Jim Baen's Universe

Fantasy Stories

The Art of Memory

Written by Barry N. Malzberg and Jack Dann

Illustrated by Karl Nordman

The car, a l958 DeSoto, last of its line, spins out, and hits the guardrail with terrific impact. Even before my head has gone through the windshield, I know that it is over. Done.

“And in that night I awoke to find myself in a dark and deserted place . . .”

That is Dante. Alighieri’s the name. As I lay dead in the wastes of the car, arms broken to fit, the smell of blood a miasma in the air, my head aching, pounding, I think: How could this be? My heart is unmoving within me. From the carcass of the car faint thuds and hissings, the sounds of re-accommodation. I think of the Divine Comedy, nothing so divine about it, and of Dante, who was as much the fool as I had been. Dante had met his precious, prescient Beatrice when he was nine; by the time he turned eighteen she had spurned him, left him bereft of that “Which was the goal of all desire,” and then in l290 had insulted him even more greatly by expiring.

Expiration.

Bereft, bereaved Dante. Bereaved me. I am done for.

“And in that black night I awoke to find myself in a dark and deserted place . . . ”

 Who will mourn me? Who do I leave bereaved?

My wife Janice will be so. She won’t know where the checkbook is. She won’t know the passwords to get into the laptop files. I tried to tell her . . . Lord knows how I tried.

It comes to me that this rictus planted on my face would look like a smile to any witness. There is much about which to smile. Death is not only absolute, it is painless and here I am, a pain-free fifty-seven-year-old pisher advertising executive newly dead. Ten minutes ago, well no. But now? Now, in the steam and huddle of the wrenched DeSoto I can face everything. Death is the great compressor, squeezing circumstance to manageability and compressed, I can feel my essence, congealing around the ruined heart.

So I look around, considering it all. If I could breathe, I would have thought, “Breathing everything in.” Can I smell? Indeterminate. I can remember smells. Memory without passion, without pain, is perhaps a sort of omniscience. One becomes little more than a witness to one’s life and everything, then, is changed.

I peer from side to side, trying to understand the situation. If I could breathe I would have retained control, but I do not appear to be breathing.

A white and yellow ambulance with a hairline crack in the rear window roars along the highway, no siren, gumdrop red light rotating. The highway has been closed. Traffic is being redirected. In and out of their cars people are yammering on cell-phones. But I’m right here, still here, a presence, a part of the ghostly landscape rising from the blood spot on the highway, about four inches from the median. I’m here and I’m there as they strap me on a gurney and take me to the ambulance. In the ambulance I’m just an anonymous corpse. But here I am—

—I am standing.

I’m standing and dressed as if my Anderson & Shepard double-breasted suit, Holl shirt, green silk tie and Ramon Torres ostrich-skin loafers have become part of me: loose flags of tattooed flesh. The DeSoto—an antique bought for too much a few years ago out of a misguided humor—is a crushed accordion; but then, even as I assess this, it becomes in a flicker exactly what it was before the accident: well-restored, cleaned, and serviced. I wedge my way in there. The door clangs on me. I always thought of this DeSoto as a refuge, which I could take anywhere and be free, a refuge against my life itself; but the difficulty is that I was wholly deluded, I could never have been free in this car, any more than I could have been free anywhere. More than physical reconstitution is being managed here.

I had exited through the side window, I remember, and been impaled on a sheer metal rail torn from the frame. Somehow being crucified had felt, still feels, right and just. As we were in life, so we are in death. Not that in being crucified I had any great heights from which to fall.

But here I start the engine and I drive away. There is no one to stop me or even notice.

Life—or rather death—is filled with possibility and in fact promise. Indeed, perhaps I am alive after all. Maybe this is merely a concussion. Perhaps I am being given another chance or simply misunderstood the situation. I feel a surge of gratitude to whatever source has accomplished this, although I do not believe in the existence of a higher, controlling intelligence. I do not in fact believe anything except the sound of the big engine throbbing, the soft clatter of radial tires, the soughing of wind flowing wretchedly, and the ubiquitous, infinitely gray LA freeway extending forever, sprawling, launching me.

Home, I think, go home. Take me home, you poor dumb, dead Dante. Go home to your own Beatrice. Go home to Janice and fuck your brains out.

I had not realized that dying would make me so horny. My erection presses against the tautness, this post-traumatic erection warm and pulsing. Take me home, I think.

It shouldn’t be long because there isn’t another car going either way on the six-lane highway. There is just grayness, the median strip and the DeSoto.

And, of course, me.

Horny as hell and dead as road-kill.

