Resurrection Man (18 page)

Laura frowned. "Is this another girlfriend I'm supposed to tell about a Mysterious Ailment?" she demanded. "Because if so, you can forget it. I'm not doing that kind of garbage again, at least not until you get a more convincing cover story. I finally told her you'd become traumatically impotent, you know."

"Impotent!"

"Actually," Jet said, stepping in smoothly, "Dante needs someone who speaks Chinese."

Laura blinked, dipping into her paper bag and tossing a handful of crumbs into the clay-colored pond. "Why?"

"Angels."

"Oh ho!" Laura quirked an eyebrow and looked at Dante with new interest. "I didn't think you were ever going to take the plunge."

"I was pushed," Dante said morosely.

She looked at him with sudden concern. "Oh, hey. When was the last time you saw a doctor?"

"Why? Do I look sick?"

"Urn, no; it's just that the angel the cops brought in asked about it. She thought maybe you were going in for surgery or something. . . ." Laura trailed off, seeing Dante blanch.

The brothers exchanged a long look. Then Jet laughed.

The bastard,
Dante thought. All right. "Look, Laura, there's something I've got to say, before we go any further." He reached out and took her hands in his own. Ideally, the woman you love melts into your arms at this point, eager to hear your declaration.

Laura froze, wary and unsmiling.

Dante's heart flinched, feeling her recoil, and his color deepened. Christ, you're already dying, he told himself savagely. Show a little poise. "Listen, Laura, it's really hard to explain, but I think I'm going to die soon—really soon—and I just had to tell you that I love you. I've loved you for a long time, only I was too stupid to know it. I know it doesn't really matter now, only I had to say it. And I'm sorry."

Lily pads shook and shuddered in the water. Bits of floating bread vanished, one by one, beneath the surface of the pond, jerked down as if by invisible hands.

"Die?" Angrily Laura pulled away from him. "What the hell do you mean by that?"

"Die. Cease. Halt. Expire," Jet said helpfully. "Perish. Pass away."

"It's—it's kind of hard to explain," Dante stammered.

"Then don't!" Laura shouted, turning and stalking away. "God, if this is some kind of mournful suicide bullshit, I hope you don't expect any fucking sympathy."

"Ebb. Terminate." Jet studied the pond. "I believe my line is, 'I told you so.' "

"Shut up." Dante hurried after Laura. "No, look, it's not suicide," he said, pleading to the back of her leather jacket. "It's more like a, a medical thing. A cancer."

"Of all the cheap ways to try to get laid, this is the cheapest," she snapped, striding down the narrow gravel path as if it were paved with Dante's face: crunch crunch crunch. "I can't believe you think this is actually going to work on me. I know your lines, you piece of shit. If I wanted to decorate in used condoms, I could do the Empire State Building with what you throw in the trash."

"That's not fair," Dante said angrily, grabbing her by the shoulder. "This is me, Dante. You know I'd never try to pick you up."

(Jet winced. Oh, great going, D.
There's
a line calculated to win a woman's friendship.)

"Don't touch me," Laura spat, spinning and knocking Dante's arm away so hard it went numb from the elbow down.

Belatedly Dante remembered that Laura went to some sort of martial arts class.

It was his right arm too—the one with the bandaged hand at the end of it from where he'd grabbed the lure. Ow, ow, ow: feeling flooded back into it.

This was not an improvement.

They stood glaring at one another. Tactful Chinese couples flowed around them like water splitting around a rock. "I think you broke my arm," Dante muttered.

"Don't be a crybaby."

They glared some more.

"I mean Christ, Dante. What am I supposed to do with this?" Laura said at last, turning and walking on. "Swoon? Fall into your arms and confess my hidden passion?"

"Get a splint?" Dante suggested, managing a weak grin. Laura bit her lips to kill a smile. "This hurt?" she said, squeezing Dante's forearm.

Dante squeaked. "Some," he gasped.

