Bot Killer

On August the 30^th Roger received a letter. It was in his mailbox, a large rural type mailbox he had installed on his front fence, lying with its blank side upward. Roger picked it up and brought it inside to his kitchen table. He examined the envelope. There was no return address either on the front or back. His name and address were printed.

It was unusual for Roger to receive a letter so rather than open it right away, he made a cup of tea. When it was steeped and poured into his cup he opened the envelope, slitting the top with a penknife. It contained a single sheet of paper, 8 1/2x11. This is what it said,

“It has come to the attention of the local authorized agent of HUM (Human Unit Monitoring) that you are in violation of various statutes. A board of examination has been convened and you are required to attend its hearing, September 17^th coming.

The board regrets that it is unable to inform you of the exact nature of your offence, the giving out of such information contravening regulation 4987. However it is possible for the board to say that the offences are grievous and a finding of Culpability 463, the most likely out come of such a hearing, will result in a penalty involving absence from the social mileau you now inhabit. You are therefore instructed to bring with you on the assigned day three suits of clothes and personal grooming items. Such items should be carried in a bag 16x14x18.

Failure to attend the hearing will result in immediate elimination. It is wise for the addressee to recall that there are no privacies presently allowable. Any avoidance behavior will be considered Culpable Offences and result in immediate elimination.

Yours,

L------------“

After reading this Roger reinserted the letter into the envelope and laid it on top of the table. “How efficient the Authorities; how well they serve the New Reality,” he said aloud. Then he relaxed, or to be more accurate, appeared to relax, and drank the remainder of his tea. The sun was shining in the kitchen window and he allowed himself to doze for a few moments in its soft, warm light.

Doze completed, Roger said, “How efficient the authorities; how well they serve the New Reality.” Then he rose and walked into the bathroom.

The authorities were efficient and they did serve the New Reality well. That’s why Roger had a very special bathroom. Actually he had two, one a completely normal bathroom and the other lined with a double layer of lead sheeting. This was the bathroom he entered, the one which created what the authorities called ‘a dead zone’. On the floor was a throw rug and under the rug a trap door. The opened door exposed a set of stairs. Roger descended.

The trick to absconding is to create a confusion of identities. Easy enough if one has time to prepare. Roger had. Roger was the kind of man who was always prepared. The small ASZ (above surface zipper) was at the bottom of the stair. Its eID plate was not his own. As soon as the illegitimacy of the plate was recognized by the trackers a new plate would replace it and then another and another. Six replacements, together with a little added pulse from the sixth, would erase all tracking memory from the system. Most ingenuous. All this could be recreated by programmers, even the dull witted ones at Central but his would take two or three days. He need far less. When the doors opened he flew out. After five minutes he put on the auto pilot.

There is the old and the new. Sats tracked everything; the sky was full of them. However old radar was still alive as well. To avoid this the auto pilot was programmed to cross the city and once beyond its borders drop into the channel created by a gas pipeline. It then followed the line which was nice because four hours along it brought Roger to a section of country uninhabited excepting for the odd trappers cabin. Here he unloaded gear, covered the ASZ with a lead cape, and drove an electric two wheeler ten miles along a narrow trail to a dugout cabin. He was bleeding slightly from the right shoulder for he had removed the finder tab to be found there back in the lead lined bathroom. Inside the cabin he cleaned the wound with alcohol and, wrapping himself in a down bag, went to sleep.

In the morning, after a breakfast of boiled eggs and toast, there was equipment to be packed into the electric truck. Electric vehicles, ancient and rusting, were the means of transport in outback. Although it was illegal they could be bought from recyclers in the city for next to nothing. This was just right for the people in the outback had next to nothing if you were counting in money and gizmos. They had other things like clean air and functional sensoriums but even the thought of these had been edited out of the NR (New Reality) some time ago.

When the truck was packed a beep on his homemade finder warned him of a seeker bot, one of the lazy meanderers Central sent out randomly to see what they could pick up. Roger waited until it appeared above the trees and picked it off with his shotgun. Clunk it hit the ground and he had a lead envelope around it in a few seconds. Technically they could tell where it was from the leave off of the signal but that would require attention paid by techs and there was little of that at Central. Easier to write malfunction on the Missing Report and surf porno sights on the internet. Roger hit the encapsulated bot with a sledge hanmer. He removed some of the innards and, packing them in another lead envelope, tossed them into the back of the truck. The NR was prolifigate with its technology. If you knew what to look for they gave you almost everything.

Loaded up Roger drove for five miles down a rough narrow trail til he came to a gravel road. Two hundred miles down this road he tossed the seeker bot’s tab out the window. He didn’t want some keener Redeemer Bot finding it near his cabin. Five miles later he pulled off the road and made ready for the Pike bots. That’s what they had up here; humans were too expensive. When he was ready he pulled back onto the road and drove under the limit for another ten miles until he came to the Pike.

There were four visible which meant three hidden. They were old bots, obsolete, dispensible and thus here in the boonies. They had limited vision analysis which was helpful to know. They saw a plastic ray burner as a plastic ray burner but a shotgun did not compute. Perhaps they saw it as a thermos bottle. Roger blew away the four then, wrapped in a silver foil cape he stepped clear of the truck. All three remainders came around the corner of the little guard house blasting away at the smashed remains of their companions they computed to be rat bots. Roger blew them away too. He harvested things from the smashes and stripped the guardhouse of weapons. Nothing too fancy but certain friends would appreciate the old time burners and sacks full of circuit boards. There were four flatbombs hidden under a pile of rubbish in a corner. He timed one of these for the house and heard it go off twenty miles behind him, a satisfying sound. That night he drove into a slip, as his northern pals called it, a cave dug into a soft hill just off the road. No rain, out of the wind and no detection. Propane stove, beef stew and canned pudding. He heard three searchers, sleek air cushion units, go by on the road before he went to sleep.

In the morning he gave himself a treat – ox tongue cooked in raisin sauce, bannock and tea. After he filled his pipe and had a long meditative smokefest. Ready to go, he checked his finder. They hadn’t tuned in the sats; what loss a few backwoods bots? But there was a truckful of finder bots roaring down the road ten miles south. The flatbombs had a squish blower but his own were more reliable. He took out the old one and installed his own. From the slip he could hear it but it didn’t hurt his ears. When the fire was out, everything cooled down, he harvested odds and ends and headed north. That night, after dark, he pulled into a slip which turned into a tunnel and then into a great cavern. An old potash mine. Here there were lots of people and they came running over to greet him as he climbed out of the truck.

‘Non citizen Roger T.’. That’s what the nitecast called him. The photograph was shadowy. A dangerous fellow the talk bot said, full of hate and death. Death maybe, thought Roger, but not hate particularly. But a face projector made all that flat ID useless so why bother? Why even give him a name? They needed a monster, of course. Ah fellow citizens, look at the demon we are protecting you from. See how he salivates at the thought of your suffering.

He spent three weeks in the cavern building a colon bomb. That’s what he called it – small, high intensity, packed in a rolled tube three hundred feet long. All ready for uncoiling along a utility pipe under Central, a pipe so full of search bleepers you could die from their radiation alone, never mind the crusher bots they would direct upon you. Failsafe they said. Seven, folded systems, separately sourced. Seven different bots in seven different offices on seven different floors, all of whom Roger would ignore.

Bleeper beams had a weakness; bear grease exploited that weakness. Why Roger didn’t know for sure but many experiments taught him that it did. And if it didn’t? Well the first crusher bot he would disable and then take his shot. He was ready to go. Nobody could resist forever and he was almost forty. A much longer run than most.

There were three young men who wanted to come with him but he said no. “Go east,” he told them. “Marry, farm. Have children. This life is dreadful and it ends in early death.”

“Then why do you live it?” asked one.

“I was born saying no. I can’t help myself.”

He left early morning when everyone was asleep. When he reached the cabin he stayed four days reading and then packed his gear into the ASZ.

If you knew what you were doing it was easy to plate yourself like a bot, a cleaning bot in this case, rough and ugly, waiting at the gate with all the others, a smashed bot’s plate on your chest. Pick me, pick me for tunnel detail but that was already set up. He did it from the cabin, so cleanly the boss bot saw him as his dear brother. Shall I clean this tunnel dear leader? Oh yes, indeedy do. Do the door with an e disabler, down three flights of steel stairs and there she is just where the schemata said.

