Richard Kadrey: Dead Set

“Okay.”

“You took off kind of fast yesterday. I was a little worried.”

Zoe shook her head. “I was just surprised. It’s all good.”

Absynthe leaned against the lockers. “If it’s any consolation, one of the teachers smelled the vodka-hell, it stank up the whole lunchroom-and Rexx got suspended.”

“Damn. I was a little pissed, but I didn’t want that.” Zoe frowned.

“It’s for the best,” said Absynthe. “Her parents just split up and she’s been tweaking hard about it. She’s lucky that she got snagged at school and didn’t pull a James Dean in her mom’s Honda.”

Great. Someone else creeping up on death. Was everyone dying these days?

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Shit happens,” said Absynthe. He shrugged. “They’re making her go see a counselor and join a teenybopper AA group.”

“I hope she’s okay.”

“She’s a good girl. She’ll be fine.” Absynthe smiled at Zoe. “So, you brave enough to try lunch with us remaining dissolutes?”

“I can’t,” Zoe said, wishing she’d prepared a good lie in advance. “I’m only here for half the day.”

Absynthe gave her a nod of deep understanding. “Lucky girl. You legit leaving or ditching?”

Zoe put the last of her books away and closed her locker. “Ditching, I guess.”

“Where to?”

Zoe thought about it for a minute before answering. She still didn’t know Absynthe very well. How much could she tell her?

“It’s probably not a big deal,” she said finally. “Really, it might all just be a waste of time.” She immediately regretted saying it. For the first time since leaving the record shop, Zoe wondered if what she’d experienced might have been some kind of sick trick Emmett liked to play on girls and that he’d just laugh at her when she showed up, bag of hair in hand.

“Sounds like a guy,” Absynthe said knowingly. “Most guys are a major waste of time. But they smell nice, so what are you going to do?” She started walking back toward the lunchroom, giving Zoe a little wave. “Let me know if you get lucky.”

“I will,” said Zoe, heading the other way, toward the exit.

On the walk to the record shop, Zoe had a couple of moments of panic. Yesterday she hadn’t paid much attention to the route and she’d been so out of it on the walk home that she hadn’t memorized the way. As she walked she nervously gnawed the inside of her check until she bit so hard it started to bleed. She cursed and spit blood in the street.

She wished she could talk to Julie and Laura. Julie always seemed so grounded and Laura was flat out the smartest person she knew. Zoe suddenly felt very alone and off balance without them, without anyone to talk to but Valentine. And Valentine just lived in her dreams. According to the doctor her mother sent her to, Valentine was her imaginary friend, a result of an acute emotional crisis. When Zoe told the doctor that she’d known Valentine all her life, since long before her father died, he’d talked about invented memories and how Zoe must have been suppressing abandonment issues since childhood. She decided the doctor was an idiot and she’d stopped listening to him. But now she wondered if he might not have been at least a little right.

If Valentine isn’t real, then I’m just talking to myself and there’s no one anywhere, she thought. And that’s exactly how it feels sometimes, like I’m alone and trying to make friends with the echoes of my own voice. The full weight of that possibility, that Valentine might be nothing but her own bad wiring, made her feel worse. More alone than ever and possibly crazy. Zoe pushed the thought out of her head and looked around for something familiar.

And saw, with a shock, that she was standing at the front door of Ammut Records. She still couldn’t remember the route she’d walked to get there. Maybe I’m not supposed to? she wondered. Maybe not knowing is the way. It didn’t make much sense but it’s what got her here and back home again.

Zoe reached for the door and stopped. She felt in her pocket and found the compass Valentine had given her. Or had she had it all along and convinced herself that he’d given it to her? The compass pointed due west. Zoe shut her eyes and closed her hand around the toy.

I don’t know if you’re real or just me talking to me. Either way, wish me luck because I really need it right now.

She opened her eyes and entered the store.

Just like yesterday, it was cool and pleasant inside. The pine smell of burning incense hung thick in the air.

“Right on time,” came Emmett’s low voice.

She looked around, and through the dimness she saw him standing back by the beaded curtain.

“Did you bring me what I wanted?” he asked. In the strange light she couldn’t see him step forward, just his shadow.

Zoe reached into her pocket and pulled out the plastic bag that contained strands of her hair. He accepted the bag, held it up to the light, and weighed it in his hand like they were doing a drug deal.

“Good girl,” he said. “But next time when you bring me something, please bring it in a paper bag or wrap it in a tissue. Plastic is so”-he paused for a moment as if groping for a word-“unnatural.”

“Okay,” said Zoe, thinking, Next time? Right now I’m not a hundred percent sure I want a this time.

“Well,” said Emmett conspiratorially, “I suppose you’d like to see dear old dad?”

“Yes,” she said, and followed him through the curtain into the back room, feeling a dizzy mix of excitement and fear.

Emmett already had her father’s record out. It was leaning against the wall near the incense burner. While he put it on the Animagraph and adjusted the legs, Zoe looked at the bins. There must be hundreds of lives in there, she thought. It’s like a cemetery for ghosts.

“Ready?” asked Emmett. He stood beside the Animagraph, holding up the elaborate headphones.

“Why did my dad end up here?” Zoe asked.

“His spirit got lost on its way to somewhere else.”

Zoe ran her fingers over the coarse paper cover of one of the special records, tracing the outline of the symbols. “Then why isn’t he a ghost like in the movies? How did he end up here like this?” she asked, spreading her fingers across the record cover.

Emmett did an exaggerated shrug. “God? Gods? The universe? I don’t know who makes decisions like that,” he said. “I’m just a small businessman.”

“Yesterday you didn’t ask my name or anything about me, but you knew who I was. You knew that my dad was here. How?”

“You found the back room. That meant there was something for you back here,” Emmett said.

“How did my dad get lost? Did he do something wrong?” Zoe nervously chewed the inside of her cheek again. It hurt and the broken skin felt gross, so she stopped.

“Some spirits are too weak to go. Some can’t let go of their previous lives.” Emmett held up the headphones again. “Maybe you can ask him when you see him.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” said Zoe. “And I don’t believe in magic.”

“And yet, here you are.”

Here I am, she thought. She looked over at the bins. She couldn’t stand the idea of her father lying there, forgotten and dusty, slotted between other lost souls. She went to Emmett and stood in front of him. “I’m ready,” she said.

He slid the elaborate headphones over her head. As he wrapped the last cord around her neck, she felt a little jolt of claustrophobic fear again. She slipped a hand into her pocket and felt around for Valentine’s compass. She closed her hand tight around it.

A moment later, Emmett patted her shoulder. Zoe readied herself, not sure what she was expecting or even hoping for. She knew in the still, small center of herself that didn’t always hurt, that wasn’t always on the verge of tears, that her father couldn’t possibly be here, couldn’t be anyplace where she could actually talk to him. But the rest of her wanted anything that would, for even a moment, bring back some sense of him from his shattering absence.