Песах Амнуэль - Zion's Fiction - A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

“Oh, cut it out!” Mor sneered. “Cheap theology! Why would Ruth and Zoe do such a thing? What’s the gain?”

Daniel beamed at her:

“A very Jewish attitude, if I may say so. Well, since there are so many of us, the only way to gain influence is to enlarge the sphere of one’s activity. To some extent this does not depend on us at all. You humans are our real masters, even though most of us consider you mere cattle. But that’s just the deplorable lack of education. Not many of us read Hegel or understand the master-slave dialectic. Anyway, once a new modality of death is discovered, a new… executive comes into being by a process which, quite frankly, we don’t quite understand ourselves. The twentieth century was a fertile one. Have you met John? In the sixties he was about to crown himself King of Death, but after the demolition of the Berlin Wall he has been semiretired. Tending his garden, I assume, growing mushrooms.”

“Mushrooms?” repeated Mor blankly. “Oh, I see. Mushroom clouds. And you?”

“I am a different matter,” said Daniel evasively. “In any case we don’t—quite—control the course of human history, but we can give a nudge now and then. Ruth and Zoe hoped that by eliminating Old Age they would enlarge their own respective domains. The political situation was favorable, too. What they did not count on was that Mark’s demure little bride, whom everybody considered half-witted, good perhaps for crib death but nothing more ambitious, would blossom overnight into the queen of geriatric wards.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Mor’s voice rose again. “Are you grooming me to be your successor? If you think I’m about to take over the gas chambers….”

“Please!” Daniel shook his head. “A little perspective! The gas chambers have been inactive for seventy years! No, Mor, I’m saying just the opposite. A death’s existence is boring, devoid of pleasure, not fit for a woman like you. I don’t need to tell you what our sex life is like. And no children, of course. Your husband has trapped you on purpose, for his own amusement. He cannot love you, being what he is, but he cannot even appreciate you. You are a fighter; you are resisting being assimilated. But what if the force of your resistance is such that you’ll be forever stuck in that twilight state, neither a death nor a living woman?”

Mor looked at the wreckage of her lunch. And then she looked at the man in front of her.

“You have a proposition,” she said. “What is it?”

The red-eye flight was ruined by a cramped seat and talkative neighbor. But she emerged into the terminal at five a.m. feeling no worse—and no better—than after a night in her own bed.

Guided by her cellphone, she was in Holborn by eleven. She walked down Great Holborn Street until she came to an arched entrance into a cobbled courtyard. There she had to press the button several times before the gate swung open.

The flat was cluttered with dusty Victorian junk. The brownish liquid in her cup was either coffee or tea; even with her taste buds intact she may not have known which. Maggie took out the ingredients for the beverage from an old fridge that was not plugged in, its interior choked with bundles of cobwebby herbs.

“Daniel thinks the world of you,” Maggie declared.

In contrast to her place, she looked neat and very British in her twinset and pearls. As long as Mor only glanced at her briefly, the illusion held.

“How nice,” said Mor dryly. “The feeling is not mutual.”

Maggie only smiled indulgently.

“Dear Daniel! He and I have a lot in common.”

“How so?” Mor asked.

“We are both retired. Well, no. I’m semiretired. I still do quite a bit of freelancing, but it’s nothing compared to what it was once. I pity Daniel; so much work, and so spectacular, in such a short period, and then he is kicked out. There were certain affinities, you know, between what he did and my own skills.”

Mor felt her gorge rise as the brownish liquid in her cup suddenly took on the tint of clotting blood. She tried to hold on to her nausea, but it subsided.

“It is ironic,” continued Maggie chattily. “I’m the oldest one and he is… no, I take it back, he is not the youngest one, even though none of the millennials is as talented as he is.”

“Are you really the oldest?”

“Yes. I was the firstborn. Even before your kind was quite sure of its direction. I was there when Neanderthals scattered ochre around the skeletons of the eaten ones. I was there when shamans withered babies in their mothers’ wombs and flayed men alive without even touching them. And I still enjoy the old art. There are people, right now, dear, who are sticking needles in voodoo dolls and calling my name. Some things never change. When all the computer-guided missiles crumble to dust, I will still be there.”

Maggie was smiling sweetly throughout the speech, but it was not her pink-glossed mouth that spoke the words. It was the other mouth, squirming beneath her skin like a black worm: the slit in the whorl-painted visage of Death-Magic.

“But why here?” asked Mor. “Why London?”

Maggie shrugged: “This land is so soaked in history that it’s beginning to rot like a bloated sponge. But this is not about my plans, dear. Daniel has asked me for a favor, and I see no reason to refuse. David and I have never gotten along. His modus operandi is far too mechanical for me. No spirit. So shall we start?”

Mor nodded and braced herself for the ceremony she assumed was about to begin. Instead, Maggie just took a more comfortable position on her sway-backed couch.

“Once upon a time,” she said, “there was a boy who loved guns. His family was dirt-poor, and they could not afford the weapons that he wanted. His father had the only gun in the family, an old Colt Browning. One day the boy came home and saw his father sitting at the table, the top of his head blown off. He looked at his old man for a while. And then he picked up the gun lying in the pool of blood, turned around, and walked away.”

Maggie reached under the torn cushion and pulled out a wreck of an antique gun, rusted and bent.

“Old tales are right,” Maggie went on. “The only power stronger than death is love. When we become deaths, old loves shrivel and fall away. But just as our bodies still bear one mark of our lost mortality, so do our souls. In a dusty corner of each death’s still heart the one true love of his or her life lies sleeping. If it’s woken, the heart will beat once and stop forever. And the death shall die.”

“David does not love anybody,” said Mor.

“This gun is your husband’s one true love.”

Mor’s fingers closed on the coarse metal. The rust stained them red.

They drove up to Jerusalem to spend the Sabbath in the Holy City. It had become a habit by now. Mor bought a bottle of red wine and a couple of fat candles, which she lit in the bedroom. In the candlelight, David’s real face poked through his unconvincing flesh. She caressed the bone and thrust her tongue between the lipless teeth.

Their mock lovemaking died down, as it always did. She sat astride the skeletal thing.

“Don’t you ever miss it?” she asked. “The little death, la petite mort? ”

“Why should I?” he said. “I have the real thing.”

“But not with me,” said Mor. “And I’m your wife.”

He laughed.

“I did not marry you for that!”

“You did,” said Mor.

Her hand snaked under the pile of her clothes and whipped out the gun. Quickly she pressed the muzzle to the wound in her husband’s chest and pulled the trigger. For a second, she thought it could not work. But then the body underneath her convulsed, and dark, heavy blood erupted from the wound, splattering her belly and legs. At the same time she felt a hot explosion inside herself. A single groan escaped her husband, the metallic bones of his face corroding and falling apart, the hard sleekness of his flesh growing soft and mushy, her fingers sinking into his arms and encountering only the pliancy of a child’s bones that were snapping like twigs, while she was crying out, dying a thousand little deaths in one infinite moment of time.