay beneath. They collapsed amid the weeds, weary with their great effort. Without looking back, the Fury walked out the other end of the cemetery and down the road toward Argos.
The gate guard hid within his mirrored kiosk and pretended not to see her. The Fury skirted the lowered security gate intended to bar entry into Argos and headed up the winding road that led between the lawns. The houses sat back behind their garages. Beyond them was the white wall, topped with a roof of red tile, that surrounded Argos and protected it from the desert.
An occasional car slid by her, drivers polo-shirt relaxed in their air-conditioning, but there was no other sign of life. The planned community centers, one in each quarter of the city, were empty, the bulletin boards devoid of anything but admonitions that notices would be removed after two weeks. A single toppled tricycle on a front walk seemed like a monument to a vanished race.
The Fury stalked to Agamemnon’s house. Reporters were clustered around the front, outside the police line tape, waiting for something to happen. Most sat in the back of the video van from a local TV station, crunching empty coffee cups in their hands and staring at the pavement. Some peered anxiously at the half-open front door, desperate for any sign of activity.
A murmur ran through them at the Fury’s appearance. Camera and video lenses shifted in her direction, but there was no click-whiz of film advance or whir of videotape, just breathless peering through the viewfinders. The Fury kept her power because her image was never reproduced. Aside from vague rumors, the first sight of the Fury was always the first unforgettable sight. This was quite unlike the new Olympians, whose power depended precisely on the excessive reproduction of their externals, on the presence of a hieratic image of Zeus in every temple and automobile showroom, so that the actual appearance of the god was unnecessary.
Well, the Fury still did all her own stunts. The new gods would soon no doubt change this rule. There would be cover stories on the Fury, tabloid TV scenes of her office, Fury posters, Fury drinking cups, all the rest, and her effectiveness would vanish. These reporters would be instruments of that downfall, and they knew it.
That would explain why she was here, at this scene of an irrelevant sideshow. Clytemnestra had not died at Agamemnon’s house. That the roots of her death could be found here should have been irrelevant, but somehow it wasn’t. Agamemnon had been murdered by Clytemnestra on his return from the war, but since Clytemnestra was not his blood, but just his wife, the Fury had not been called to avenge him. A man chooses his wife, and thus cannot find her actions against him incomprehensible.
A nondescript sea scene hung askew on the wall of the living room, an unnecessarily coy symbol of violent events. One of the off-white armchairs, part of a coordinated set that included the curtains, was toppled over, and the vast TV in the walnut cabinet was shattered. The vacuum of the CRT had sucked most of the broken glass into itself, and the oatmeal cut-pile carpet was clean, except for the bloodstains. The victim had died watching TV, perhaps even a local report of his own recent activities.
Aegisthus lay on his back on the living-room floor. He wore a steroid-driven paramilitary police uniform, a large holster, and insignia of iridescent tantalum, a subtle sign of his ancestry, and perhaps a claim of legitimacy. That claim had done him little good. After his assistance in the murder of his cousin Agamemnon, Aegisthus had pushed Argos around for years, his power derived from Clytemnestra.
The security walls, the checkpoints, the tire-busting spikes at the entrance—these kept the outside world at bay, but did nothing to defend against internal tyranny, whose takeover was made easier by isolation. No one had struggled too hard against it. He’d reduced greens fees.
A young police lieutenant, his uniform already stripped of the more egregious insignia, seemed unconcerned by his one-time commander’s fate. He knelt by Aegisthus’s pulled-in right hand, tilted the wide, sightless face first this way, then that, and talked quietly into a tiny tape recorder. He had not noticed the Fury’s entrance. He glanced occasionally at the open front door, to where the reporters stood, one or another of them pointing a camera at the only activity visible: the intent policeman doing his job.
He moved down the body, careful to stay in view of the door. Aegisthus had suffered as many knife blows as Clytemnestra. Orestes was clearly fit, and not a man to make the minimum necessary effort. Aegisthus had damage to every major organ, with an almost mathematical delivery of thrusts. He was a heavy, fleshy man, and it couldn’t have been easy to find the pancreas, say. The Fury leaned forward to listen in on the police lieutenant’s forensic observations.
