The past may be immutable, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing anyone can do about it…
The door of the smart cab hissed open, and Juanita was half out onto the cemetery sidewalk before the smell of the place washed over her. The overwhelming smell was of honeysuckle and sweet, freshly-mown grass, but somewhere under it all, Juanita imagined, and perhaps it was just her imagination, the rancid smell of death.
She looked out across the expanse of manicured lawn, broad shade trees, and carefully tended islands of flowers in red, purple, and white. It might have been a park or a garden, but for the ranks of marble headstones, and the corruption and decay she knew lay only a few feet beneath the perfect surface. Harvey was down there, rotting.
Juanita had queried the cemetery computer on the way from the airport and transferred a map to her hand-link. She knew the way to Harvey’s grave. So, why couldn’t she move? She considered getting back in the cab and returning to the airport. That would be stupid.
She made a fist and thumped it gently against the side of the cab in frustration. “What am I doing here?”
Two of the cab’s eyes swiveled to watch her from a little turret in the cab roof. She wondered if it had heard her rhetorical question, and was trying to decide if it should respond, or if it was merely concerned that she’d damage the cab. She had
“Is there a problem?” The cab’s little-boy voice was gentle and polite. She wished it were coarse and rude. Then she’d have an excuse to get out of the cab. Or to get back in, return to the airport, and leave this place forever.
She’d planned to go to the grave and—what? Dance? Spit? Gloat? It had seemed so clear when she’d finally heard about the car accident—learned Harvey was dead. She’d boarded the boostliner in Seattle feeling such a sense of purpose and satisfaction. She’d maxed all her credits to afford the cross-country ticket, and it had seemed a good investment at the time. Now it had all wilted like a cut flower too long in the Sun.
All she knew was that she and Harvey had unfinished business. She’d never confronted him for the way he’d treated her, or what he’d done to her. She’d filed a police report at the emergency room while they were getting ready to set her arm. While he’d spent the night in jail, she’d had friends pack her things. By the time he had gotten home, she was already on the way to Seattle and a new life. She’d later heard that, without her to testify, the assault charges had been dropped. She’d never had to face him again, and at the time, she’d considered it a victory. Now, she wasn’t so sure.
“Wait there,” she finally told the cab. “I won’t be long.”
She was away from the car before she could change her mind, wading out among the headstones, lined up like soldiers at attention. The sound of distant voices caused her to hesitate. She wasn’t the only visitor to the cemetery today. Half a dozen rows over, she could see three people standing in front of a grave, an elderly man and woman, both dressed in black, and a scruffy teenage boy dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket, a red bandanna tied around his long dark hair. It seemed curious to her that the boy was standing directly on the grave, leaning against the headstone, arms crossed over his chest. He seemed comfortable there, chatting with the old couple.
Things seemed to wrap up, and the couple lowered their heads and turned to walk away. The teen held up his open hand, rotating the wrist in an understated wave good-bye. Then he dissolved. Juanita blinked her eyes just to be sure she wasn’t imagining it. The boy turned into a cloud of particles that swirled like a dust devil for a moment before fading away. She held her hand to her chest, feeling her heart pounding beneath the white silk of her blouse. Then she laughed nervously, knowing that the teenager must have only been a Dead Ringer.
She turned to the nearest headstone, examining it closely. It seemed conventional enough, an elaborately carved slab of speckled gray granite, engraved with a name and the years of birth and death. There was no other inscription, but that would have been redundant. She stepped closer, spotting the array of lenses skillfully blended into the pattern of the carvings, like the eyes of a camouflaged desert spider.
She edged nearer to the grave, flinching in spite of herself as an elderly black woman materialized in front of her, wrapped in an elaborately patterned shawl of purple and white. The woman lifted her head and spread her arms, like a blooming flower or a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. She looked at Juanita, with eyes the color of chocolate, and smiled.
