After work I shop. I’m a shopping fettishest. There’s something about a room full of things that don’t belong to me that turns me on. I’m not much of a buyer, I’m more of a hunter of pretty things. I’m not alone in this. Most of the Never is occupied by creatures who want something belonging to someone else, in one way or another. The beasts hunt flesh, hermits steal trinkets, vampires look for unwilling blood, even the high and mighty Cult of Mantis will go out of its way to take from an unlucky wanderer. For me, it’s a preoccupation with the shops on Sparkle Row.
I always shop alone. Most people shop in groups, even during the day, for safety reasons. But in my position, I have little concern of being attacked by a fellow tribesman. The children's tribe doesn't generally traverse the central area of the city, the hermits never go more than a few blocks in, and nothing else comes out in daylight. I consider myself safe enough on the Sparkle. Still, I am never without my small hatchet and pick-axe.
You can’t be sure of anything but yourself here. There are threats beyond every dark corner. I had an assistant at the mortuary before Noel came along who went mad and turned on me when the morning slab was empty. I knew the guy for a decade, he was reasonable enough. I don’t usually get called in for an empty slab; There was an error at the toll booth where the hermits drag in the bodies. He could have just laughed it off and went home, but instead he started babbling about the unbearable cold and tried to stab me with a pencil. In the end, I had to put him down. It goes like that sometimes.
The way I see it, it's everyone for themselves here, tribe allegiance or not. Just because you turned up in the same morgue as I did, and just because we happen to be from the same canal, that doesn’t mean I owe you any loyalty. You could have easily been tossed back in for the hermits to mutilate, or for the children's tribe to cut up for parts, or for Tribe Over Fall Ninety to enslave. I have been a success in Yellow Eleven not because of my tribesmen but despite them. Others may cling to their tribesmen, feel safety in their number, even bear abuse for the sake of acceptance. I need no such reassurance. I am old and have been here long enough to know that there are no guarantees. Tribesmen kill their fellows as often as outsiders.
But on the Sparkle I don’t think about the tribe. I am my own person, whole and alone. There is a sense of peace I achieve just by walking past the lower level windows. Each display is like a brief glimpse of another life. And unlike the museum, the Sparkle hasn't an air of solemnity or any vaguely illustrated moral message. The shops simply exist to be enjoyed. I have a hard time with the elevators, you can get lost easily unless you remember how you got in. But once you’re in, with all the shiny snapshots, and the fancy clothes, you feel like you could stay forever and never run out of things to look at. Of course, you don’t want to be there at night. I don’t know where the beasts go during the day, or the vampires, but they make easy prey of tardy shoppers. One night, I was unfortunately late from the shops.
I was trying to pay for a pair of shoes, but I couldn’t find the right change on my key chain. I knew they were coming, Tribe Left Behind, I could feel the vibration of them accumulating in the curtains. “I don’t have the change. I don’t want the shoes. I’ve got to go.”
“Do you want it gift wrapped?” The clerk held up a sheet of glossy, irridescent paper. “Or would you like a bag? We have string.” She was tranced and oblivious.
“No, I’ve got to get out of here.” They would take her, I knew it. By morning she would be gone. “Which elevator will take me outside?”
“In the dressing room.” Her arm was too long as it pointed behind me. Someone botched her carving. “You’ll put them on layaway, then?”
“Yes.” I don’t know why I said it. I wouldn’t return. I wouldn’t even know how to get back through the labyrinth of elevators.
She nodded. “They’re here, aren’t they?”
The elevator was only five feet away. I could hear the lights burning out.
“You’re a mortician, yes? Calli, from Yellow Eleven? Do you remember me?”
“I’m sorry.”
Silence.
I was on the elevator before they came for her. I stumbled down Sparkle Row as the grey whirls of sky swallowed all else. I remembered.
She was carved by Sithia, a mortician long since gone to the grave. It was one of the first carvings I had witnessed. At the time, I still had some recollection of my former life, and was haunted by strange stabs of weird images. It was in these early days that I grew to love the carve. There was an unparalleled perfection in the molding of flesh into living being. It distracted me from my confusion.