Bear grease is messy but messy is good here. It does something to the beams when they hit, who knows what? Maybe they slide. Maybe there is a chemical. One hour and the tube is unrolled. Timer. Two actually, to be sure. No need to be embarrassed explaining the grease to one’s fellow bots for tunnel 46 goes a long way into the city, fifty-five minutes in this case for the timer’s one hour five. The outlet is in a back street where no one ever goes. There is a little whiz car parked there and it moves so silently back to the ASZ.

Half way there he hears and feels the rumbling explosion. Then the ASZ and the cabin. Rest, fish, build a few devices.

One can’t trust the nitecast lies but he soon gets reliable info from friends. Poor Central. Five thousand smashed bots and a giant hole. And Roger T - they want him even if he owns a thousand face projectors.

“I think I might become a monk,” he said to the woman he was with three weeks later.

“You? You must be mad,” Ruth replied.

“The mad monk. Wasn’t that what they called Rasputin?”

“And who might Rasputin be?”

“Some guy I read about.”

“Sounds like some kind of rat poison.”

“Yes it does now that you mention it.”

Three months later he and Ruth went into the mountains so Roger could rest from his life of killing bots.

The Fourth Room

1

Doctor McIvor ran the Clinic built on stilts at the edge of town. The money to build it had been provided by the rich man who lived back from the river on a rise, the only rise in that part of the country for many miles. His money came from mining and he had a private army which, along with the eight foot electric fence, batteries of video cameras and guard dogs, protected his property. The Clinic was a kind of protection too for it gave free medical care to those who could not afford it. You couldn’t say the poor who lived along the river were grateful but at least they didn’t take potshots at his house with twenty-twos like they used to before the Clinic was built.

Doctor McIvor had three nurses for assistants and a middle aged man who did the administrative work. Benson, the rich man, paid their salaries rather grudgingly but still he paid them. Doctor McIvor received his salary from a far away entity still called the Government although exactly what it governed people were hard put to say. Mostly it collected taxes and sent around edicts, long involved edicts filled with rules and regulations. These edicts were baffling to the residents of the little town for they did not concern anything that went on there. They were very abstract and seemed to be about ways of thinking which the residents assumed were matters of concern to people living in the great cities. But the Burns had destroyed the great cities and most of the smaller ones too so why the Government kept sending around such edicts was a mystery to everyone. Most people ignored them but a few of the educated ones read them for entertainment.

Doctor McIvor was a sour man. He had a sour face, sour eyes and even a sour way of walking. He walked as if he were saying he didn’t expect to get anywhere and if by accident he did, it was more a matter of inconvenience than anything else. He was thirty which is a young age to be sour. He himself claimed that he was born sour, the reincarnation of a disillusioned Greek Philosopher called Malen. He made all this up for the Doctor was a man who diverted himself from the sorry state of the world by imagining things and then talking about them as if they were real. Despite these and many other eccentricities the Doctor was an excellent medical man. He claimed the reason for this was precisely because he was a man who indulged his imagination. The educated people in town sniggered when he said this for they knew that science had nothing to do with the imagination and he was pulling their leg.

The clinic had three waiting rooms, one for the townies, one for the poor along the river, called ‘Mud People’ by both the townies and themselves and one for Benson and his chief men. Benson had insisted on this and the government had agreed. Nobody asked the Doctor for he came on the scene after the clinic was built, but if they had asked him he would have spoke up for a fourth waiting room. If asked for whom he would have said for nobody for the fourth room would remain empty. Empty or filled with nothingness as the Doctor put it, the fourth room would act as a kind of potential womb, a reminder of the possibility of things to come even the surety of things to come. People to whom the Doctor spoke of the fourth room became a little afraid. They became concerned that this man who was such a good Doctor and such an energetic, fruitful man, might contain within himself a seed of mental fragility which one day might overwhelm him. When the Doctor mentioned the fourth room to the Mayor at a Town Supper the Mayor told him he was mad. Perhaps, said the Doctor, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is a need for a fourth waiting room. The Mayor, a social smoothy if ever there was one, changed the subject.

The Mud People lived along the river in what at first were a series of shanty towns but which eventually bumped into one another to form a continuous line of settlement three miles long. Their ‘houses’ were made of cardboard, old sheets of plywood and tarpaulins so old the color had been bleached out by the sun. Some did odd jobs in town. Some fished and hunted. Others stole. Most combined all three and by doing so made enough money to stay alive but barely.

Many of the Mud People had scars and growths caused by the Burns. But they were not alone in this for many townies had them as well and even a few of Benson’s chief men. Human hierarchial arrangements have no influence on solar flares or bursts of radiation. So the three waiting rooms were not created for the purposes of segregating categories of illness but rather as an expression of the new social arrangements. The Doctor would have said the old social arrangements repackaged. The poor, the middle class and the rich, as the Doctor called them, the three Great Eternals.

When Benson came to his waiting room he did so with an armed guard and a bevy of chief men. The chief men were so similar to Benson that one would think them clones and with the state of outlaw medicine this was not impossible. They were heavy men full of gravitas and glowering looks. Benson’s party filled the waiting room. They sat on plastic chairs placed around the bare white walls, chewing tobacco and spitting green gobs into the waste paper baskets. Benson himself smoked a cigar, a very expensive cigar the size of pony’s erected penis. Nobody but Benson smoked a cigar; there was no law against it but it was generally considered to be forbidden, at least in Benson’s presence. This pleasure – if that is what it was – was reserved for him alone. At least Benson thought so but he thought wrong. The Mud People grew dark tobacco along the riverbank and rolled homemade cigars with it. The Doctor had smoked both – Benson had given him a cigar in an expansive moment when he found out he didn’t have cancer – Mud People sometimes gave him one as a gift of friendship – and he liked the Mud People cigars better. They were richer and tasted of smoky fires and the river. They reminded him of the beautiful brown skinned women you sometimes found in the Mud People shanty town, women with facial bones so exquisite they made the Doctor’s whole body ache with what seemed to him to be unachievable desire.

Benson came often for he was a hypochondriac. If his scalp was ichy from not wearing a hat in the sun he was sure he had skin cancer. If he had a back ache he was sure his discs were crumbling. If he could not achieve orgasm with his young mistress he was sure he was impotent. And so on. He was in the clinic at least once a week with the symptoms of an incurable disease which could finish him off at any time. First one of the nurses checked him out, usually the middle aged one with the gravelly voice for Benson would feel up the legs of the younger ones as they were examining him. After this preliminary examination and the filling in of many forms which minutely described his latest symptoms, Doctor McIvor came in to speak with him.

“What’s the matter?” he would ask.

“Flaccid erections,” might be the answer.

“How many orgasms do you have in a week?”

“Three a day.”

“Too many for a sixty year old man. Cut back to one.”

“A week?”

“No, a day.”

“OK.”

Then Doctor McIvor would shake his hand and leave. This would take one or two minutes. With Benson the Doctor was brusque and business like. Benson didn’t mind for he thought it revealed the Doctor to be a serious man, snappy and brisk, the kind of man he liked.

Most of the people with radiation burns didn’t die of them or at least it took them a long time to do so. Right after the burns occurred was when many people died; if they survived the first year they often lived a normal life span. But there was a lot of work to be done. A plastic surgeon came twice a year and stayed for two weeks at the clinic. He did skin grafts and reconstructions. The Doctor and nurses did some of this themselves but they left the complicated cases to the plastic surgeon. There were new drugs and the Doctor dispensed them. He gave out drugs for pain. This was sometimes a problem for patients would ask for pain killers they didn’t need and then sell them. On the whole Doctor McIvor dispensed quite freely. He thought it better that a few deceivers made money than somebody who needed pain relief went without it.

The Edicts which the government sent around three or four times a year were printed on expensive paper. The pages were bordered with pale blue and the words printed with bright red ink. In the left hand bottom corner there was a picture of the Great Leader, a rather grainy picture which gave the impression of vague benevolence rather than facial distinctiveness. From the evidence of the picture the Great Leader could well have been any of many thousands of pudgy middle aged men given to beaming brightly and smiling widely. The Doctor thought of him as the owner of a flower shop. The Mayor, who had been in his presence as a member of official delegations, thought of him as a kindly dentist. Benson who met with him secretly once a month thought of him as a crude sonofabitch, a nasty bastard. The Mud People thought of him as an institutionalized joke which had repeated itself every day over a long period of time until it had grown stale.