The effect was startling in its realism, and Juanita felt compelled to say something, even though she knew the woman was just a computer-generated projection. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Ms. Thomas,” she had read the name on the headstone, “it’s just that I’ve never been to a place like this before. I’ve heard about them, seen them on the vids, but never…”
She was afraid somehow that she’d upset Ms. Thomas, as absurd as that seemed. Ms. Thomas was only a sophisticated artificial intelligence, programmed with the voice and appearance of the woman when she was alive, provided with enough information to recognize and respond to family members. She’d heard some of them had more complex programming based on diaries, biographies, interviews with relatives and friends, old vids and photographs, and other information that could be dredged up. But the programming was more expensive than the DeadRinger hardware, so most started out quite simple, learning about themselves from conversations with visitors they recognized as having known them in life.
Thomas leaned toward her, squinting slightly. “I don’t know you, do I, honey?”
“No, ma’am. I realized what kind of place this was, and I just went to the closest headstone to see. I’ve never met a DeadRinger before.”
Ms. Thomas drew back and frowned. “We don’t like that word here, honey. That’s just what they say on the vids. We’re called ‘life memorials.’” The smile returned to her face, and she somehow reminded Juanita of a child who had just done a successful recitation. Then the smile took on a bemused twist. “Did I say that? Darned if they don’t put the funniest things in our heads. When Harvey Mendez sold me this plot he never said they’d be putting these things in my head. I don’t mind DeadRinger at all. I think it’s kind of funny, myself.”
“Wait a minute. Harvey sold you this plot?”
“Oh, yes. We have to be reminded of a lot of things, out here in the graveyard, but that’s one thing they made sure we remembered, just in case anyone asked.” She giggled. “Harvey hated it when I called it a graveyard. ‘Memorial park,’ he’d say to me. ‘Memorial park.’ ”
Well, it figured. Harvey had always been a salesman, always a hustler. Selling high-tech funeral plots to old ladies who couldn’t afford them would have been just like him. “Bastard,” she said unconsciously.
Ms. Thomas shook her head. “You don’t mean Harvey, do you, honey? It’s not nice to speak ill of the dead.” Juanita nodded.
“But he was always such a nice young man. Very serious. He’d come by to talk to me sometimes. He’d talk to all of us down here. I kept telling him he should stop spending so much time down here and find himself a girlfriend.”
Juanita flinched at the last suggestion, and found herself rubbing her forearm. “Harvey didn’t have much luck with women.”
“You don’t mean—? Were you and Harvey involved? You did know that—”
“He was here? Yes, I knew. That’s why I came here today. And Harvey and I were married once. But things didn’t work out. Harvey broke my arm, and I left him.”
Ms. Thomas gasped. “Oh, I just can’t believe it. You just never know the torment some people have buried down inside.”
Juanita’s reflex was to be offended by the sympathy the woman appeared to feel toward Harvey, but she suppressed it. It was the reaction most people had when they found out somebody they knew, or thought they knew, was a thug. They’d built up a view of the person in their minds, one that didn’t include cruelty and violence. It was difficult to discard that view, and the new information had to somehow be crudely cobbled on. The other alternative was to throw out the old view completely, and to treat the new view as a separate person, Jekyll and Hyde. Or just Hyde, and Jekyll who never was.
Then, abruptly, she remembered that she was only talking to a computer simulation of a person. The illusion was so perfect that she’d forgotten. Did a DeadRinger think like a person at all? She shivered despite the warm afternoon Sun. But looking at Ms. Thomas’s moist brown eyes, so like her own grandmother’s, it was impossible to treat her any way other than as a person.
Is that what had happened to Harvey? Had he just been assigned to go from grave to grave, inspecting each for proper operation? Had he found himself talking to them the way she was now? All she’d wanted was a little information. All she’d wanted to know was what it was like to talk to a dead person before she had to talk to
Ms. Thomas stepped toward her. “Is your name Juanita? Harvey used to mention you sometimes when he came by here. He talked about driving you away. Said something about not deserving you. I never understood that till now.”
Juanita suddenly felt uncomfortable. She realized that she was hearing things that didn’t fit
To her amazement, Ms. Thomas giggled. “That tickles, honey. Of course, I can’t really feel it, but it tickles just the same.”