"Crybaby." Laura stood still, looking out over the carp pool with her fists jammed into the pockets of her bomber jacket. "Christ, Dante, you hardly even know me."

"I guess having tea every day hardly counts, eh?"

"Telling a girl stories about screwing other girls does not count as knowing a woman's heart, no."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" Laura said sharply. "I wonder. Tell me, where am I going now, hey?"

Dante blinked. "Urn, I don't know. Home, I guess."

"Where do I go every Sunday after church?"

"Every Sunday? I, um. . ."

"Every Sunday," Laura said bitterly. "Yeah, every fucking Sunday after church. Where do I go, hey? Where?"

Dahte stared at her helplessly.

"Where, damn it!"

She turned from him, disgusted.

"I told you, I don't know," Dante said softly. "I wish I did, but I don't. I wish I could make up for a lot of things, but there just isn't time—"

"Don't tell me that," Laura said warningly.

"There isn't any time anymore. Jesus, Laura. I'm not . . . I don't want anything from you. I don't expect that. I just wanted to say what was on my mind, that's all."

"It's a pretty cheap indulgence. Why the hell tell me? Why not just go ahead and die, damn it, and send me an invite to the funeral? Why do this?"

Dante sighed. "That was Jet's advice."

"You should have listened to him."

If I hear that much more often, Dante thought, I'm going to get angry. "Okay, so I made a jackass of myself and ruined your day, but hell, I'm the guy with four days to live. I think I'm entitled to a little resentment too."

Laura glowered at him for a long moment. "Not to mention fear, anger, denial, and bargaining."

They giggled.

"Oh God, don't laugh, it's too horrible," Laura whispered. "God. How can I make jokes?"

"My mother would say it's the only possible response."

"Yeah, well, I bet she's not laughing now."

"Haven't told her yet." Dante reached out to take Laura's hand. His bruised arm screamed and he thought better of it. "Take me with you," he said.

"What?"

"This is Bargaining," Dante said rapidly. "It comes after Denial and before Acceptance. Take me wherever you go every Sunday after church."
Four and a half days.
I know, I know, god damn it. But this is one of those things I'm supposed to settle up, isn't it?

"I thought you needed my help for some angel thing. Speaking Chinese."

Jet had caught up with them. "And being Chen Dai Fei's great-niece," he added.

Dante shook his head impatiently. "That can all wait. Take me with you, now."

Laura shook her head in disbelief, sending the Chrysler Towers crazily spinning. A couple of tears ran down her cheeks and she wiped them angrily away. "This is not one of your smoother pickups, you bastard."

Dante had never seen her cry before. "Hey," he said softly. "It worked, didn't it?"

*   *   *

They were going to visit Laura's mother.

" 'A house is a machine for living in.' Le Corbusier said that." Laura maneuvered her Elegant Vehicles compact through the narrow streets of Chinatown, angling for Main. Dante sat in the passenger seat, surreptitiously rubbing his bruised right arm. Jet was tactfully absent; he would meet them later, back at Dante's apartment.

Laura waved at the office towers rising around them as they cut through downtown. "Machines for living in. Ghastly, isn't it? Chen Dai Fei used to say, 'A building is a harlot's gown—' It emphasizes the positive and hides the flaws. You know the old saying, the woman should wear the dress, not the dress wear the woman? That's the idea with architecture too. The house must make its occupants feel beautiful, serene. It's all a question of priorities: do you shape the people to fit the machines, or the machines to fit the people?" The Chrysler building swirled, an art deco teardrop hanging beside her cheek, as she glanced over at him. "Get it?"

"Uh, I think so."

"My great-uncle was the one who came up with the big symbol—tearing down the Wall and using its stones to pave the Permitted City's East Gate and the Winding Road. That's why Dad was in the first wave of urban planners to be sent out into the world."

Dante frowned. "Why did he want to leave a perfect city?"