It was late April. The snow melted early that year and the days were unusually warm. Birds were singing in the trees. Bears just up from winter’s hibernation roamed the trees on the south bank of the river and the Mud People hunters carried shotguns loaded with BB’s while checking their rabbit snares. The Spring Edict, due to the warm weather, was early. Mallomere, that great fat bag of guts stuffed into his bandstand conductor’s uniform, came riding his bicycle down the river road (path really) stopping here and there to staple a copy onto a tree.

No one said anything to him. No one even waved for Mallomere was the man who came to knock down the shacks of those whom the Townies deemed too enthusiastic in thievery. He brought with him four brawny workmen and a small bulldozer. The occupants of the shacks were not allowed to remove their belongings. With a few pushes of its blade the dozer knocked the building down and then ran over it, breaking it into little pieces and pushing them down into the mud. The women connected to the shack stood off to the side lamenting, wringing their hands. The men, not wanting to be associated with such female complaining, stood some distance off, silent and stoical.

But when it was over and Mallomere and his cronies retreating up the road, the men suddenly became agitated and shouted after him – “You won’t live forever you fat pig! Something will run over you some day you turd, you rooster fucker!”

But that Spring day there were no dozers or insults but just Mallomere stapling his edicts and the Mud People watching him with cold, hooded eyes. When he was finished he climbed laboriously onto his bicycle and rode silently away as if he were been a visitor from another planet suddenly called home.

The new Edict was different in tone from the others. The others were avuncular. They emphasized the kindly, all giving nature of the Great Leader, his endless striving to provide the good things necessary to his people. The poor man worked day and night. Seldom did the light in his office go off before three in the morning, and so on. This new Edict was stern and demanding.

It had come to the Great Leader’s attention that certain of his children were avoiding their duties. Could you imagine that? While the Great Leader and his companions were working day and night ruining their health, certainly their complexions at the very least, ‘Lazy Elements’, ‘Disturbed and Confused Personalities’ were slacking, refusing to put their shoulders to the wheel. This saddened the Great Leader so much that mere thought of it brought him close to uncontrolled weeping. But the Great Leader was not the Great Leader for nothing. With steely determination he turned away from such unproductive self indulgence toward ever more vigorous, ever more focused work. The light in his office now did not go off until four in the morning.

The Great Leader was sad to report that the avoidance of duty was growing especially when it came to service in the New Army. Letters went out requiring recruits to attend but few of these recruits came at the appointed time. In fact most did not come at all. When agents went to their homes they were told the recruits had died or that they were off far away in a foreign country or they were deathly ill and in the care of a Doctor who held out little hope for their recovery. As a result the New Army, although strong, invincible and incomparable, was not as numerous as it should be for the purposes of carrying out its national duties such as defeating the armies of neighboring states, crushing uppity provincial governors, sacking disobedient towns, and butchering crowds of disorderly unarmed civilians. Something would have to be done.

The Great Leader in council with his advisors, wise men and women all whose only thought was the good of the country along with the comfort of their relatives down to the fourth cousins and even beyond, eventually including every single soul in the nation, babies and even fetuses included, had thought long and hard on the issue. Some had gone two weeks without sleeping although this may have been partially caused by new drugs the doctors had given them. They had come up with a new policy.

Whereas before individuals were selected as recruits and notices sent to their homes, from now on, communities would be assessed capable of producing a certain number of recruits and be held responsible for them arriving at training centers at the appropriate times. The river shanties of Xtown, in the last conscription had been sent four hundred call up notices of which only twenty produced a serving soldier. The others were dead, sick or gone away. Under the new system these same river shanties would be responsible for sending three hundred and fifty recruits to Y town barracks on such and such a date. Failure to comply would result in penalties unspecified at this time but surely to be avoided. The Great Leader was not just a toothless old mystic counseling love. True he had a beautiful smile but his teeth were made of the hardest steel.

The elders in the shanty town were much agog at this. Where were they going to come up with three hundred and fifty recruits? Especially now that the contents of the Edict was out to everyone and the few prospects would soon be melting away. They wrung their hands. They moaned and groaned. They lamented. Then they decided to speak with the Doctor whom they considered to be a good man who had their best interests at heart.

“Figure out how many you can come up with and then send a letter to the Army Center explaining,” said the Doctor. This they did that very day. The reply came within the week. Three hundred and fifty it said, not a man less.

The Doctor went to see Benson. Benson recieved him in his office at the back of his house where the older man sat behind a desk not much smaller than the deck of an aircraft carrier. Doctor McIvor explained the situation. Benson was not sympathetic.

“What does it matter?” he asked. “These people are totally useless unless it be for the Government tapping them now and then for cannon fodder. If they are useless for even that what is the good of them? If they bring in the Army, shoot them and throw their bodies in the river, good riddance.”

“But surely there is some value in human life,” said the Doctor but Benson would have none of that. “Produce or die,” he said. “That’s the iron rule.”

The Doctor met with the Mayor. “It’s out of my hands,” said the Mayor.

“But surely you have some influence,” said the Doctor. “Perhaps by you talking to some of the influential people the number might be lowered, some kind of compromise achieved.”

“Many of the people around here think the leveling of the shanty towns would be a great blessing,” said the Mayor.

The Doctor advised the elders to bundle up their goods on the back of their donkeys and flee.

“If you don’t produce the quota the Army will be sent to kill you,” he said. “At least in the wilderness some of you will survive.”

After some days of beating the bushes for quota the elders came up with fifty names and they knew that by the time they tried to muster them there might be twenty five. This would never satisfy the Army or the Great Leader.

The elders were crafty men. The shanties were left intact. The contents were packed on donkeys in the night and led across the river five miles downstream where there was a ford. Then they dissappeared into the great forest south of the river. But the shanty town still looked fully occupied. There were fires outside each building, people moving about. So when early one morning, two weeks later, the Army moved in, they were surprised to find empty buildings, everyone gone. Or at least the officers were surprised. With bulldozers they pushed the shanties into the river and marched back to barracks. The Great Leader was livid but then he was naturally livid. Being livid for him had become less the result of a mood than a state of being. He wanted heads and punishments but the Army Commander convinced him that to pursue would be counterproductive. Firstly it would be very difficult to find them. Then it would be difficult to engage them. And even if they did what would be the result? A few dead bodies. A handful of donkeys and a few rusty pots. Reluctantly the Great Leader agreed. But he did command that Rangers be sent to find their location. The Army commander did as he was told but the Ranger units were instructed to find nothing. The Commander had better things to do with his troops than to waste them roaming about uselessly in the forested highlands south of the river.

Three weeks after the Army bulldozed the shanties the Doctor disappeared. One evening he was at the clinic sewing up a sport’s injury and the next morning he was gone. The furniture in his little apartment at the back of the Clinic was untouched but his personal effects were gone along with all of the drugs the Clinic possessed, even the aspirin.

“The man was unstable,” the Mayor said to his secretary. “Did I tell you what he said to me about the waiting rooms?”

“These idealists come and go,” said Benson to one of his chief men.

A man who farmed the river east of town said he saw the doctor crossing at the ford early in the morning. There were two people with him, a man and a woman. They led donkeys carrying packs across the ford and then went off into the trees.

The house was a two story with a small attic tucked under the rafters serving as the second floor. She used this as a studio for her pottery making.

Ten years ago the main reason she was attracted to the house was its isolation at the end of a cul de sac. There were empty lots on either side filled with mature maple trees and crisscrossed with dirt paths. There was very little traffic. The neighbors came down the back lanes to park in their yards. Occasionally someone made a wrong turn and drove up the street, turned around and went off again, but that was about it.

Melody’s partner lived in the basement. He loved the quiet and sense of isolation even more than she for he worked security on the graveyard shift. In his basement room at the back of the house with the windows blacked out he slept like a baby from eight-thirty AM to four in the afternoon. In the evenings he worked for three hours on a fantasy novel, a long thing of some three thousand pages and growing longer. Arthur was his name. He had a bony face attached to a cadaverously thin body one would think would be brittle, easily breakable, but in actuality was very flexible and very strong. Sometimes he gave Melody the creeps with his long strides totally silent and inexorable like the movement of a two legged spider towards a victim caught in its web. But this had little to do with Arthur who was a very kindly, purposeful man, a passionate lover who did more around the house, cooking, cleaning and fixing than she did.

