going to your funeral / and feeling I could scream
everything fades away.
look at all the people with / their faces in their hands
when everything I'm feeling makes it hard to understand
that was once / that was once / you.
--The Eels 'going to your funeral'
HOME : 1 going to your funeral
Outside her window, sometimes, looking at the city through a fog heavy with grime and dust, city-tears never cried, she smokes a cigarette until it's only a few inches long, then she stubs it out in the glass ashtray on the windowsill.
She's not doing anything dangerous, now. An accountant from an office somewhere in the City calls her from time to time, tells her how her accounts are during. His voice is like a boy's voice, but cool, professional; he switches between her, a director in a Zurich bank, another director in a New Valha bank, important people scattered all over the universe. Sometimes she calls him and listens, and then she gives him directions, tells him what to buy and what to shift to where.
Most of the time she just sits in her apartment, which is not an expensive apartment, just nice enough that nobody gets murdered near it and the lifts work most of the time and she doesn't get bums or salesmen or other weird people knocking on her door. She has a big-screen TV on the walls that's never turned on, a little gym full of exercise equipment that she goes through for exactly the same amount of time every day, a stereo system that never plays any music, a computer that's hardly ever out of idle mode. She goes through a lot of cigarettes and sometimes a beeper on her belt goes off, that's when she knows she ought to call her doctor and go to see him, get a new pair of lungs. But most of the time she just sits and smokes and watches the smoke drift away.
It drifts so slowly.
Today the military man came again. She watched him the other day, when she first saw him; when the bell rang, the security monitor flicked in and faded out from black, melting into an unfamiliar face standing in front of the apartment's front door, one hand raised to knock on the wood.
"Miss Black?"
She never answers the doorbell or the knocker, never says anything. Sometimes she watches the monitor, but usually she turns it off. When the military man turned away without saying anything she watched him go, the back of his head made a strange aerodynamic shape by the sweep of his short hair, shoulders stiff and slim under the heavy black uniform. She didn't recognise his face. The security computer, when she'd asked it, said he was research personnel, stationed somewhere nearby, but she hadn't recognised the name that it spat out along with the rest of its datafeed. A young man's face; no one she knew. Maybe he'd been a boy, and she'd passed him by, swooped over his small head and made him look up and gape at the roar of her engines, full throttle and forward-gone to the horizon... but those days were more like dreams, now, the dust of them choking her in her sleep and waking her up, rubbing at tearing eyes.
The other day she stood in the bathroom with a line of dancer in her hand, watching the yellow drug crumble to a powder on the floor, knowing the little robots that lived in the wooden panelling would come out after she'd gone and sweep it all up nice and clean, and not tell her servants or staff anything. She'd looked at it and it had seemed so heavy and neat in her hand, and she had realised how easy it would be to snort the whole line and lie down on the bathroom floor, like in the song, and she'd be that, 'elizabeth on the bathroom floor' like the man sang it in the song, on her way to a place where she'd be always high...
But she'd put it away, in the end, and when she felt her hand creeping towards the bathroom cabinet, where she'd stashed it behind the toothpaste, she'd made herself pick it up and flush it down the toilet. She hadn't asked her pharmacist to sneak her any more, after that. It was too much to have just lying around.
She'd looked at the knives in the kitchen and the razor blades in the bathroom cabinet with a little bit more caution, after that, but in the end there was never any need to get rid of them. When she looks out of her window, at the smoke wafting out of her mouth, she knows why; but she can never put it in words to explain to herself, and she's never really satisfied.
And then the military man returns again, today, and he doesn't call her Miss Black, and he doesn't try to say who he is.
He just stands on the doorstep, rings the doorbell, then with his hands held stiff behind his back he says, "I am going to visit his grave today. It should be fifteen years now... If you would come and speak, a little, I would be grateful for your company."
He leeaves after that. He is not wearing his black jacket, because the weather is now so warm, here on Mars; and, as he walks away, she thinks she sees, through the white cotton of the back of his shirt, the ripple of a dark tattoo on his back. The head and snarl and curve and twist of a dragon...
She dresses in black, and takes an automatic car to the cemetery. There's a gun in her hand that she hasn't used for years. It's old but she cleans it as good as she ever did and she knows it'll still fire if she wants it to.
It's cold underneath her jacket, like it's sleeping. Cold and quiet. She wonders if it will wake up again. If she will ever wake up again, too. It's been so long since life didn't feel like one of those long, aching, tiresome dreams you have, where you wish and wish and wish you'd wake up because nothing's happening, nothing at all, and you don't know yet how long the night's still got to go.
The sky is scattered, pale blue and stark white and clouds shot through with dazzling sunlight; magnolia trees shiver and the thin fragrance of their soft white flowers comes down the slope, hovers in the air. At the heads of green mounds the tombstones in the cemetery gleam, freshly-scrubbed by recent-fallen rain, and the ground is damp underfoot, the grass a richer, darker feel and shade of green.
She walks across it, going straight to that place where the military man stands with his back to her, looking at the headstone of one grave.