Beyond the Doors of Death (14 page)

JANE
: When the blood vessels of old and young mice were spliced together in experiments back in the oughts, the old guys got young and the young mice got older.

JORGE
: I suppose that’s possible. But it has nothing—

JANE
: Let’s get technical, doc. Heterochronic parabiosis increases hepatocyte proliferation and renews the cEBP-alpha complex, giving the old buggers a kick-start of youthful vigor. Blood, man, fresh young blood. Isn’t that what spices up the deads?

JORGE
(laughs): Really, you’re not serious. Deads as
vampires
? Blood suckers? Dr. Makwe, that’s the coarsest slur seen on the most rabid gogs. Have you ever heard the term
blood libel
? The Nazis accused the Jews—

JANE
: Oooh, touched a nerve, have we?

***

“That went well,” Jamal Hakim said in his ear.

The stupidity of it all. Klein said, “Look, Dr. Hakim, I’m by nature a solitary, introverted man, always have been. Death had not made me magically more congenial. I’m just not cut out for this kind of advocacy. You want me to soothe the warms down, and I’m just inflaming them.” He paused. “Unless that’s your intention. Am I a Judas goat?”

“Truly, Jorge, that interview was a success. You showed again that we are not chilly monsters to be feared, that we are offended by slurs and attacks. The warms watching that gog will feel a deeper empathy for us than they would have if you’d brushed aside that woman’s offensive questions with a smile and a quip. That would be the response of a practiced politician, which is to say a corporate crook and conniver. You are not a Judas goat, Professor. You are not leading warms into a trap. Quite the reverse. We are their future and their salvation, however much they fear us. This is part of your training, Jorge. I meant it when I said you are to be our Apostle to the Gentiles.”

“None of the Apostles came to an especially enviable end.”

“We need not be overly literal in our figures of speech. But look here, you mention your tendency toward solitary introversion. When you return to the Cold Towns, we will do something about that.”

“What now? Not just Guidefather, but Panderer-in-Chief?” No response, defense, angry retort in his ear. “Listen, I was scarcely a virgin when Sybille and I married, you know. Christ, I was nearly thirty. And we had our fun with others during the marriage. I’ve known the bodies and minds, if not the love, of fair women and dark, more than a few of them. I don’t need your damned help.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. Still, I remind you that since your drying off, you’ve conspicuously sulked in your tent. Not least during your travels.”

Klein thought suddenly of the wandering gang into which Sybille had fallen so swiftly, roaming the world as tourists of the expired. Had she been inserted into that aimless set by psychologists, Conclave specialists enacting the role of marriage brokers, some
shadchan
arranging plural
shidduchim
for the newly dead? The prospect promised some entertainment value, but really it revolted his deepest essence. He and Sybille, the one lasting liaison of his life, had been an accident abetted by their simultaneous presence in the Hanging Gardens, favorite refectory of the university scholars. Like and unlike, Jew and Gentile, teacher and student, congruent in the shared culture of centuries, different enough not to stale, sufficiently akin to merge flesh and mind and soul into a dyadic unity greater than he had ever supposed feasible for a man isolated by intellect and temperament. But that was the old Jorge, he told himself. That was the Klein before death had sucked him dry, drained away the warm juices from their conjoined link. Parabiosis indeed, he thought. And now their blood was a construct of old fluids and prowling haematocytes, oxygen borne through the raceways of their blood vessels inside carbon and silicon cages stronger and more commodious and longer lived than anything devised by bumbling evolution. Maybe the brokers of the postmortal cult he had been snatched into might bond him anew with comrades whose company he could enjoy, women he might lie beside in the remote yet oddly tender embraces of the dead.

“All right,” he said, in the swift code that had been impressed upon his brain by machines grown out of algorithms from a star in an entirely different galaxy, “all right, set me up.”

“You don’t
look
very dead, you deads,” the interviewer said. “In fact, you seem rather quick on your feet.”

“Calling us
deads
is a vulgarism, you know. The preferred term is ‘rekindled.’”