The house was actually owned by Arthur’s father, a terrible old barracuda who lived outside of town in a house large enough to be barracks for a small army. He lived there alone if you discounted the three servants who looked after the place and cooked his meals. He owned hotels, breweries, warehouses, apartment blocks and so many other things it would take a book to list them. As far as Melody could make out the old man spent most of his time hiring and firing people. He did this in a particularly obnoxious style shouting and screaming into one of the three cell phones he carried on his person at all times. His relationship to Arthur was a complete mess. Melody’s theory was that he hated Arthur for he was the only person in his life whom he could not fire. But this hatred made him feel guilty. After all it is rather unnatural to hate your son especially when he is a decent man like Arthur who looks after himself and asks nothing of you. So occasionally he alternated his hatred with a lugubrious sentimentality. When in one of these moods he would phone Arthur offering ownership of one hundred condominiums in the Bahamas or several office buildings in Chicago. Arthur always politely declined which made the old man furious.

“So Condos are not good enough for you, eh?” he would ask.

“I’m quite happy with what I’m doing, Dad,” Arthur would reply. “I have no need for condos or office buildings. Give them to the Winnipeg Foundation. Give them to the Art Gallery.”

“So it’s just great being a rent-a-cop, eh? And scribbling insane novels nobody reads or wants to read. That’s just the ideal way to spend your life, is it? Shacked up with a whore who makes false images with mud.”

“It would be better if you left Melody out of this, Dad.”

“I’m afraid I wasn’t hard enough on you when you were young, you slack mouthed son of a bitch. I should have sent you to a boot camp private school where they would have whipped you into shape. But your mother wouldn’t have that. No, no, we can’t send sensitive little Arthur off to be fondled at night by pederasts. Now look at you, a completely useless pile of shit.” Once the old man reached this level of foaming at the mouth abuse, Arthur hung up the phone. It immediately rang again but Arthur didn’t answer.

One of the old man’s favorite threats was to take back the house. When Arthur mentioned that this was impossible because the old man already owned it and had always owned it, he would threaten to evict them, throw them out on the street. Arthur took these threats in his stride.

“Three times every year he threatens to evict us,” Arthur would say to Melody. “He sends us lawyer’s notices, bailiff warnings, etcetera. Yet he never does it. So we pay for the house three times a year listening to his mad goings on. Not so bad when you come to think of it. We have some savings. If he ever does actually kick us out then we will have to look for a place to rent. We could look upon it as an adventure. Until then, what is the use of worrying about it?”

“I don’t see how you can stay so calm in the face of all that wind and fire,” Melody said.

“If you had heard all these things over and over again from when you were two years old, you too would learn to treat them as the rumblings of a far away geyser, all very interesting but not having much to do with the realities of your life.”

And this was exactly how Arthur did threat his Father’s threats and insults. When his Father was in a particularly windy period he would even bring a book to the phone and read it while his Dad went on about assets, ingratitude and mothers sucking the ompha out of little boys and leaving them useless for the real struggles of life, etc.

“Are you listening?” his Father would ask.

“Yes, Dad, I’m listening.”

“I hear you reading. You are reading one of those degenerate escape books. I can hear you, you bastard. Right across the broadband I can hear you.”


Sometimes Arthur would grow weary and refuse to take his father’s calls. Then Melody, who usually refused to talk to the old man, would answer the phone and listen to his complaints. It was as Arthur said. The old man was a wreck of a human being. Arthur and to some degree herself, were the only people with whom he had a relationship not based purely on money and power. In a way, miserable bastard that he was, Arthur and Melody were his only home. Everything else was a wasteland of will and greed.

“So why does he do this to me, Melody?” the old man would ask. “Refusing to talk to your Father is a mortal sin I would say.”

“He’s tired these days, Andrew. I think he needs a little bit of a break.”

“From what?”

“Listening to your constant bitching.”

“Jesus, what a way to talk. You are just as bad as he is.”



One day in June on a very fine and sunny morning, Melody and Arthur were packing for a weekend trip to the cabin. They bought a few acres of land some years before and had built a cabin on it, a simple affair with a backhouse and small solar system for lighting and the computers. There came a knock on the door. Melody walked out of the kitchen to the front of the house and opened the door.

It was Felicity, Arthur’s mom. As usual she was dressed extravagantly in a flowing red dress with a pink cape-like thing over her shoulders. Her make up, false eyelashes and fingernails weighed easily a half a pound. If Melody didn’t know her she would have thought she was on her way to the Academy Awards, which, actually, she did attend some years ago with a young protégé who acted in an afternoon soap. She was holding in one arm a massive handbag of tooled leather with sequins sewn around its perimeter and flashing in the bright morning sun. Over her shoulder Melody could see a Mercedes sedan with a uniformed driver at the wheel.

“Where’s Arthur, dear girl?” she asked, in a peculiarly strained, pathetic way which reminded Melody of Maggie Smith playing Wendy in ‘Hook’.

“In the kitchen, mother.” Melody called Felicity ‘mother’ and she called Melody ‘dear girl’ even though she would be forty her next birthday.

With a watery, weak smile, Felicity flowed past Melody and swept into the kitchen. Arthur, blessed with excellent hearing, already knew she was coming. When she appeared, he said,

“And how is my dear mother today?”

“I have never been better. It’s your Father I’m worried about. I’m afraid he has gone completely off the deep end so to speak. He has sold all of his Consolidated Edison and has taken up with a nineteen year old floozy. He has taken to wearing loose clothing and talking in hipster jargon.”

“Ah,” said Arthur.

“I spoke with the lawyers but they say nothing can be done. Apparently he has already given the floozy five million dollars worth of condominiums in the Bahamas and has promised to bankroll her career on stage and screen.”

“Hmmm,” said Arthur.

“Perhaps you can see what you can do with him, dear. He’ll listen to you. All he does with me is screech and complain about the past. He says such vile things that sometimes I think the man is the devil incarnate.”

“Hmmm,” said Arthur.

“See what you can do, dear. Remind him of his family obligations. Remind him that his own dear Father was dead against these May-December things, even though, granted, he did weaken at the end. Perhaps you and your dear girl could visit him and give me a report later about his floozy and how he spends his time, although I suppose taking sheep’s hormones and screwing would be the answer to that. Actually I am most curious about his state of mind, that is, how much he has already given to the vixen and how clever she is at scooping it all up. Promise me, dear.”

“I promise, mother. Sometime next week when we come back from the cabin.”

Felicity then gave him a light peck on the cheek and swished her way through the house out to the waiting Mercedes.



“Why do you bother?” Melody asked him when they were sitting on the cabin porch.

“They are my parents. To deal with them is to enter the world of madness but what am I going to do? They belong to me; I belong to them. I can’t pretend otherwise.”

“Will you go visit him?”

“Tuesday night. Want to come?”

“Yes. I would like to get a look at the floozy.”



Mildred the housekeeper opened the old man’s front door. Along with Arthur and Felicity as a hovering presence somewhere off in the distance, Mildred was the stable presence in the old man’s life. She had accomplished this by establishing a moral dominance over him some fifty years before. Although he complained bitterly about her behind her back to anyone who would listen, in her presence he was deferencial and patient. He even stopped swearing in her presence for Mildred was a firm Baptist and even though she would never have actually said anything about his foul mouth, an icy torrent of disapproval would have descended upon him like a precursor of the eternal torments. Melody and Arthur both liked Mildred. She was a no nonsense woman who had provided the old man for many years the rock of a daily schedule. And she did not take advantage of her position. She took what was hers and that was it - a good salary, a place to live and three vacations a year to visit her grandchildren. Mildred was not particularly impressed by the old man’s wealth. “You don’t have all that stuff with you when you are standing before the judgment seat,” she would often say.

The old man and his new girlfriend were out on the back patio. Andrew was indeed dressed in loose clothing as his mother had said but it was tasteful and suited him. During their visit he could detect no trace of the ‘hipster jargon’ complained about by his mother so put that down to her receiving reports from the malicious matrons at her country club. The ‘floozy’ was not really floozy at all but a self possessed young women with all her wits and social skills about her. She was beautiful and curvaceous as well, of course, and, no doubt, very keen on his Father’s many millions. Yet Arthur and Melody could not help but like her. She was intelligent and had a gentle, self deprecating sense of humor. All during the visit which lasted three hours, she was pleasant and polite and never said a single silly or patronizing thing to his Father, as floozies are famously want to do. Strangely Mildred, by her body language, seemed to approve of her as well. But then, besides being a Baptist, Mildred was a grounded woman who was in her own way loyal to the old man. If this woman, no matter what her age, was good for him, then she could turn a blind eye to the rigors of her moral code.


