THE FUNERAL, RUINED

By Ben Peek

It was the weight that woke Linette. Her weight. The weight of herself.

The flat red sky above Issuer was waiting when she opened her eyes. Five hours before, when she had closed her eyes, it had been a dark, ugly brown-red: the middle of the night. Now it was the clear early morning red, and a thick, muggy warmth was seeping through her open window with the new light. There would be no rain today. Just the heat. Just the sweat. Just that uncomfortable, hot awareness of herself that both brought. The worse was Linette's short, dark hair, dirty with sweat and ash. The ash that had come through the open window during the night. It had streaked her face and settled in her mouth and she could taste it, dry, burnt and unappealing in her gums. Her left arm, with its thick, straight scars across the forearm, felt heavy and ached; but it always ached. It was a dull, lazy ache in the heat, and a sharp, pointed pain in the cold, as if, with the latter, the brittle weather was digging into her fractured bone to snap it. Her feet, tangled at the bottom of her coarse, ash stained brown sheets, sweated uncomfortably, and her long, straight back could feel the sweaty outline of the bronze frame beneath the thin mattress that she lay on. There was no end to herself, Linette thought, and she would never be able to sleep again, so aware of it was she.

Her dreams had not been a sanctuary, however. In them, Linette had lived under a different part of the red sun, wrapped in heavy brown clothes, wearing pieces of light bronze armour, and holding a short, wide-nosed gun. Around her, clouds of black ash spewed from the back of bronze, grey and silver coloured machines. Cages of crows peppered the ground and, inside, the black birds sat silently, waiting. They were not real, she knew. They never had been. The ground the fake birds lay on was mud and ash and the waste of brown and red trees that had been torn down to make the circular camp she lived in. The wastage clung to her boots, leaving a trail to its centre behind her. There was a man beside her, but she couldn't make him out. He had been asking her when she planned to read the letter, but she had responded by telling him to be quiet. Two men had escaped, she said. They could be anywhere. They could be watching—

They were, but she had awoken before that.

It didn't matter: she knew the outcome, had lived it, didn't need to experience it again.

The letter, however, was not part of the memory. The letter was part of the muggy heat and her life in Issuer. It was sitting in her tiny kitchen, leaning against an old bronze kettle: thin, straight, pristine and white. A perfect set of teeth to speak with. Her name was printed in messy letters on the front, and though a young, clean skinned man she didn't know had delivered it, she knew the author.

Slowly, Linette pushed herself up with her good arm. Her left was a dead weight in her lap. It would take a shower and exercise for it to gain full movement. Two months out of the hospital, out of the army, and a month living in Issuer and her arm had only just begun to improve to the point that she could use it properly. But it took time, still. She slid across the bed that was big enough for two, but held only one, and placed her feet down on the cool stone floor of a room so bare that a visitor would have thought no one lived in it.

The room's possessions lay in the hallway in a disorganised jumble. Linette had thrown them there last night. The large, bronze framed mirror that had, once, sat on the far wall to give the room size now leant against the wall with cracks around the top. Near it lay a brass clock, and next to that a stocky bronze fan with bent blades, followed by a dozen tiny mechanical devices that she had been unable to stomach the thought of having near her as she slept. The way that each simulated a natural event, or imposed an artificial meaning . . . she had been disgusted by them, just as she had been by the way she had treated each with easy familiarity at one stage in her life. In anger, she had thrown them from the room and opened the window so that the muggy, ash stained breeze could enter.

She had not yet opened the letter.

My Dear Linette—

 

I do not know how to begin, but I do know is that there is little time left for me to write. In half an hour, the operation will begin. I am apprehensive. My hand trembles. I have always prided myself on clean, simple letters, but look at them now. They cross lines. They mix against each other. They slope one way, then another. They fall outside the neat order that I have cherished so much. I suppose, given what is about to happen, that is the way things should be. Nothing in life is neat and contained.

She tried to eat, but the taste of ash lingered in her mouth, even after she had rinsed.

From her chair at the kitchen table, Linette swallowed her half-chewed piece of apple, then tossed the remaining half into the bin next to her sink. The apple was small, brown, and made an unpleasant, soggy slap as it hit the brass bottom of the bin. Silence followed. The tall woman, now wearing black pants and a long sleeved black, buttoned shirt, had not allowed a sound to escape her mouth since waking up. She had left the bedroom rubbing the scars on her arm, disgusted by the way sweat gathered around the thick, puckered flesh. She had stepped around the mess in the hall, entered the toilet, pissed, showered, scrubbed herself with hard movements, worked her arm until it moved like the other, then dressed and picked up the apple. The only noise had been her feet on the slowly warming concrete floor.