“Yet you do use it yourselves.”

“Well, it’s a traditional defensive move by persecuted groups to borrow terms of abuse. Gays called themselves
queer.
Black singers took up the gangster use of
nigga.
But I’m also of Jewish stock. Would you sit there with a smile and call me a kike?”

“Didn’t mean to tread on your toes, love.” Brine Di Stefano was an epicene specimen, languid in Klein’s borrowed Bunche Hall professorial office. Sunlight streamed through his bouffant hair, each strand crisp and surrounded by a glow. “But now I’m going to have to.
The New York Times
is the gog
de référence
, you know, so we have to get the record straight. So to speak.” He smirked. “It’s often said that the drive behind rekindling is an evasion of reality, a flight from life. Some say you willfully block your transition to the afterlife. Even the Mormon Atheists find evidence in their scriptures that you are the new Nephilim, to be abjured and cast out.”

Klein smiled. “I’m not tall, as you see. I believe the imaginary Nephilim were Giants in the earth.”

“We speak here in symbols, professor. Let’s not nitpick. I can be specific. A senior member of the White House staff, speaking off the record—”

“If she spoke off the record, why are you quoting her?”

Di Stefano brushed this aside. “This person whose gender must remain undisclosed said that the Conclave of the Dead has criminally evaded payment of taxes for more than a decade, is using highly classified information stolen from Federal assets, and plans the corruption of the American people. Comment?”

“I’m not a lawyer, Brine, nor am I a tax expert. Still, as I understand it, taxes have never been levied on the deceased since the founding of this Republic, unless you count the estate tax. I grant you that the President’s party is often accused of gaining office through the franchise of the dead—and I don’t mean people like me, who are currently entirely
dis
enfranchised. Does this seem just to you and your readers?”

“Okay, sweetie, I’m with you. Let me track back a step. Revival from death is a kind of ultimate eugenics. Isn’t death designed as the proper termination of life, without which living has no meaning?”

Klein had heard all this a hundred times by now, and his mind was stocked with a hundred glib one-liner ripostes. He put them aside, leaned forward, spoke carefully. This intellectual buffoon represented a serious newsgog; surely some of its readers were capable of thinking beyond clichés.

“Eugenics is a tainted word. Why? Only because of the way it was abused a century ago in the era of fascism, Nazism, and Soviet and Chinese communism. Not to mention in this country, when people of limited intelligence were forcibly castrated for the alleged good of the race.”

“By ‘race’ you mean—”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. The distinction needs to be drawn between that kind of atrocity and the free choices individuals make for themselves and their children.”

“Oh, so it’s just fine for some bigoted redneck or Chinese commissar to—”

“If they’re making free choices not imposed by the state or corporations or faiths or any other kind of forcible—”

A wave of the hand. “Rekindling is an affront to the Lord, according to Cardinal von Sachsen. It is a regressive infantile evasion of maturity, says the New York Directorate of Psychoanalysis. I could spiel out the quotes, but you’re surely aware of these arguments. How do you answer them? I have to tell you, I find them persuasive.”

Klein sat back, sighed. “You’ve heard of the Stockholm Syndrome?”

“I believe so. I took a course in Asymmetrical Warfare at Princeton, actually.” The interviewer frowned. “You mean the way a captive or victim of torture paradoxically bonds to her oppressor. That’s a facile analogy.”

Klein was remorseless. “If a child is threatened with death by a congenital heart defect, should that go untreated?”

“Plainly, not. A repair of localized—”

“A soldier is shot in the field of battle and bleeds out. His biometrics report an EEG crisis. In moments he will be dead. Should the medics zip him up in a body bag, untreated?”

“Certainly not. This is sophistry! We were talking about people already dead who are subject to a grossly unnatural procedure that some ethicists claim produces a ‘zombification’ of its victims.”

Klein bared his teeth, then smiled. “Do you fear I might lunge and eat your brain?”

“Stranger things have happened.” Di Stefano returned a dazzling grin. “Don’t bite the messenger, doc.”

