Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

The spy slot closed, the iron door opened, dim light spilled out, and a feathered chimera in slippers appeared, unlocked the metal gate, and stood aside. We entered this huge space like a warehouse, with old historic furniture, gold Chinese screens, long tables covered with lenses and tools. One wall was painted to look like a faraway city with tall buildings.

The chimera took me past rooms with lights from screens where people watched and worked. Others were dark with humans and chimeras lying on mattresses. Some watched us pass. At a worktable a fox, a cat, and a lizard chimera showed some human kids how to polish models of the old empire building and the statue of the lady that was in the harbor and stuff.

Those get sold to tourists, and the metal they’re made of is supposed to be from the original buildings and statues. And I guessed this studio was where they got made.

A guy was cleaning the floors, and I smelled food cooking. Right then I wanted some of this for me and Dare and our crew.

From somewhere deep in Studio Caravaggio, a voice, hoarse and kind of shaky, said, “Visitors from the Orient encounter visitors from the future and fight it out in the ruins of New York while the natives dive for tourist gold is what it’s about. Where did I get the story? My dear sir, it’s my life. I look out my window and it’s what I see.”

Ursus turned a corner, and down a short hall, bright light shone out a doorway. The bear stopped at the door and we both looked at Caravaggio.

Before when I saw him, he was old but strong and dangerous and needing to be respected. Now he was in a white robe with stains on the front, spilling wine as he drank out of a long glass. His face was thin and he slumped in a big soft chair with a fan playing on him. What I thought was a boy in silk shorts held a bowl of something and a spoon like he’d been feeding him.

Caravaggio’s eyes moved, focused on me, and he said into a tiny disc in his open hand, “That’s the scenario, Assad. As always, I’m interested in financial backing. My health? I’m not going to die before I complete this, I promise you. But now I’ve got to talk to someone.”

When the boy put down the bowl and took a plug-in from behind Caravaggio’s ear, I saw he was maybe pushing thirty, and I recognized him as Tagalong, who was on the street with a gang when I was small. He nodded to me.

“I’ve brought Reality Girl,” said the chimera.

“Depose says you wanted to see me,” I said.

Caravaggio said nothing, just stared at me through eyes that looked like he was crying. But his face didn’t move. Tagalong tried to feed him from the bowl. Caravaggio brushed it away. He drained the glass, picked up a bottle with both hands, and drank out of it. Wine dribbled out the side of his mouth.

“My scouts talked about you,” he said.

“You want to use my boys diving for the tourists?”

“The boys sure, but mostly it’s you I’m interested in.” He moved his hand over a glass surface then pointed at something behind me, wanting me to turn and look. I wasn’t doing that, but I stepped back, kept him and Tagalong in my sight. Tagalong shook his head like he couldn’t believe me.

What I saw was a flat screen. It took a second to know I was watching myself. First I was on the riverfront that summer with Dare and the boys. Then Dare and I walked through the early morning streets before the sun got bad, and we kissed. Next we were at the UN clinic in Times Square getting ointments and medicine.

Don’t get scared, get mad was Dare’s motto and mine. “You and your freaks followed me!”

“If we meant you harm we could have done it many times,” Caravaggio said. “I’ve been thinking of you, imagining you in a film. The tourists you saw today were impressed by these pictures and were impressed by you.” Mai Kin’s face popped up on the screen. “At my suggestion Mai Kin has been redone in your image.” Seeing her again, she didn’t look that much like me.

Next I saw myself in the evening, walking all alone down an empty Fifth Avenue. This was fake; none of us ever went anywhere alone. Caravaggio talked on the sound track.

“Once this was the most famous city in the most powerful nation in the world,” he said. “Then the bombs fell, the earth quaked, the waters rose, the government collapsed. Around the world, cities and nations fell, but none fell further. Mighty Gotham is a ruin at a crossroads, with local warlords like Liberty Land and the Northeast Command fighting for possession.”

He touched the surface again, and I disappeared. Color and faces exploded on the screen. A girl in leather smashed mirrors in some huge bathroom. Maybe it was a party, maybe it was a riot, but the camera spun around in an enormous space. A mob dressed better than anyone in the city is now, poured fuel on chairs and set them on fire, smashed glass doors, shot out the lights high overhead.

“A fiesta of destruction made a ruin of Madison Square Garden,” Caravaggio told me. “Caught for my first full-length film. But places remain on this planet where people are still rich and bored. The films I’ve made have kept the eyes of that world on us, and that’s what I’m still doing.”

The city opened before me. Buildings were down, but ones I’d never seen before stood. The streets were full of people. Cars went by; I saw a bus! It was New York after the bombs but before the quakes. A girl in a silk dress walked arm in arm with a chimera gorilla.

“What did you bring me here for?” I asked.

“I want you in a film. I’ll use you as Mai Kin’s body double. She’s more a prop than an actor. You’ll stand in for her in certain scenes. But it will be more than that. They think to use me to film the New York sequences for an episode of that idiotic series.

“But I’m going to use THEM to tell the story of kids on the waterline. I want you and your crew. Anything can be faked, but what’s true will always stand revealed.”

“I want a hundred gold pieces a day,” I said, because that’s as much money as I’ve ever seen at once and because gold is the only thing everyone trusts. “I want the first day’s pay up front,” I said, because that’s what I know about doing business.

“I created the legend of Jackie, the angel of divers,” he said, like he hadn’t heard me. “Now I want to give the tourists a taste of the desperation of diver kids’ lives.”

I said, “What about the money?”

“Once I dreamed of showing Jackie returning to the city like an avenging angel come to save the place,” he said. “My new vision of the city will be you and your friends.” Again his hand moved over a glass surface in front of him.

A boy in long hair and shorts stood on a pier in the full light of day. Big crowds of people watched as a coin was flung and the boy leaped, seemed to flicker like silver light in the gold sun. He skimmed over the water and caught the coin in his hand. It looked fake.

What got to me was how the riverfront wasn’t all smashed up. The water was lower than the walks. New Jersey was wrecked but not totally. Boats sailed and people didn’t look scared. I remembered some of that from when I was real little, and got angry it was gone.

I wanted to see more but the screen went blank. I got careless and reached for Caravaggio, wanting to see what he remembered. I touched his brain and saw a jumble of faces, heard a tourist talking about a hundred-million-yen deal, tasted the wine he had just drunk, caught the smell of Silken Night, a perfume he remembered.

Caravaggio looked startled and confused. He tried to stand, and knocked over the wine bottle. Tag caught it, stared at me wide-eyed like he had a hint of what just happened.

It was stupid to give myself away. But I just shrugged. Then I remembered what we’d been talking about before Caravaggio started showing me pictures.