“What do you think?” Arthur asked Melody when they climbed into the car.

“He should keep her. She’s the real McCoy.”



Three weeks later a lawyer showed up at the door carrying an attaché case. In it he had an agreement of purchase for the house. Melody and Arthur signed and handed the Lawyer a dollar for the Consideration. For an entire week Andrew restrained himself from phoning them to reap the rewards of their gratitude and even when he did he was modest rather than his usual meglomaniacal self.

“First the house no longer dangled and then ‘aw shucks it was nothing’,” said Melody to Arthur while they were eating breakfast on the back porch. “A great improvement. Maybe we should try and find you a floozy too.”

“I already have one,” said Arthur and reached out to grab her by the right buttock as she passed him by.



Arthur’s Father and Anne, the young woman, married a year later. Ten months after that she was pregnant. This news, once again, brought his mother to the front door.

“The idea!” she said. “They probably sucked it out of him with a syringe and then put it in one of those cyclotron things to make it concentrated enough. The Doctors can do marvelous things these days.” Melody and Arthur blinked several times at this and then smirked knowingly at one another.

“After all a seventy year old man who drinks too much and sucks obnoxious cigars all day is unlikely to be able to do it in a natural way. Although then again perhaps they indulge in perversions intense enough to keep his old tent pole straight for a minute or two. Long enough if you are quick about it they tell me.”

The idea that his mother would have to be told about anything sexual, perverted or otherwise, struck Arthur as so ludicrous that he splurted a mouthful of tea all over his best pair of jeans. When he went off to change his pants, Felicity leaned over and said to Melody in a confidential whisper (guarding against who being a mystery for Arthur was in the basement),

“He’ll be second in line now, dear. What’s her name will see to that.”

“Oh, I don’t think he’ll mind,” said Melody.



When Melody told him what his mother said after she was gone, Arthur broke out laughing. “Mind?” he said, “Mind? My God when that child is born, I’ll be over there the next day with the keys to the kingdom.”

Saturday Afternoon

The sunlight poured through openings in the fir boughs creating upon the bright green lawn patches an even brighter green. It was too hot for sitting in the direct sun. Hart had moved his chair into the shade. A slight breeze. The smell of water from the lake.

He was reading a biography of Churchill, a massive book picked up in a garage sale. He was three quarters of the way through when he remembered an incident recounted in another book on Churchill he had read some years before. Suez Crisis, 1956. The Egyptians, under Nassar, had taken the Suez canal, the oil bloodline of Imperial Europe. The British government was Labor, thus Winston was in opposition. The debate was on the response of the government to the takeover. The Foreign Secretary had just given a speech equivocal on the question of military reaction. Churchill was livid. He came out from behind his desk, an old man of eighty-two, dangerously red in the face, wagging his finger at the Secretary and in a voice raised to a high pitch, screeched “You tell your Egyptian friends that if they don’t do what they are told we will sic the Jews on them and drive them back into the gutter from whence they came!”

Nice, thought Hart. The ancient warmonger howling his way towards death. No wonder the paintings are so lifeless and conventional – no passion in them. The passion was for Empire, Control, Glory. And so the Imperial History of Britain, Europe even, can be summed up in this – a nasty old man ranting at the servants in the tones of a psychotic gangster.

He closed the book and lay it on the arm of the chair. He shouldn’t be indulging himself in vicarious dreams of Imperial Glory, he thought. Just as bad as old Winnie. Little tin soldiers marching and the cash registers ringing.

When he was a child in grade six the homeroom teacher had a series of roll down maps. They hung from the top of the blackboard waiting to be unfurled in geography and history class. He remembered one of the maps especially – the British Empire coloured in red, the other parts of the map a dull gray. The Royal Lion had dominion over one quarter of the earth’s surface, admittedly mostly populated by ‘natives’ of various descriptions and colours, speaking languages Miltonless and Byronless, and possessed of quaint ethnic ways. Still, they loved the Queen. Or at least the teacher was sure they loved the Queen. The maps were hopelessly outdated but then everything where he grew up was hopelessly outdated. The Church was Irish Catholic funneled through Boston, a fusion of counter reformation triumphalism and Calvinist prudery. The teacher lived in a dream of 1912 when it was already 1960. The school was a cross between a prison and a indoctrination chamber where children of the working class, through a judicious application of abuse and lies, were being taught to be the obedient servants of an Empire which no longer existed.

The teacher was not without her virtues. She was kindly. She used the strap infrequently and applied it lightly. Unlike the many sadists who walked the halls she took no pleasure in the beating of children. She was possessed of certain harmless obsessions, which at times gave relief from the sanitized boredom of the curriculum. She had a fierce sentimental attachment to the Princes Royal. This was understandable for she was essentially a warm, maternal woman and yet a fifty year old virgin. During an especially boring geography class a student would ask her about the progress of the Princes, a subject upon which she was informed in detail from subscribing to many glossy royalist magazines. The oldest of these Princes would one day be King, the others great Lords of the Realm, perhaps commanding fleets and armies. Apparently they were precocious. As befits young Princes they were also handsome and charming. One day they would rule the world or at least that part of it coloured red on the map. It was implied that the other areas of the map, the non red ones, deprived by fate or Jehovah’s stern judgment, of the Princes’ wise guidance, would be left floundering in ignorance and confusion. The Americans were failed colonists led by hubris into rebellious ways and afterwards into the arms of unholy Mammon. The South Americans, despite the labours of the Church, lived lives of riotous sex, dancing and racial mingling and were thus entirely hopeless.

The stories of the Princes, after the use of mental filters to rid them of the sentimental gloss, interested Hart. They were his contemporaries and he could imagine himself in their shoes. The teacher told the stories to inspire the children with admiration for the paths of glory stretching out before the golden Princes and perhaps to encourage in them emulation of the royal devotion to duty, etc, albeit in the more circumscribed conditions of the station in life assigned them by Divine Authority. But, actually, Hart was not much interested in the paths of glory. He saw the Princes as fellow children and had a fellow feeling for them. To him they were fancier versions of himself attending schools which, despite their fine appointments and honour rolls of social and state distinction, were, no doubt, as dark with cruelty and ignorance as his own. And despite their royalty and privileges, he considered that in the most important matter he was in fact superior to them, for after his period of incarceration in the Kafkaesque education mills he could chose a life suitable to his own desires, even to his own fancies. They could not. Hart, as poor and wretched and powerless as he was, could one day chose a life free of the social sadism of the Imperial state. They could not. The uniforms, the harness, authority, duty would swallow them whole forever. The sentimental, devoted love of millions like his teacher, useless to them in any real human way, would lockstep them down the processional halls as if clamped into a vice of steel.

Mary came out onto the lawn to bring him a glass of lemonade. They chatted for a few moments about the weather, who was coming to lunch the next day, the arrival of their daughter and grandson later in the afternoon. When she left he watched her go until she entered the kitchen door, closing it behind her. Then he lit a cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to smoke and there was a tacit agreement between them to pretend he didn’t. Part of this agreement was that he didn’t smoke in her presence. If she happened to look out the window she would, of course, see him smoking, but she didn’t look out the window and even if she did she would say nothing about it. Mary was very practical and very wise. If she challenged him directly his stubbornness would raise a great rebellion and he would smoke more than ever. As it was he smoked perhaps fifty percent less than he would have otherwise. Although in her heart of hearts she wished he wouldn’t smoke at all she was reasonably happy with this partial victory. Hart couldn’t remember how they had come to this agreement. It was not a matter of words but a matter of gestures and emotional arrangements, one of the many, many things not accessible to the world of reason and intellection.

Cigarette finished, Hart decided to go for a walk. He shouted his intention through the screen door receiving in reply a muffled acknowledgement. Mary was rearranging the closet in the bedroom. She had been rearranging this closet for forty years but Mary was an optimist, a fervent believer in the power of new beginnings. Although he sometimes teased her about this, in truth he admired her. Her optimism had nothing to do with laziness of mind as it often does, but with a deep rooted irreverence for the past. Mary chose to live in the present and Hart had to admit, considering the deep happiness of her personality, it was a wise choice.