“Messengers can catch Stockholm Syndrome too. Open your eyes and look at the evidence, Brine. Death has always been an abomination, a horrible accident of evolution. Nobody designed death. It’s an evolutionary kludge. We’re disposable. Our genes don’t care about our survival once we’ve multiplied them through reproduction. But now we have scientific means to reverse that blunder. Rekindling is no more unethical nor Satanic than having damaged teeth replaced by genomic implants, or fixing your worn-out knee cartilage or heart with autologous stem cells reprocessed from your own skin.”

“So saith the Chamber of Commerce of the Cold Towns. Philosophers and ordinary folks vehemently disagree. You’ve crossed a line. Some are anticipating a severe government crackdown. What will be the response of the Conclave if and when that comes?”

Klein stood up. “It’s been delightful chatting with you, sir. Please don’t forget to mention the Stockholm Syndrome argument in your piece. If you need a quote to support that, look at Keats.”

“The poet?” Brine Di Stefano nodded. “Ah. ‘Half in love with easeful Death.’”

“‘Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme.’”

“Point taken.” Ushered to the door, shaking Klein’s hand, the journalist said with every evidence of sincerity: “I just hope you guys have good guns and lawyers, when
Der Tag
comes.”

***

Albany Cold Town was literally cold on Christmas Eve, 2037. Strictly speaking, it was part of the city of Cohoes rather than the State capital, but the name had stuck. Jorge Klein took an autonomic cab north from Albany along 787 beside the Hudson. Icicles glittered in bare branches in the streets below, and a little fall of snow sifted down. The Conclave had taken over the Van Schaick Island Country Club, purchasing it outright for a fabulous sum to the fury of its dispossessed members but with the connivance of three members of its Board of Directors including the President and Treasurer, each signed up for rekindling. Its lush championship golf course was now a grid of graceless cinderblock structures, heavily walled, newly braced against attack from the lawless and the law alike. Klein entered the redoubt, displaying proof of his bona fides.

***

“Come in, come in.” The house of strangers was like any other, but he was expected, a notable guest; clearly word had gone ahead from Jamal Hakim. He was to be integrated more fully into the community of the deads, the better to perform his duties for the Conclave. “Welcome, welcome, welcome.” Gently they touched and nudged him; after all this time, their waxy skin and staring gaze no longer dismayed him. He was one of them, he knew their thousand-yard stare from within, it was his own condition. “Hello,” he said, “hello, hello.”

A trio circled about him as he met the residents, two handsome women and a ratty-looking man with a distant but somehow droll demeanor. It was unsaid but immediately understood: these were to be his companions, his set, his crew. They made themselves known to him as the occasion arose, unobtrusively. Here was Francine, slim, elegant, perhaps fifty, a
goyishe
version of his mother, perhaps. And a pretty young third-generation Korean. “Mi-Yun,” she said, placing her hand on her breast. “Please don’t say ‘Me Tarzan,’ it gets very, very old.” He nodded, amused. And the short fellow with the beaky nose was Tom, an experimental picotechnologist, whatever that was. Finally they bore him away to his guest room, his small suite, in fact, bringing wine and a plate of cookies. “If you decide to make Albany your home base for a while, we’ll move you into the main house,” Tom told him.

In the night, after all the formalities were completed, he lay beside Francine in the darkness, listening to her breathe. He had decided it would be crass to choose Mi-Yun for this first encounter. Francine was not the first dead woman he had been intimate with, but none of his early experiments had been satisfactory. In the earliest days after his rekindling, he’d been informed again and again by the technicians that he was no longer a sexual being, not in any traditional sense, perhaps in no sense at all. The process altered not the genitalia but the brain, the gusts and flows of hormone secretions, the mechanisms of arousal and performance. He was a eunuch now, as were they all, male and female. The senses remained alert, however, and a numb craving for contact, the bleak reassurances of the grave. He placed his hand on Francine’s elbow, where it rested against his ribs, and heard her breathing alter. Slowly he stroked her forearm, clasped her hand lightly. She murmured sleepily; they said nothing in words; they slept.