Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

I got the feeling that the real Chloë was a sweet person through and through. I imagined her walking in Central Park back in the day, when we would have both been little kids, back before the crash, before the Hoovervilles, her daddy holding her hand and me walking with my uncle Walt, our two little groups passing on the sidewalk while a guy blew big soap bubbles and somebody in the distance played the clarinet. Both of us young and healthy and full of possibilities, before she was a corpse and I was a monster. I was sure the two of us in that room together was some of kind of mistake. Like she didn’t deserve what happened to her, like she was something to blame God with, the patron saint of injustice. Maybe I would have married her. She might have made me a better person. The Chloë I liked to imagine probably wouldn’t have wanted me teasing Cvetko. But really I just couldn’t help myself.

“Imeant to ask you, Cvets, how did the hunting go near Broadway? Did you ease the melancholy of the postmenopausal? Did you play any exciting games of Hearts or Spades? Did you see Frank Langella?”

This was at the very end of the night, when, above us, all the regular schmucks were fisting the sleep out of their eyes, getting ready to zombie-walk onto their trains and earn their bread.

Cvetko had his big-ass table lamp going; Baldy had run a line down here stealing power off the grid. Cvets didn’t need a lamp to see any more than I did, but he said it was easier to read. I read just fine without one, but maybe it’s because I got turned younger? Anyway, he was sitting on the floor next to his stack of National Geographic s. The one he was reading had a freckly redheaded kid on the front, a Mazola corn oil ad on the back. Besides his groaning-ass shelves of actual books, he probably had forty, fifty issues of National Geographic , plus Life , travel magazines, anything with good photos. I don’t think any sad bastard thing Cvetko did broke my heart like watching him thumb through magazines and stare at pictures of sunny places. He waved away my saucy query and pointed at a picture of Arab guys building something, a boat? No, a house like an upside-down boat, made of reeds. Marsh Arabs, three of them smoking, palm trees splayed in the distance against a white-blue sky that stirred fleeting sense-memories of heat and pain.

“Tell me, Joseph Hiram Peacock, about the time you went to Al Kabayish.”

“Al Kabeesh my ass, I’ve barely been out of the boroughs, you know that.”

He kept talking, still staring at the picture. “No, Joey, that is not how the game works. I say tell me about the time you went to Al Kabayish, or, if that is too obscure, Egypt. And you entertain me with tales of your adventures there. Perhaps you went to a camel market at the foot of the Great Pyramids and haggled a magnificent bargain.”

“Because I’m a Jew?”

“You are, if I remember correctly, half Jewish, raised Presbyterian.”

“My mom’s a Jew, that’s all it takes to get in the club.”

“I concede the point, even though it is immaterial. Everyone haggles in Egypt, the Arab as well as the Jew.”

“I still think it was a Jew crack. Did you hear Margaret whip out jigaboo to Billy?”

He waved that off, never looked up from his magazine, just turned the page. “Or I might say, ‘Tell me, Joseph Peacock, about the time you traveled in India.’”

He waited.

“And then you say…”

“What?” I said.

“Anything you like. So long as it is entertaining.”

“Oh, you want me to lie.”

“A mundane lie hiding an exotic truth is deception; an exotic lie hiding a mundane truth is storytelling. Deception may be necessary to preserve life, but storytelling makes life worth living. So make my life worth living.”

“I shot a tiger. Like that?”

“Yes,” he said, looking at me now, pleased with me. “Exactly like that.”

“I shot a tiger in the ass.”

“You don’t have to be vulgar.”

“What?”

“You could shoot the tiger anywhere you wanted to.”

“I shot a tiger in the poontang.”

“What is poontang ?”

I smiled a fangy smile at him so he guessed what poontang must be. He sighed deep, stale lung air and went back to his National Geographic , where, I guess, tigers only get shot in legitimate body parts. He was pissed. I scooted around in front of him, pulled his magazine down with my finger so he was looking me in the eye.

“I shot a tiger straight through the heart. It yawned a big whiskery yawn and stretched and died. It was as long as a small horse, and the raja was happy. He gave me opium to smoke and then the coolies picked up the tiger, only it wasn’t really dead, and it clawed a man who died later. Infection. Now everybody shot the tiger. And the raja made the man’s family rich beyond their dreams, with rubies and emeralds and pearls and coral. Especially coral.”

Cvetko smiled. His eyes twinkled.

“I think there is hope for you. Not much. Just a little. But enough so we may not yet declare you an American savage.”

I made like an Indian patting my open mouth and going woo-woo-woo .

“It’s almost sunrise,” he said, a little sadly.

I wasn’t sad. I was full of blood, ready to curl up in my fridge like Oscar the Grouch in his can and get some sleep, maybe dead-dream about getting me some little vampire kid scalps on the subway raid.

Cvetko closed his book, crawled into his coffin. For the record, he was the only one of us who slept in an actual wooden coffin, but that’s just how he was.

After he tucked in, I picked up his magazine. Wrinkly old Irish fuckers from the Dingle peninsula, a San Antonio colored girl who looked a lot like Elise (only nobody let their nipples show through their dresses back then), and an article about Brazilian killer bees. How they were coming north, all pissed off, how amateur beekeepers were going to have to find a new hobby. Nearly identical in appearance to gentler honeybees of European origin, the African bees quickly dominate the hives of the less aggressive strains. But that’s nature, isn’t it? Nice guys really do, really always finish last.

We didn’t see anything on the subway the next night. Well, no creepy little kids. Just the usual weirdness; punks, dudes with big Afros, women in pantsuits, guys in sideburns, cops. New York cops always impressed me by looking bored and dangerous at the same time, like big, sleepy crocodiles who probably wouldn’t notice you, but could really fuck up your evening if they did. Big asshole crocodiles in their chalky blue shirts and stop-sign black hats, silver badges shining like a lie only kids believed. I always smiled at them, broad enough to show my fangs, confident the constant low-grade charm was humming along, hiding them. One cop, kinda meaty in that used-to-play-football way, woke up a sleeping pot-smelling kid with long hair and a yellow but stained Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt. He woke him up by poking him with his nightstick. “Hey,” he said. “My partner wants to know if you got a joint on you.”

“No, man, I’m clean,” he said reflexively, rubbing his eyes.

“He’s clean,” he said to his partner, who barely looked. You could tell he wished he had a different partner. “Too bad. We wanted to party. Anyway, sit up. No sleeping on the cars.”

“Okay,” he said, and sat up.

But the cop kept looking at him. He wasn’t done. “You got your terrible towel on you?”

“Excuse me, sir?” the sleepy kid said. The cop gestured at the T-shirt, so I guessed it was a football thing. Have you noticed that most bullies are boring?