He decided to walk downtown. He walked along the back lanes, a route which exposed him to the rough, utilitarian side of things – garbage cans, dilapidated cars, piles of lumber, mounds of gravel, broken furniture, retired washers and driers waiting for the scrap guys or the garbage men, leaning garages lined on the lane side with high forests of weeds and grass; much better than the military precision of the front yards, everything just so. It had rained last night and there were puddles gathered in the low spots on the gravel roadbed. He stopped for a moment to say hello to an old Ukrainian woman hoeing her garden. She gave him four ripe tomatoes, which he placed very carefully into the bottom of his backpack. In her youth the old lady would have been a great beauty. This was obvious from the fine, symmetrically sculpted bones of her face. Men like hornets round a spill of pop on a patio table no doubt. Now she worked her garden and made pastries for her many grandchildren. Not so bad. In the evenings he had often seen her praying her rosary on the back deck.

When he reached the main street he entered a coffee shop. When the young woman behind the counter asked him what he wanted he said, “An ordinary coffee.” He found it impossible to navigate the incredible array of choices. Sometimes when he was with Mary she ordered him some kind of latte which he liked but he could never remember its name. If he asked he would be given so much information in the clipped, staccato, practiced way of the clerks that his mind would reel. He took his coffee out onto the patio and sat on one of the stone benches. He nodded to a fellow old gaffer on the other side of the patio but took his eyes away quickly. A retired school teacher who bored everyone silly with psychological portraits of students either dead or retired now themselves. A relentless old man who had one topic and one topic only and who confused the weary resignation of his listeners with the slight hypnosis caused by the impact of good story telling. On days he felt generous Hart would sometimes sit listening for half an hour but he wasn’t feeling generous today. The old man was lonely, granted, but it was a self inflicted loneliness.

It was Saturday so the tourists and the weekend cottagers filled the streets. A motley crowd – middle aged women with enormous bums, skinny children, beautiful young people soaked in an erotic ambrosia . Old men wearing shorts extruding spindly shanks. Old crones pushing walkers before a slow, determined shuffle. There was a steady stream in and out of the department store on the corner. Packages. Everyone seemed to be carrying packages, shopping bags. Three young girls each with a handful of strings holding earthbound a cluster of helium filled balloons.

Coffee done, Hart dropped by the table of the old man, receiving a brief (only because Hart refused to allow it to be anything else) tribute to the class of ’49, no doubt little different from the class of ’59, ’69 or ’79 but for the old man a luminous highlight. He headed toward the pier but on the way stepped into the department store. He slipped through the crowd to the section containing lawn ornaments. Here he bought a red rooster, crowing, apparently, to the morning sun. Made in China. Very cheap and probably not very long lasting but who says a lawn ornament should last forever? A brief, tinsel joy, what’s wrong with that? He paid at the cash register, put it in his backpack, exited skillfully through the packed doorway and continued down the street to the pier.

Here there was a drinking fountain bubbling up a water blossom from an artesian well. He drank deeply for the walk had made him thirsty. The water had a slightly metallic taste, very quenching. Beyond the drinking fountain was an ornamental fountain shooting water twenty feet into the air. Below, receiving its fall was a basin, twenty- five feet in diameter, one foot deep. At one end of the basin was a cut ushering the water off into a concrete channel emptying into the lake. Off to one side in the basin was a young boy, perhaps three or four, eating an ice cream cone, a beautiful boy with straw blonde hair. He wore only a pair of shorts and the combination of licking the cold ice cream with his tongue and having his bum immersed in the cool fountain water had sent him into an ecstasy of enjoyment, which excluded the attention given him by the adults around. It was as if he was on a paradisiacal island and the voices and eyes around him were merely the murmur of the surrounding sea. His mother, who was talking to an older woman ten feet away, kept half an eye on him, her lips composed into a wry smile and her eyes full of indulgent happiness. She didn’t care that there was a rule which said little boys should not immerse their bums in the fountain and Hart blessed her for it. When the boy was finished crunching the last of his cone, he rose like a young Neptune from the waters, stepped over the concrete wall and rejoined his mother.

The pier, jutting out into the water some three hundred and fifty feet, had along its north side a concrete wall five feet thick at its base, thinning out to two feet at its top and taller than a tall man. It protected the boat moorings from the prevailing winds from the north. During storms the waves would smash into it tremendously, sometimes hurling slashing heaves of water over its top onto the concrete deck. On the wall the local arts society had arranged for artists to paint pictures on it’s somewhat pebbly surface. For its entire length these paintings followed one another in colorful procession ending where the wall ended to expose the calm surface of the green water stretching out as far as the eye could see under a mild blue sky.

As is usual in such a collection, many were humdrum, reasonably well executed, but embodying nothing more than obedience to some artistic convention. But there were three or four that were quite exceptional, endowed with great liveliness of line and color. One was of an Indian village, perhaps meant to be from a time before the Europeans came, the figures painted round a campfire against a background of darkening poplar trees. Hart always stopped before this painting and studied it carefully. The skin of the figures was colored a soft golden brown illuminated by the reds, blues and yellows of the blazing fire. There was an old man, a little off to the side, shoulders draped with a fur robe and gazing into the fire. On either side of him, leaning into his lap was a child, a girl and a boy. The old man’s gaze was fixed on the fire yet it seemed to include these little ones fumbling about his knees and reaching up to tug the braids hanging down past his jawbone on either side of his face. Such a serious man but still there was something in the expression on his face which made it clear that he was happy to have become a playground, that he thought himself privileged in his old age to act as a focus of delight for these little children.

On the walk home the Ukrainian lady was not in her yard. She was always absent between one and three, probably having a nap. He opened the gate and pushed the skinny rod upon which the eternally crowing rooster was mounted into the soil at the end of the garden. Then he let himself out and continued homeward along the lane.

When he came into his yard his daughter’s car was in the driveway. Out the door came his grandson squealing his welcome and clutching him tightly round the legs. When he released his legs Hart swung him up onto his right hip and kissed him on the cheek.

“I have a new train grandpa.”

“And what color is this new train?”

“Blue.”

“A very good color for a new train.”

They went inside, Hart being careful to allow his grandson to open the door for it was something the boy so very much loved to do.

Laid To Rest

That spring Alan got a job on a harbor tugboat as a deckhand. Occasionally the boat went out of port for a towing job down the coast but for the most part it was like working in an office or a factory, starting at eight in the morning and back home by five. He loved it. He hated being penned up inside and this job meant being on deck all day, painting, cleaning, installing new equipment, working the lines, and other tasks assigned to him by the bo’sun.

Home was a small apartment in a building in the old downtown. Once it had been a single family dwelling, a very large one, but some years ago it had been broken up into apartments and rented out to people much like himself, workmen of various descriptions and women office workers. The place was owned by a woman in her seventies, a Mrs. Green, a widow. She lived in the apartment at the very front on the first floor, one which took up half of that floor and was thus much more spacious than any of the others.

Mrs. Green was a church going lady, an Anglican, and dead against late hours, drinking and fornication. She made her dislikes well known when Alan had first come to look at the apartment but they didn’t bother him for he was a nondrinker, kept hours as regular as clockwork and had a girlfriend with a house of her own where he slept every Friday and Saturday night. Mrs. Green didn’t mind fornication outside of her own premises; it was the inside kind that caused her distress. Alan appreciated the old lady’s strictness, for the house was a quiet one and he had to be up early in the morning five days a week. He had one of the smaller apartments sharing the first floor with Mrs. Green and was thus comfortably near the center of order, authority and proper living.

Alan knew some of the other tenants by sight, seeing them coming and going in the corridors or up the front steps but he never got to know any in a personal way. Most were middle aged, settled in their ways and not looking for new adventures, new acquaintances. This suited Alan fine. Although younger than most, he shared their quiet habits. The five nights a week he spent in the apartment, he showered, made and ate supper and read for some hours before going to bed early. Ocassionally he went over to his girlfriend’s during the week but his was unusual. She had a high powered, stressful job which didn’t leave her much energy for anyone else during the week.

The house was situated on a large lot next to a graveyard. Alan’s window looked out over the graveyard, something many might find discomforting but not Alan. He was not superstitious and the graveyard, with its well tended green grass, its aging, weathered stones and its yew trees was delightful to look out over, especially in the evenings when the sun was going down. It was an Anglican establishment and, since its history went back more than two centuries, mostly full. There were still a few empty spots, usually waiting for the widow or widower of an already deceased spouse. Mrs. Green’s husband was buried there and she would be joining him when she died. “I don’t have to go very far,” she joked when she told him this. Although on the outside, a strict and severe lady, Mrs, Green had a very good sense of humor, wry and self deprecating. Over the spring and summer months, spending fifteen minutes with her now and then, sometimes in the backyard where he went to read outside, sometimes in her apartment when he paid the rent, Alan developed an appreciation, even an affection for the old lady. She was a woman of character, intelligence and depth.