This unfortunate clerk was called Bethany. She woke up screaming. There is no shame in this, many awake in worse condition, fitting and frothing or weeping helplessly. She was badly carved, her limbs uneven, her appendages too wide. Perhaps she imagined herself in pain, she screamed as if she did. Her eyes were unnaturally wide in the waking, they were slow to heal over an internal quake of terror. She would look down at her malformed body, then look away in horror and screech like some kind of trapped animal. Sithia only crooked her head back against the partition of her carving room and smiled up at the plain, white ceiling. I perched on the lip of the cutting table and bowed to watch Bethany struggle under her restraints.
I wanted to see what it was like. I suppose I thought I could find in her thralls some remnant of my own wake. Normally such behavior is reprimanded; A mortician must remain dignified and deferential in the presence of a waker. But Sithia was a sloppy, careless mortician and had less interest in training me than in entertaining herself with my mistakes. I should never have gotten so close to the waker, but the intimacy I experienced with her that day taught me a great deal about carving.
Before I watched the carve of Bethany, I believed that the waking was a horrible experience. From my own memories and the accounts of others, I subscribed to the common belief that waking was the only thing worse than death. Morticians are so esteemed, so feared, after all, because people are under the illusion that we have a hand on the wheel of life, and are equally as talented as indifferent. This gives us a certain power over our fellows, an air of prowess, a personal safety zone of intimidation. The wake, to most, is a scarring experience and the mortician the charitable, but doubtless dangerous creature that conducts it. But the waking is not an act of violence, and the mortician conjures no Mantid magic to bring life to the corpse. On the contrary, the carve itself is rather tedious, and the bodies pretty much vivify on their own. Whatever horror is involved comes not from the lovely mortuary, or the skilled professional weilding the scalpel, but from the corpse itself, the body that takes its first breath and recalls suddenly an entire life whose memory dies again just as instantly.
As I bent over the waker, my hair brushing her skin, my breath teasing tremors from the laces of blood on her face, I could almost sense the terror, like a sweet fragrance, burning out of her. She screamed, how she screamed, eyes twitching like pinballs, face drawn up in grey revulsion and fingers clawing at the silver chains which bound her. Her pelvis twisted, her legs kicked, her arms flung out as if she did not wish them, deformed as they were, to be a part of her body. But most brilliant of these expressions were the contortions of her face. Her lip would curl down, wet, innocent, and tears muddy the lines of blood on her face. Then would come a gnash of teeth, her head thrown side to side, her scream a roar of rage. She would pause between hate and despair, just for a split second, during which you could see by the bewilderment, the stricken oblivion, the sheer sterility of her visage that her former life was being purged from her. I was so close to her that I rose and fell with her breath, that the red soaked clumps of her yellow hair clung to my forehead. I lost myself as an observer to the waking, and realized how beautiful it really was. Here was a girl so confused, so violated and so alienated from her own body that her heart would never truly recover from this event. Her whole Neverlife began here, and yet her whole identity died on this very table. It was a rape, and at once a birth. A pain so great that it ceased to be painful, a gift so vital that it must be had even though unwanted. It was a nightmare so torturous to fight that it had to be conceded to entirely. And oh, what beauty, what a pleasure uncomparable to witness the wake. At one point she even touched me with her knotted fingers, put her eyes to mine, whispered: "Please, please help me." I shuddered with sensation.
I had not thought of her in decades before that day. As profound the impression she had made on me, as intimate and extreme the circumstances, my life had moved in leaps and bounds since then. Her wake was for me like one's first visit to the Museum, or the first, blissful days of love; What comes of familiarity usually dulls the innitial dazzle. Still, my pulse flew a faster tempo in recollection of her wake, and faster still in the knowledge that even as I thought of her she died by violent hands.
Bethany survived hundreds of years on the Never. I may have run into her between wake and sleep, but I remember it not if I did. My memory of her now is anchored only at these two points; The violent seizures of awakening, and the placid deferral to death. I wonder what woman was the true Bethany, the screamer or the mute. I wonder, also, what has made the difference.
I made it past Sparkle Row to the Mission and sat on the steps while the bells rang. It was an acrid night, the Museum was having a show on culpability. Even with the streetlights blaring, most everyone had found somewhere else to be. I kicked at the dust, not ready, somehow too uneasy to go home. There were whispers in the distance.
end (3)
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