Richard Kadrey: Dead Set

“I guess,” Zoe said. This thing, whatever it is, is getting stranger by the minute. But I can’t stop now.

Emmett lit up an unfiltered Camel, inhaled deeply, and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. “It’s your choice, of course,” he said. “You’ve seen your father, with those pretty cat eyes. What you have to ask yourself is ‘How much do I really want to talk to him?’ ”

Zoe didn’t say anything. Emmett put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and busied himself stacking the 45s and clearing clutter off the counter. She wondered where the records and papers could have come from. There hadn’t been anyone but Emmett in the shop either time she’d found it. As she looked around it didn’t look like anyone else had ever come inside.

“How do you even know I have a tooth?” she asked.

Emmett cocked his head to the side. “I get a lot of different kinds of people in my shop. I watch them. Watch them move and think and make the million small decisions that will lead them to the back room or out the door. You get to know people that way, the way I know you. You have toys. You have clothes. You have books. All sorts of childhood trinkets from a time when you were happy. You keep these things close to you. Some people call these objects ‘souvenirs.’ Others call them ‘talismans.’ ”

“Is that why you want my tooth? It’s a talisman?”

“Who knows?” Emmett said. “However, it is the price.”

Zoe sighed. What choice did she have?

“I’ll take it,” she said.

Emmett smiled, showing his big white teeth. “I’ll have everything ready for you tomorrow. Your father will be so happy to see you.”

Zoe walked home the same way she’d arrived at the store: by vague wandering and eventual luck. It seemed insane to her that she could navigate that way, but she was getting used to it.

It was dark and the streets seemed unusually quiet, the lights unnaturally bright. Like the last time, instead of feeling nervous wandering in a city she barely knew and couldn’t really navigate, she felt a thrilling rush of energy. If this is what seeing Dad again will be like, it’s worth it, whatever crazy things Emmett might want. Besides, what’s he going to do with a tooth?

She let herself into the apartment as quietly as she could. To her relief, her mother was asleep on the couch with the TV on, her shoes off, her jacket and purse in a pile on the one chair in the room. Zoe went straight to her room and closed the door without making a sound.

Already the trip inside her father’s life had begun to recede in her consciousness until it was like the memory of a dream. She wasn’t sure if this was an effect of whatever magic powered the Animagraph-and magic was the only word she could think of for it-or the shock of feeling her father die. What she was certain of was that she had accepted a whole new idea into her life, just as she had begun to accept that she could never remember the exact route to Emmett’s store.

Magic, she thought. Why not?

She could hear the word now without judgment or irony. It was becoming just one more fact in the innumerable facts that she learned every day at home and at school. Algebra. The name of the largest mammal. The number of days in a row you can eat fried chicken without barfing. Ways to communicate with the dead.

She went to her closet and pushed the clothes on hangers out of the way. On the floor was a box. She picked it up and tore off the sealing tape. Inside were her baby shoes, snapshots of her parents back at the warehouse, small stuffed animals, and a small pink plastic bottle with a white kitten on the top. My talismans, she thought. Zoe shook the bottle. Something rattled inside. Popping the top, she poured out the contents. Her last two baby teeth, the ones that had come out together, rested in the palm of her hand.

She held the teeth up and looked at them, amazed that she’d ever been small enough for the tiny things. Then she put them back in the bottle, sealed it, and set it on top of her dresser.

She took the compass from her pocket. “Tomorrow,” she said, holding it tight. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

Zoe awoke early the next morning before the alarm went off. While in the bathroom for her morning pee, she realized that she was starving. She hadn’t eaten lunch or had any dinner after coming home last night. Even bone-dry KFC leftovers seemed appetizing at that moment. She went into the kitchen to forage for breakfast and found her mother sitting at the table, red-eyed and smoking. When her mother had quit smoking a couple of years earlier, she had threatened to strangle Zoe if she ever started, so Zoe made sure her mother never knew. There was an upturned peanut-butter-jar lid on the table, overflowing with burned-out Marlboro Lights.

Official-looking papers were scattered on the table. Zoe had seen enough of them by now to know that they were legal documents. She tried to read them upside down, but the kitchen lights were off. All she could make out were a few words at the top of one page, words printed larger and darker than the rest: DENIAL OF CLAIM.

“Your father doesn’t exist,” said Zoe’s mother. “Didn’t exist.”

“Don’t say that. Dad existed .”

“Not according to these assholes,” said her mother. Her voice was raspy from the smoke. There were dark rings under her red eyes. She looked like she’d been up all night.

“Just please don’t say that about Dad.”

“I know, baby. I know,” said her mother with a kind of exhausted resignation. “I just don’t know what we’re going to do. We can’t live like this forever.” When her father’s software company had gone bankrupt, it took their savings with it. After that, the little money they had in a family trust disappeared frighteningly fast. Zoe’s mother kicked an empty moving box lying on the floor near the table.

The way the flat morning light came in through the grimy little kitchen window, if she tilted her head just right, Zoe could almost see her mother as the girl in purple eye shadow. Beautiful. Happy. Confident. If she tilted her head back and looked at her straight on, it was her mother, raw-nerved and bone-weary.

The girl in the purple eye shadow is dead. As dead as Dad.

Zoe remembered her father watching his own mother die, how he’d been made mute by despair and hopelessness. How he’d carried the guilty memory of it his whole life.

“It’ll be okay,” said Zoe, feeling like a liar as she spoke. She looked down at her feet, willing them to move. She took a couple of tentative steps. “It’ll be okay.” One more step and she was standing by her mother. She was afraid to look at her, but gently laid a hand on her shoulder. She felt her mother’s hand close over hers.

Zoe’s mother put her arms around her and pulled her close, crying like Zoe had never seen her cry before. There was a flutter in Zoe’s stomach, a heat that rose to her cheeks. Part of her wanted to cry, too. But she’d already lost control in Emmett’s record store and the tears had stung, like her body was trying to force broken glass out through her eyes. Now she held the tears back, telling herself that she would never lose control again. Zoe rubbed her mother’s back as she cried.

“It’ll be okay,” she repeated. It didn’t matter if she herself didn’t believe it.

She saw her father by his dying mother’s bed.

I just have to say it.

School felt entirely new and strange. Not impersonal and oppressive, the way it had when she’d first arrived, just. . strange, but not in a bad way.

As she stood at her locker, the distance Zoe had felt toward the other students had changed. All the kids, the different tribes. . they all looked different. A little less odd and a little more something else. What? Forgivable, maybe. Seeing through her father’s eyes, feeling his life pass through her, had changed something in her, but the sensation was even stronger here than it had been the night before.