Things went along just fine through the spring and summer and into early fall until one night, in mid September, Alan was woken by a loud scream coming from inside Mrs. Green’s apartment, a long piercing scream which could only come from a mind and body gripped in a vice of pure terror. Alan leaped out of bed, threw on his bathrobe and rushed into the corridor. When he came to Mrs. Green’s door, some twenty feet down from his own, he knocked. No answer. He knocked again. He thought he heard the sound of movement through the door but couldn’t be sure. He knocked once more and when there was no answer went back to apartment. The scream didn’t seem to disturb any of the other tenants, although why was a mystery to Alan. His own phrase for the scream was one of his grandmother’s, that it would have woken the dead. No one else came out into the corridor and he could hear no sounds inside any of the other apartments. He began to think that the scream was from a nightmare of his own and he had confused it with outside reality. But he was a resilient young man and tired after working hard all day so he went back to sleep almost right away and slept soundly until his alarm clock woke him at his usual hour the next morning.

Alan had no intentions of bringing the scream up with Mrs. Green. He figured that she had a nightmare and hollered out in her distress and would be mortally embarrassed to have a tenant bring this up in conversation. She would no doubt think it a personal affair. He couldn’t have been more surprised when, two weeks later, in her apartment paying his rent, the old lady brought it up herself.

“I suppose it was you who knocked on the door,” she said.

“Well, yes, it was,” replied Alan.

“I must apologize. He was still there and he forbade me to go to the door.”

“Who was still there?”

“Albert. My husband.”

“I thought you told me he was dead and buried.”

“Well, yes he is. I call him Albert, out of habit, but it would be more accurate to call him Albert’s ghost.”

“His ghost?”

“Yes. But perhaps you don’t believe in ghosts?”

“I don’t believe or disbelieve in them. I have read some things about them but have never seen one.”

“One is supposed to be loyal to one’s husband, alive or dead, but there is a limit to all principles of conduct. After all they are meant to be guidelines, not absolutes. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr.Gill?”

“I suppose there is, yes.”

“Exactly. Albert died ten years ago, at the age of sixty-three. It was surprising to me and to anyone else who knew him, that he lasted that long. He drank. He took drugs. He was arrested many times for brawling in bars. He frequented houses of prostitution where he paid large sums of money for deviant pleasures. Often, on one of his sprees, he would be gone for months, and occasionally he disappeared for half a year. He worked as a lawyer until the age of forty when he found the practice of his profession interfered with his dissipations. From then on his source of income was browbeating money from me and the odd shady scheme he lent the ever dwindling authority of his legal reputation. Fortunately, I had some money of my own and when I saw the lay of the land clearly, I converted the house to apartments. What was left I put into an iron clad annuity which could not be broken. If it wasn’t for that, ten years after we married, I would have been destitute, on the street in fact. Even then, over the next twenty years or so, he succeeded in extorting money from me with tears, threats and promises of reform. He could be very charming if it was in his self interest. Thwarted he was a monster. Once he broke my arm, another time my wrist and jaw. Twice he battered down the door to my apartment and I was forced to call the police and have him taken away. These events were occasioned by my refusing to borrow money for him. The house was from my family and the deed was in my name. In the end, five years before he died, I had a court order issued against him. Then, several months before he died, the hospital phoned.”

Here, Mrs. Green lifted her cup from the table and had a drink of tea. She set down the cup, looked for a moment out the window where there was bright sunshine playing in the leaves of an oak which partially blocked the view, and then, bringing her eyes back to her cup, resumed.

“He was dying, of course. A ruined liver, kidney disease, a failing pancreas and a number of other problems, each one, if taken alone, enough to kill him. They wanted me to take him home, partly because he claimed the right to die at home but also, I think, because he was a very trying patient. As weak as he was his temper had not abated. He swore vehemently almost with every breath. He threw things. He shouted and screamed. It was as if he was possessed by a devil. Being the dutiful wife I took him in. What a mistake! From the day the attendants wheeled him in the door he never stopped his torrent of abuse. He claimed it was I who had ruined his life. I was a mean, selfish, coldhearted bitch. My coldness, my nastiness had driven him to drugs. My frigidity had driven him into the arms of other women. My meanness with money had destroyed his chances of redeeming and reforming himself. And so on and so on. It only stopped when I gave him an injection and he went off into the world of nod. Did you know that in some cases of palliative care they use heroin? He was a terrible mess and it was the only thing which gave him any relief. When they sent him home they told me he had six months but he lasted only three. At the end he couldn’t swallow, he couldn’t void his bowels, he was blind and he could barely breath.”

Again she paused, this time looking me directly in the eye. “I’m sorry Mr. Gill. I did not plan to unload all this on you but you have a sympathetic presence and it has triggered a great need to unburden myself. I have friends, mostly women my own age at the church. But I cannot talk to them about these things. They would be scandalized and made truly miserable if I spoke to them of these things.”

“Mrs. Green, it’s OK. If it is of use to you to tell me all this then go ahead.”

She took another drink of tea and began again.

“At the end it was horrible. He was either so sedated he was like a man already dead, or raging like a madman. Whenever he was awake he followed me around the room with his head, for although he was blind, he used his head as a sightless directional device. His eyelids were open and his corneas a pale yellow laced with the tiniest spiderweb traces of red. He told me that his death would not be the end. He told me he would be back to torment me just as I had tormented him. He would be buried only next door he said. He would come wrapped in linen cloths like Lazarus, stinking of the corruption of the grave. I would be forced to remember, forced to relive the injustices I had visited upon him, the coldness, the meanness, the humanity which I had held back from him. In a queer reversal, he told me, he, a dead man risen from his grave, would make me, a living woman, his incubus. All this was so horrible I sometimes wonder now where I found the strength to go on bathing him, changing his sheets, giving him his drugs. But somehow I did.”

“On the day he died, early in the morning, after giving him his shot, I went down the back stairs into the yard and sat on the lawnchair beside the big flowerbed. The sun had yet to climb above the trees in the east and the streets beyond the house and the yard were yet unburdened with the traffic carrying people to work. A few birds were singing in the leaves. There was a slight breeze coming from the west, a warm breeze, for it would be another hot day in a succession of hot days. Suddenly a decision which had been mulling about in my mind for some days, was made. I got up from the chair, went back up into the apartment and, filling the syringe with four times the usual dosage, injected the whole thing into a vein in his leg. He was dead in ten minutes.”

This was so stunning to Alan that he didn’t know what to say.

“The doctor came to pronounce him dead in the late morning and the funeral people picked him up early in the afternoon. Of course in a case like Albert’s there is no autopsy so there was no chance of the immediate cause of his death being discovered. Even if there had been I suppose they would have covered it up. What would be the point? Whether he died on Tuesday of an overdose or on Wednesday of heart failure would not have been a matter of real interest to anyone.”

“Probably you did the man a favor Mrs. Green. From what you say any extra time he might have had would have been spent in raging and beastliness. What would have been the point of that?”

“It’s not so much that, Mr. Gill. It’s the motivation which sometimes bothers me. I realize that Albert had blocked himself off from any possibility of redemption. Certainly in his last five years, while it may have been a theoretical possibility, it was not a practical one. What concerns me about my actions on that day is motivation. I am afraid I must admit that I wanted to kill him, that I enjoyed killing him and that when he was gone I was glad in a deep and enduring way. I am still glad that he is dead. And then, of course, there is this other thing, these visitations.”

“I am not a priest or an expert in ethics, Mrs. Green, but it seems to me that your wanting to kill this man after all the suffering and abuse he gave you would be quite natural. And, as well, I would say that your killing him was not the usual kind of killing. After all he would have been dead in a few days even if you had done nothing. It might be more accurate to say that you expedited his death rather than caused it. From what I know of Christian ethics, if there had been some possibility of his healing, of his delivering his soul to God, before his death, then taking away those last few hours would have been a great sin. But there was no possibility of that and therefore no sin.”

“And the motivation?”

“Was human weakness, perhaps, but surely the Christian God forgives human weakness if the sinner asks for forgiveness.”