“I’m sorry. I should really go find Harvey.”
Ms. Thomas pointed up the hill. “He’s up at the crest, straight up from the lily pond. Of course I can’t go visit, but he pointed it out one day when he was here, and my daughter came to visit the day they put him down. I watched the service from over here.”
“Thank you, Ms. Thomas. It was a pleasure meeting you.”
She smiled. “Drop by to talk any time.”
Juanita remembered the teenager’s sad little wave, and suddenly felt guilty. “Will you be—OK? I mean, you won’t be lonely or anything?”
She dismissed the notion with her hand, like swatting a not especially annoying fly. “My people come to visit me all the time, and there are plenty of lonely folks who come to the cemeteries just to talk. There’s always some company about. And besides, when there’s nobody here, it’s just like sleeping.” She continued, without a trace of irony in her voice. “That’s something we dead folks do well, sleeping.”
The hill beckoned Juanita, even as part of her screamed to turn back. Part of her was still afraid of Harvey, even though she knew he was dead in his grave. Part of her was afraid to see him, to hear his voice, even though she knew he couldn’t touch her, even if he wanted to. But she could talk to him. Tell him how angry she was, how she felt about him. She could do it, unafraid of repercussions, knowing Harvey could never hurt her again.
The plot was in a lovely location. She could look out past the cemetery, over the forests of dark green pine, and down to the river a few miles east. Harvey had certainly gotten a choice plot for himself. Perhaps he’d used it as a sales tool. Juanita could imagine that, proof to his gullible pigeons that he believed in his product. Of course he could have lied about owning a plot, but that wasn’t the man Harvey was. He could have been caught at that.
That was one thing you could say for Harvey, he never lied unless he thought he could get away with it. He used the truth like a tool, turning it to his advantage, like he’d gained Ms. Thomas’s sympathy over his “lost love.”
But if the location was choice, he seemed to have cut comers elsewhere. The headstone was small and simple, a dwarf in the shade of its more spectacular neighbors. Had he cut corners on the programming too? Juanita wondered just how much of Harvey there would be left to confront. For the first time, she wondered if the DeadRinger would recognize her. They were always programmed to recognize family, but Harvey would have had no reason to think she’d come here. Or would his ego have let him assume otherwise? There was only one way to find out.
The headstone was only a few meters away. She knew that only a step or two would take her within its range of sensitivity and activate the DeadRinger. Only a step or two to see Harvey again.
Those steps seemed both uncomfortably close, and painfully far. It was like standing on the ledge of a tall building and looking down. She took a deep breath and stepped forward.
The air in front of the headstone shimmered, particles swirling upwards as though dust were rising from the grave and reassembling into the man. Juanita felt a certain sense of power, even as he began to take shape, in that she could take a few steps back and return him to dust. It made seeing his familiar face a little easier to take.
He looked just as he had the last time she’d seen him, not a day older. His dark hair was longer, standing high on his head like wind-blown wheat, but the face was the same—the blue eyes, the high cheekbones, the full, sculpted lips, the jaw-line just a little too strong for perfection. It was easy to see how she’d once been attracted to him. Now she could look into those eyes and imagine only anger, hatred, and violence.
Now, he only smiled, gently, warmly, like when they’d first been together. “Juanita! You came! I wondered if you’d come. We have so much to talk about.”
Part of her wanted to call him a bastard, that word that had escaped her lips so many times at the thought of him, but she didn’t. Instead she just stared at him, looking for some trace of the meanness that she had known there, and not finding it. She realized, with some disappointment, that his programming was limited. Despite the smile and fond greeting, he seemed hardly to know her at all.
She tried to think who would have visited him here-, his mother, a doting little woman who lived only an hour or so away in Atlanta, his older brother Carlos who worked for one of the vid networks in the city, and his older sister, Etta, an ice queen who designed thought-pumps for a company in Columbus.