Not so long ago, the mornings had been filled with sound: men and women she knew in smoky, hazy camps, talking about bad food, about operations, about people back home, and those they knew now. Before she had left, and when she had lived in Ledornn, there had been conversations about what kind of toast she would prefer, and who would come up with dinner. Insignificant, shallow, domestic conversations . . .

Linette gazed through the dirty window of the kitchen. The tall, dark shadows of windmills lined Issuer's morning skyline, a few turning slowly, but most that she could see were still. The empty red of sky hung above them regardless, still and oppressive.

She did not think consciously for the half an hour that she sat at the table, her fingernails clicking on the bronze top every now and then. Her mind had drifted and, in a mix of fragments from conversation, bits of song, parts from books, and even scenes from plays that she had seen, her mind turned itself over until, finally, she began to focus on a man. He was blond, slim, and his teeth were crooked, and he had been an unlikely lover for her as much as she had for him. She did not want to think of him, and when her arm began to throb again, either with real or symbolic pain, she knew that she had to stop before her thoughts turned into a morbidity that crumbled her resolve for the day.

Quietly, Linette entered the small, pale grey painted living room. There was a long brown couch in the middle, while a slim bronze table and brass and silver lined radio sat on top of it in the far corner. A box of outside opinions pushed aside. On the floor, however, were a pair of old, scuffed black boots, which Linette picked up. Holding them, she sat down upon the couch, and there, paused again.

In the kitchen, the letter sat, still, against the kettle.

"I have been to too many funerals," she said, as if it could reply to her.

It could not, of course, but the fact that she had spoken to it both frustrated and upset her. With hard yanks, she tightly wound the frayed black laces of her boots up. On the right boot she missed a hole, and on the left, two. She ground her teeth together harshly both times, but retied carefully, wiping her hands free of sweat.

Finished, she rose and crossed the tiny kitchen, to the back door. Her strides were quick and purposeful: the walk of a woman who had an unpleasant task ahead of her, but who would meet it without flinching.

 

Are you angry?

That day when I first met you, you were angry. Nearly two years and that is what I remember about you most. It is not your beauty, not your smile, not your habits . . . No, for over the years, I have realised that these do not define you. They are secondary to your anger—that brilliant, burning anger that exists because the world is not right. The anger that exists because you must fix it, somehow. The first time I saw you was from afar, standing beneath a bronze parasol, while you stood at the front of the Anti-War rally in Ledornn, and it was there that I saw that anger. You demanded to know why Aajnn mattered so much to the Shibtri Isles? Why the Queen and her Children were such a threat?

You told us that they lived in cramped cities beneath the earth, away from our red sun, and with the bones of crows around their necks to catch their souls when they died. They were full of superstition that made the men and women who had Morticians tattoo their life into their skin for God seem at the forefront of science and logic.

What impressed me most (and everyone else, I imagine) was that you were not a person off the street, but a career soldier. You stood in front of us in the straight, light brown pants and suit of the army, your medals and rank displayed for all. You were proud of who you were. You were proud of what you had done for the Isles. You were proud to be in service.

But now, you were angry, and that anger would not allow you to be silent, no matter the consequences. It was an anger to fear and, I am afraid to say, I did—and do—fear it.

The pear shaped Ovens of Issuer dominated the city's horizon, though they were easily an hour away by carriage.

Lately, the twin ovens had a tendency to blur around the edges for Linette, but even with the beginning of her deteriorating eyesight due to her thirty-eighth year, the immense girth and height of the creations meant that they were unable to be passed over when she looked at Issuer's skyline. In contrast, the hundreds of long, bronze windmills that rose out of the city could—and did—fade from her awareness. The Ovens, however, lurked on the horizon like a pair of dark, hunched watchers outside the city, covered in a layer of soot as a disguise. If you managed to forget them (and Linette doubted she ever could), then you would be reminded each Friday when they belched tart smelling ash, and plumes rose out of each to signal the burning of the weekly dead.

Outside of her house, Linette spent a moment in morbid contemplation of the Ovens. It was where she would finish her mortal journey, she knew: a friend, a family member, perhaps even a Mortician, would take her body wrapped in white sheets up to the silent monks who lived beneath the ovens. There, she would be bathed, cleaned, and finally, placed in the giant pits that never fully cooled, and which would ignite at the end of the week, consuming her. There was nowhere else where she would prefer to end. She would not be buried in the ground, not given—or sold or stolen—to a Surgeon's workshop . . . what was left of her would be burnt away. She would be given freedom.