“Yes. I have asked but so far I don’t feel I have been forgiven. But then they say one must continue asking, which I do. They also say that one does not necessarily feel the forgiveness in an emotional way, as if it were a purging or an epiphany.”

“Does the ghost know you gave him an overdose?”

“No, thank God.”

“What does he want?”

“For me to come to the grave with him.”

“God.”

“He comes once or twice a month. I wake as soon as he comes up from the grave and I can hear him walking in that terrible, stumbling way, along the gravel path of the cemetery. His flesh is half eaten away and his bones literally rattle and grind against one another. His eye sockets are a swarm of worms and his skull mostly exposed. He brings with him a horrible stench and a cold so extreme that even in the midst of the summer it is as if a sudden stream of artic air had been released into the room. He must be incorporeal for he comes through the door as if it were merely a screen of molecules and yet he gives the impression of solid physical presence. He has about him the energy of a keen and abiding hatred, a hatred which began in life and now has gone beyond the grave.”

“Does he speak?”

“No and I thank God for that. If he spoke I would go out of my mind. But he gestures. He wants me to come with him back to his grave. He makes the same gestures over and over again like he was an automaton or a robot. Sometimes he reaches out to grasp my hand as if to drag me off with him. But I pull back out of the way to avoid him. This pulling back confuses him. He stumbles about and then retreats to the other side of the room. He stays sometimes an hour, sometimes two, but never longer. He raises his arms in a kind of rage and stumbles about violently before he goes. After this terrible dance he turns about suddenly and goes back through the door.”

“I am not experienced in these things, Mrs. Green, but if you wish I would be willing to come sit with you when he next comes. You say you wake when he rises from the grave. How long is there between then and when he comes through the door?”

“Perhaps five minutes.”

“If you put your phone on speed dial and push the button as soon as you hear him, then I should have time to come over and be there when he comes.”

“You are not afraid?”

“I might be afraid when he comes, Mrs. Green, but I’m not afraid now. After all I have no history with him. Some of the books say that the dead have no power unless we give it to them. I wonder if that is true?”

“It may be. If I move away from him it confuses and agitates him. So maybe it is true.”

“Do you want me to come then?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.” Alan programmed his number into Mrs. Green’s phone so that when she pushed the number one his number automatically dialed. From that night on he slept with his own phone on the bedside table a few inches away from his ear.

There was no phone call for nearly three weeks and Alan began to wonder if the whole thing had not resolved itself. Perhaps Albert’s energy had run out in some way and he was now condemned to lie in his grave. During this time he didn’t meet Mrs. Green in the corridor or in the back yard so had no opportunity of speaking with her. He thought a few times of knocking on her door but decided against it. If she was comfortable simply waiting so was he.

In October his girlfriend wanted to take a long weekend holiday but he said no. Already he had cut down his sleepovers at her house to Saturday night and his refusal to go away with her for three days made her very angry. He told her a little of his reason why but she was not sympathetic. She thought him morbid and the ‘elderly lady’ whom he spoke about to be a deranged crackpot. She wondered aloud whether this ‘elderly lady’ might not in truth be much younger, in short a hot little number he was seeing on the side. She became so angry that she threw him out of the house which distressed him but not too much. She had an impulsive and fiery nature but would soon get over it. Meanwhile he could be at home, even weekend nights, ready for when and if Albert came.

It happened on a Friday night, almost a month after Albert had last come to visit. When the phone rang the illuminated clock on the bedside table said three thirty-six. Mrs. Green’s voice was very steady, very controlled, but beneath there was an undercurrent of tension. He said, “I’ll be there in two minutes.”

Alan pulled on a T shirt and a pair of jeans. He plunged his feet into an old pair of cowboy boots. This took a few seconds longer than donning his bathrobe but he wanted to meet Albert in clothes which gave him some freedom of movement. When he reached Mrs. Green’s door it was ajar. He walked into her apartment and closed the door behind him.

Mrs. Green was seated on a stuffed chair in the living room. There was another, of exactly the same design, beside her and she gestured her intention that he sit in it. He sat. They looked at one another directly in the eye but said nothing. They both stared off toward the door, waiting.

Mrs. Green’s guess about the timing was very accurate. Two minutes after Alan sat in the chair beside her he heard something come along the corridor. When it came through the door the hair on the back of his neck stood up like porcupine quills. His mouth opened in astonishment.

First came a skeletal hand almost devoid of flesh but not totally. There were still hanging from it a few shreds of rotted sinew and bits of gristle half covered two of the finger joints. Then came a ribcage carrying within it a mass of foul corruption spreading before it a stench so powerful it was like a chemical spray or mist. Along with it came a dropping of the temperature so extreme it was as if the room had suddenly been dropped into the depths of a polar sea. Then the rest of the figure stepped into the room and the full horror of a half rotted body risen from its grave stood before them. The corruption in its ribcage was a seething mass of worms. Shreds of flesh hung here and there as if it had been raked by a giant metal comb. Lank hair hung from a scalp which had slipped off its center and now was slumped onto the side of a bare skull. When it came fully through the door the figure stopped and moved its head around to get its bearings. After a few moments of this it brought its maggot filled eyes to a point between Mrs. Green and Alan, and slowly, stumbled toward them.

Alan was terrified. Never in his life had he ever imagined that he would see such a thing. It was only with a great effort that he stopped himself from voiding his bowels and bladder. His stomach was as if someone had pierced it with a giant icicle. He stopped the violent shaking of his hands by placing them on the arm of the chair and grasping with all his strength. Mrs. Green brought both hands up to her mouth and began to softly moan. In a surprisingly low, quiet voice Alan said to her, “No.’ and she stopped. Then he rose from his chair and moved toward the figure.

When he was almost in contact with it, the figure grew, or at least it seemed to Alan that it did, less substantial. Still he continued on not so much in the hope of grasping it physically and conquering it, but rather making an attempt to confront its unreality. He walked through it. There was a sensation of even more intense cold and then, thinking himself through, he turned around. His movement had broken the figure up into hundreds of parts. They swam in the air like shredded pieces of tissue might swim in water. Some were recognizable segments, a section of teeth here, a knee joint there; others were mere indistinguishable flotsam. He walked through again, then again and then again, not violently, not aggressively, but as calmly as he could muster in the circumstances. Soon there were only a few shreds of mist and then even these disappeared into nothingness. The room returned to its normal temperature. The stench turned suddenly, as if a magician had snapped his fingers to command it, into a faint smell of flowers - lilacs, roses, and even the slightest touch of the rich smell of blooming lilies.

Sunday morning Alan and Mrs.Green attended the eleven o’clock service at the Cathedral, a short walk away from the house. Here in the cool stone interior they listened to the drone of the liturgy and the clear crystal notes of a young people’s choir. Mrs. Green stepped forward to receive the Eucharist, but Alan, neither a Christian nor of the Anglican communion, remained in his seat. The congregation was mostly elderly but there was a sprinkling of the middle aged and even the odd person under thirty. After the Eucharist came more prayers and then the final hymn. Although not theologically inclined, Alan loved the old hymns, and he and Mrs. Green gave out a robust version of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, she in a quavering soprano, he in a stentorian Russian baritone. They shook the Vicar’s hand on the way out of the church and walked down the steps into the bright sunshine.

But Church was not the only place they went that morning. After walking the length of the tree lined street leading from the Cathedral, they turned left and walked two blocks until they came to a restaurant hidden behind a series of tall lilac bushes. When they entered the front door Alan spied his girlfriend at the very back, sitting in a booth. They joined her there.

Although suspicious and inclined toward conspiracy theories, Alan’s girlfriend had no choice but to accept the reality of Mrs. Green, a formidable lady who, accessing the situation in one quick, intuitive glance, was all charm, kindness and delightful conversation. The young woman was won over completely by this grandmotherly person who, before the meal was ended, invited her for morning tea and a tete a tete at her apartment the following Saturday. Mrs. Green left for home right after the meal by taxi, insisting there was no need for the young people to accompany her.

After several cups of coffee and conversation, Alan and his girlfriend left the restaurant and walked to her house, hand in hand.

Some blocks over, towered over by oaks and shaded by yew trees, the graves in the old cemetery lay quiet beneath their stone markers. In one corner, up against the wrought iron fence which keeps out the street and strolling pedestrians, was a granite stone bearing an inscription on only one half of its polished surface. Beneath it lie the bones of Albert Green, which, after much madness, violence, meanness, suffering and sorrow, have finally come to their eternal rest.