They’d all thought highly of Harvey, in different ways. If that was where he’d learned about himself, he’d certainly gotten an unbalanced view, one that probably didn’t include Juanita. Carlos hadn’t liked her since she’d refused his pass at a Christmas party eight years ago. She and Etta had never gotten along, and Harvey’s mother, though she’d always been friendly, had turned on her like a snake when the marriage went sour. They’d all been glad to be rid of her, and she couldn’t imagine them bringing her up now.
“You don’t even remember me, do you, Harvey?”
The smile faded for just a moment, then returned full strength. “Of course I do. You’re Juanita. We were married.”
“We were married. What else?”
Harvey looked away, smile fading completely this time, and his image seemed to get grainy, as though her question had overwhelmed the computer, for a moment drawing back the curtain of reality. “I’m sorry, Juanita. Dying is a difficult process, and I’ve forgotten things. I only remember that we once felt strongly for each other. Can’t we reminisce about those times? Tell me about how it used to be.”
Juanita felt her body tense, felt herself swept away on a wave of emotion she hadn’t seen coming, felt pressure building up inside her, like a teakettle coming to boil. He was doing it again—smooth, charming, spinning a web of lies. But this time she knew, knew who he really was. Suddenly she was moving toward him, no longer hesitant, no longer afraid. In a moment she was on him, swinging her arms, lashing with her fists, kicking. But she felt nothing as her flailing limbs passed through him, scattering him into condensed clouds that swirled and reformed, like a flock of birds avoiding a hawk.
The only satisfaction, the only satisfaction at all, was that Harvey reacted to her blows, only not the way she wanted. He was laughing, pulling away, trying ineffectively to block her with his arms. “Damn it, Juanita,
She did stop, stepping back just a step, to see what she had done. Harvey was still laughing, trying to compose himself, or at least, the computer was putting on a pretty good show. How much of this was show, pre-programmed reactions to make the visitors happy, and how much was real personality, recreated in the machine? Did it matter?
She moved half a step closer, getting in his face, arms back, chest out. “Hit me,” she said. “I’m not afraid of you, Harvey. Hit me!”
Harvey just stood there, looking bemused, shaking his head.
“Damn you, you bastard, hit me! Just like you used to! Like the time you broke my arm! Have you forgotten that too?”
But it seemed that Harvey had. He held his hands out, and she saw that his lips were moving, but there was no sound. The image shimmered, then seemed about to break up entirely. She remembered what she’d been thinking earlier, about how people had to throw out their vision of a person when presented with anomalous information. That was fine if that vision was someone else, but what if that vision was all
“You didn’t hit me, Harvey. I just said that because I was angry. I’m sorry.” And with her words, she healed him. Suddenly the image was whole, and Harvey was smiling as though nothing had happened.
“I understand, it must have been difficult for you, Juanita. I can’t blame you for being angry at me.”
She drew her arms across her chest, and thought of the real Harvey, cold and buried in the ground under her feet. She thought of him and felt nothing. He was buried, old business; let him stay that way.
“I have to go, Harvey. I just had to say good-bye. I won’t be back.”
Harvey smiled sadly. “I understand, it’s that way sometimes. Good-bye, Juanita.”
She started to walk away, but turned for one last look at the Harvey that never was, or perhaps the Harvey that might have been. He was all the things she had once loved, with none of the anger, none of the greed, none of the hate. He was Harvey filtered through the hearts of the people who had cared for him, who had never known his dark side. He was perfect, and he didn’t exist. All that was left of Harvey was a kaleidoscope of memories, all equally right, all equally wrong, as illusory as the people who inhabited this cemetery, and just as real.
She walked down the hill, not looking back. Sometimes, she would pass too close to a headstone, and she would smile and greet the person who materialized there. Let people have their illusions. Sometimes illusions were a good thing.
The cab was waiting, but first she had to stop and straighten things out with Ms. Thomas, to restore her old image of Harvey. She’d have to lie, of course, tell her that Harvey hadn’t hit her at all. What harm could it do? It was old business.
Let this be the place where the past was buried.