Her small house sat at the end of Issuer, surrounded by other small, cheap, red brick houses. Packed dirt worked as a road around them, but within minutes, she had stepped onto the paved streets of Issuer proper. There, the tall windmills turned at a variety of paces, powered by electricity that was strung from house to house. Issuer had never been big: it was a transient's city, organised in an ordered grid, with street names that indicated purpose. Everything in it was designed to make it easy for the visitor, of which Issuer saw many. It was a city—more a town, really—where men and women arrived for a few days, a week, and after they had seen the Ovens burn and their duty was done to family and loved ones, they left.

The windows to the private houses Linette passed were shut, the boards pulled closed. Inside, bronze fans circulated the air, but the impression of personal lives being closed off was not an illusion. The people who lived in Issuer kept to themselves for the most part, and it was only when you entered the middle of the city, where the public stores, hotels, and other places of business were, that an openness existed. There, windows were open. There, fans sat on the streets, blowing, while larger windmills—the largest in the city—turned above them. There, men and women, mostly young, presented the smiling, happy face of Issuer to visitors. Everywhere—and everyone—else, Linette believed, looked like a coffin: closed in, quiet, and still.

Death was the commodity of Issuer. A Alan Pierre, a black man who had come to the Isles as a child and made a fortune as a body snatcher, had founded it. When age had finally driven him into looking for a way to settle, he had looked at the makeshift tent city that had existed outside the Ovens and sunk his considerable, ill-gained fortune into turning it into something more lasting. It wasn't long until hotels were built, Surgeons and Morticians arrived, as did the other trades that had attached themselves to the industry of death. The people, like Linette, who drifted into the town, drawn by their own morbid frame of mind and the internal struggles that each had, had always been part of it.

Linette herself did not know, exactly, what it was that drew her to Issuer. Her pension provided enough for rent and food, but very little else. In another city, she might find work, and earn more, but while her life was mean, she did not dislike it. The heat bothered her, but it was not as bad as the cold. She was lonely, but—

No.

No, that was wrong: she was not lonely.

She had not been lonely since she moved here and had been able to gaze upon the Ovens daily.

 

I am not a soldier, and I do not pretend to know what you went through, or why, indeed, Issuer allows you to sleep more calmly than you did in Ledornn; but I like to think I have been supportive of all your needs. That I have tried, as much as I possibly can, to be supportive of you.

It has not been easy, Linette. It is true, yes, that I have not been in the best health, but your hatred towards the advancements in our society have made our lives—our illnesses and injuries—more difficult than they should be. Neither of us can heal with your attitude.

For you, it is your arm that bothers you. Why would it not? The machete of an escaped prisoner splintered the bone and it is now held together by steel rods. It will take years to heal, if ever it does, and it bothers you greatly. The obvious solution to your injury was a replacement, which was offered by the army Surgeons, but you rejected this—and you have since rejected anything that the Surgeons have been able to offer that takes away what you are born with. You tell them (and you tell me) that it is unnatural, that it is not right.

But what is right, I ask? Tattooing your body for God? Wearing a charm around your neck to capture your soul? To believe the Ocean is a living God? To believe the hundreds of other, unexplainable things in this world? Are these somehow more acceptable to you now than the science that has been developed, the advancements that will allow us to live long, healthy lives?

Though Linette did not believe in a God, she made her way to the men and women who traded in that belief on the Morticians' Avenue. Specifically, she made her way to the long, straight building of the Mortician Yvelt Fraé, which was made from caramel coloured bricks. It had a dark, brown tiled roof, and was the largest building in the street, lying curled in between a dozen smaller houses of varying brick colour. Her building had three bronze windmills around it, two on the roof, and one larger piece cemented at the back, and which towered over all others on the street.

At the bronze door, Mrs. Fraé, whose hair, it appeared, had only been freshly dyed a red-brown, greeted Linette. Her skin, however, sagged around her jaw, wrinkled over her face, and continued to do so down her neck until it was covered by the brown gown she wore. Beneath the tattoos across her body there was no tautness of youth, and so the illusion created by dying her hair seemed ridiculous and nothing more than a vanity.

"Linette, it is pleasure to see you." Mrs. Fraé's deep voice sounded as if it should emerge from a larger woman. "Linette? Are you—"

"He's dead."

