4
DONNER
I got about four blocks before somebody beat the shit out of me.
I’d left the hospital quickly, accepting the clothes they offered, signing the required legal disclaimers (We Are Not Responsible For Your Afterlife!) and making a promise I had no intention of keeping to attend another counseling session.
As I dressed in the changing room, fumbling with unfamiliar button-fly pants, looking at the snap-brim fedora and the wide-lapelled jacket, the panic started. First, in my fingertips, then swirling into a tight, cold knot in my stomach. By the time I was striding across the lobby, I was actively fighting the urge to run.
I burst through the front doors like a sprinter hitting the finish tape.
Out on the street, the relief I’d been chasing didn’t appear. Only terror. I stood on the sidewalk, the leather shoes stiff and biting through absurdly thin nylon socks. A wind played with the raw skin of my face. My first shave in forty-two years.
I’d survived my own death.
No. Worse. I’d survived the death of my whole world.
I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to deal with this.
Was I really alive again? Revived, like they said? Dreaming? In some perverse afterlife? At that moment, on that sidewalk, anything seemed possible.
It was rush hour, the streets packed. I eyed the men in their blocky suits and hats, the women in their wool skirts, mesh stockings and pumps. Christ, some of them had pillbox hats. I caught a few other styles as well. A shaggy-haired guy in a tie-dye tee, fringed suede vest and bellbottoms. A black guy in what looked like a purple zoot suit. They all bustled down the street in that familiar, harried, self-absorbed big city way.
But no cell phones. No laptop cases. No iPods, no Starbucks coffee cups. Just heavy-looking briefcases, cute little one-clasp handbags. The whole fucking vista could be a piece of vintage newsreel…
… except for the traffic cop in a lozenge-shaped pod at the intersection, directing the Packards, Hudsons and Buick Roadmasters, which hummed wheellessly along, six inches above the street…
… or the holographic newspapers tucked under pedestrians’ arms…
… or the tiny glowing dots many of them had in their temples…
… or the swirling stacks of streets high above my head, aerial highways crammed with cars. Worse, the streets moved, they changed, redirecting themselves like some solid yet fluid river, reacting as traffic thickened or lightened, adding lanes, anticipating flow…
I tore my gaze away, overwhelmed with vertigo. I tried to focus on the wall next to me, but my eyes were drawn to a movie poster. It featured Alan Ladd and Russell Crowe in something entitled Shane Comes Back.
No escape. Even the sky was wrong, swirling and out of focus behind the magnetic Blister. The whole thing, the combination platter of styles and periods, made me want to curl into a tight ball right there on the cold street.
I’d busted this crack fiend once. He’d been a real hardcase, back from a two-week suicide run during which he’d stolen his grandmother’s silver, gotten kicked out of another shelter and flushed his last chance at redemption down the crapper. I remember him telling me, as the cuffs clicked shut: “I got no place to go that I understand.”
Now I knew what he was talking about.
My body started shaking.
C’mon, Donner, get it together. You’re not a civvie.
I had to treat this unknown like those dark hallways I’d faced as a cop. Putting one foot in front of the other, trusting my reflexes and my judgment to get me through.
But what was this body? Was it really mine? Every muscle felt stiff and unwieldy, every contraction forced. I looked down at the bizarre coal-black nails. My eyes shone a freakish gold and my hair was Andy Warhol white. And what about my mind? I couldn’t summon up the last day of my life. What was here that I actually could trust, even within myself? At least, before, when everything around me went to shit, I still had myself. Could I still count on myself?
Approaching paralysis. Let’s go, I told myself. One foot in front of the other. You do have somewhere to go. An address in your pocket. A new apartment. Start with that.
I moved. A foot, then two. Slowly, and then more surely.
Things actually might’ve been okay if the old woman hadn’t screamed.
***
She lay on the sidewalk fifteen yards distant. Her hose were torn, her skirt ridden up to reveal a girdle that looked like a medieval torture device.
Surrounding her were five young reborn freaks. Their dreadlocks were spiked whole feet into the air by immense amounts of gel, forming actual two-dimensional words and images. One hairdo was shaped like a hand with its middle finger extended. Creative. Another said, inexplicably, MAURY LIVES! Their faces were tattooed black around the eyes and nose to look like skulls. Goth and punk, with a dash of Night of the Living Dead thrown in for flavor.
They tore the purse from the woman’s grasp and bolted away, shouting and waving fists.
I moved to the woman before I was even aware that I was in motion. Instincts apparently still intact. Reflexes weren’t so awful, either.
I reached down a helping hand. She saw me. Took in my eyes, my hair. Screamed again.
Then, from behind me: “Step away from her, corpse.”
I turned. Almost a dozen pedestrians had stopped. I didn’t know who’d actually spoken, but it didn’t matter. They all had the same look. Not too hard to recognize hate.
Two cops encased in riot gear pushed their way to the front. No, not cops. Private security? They were bulging and steroidal. One tall, one short. The word SURAZAL was emblazoned across their body armor in block white letters.
I straightened. “Three white males, heading north on foot—”
The cops surged forward. I briefly hoped they were going to help the woman. Instead, they grabbed my arms. Their strength was legit. They moved me across the ground like I was an empty sack of clothes, toward an alley. Angry shouts of encouragement followed us in. Then we were deeper between the buildings, all witnesses gone.
Going to get bad fast now.
I tried anyway. “Hey, boys, hold on—”
They threw me through some trash cans. As my new clothes were coated in garbage, part of my mind was thinking, metal trash cans, not plastic, hey, even the trash is retro.
I tried to pick myself up, brush myself off, but my body objected. My legs went south and I staggered back down into rotting egg shells, old tampons and coffee grounds. The cops sneered through their visors.
“What’s wrong, reeb,” Taller said. “Legs don’t work yet?”
“Must be a fresh one,” Shorter opined.
I kept trying. “I used to be—”
I was thrown against the brick wall. As skin tore and flesh abraded, I realized the sensation was strangely comforting. Pain was the only old friend who’d stuck around.
“I was on the job,” I managed to croak.
“Right,” replied Shorter. “And I’m Martin Luther King.”
He jabbed his baton into my diaphragm. Stars flashed. I dropped to my knees again, not even able to gasp.
“You know what I like about you freaks?” asked Taller. “You can take twice the beating a norm can, and you won’t die. You just—” A fist to my kidneys. “—won’t—” A sap to the solar plexus. “—die.” A baton across my face.
Darkness screamed at me. My mouth worked, a fish out of water. Shorty laughed. “He’s still trying to talk.” He yanked my head back by my white hair.
“What’s that, freak?”
“I didn’t… touch… that woman…”
Grins. “Good for you.”
They descended on me with fists and batons.