"He didn't." Laura shrugged. "But China needed exports, needed to show off her talents, and really, really needed hard Western currency. Uncle Chen ordered Dad to go, and like a dutiful nephew, he went. That was 1961. The Permitted City had been up and running for three years—long enough to produce the numbers the Mandarinate needed to prove the idea to the rest of the world. Production stats, crime stats. Icing on the cake, really. All they had to do was take any visitors through; let 'em live in the place for a week or two. Meet the people. Walk in the Gardens." She shrugged. "It ate my father away, you know. Coming here. After all that work, to leave the perfect city and have to live with this." She gestured at the motley collection of skyscrapers and boutiques, blues pubs and porn shops around them.

"Like being tossed out of Eden."

"Yeah." Laura laughed. "Of course the Americans were damned if the slants were going to make a Perfect City before them! This was Kennedy and Johnson and the Great Society, remember. But as soon as they tried to build a perfect city of their own, they slapped it down on a grid that would have made Corb proud. The Elegant Prison model, as my father used to say. Just like Henry Ford's factories: the great American method was to make the humans adapt to the convenience of the machines.

"The Permitted City proved how much more productive a happy worker is. Before that, only left-liberal sociologists were interested in whether treating people like ball bearings was such a good idea. But magic caught Americans by surprise, see. They were the greatest empire of the Rationalist Age and they just couldn't use their angels right: In China, they'd been using feng shui to help design houses and gardens for thousands of years. They had a nice, clearly defined social use for magicians already in place; and the higher the magic rose, the better use they made of them."

"That's why it's good that you speak Chinese," Dante said, scrambling to put things together.

Laura nodded. "And even better that I'm related to one of the Permitted City's inner circle. Things Chinese are very hot in angel circles." She glanced at Dante again. "It's not that Chinese angels are more powerful than angels anywhere else. They're just less marginalized. They actually have a place in society, a role to perform."

"Rather than pissing their lives away without direction," Dante said dryly.

Laura shrugged. "Your words, not mine."

But that was it, of course. That was another reason he had never tried to date Laura. It wasn't just that he was afraid of intimacy; it was that he knew she wouldn't be interested. That was the bitter truth of it, Dante told himself. As a friend, old Dante could be pretty entertaining. But as a husband, a man with his shit together on whom you could depend?

A man you'd trust to raise your children?

Get serious. Laura would never dream of pinning herself to a man with the direction of a butterfly.

The thought made him close his eyes in self-disgust. Never had the gulf between them seemed greater.

Laura was a professional woman with a vision of her future and something to contribute to her community. While the only thing I have left to contribute, Dante thought bitterly, is a seven-pound sack of white silk feasting on my-internal organs.

Laura turned onto a gravel drive that led into a small park on the side of a hill dotted with evergreens; all as serene and lovely as a cemetery. Dante had never seen Laura's face so controlled and expressionless. "Welcome to Seven Cedars Nursing Home," she said. "Mother's inside."

*   *   *

"A retirement home is an interesting challenge for an architect," Laura remarked as she signed herself in at the front desk. " 'Flowing space' is all very well, but here you can't use changes in level to separate one area from the next." Dante's eyebrows rose. "Broken hips," she said tersely. "Any steps or ramps would make this into a machine for dying in. More than it is already, that is."

From the front desk area (a pleasant atrium welling with natural light) she led him along a wide, winding central corridor. "This is one technique," she said. "Rooms come off a central artery; the artery widens into a common area, then curves. Makes for a winding building, but each little set of Suites feels more private, without having to introduce heavy doors or dangerous steps."

She stopped and tapped her foot on the floor. "Custom carpet." It was a strange design, now that Dante came to look at it: two rich brown strips on the outside, and a wide golden band down the middle. "Carpet is better than tile for cushioning falls, obviously, but it has to be very flat, to make walking as easy as possible. The color scheme has to maximize contrast for people whose eyesight is failing: by following the gold band they can avoid walking into the walls. The wrong level of contrast will make them scared: a really dark band in the middle makes them feel they're walking in a trench; something too light, and they think they're balancing on a curb."