****

Trees blur, the highway blurs, all passage blurs, but in the car death makes all these spaces warm and safe. I am not so much driving as being driven, and outside the barren highway has become a vast tent pitched over desire. I think of Janice, of all I had wanted to say and would have if I had known where the DeSoto would bring me that morning . . . but it is not so much the saying as the doing which overtakes. I want to screw her, enter her very heart, create an erection so enormous that it will touch and dangerously displace her heart. An erection so enormous—impelled by death, by that hangman’s noose draped now upon me—that it will reach to her center. Small puffs of cartoon steam seem to purr from my groin, the little abscess of the car fills with steam, and I think of Janice lying against me, of the sounds which I helped her make.

Oh, it was all such a long time ago.

Suspended, then, hanging in that space, the soundless gel of the car dense and swaddling, I find at the center of my new purpose raw necessity and past that an agenda. I have plans. I have clearly defined plans, even for a dead man. Never in fact have I had so many plans as those which now assault me at this moment: a little schedule of accommodation that will be met, places to be revisited, contacts to be made, but all of that only after Janice, after the screwing. Death congeals into a helpful arrangement of priorities.

Lights prowl the highway; I seem to have been overtaken by light, and I think of myself again as a figure in a cartoon, steam from the pants, lights through the window, hurt in the head. At the end of this journey: Janice, and with her the commencement of true and meaningful plans, which will then vault me past all this and into a newer life (or colder death) more certain than any I have ever known.

In that suspended place, fixed on anticipation, but placed now only in that deadly quiet, it is as if my father appears in the car, seated beside me, legs casually crossed, eyes staring madly through the windshield. His hands flutter with what surely must be the effort of travel.

He is pretty much, the old man, as I remember him on his deathbed twenty years ago, although certainly in a more advanced state of composition. Still, for a corpse, he looks terrific. He has retained most of his hair, and the mad light in his eyes shows an uncharacteristic enthusiasm. He was always distracted. He always had places to go. He was always half out of the room even when he was in the room. “How are you doing?” he would ask, and his lips would move, and he would stare at his watch, at the door. “Well, that’s very good,” he would say. “We must discuss this later.”

But now he seems more sedentary, fixated in a way he never was before. “It isn’t going to work,” he says, “I know exactly what you’re planning, but it can’t happen. There’s a catch to the whole business. I mean, you can come back, but you can’t come, if you follow what I’m saying here.” He coughs, shrugs his shoulders and stares out the side window. “There isn’t enough speed to save. Believe me, I have been here for almost twenty years now, and I haven’t been able to change a thing. Not in me, not in the situation.”

“So what do you want?” I ask,. our first conversation in almost two decades. “Why are you here? If there isn’t enough speed to save, why did you come back?”

“I didn’t come back,” he says. “You call this coming back? I’m just filling in the time. Dead is dead, a big hammer on the head. Then you just try to amuse yourself.”

“A hammer? Whose hammer?”

“I told you not to marry that woman, didn’t I? She’s too cold for you, always complaining. I know the type. Saw it early.”

“It didn’t seem that way at the start,” I say.

Die in a highway crash, get resurrected to live a partial after life and what do you find? You find your father beside you, questioning your judgment as if forty years had not passed.

“Dad,” I say, “You live your life the best you can. It’s not for anyone to judge.”

“You’ve judged me every moment of your existence. You never let it go, never.” He shakes his head, shakes his hands and peers out the window, squinting. “Sons of bitches. They promised fifteen minutes and now I have to go back after five? Well, what the hell is the difference? I couldn’t ever tell you anything anyway.”

“I listened to everything you had to say.”

“And laughed at it,” he says, distracted. “I told you about that woman. I could have saved you most of it. Also if you weren’t driving antique junk, and if you had checked your brake fluid level, which I remind you should be part of your ordinary life, you would have had enough torque to spin out of it instead of driving right into that bus. But no matter,” my father says, “No matter, you were ready to end it all anyway.”

And he dematerializes.

Gone, the father! He has disappeared as quickly and mysteriously as he had arrived, and through the windshield I can see the familiar dead-white strip malls that form the gateway to my neighborhood. Surely at this moment Janice is also there, waiting, beginning to worry, some faint sliver of warning neutralizing her restlessness and contempt, bringing her alert to the inference that this is not an ordinary evening. I think of her anger, throbbing at the margins and wonder if my lustful dead thoughts are simply part of the common apparatus of death itself.

Into the drive, off the engine, trudge from the DeSoto, and I enter the blue glazed front door of our Greek revival home on Antioch Avenue . . . perfect Antioch Avenue with its huge lawns and blue-glazed swimming pools and just underneath, the trembling reach of the unspeakable. The unspeakable here or there, it is one Earth, isn’t it?”

“I’m home,” I say coming through the door, and Janice steps from the study that aligns the dining room and blinks at me.

“Oh,” she says. “You’re here after all. I was worrying, I didn’t know—”

“Didn’t know what?” I say. “What didn’t