"Ah." A pause, then, "I'm very sorry."

"There was a letter." Her voice was short, clipped. She could feel the emotion in the back of her mouth, threatening to spill out over her words. "He—he wasn't there yesterday."

"Come in, come in," Mrs. Fraé murmured, stepping back from the door to allow her entry.

 The inside of the house was lit in a warm orange and divided by a set of thick, bronze doors. Over each panel of the door was a pattern of angels and devils at war, naked and carrying weapons. The figures on it were ridiculous: sexless for angel, sexual for devil, and posed in mid-action. Behind the twisting battle, Linette knew, lay the private residence of Mrs. Fraé and her family, who were also part of the Mortician trade. She had never seen behind the door, and never would, but expected it to be different from what she saw now. The side of the house she stood on was plain, but expensively decorated with a floor covered in wooden boards and cushioned lounges made from pale brown leather. There was a real, ash-wood table at the end of the room, with a ledger that was used for appointments and payments. A feathered quill lay on it. It looked as if one of Mrs. Fraé's angels had made a table out of the dead for her, and left one of its own feathers to write with.

"Would you like a drink?" the elderly Mortician asked.

"No, I—" The emotions from before welled up, threatened her, and she swallowed them. "I'm fine. I would just like to start, if possible."

"Of course."

Linette had known that there would not be a problem. She had left early, before Issuer fully awoke, and arrived when she knew that Mrs. Fraé would be awake with the early morning vitality that the elderly had. Had she arrived later, and the woman had been engaged, she would have had to wait, for once a Mortician began leaving his or her mark on you, another would not touch you until the first had died. Linette knew that she did not have the patience to wait today.

Mrs. Fraé led her to a small room where, with a click, white electric light flooded its darkness. In the middle lay a chair made from bronze and with thick cushions on it. The bolts and screws and dials in it ensured that while the chair was ugly, it could be folded into a number of positions. Mrs. Fraé flattened the chair into a board before turning to the trays that lined the side of the room, filled with needles and pots of ink.

Linette had received her first tattoo shortly after she had moved to Issuer, when her arm had been mostly useless, but it was the memories of the war that damaged her mostly. She had been in the army for twenty-one years and had seen men and women die, just as she had killed, by her reckoning, more than thirty in various battles. Psychologically, death was nothing new to her. She had always been able to rationalise it, to make it part of her job . . . at least until the campaign against the Empress and her Children began, and she found herself fighting men—always men—armed with mining equipment and rusted machetes and muskets so old that they wouldn't hurt anyone but the owner. It was impossible to look at those men and see a threat. After she left the army with her injury, she had struggled with that awareness, and how to deal with it.

On her back were one hundred and thirteen names in the neat, elegant script of Mrs. Fraé. They were the names of soldiers: friends, some, but a large portion were men and women who she had fought with, peers and comrades before friends. Each one of them, however, had died fighting the Empress and her Children. Each one of them had died needlessly. Died pointlessly. Died for nothing but the greed of their own country.

"Do you still want this outside the others?" Mrs. Fraé asked, referring to the new tattoo. "On the small of your back?"

Linette nodded.

She did not need to speak his name, for which she was grateful. Climbing on to the bench, Linette pulled her shirt up, then curled her arms beneath her chin, and waited. The puckered flesh of her bad arm was uncomfortably warm against her and she could feel her muscles tensing in anticipation of the moment when her skin was pierced—

"So."

A voice. His voice.

"So," he said, repeating it, drawing it out, letting his very familiar voice sink into her. "This is my funeral."

 

I am dying.

Soon, I will be taken into a chamber where two giant tubes hang from the ceiling, and I will be submersed in a green liquid. There, I will die. There, I will be put into a new body. There, I will return. I will return without these weak lungs I was born with; without the holes in my heart; without the pains that stop me from being able to travel this world of ours without having oxygen next to me. When I awake, I will be, for the first time that I can remember, without pain.

You would rather me die. You said that to me, only a week ago, stroking my hair as I lay in our bed, exhausted by the muggy heat, and unable to draw a good breath. You would rather me die than return a man made from bronze and silver and skin. You would rather mourn me than celebrate me.

You defend the right for the Empress and her Children to worship and live as they wish, but it strikes me that their beliefs are not so different than mine. For them, they return in a new body, reborn into their family by a sister, brother, daughter, or son. Perhaps even their own parents. The men and women who believe in God, and who we share our cities with, believe they will be reborn too—given a new life in Heaven (or Hell), after their life has been judged by God. So why is it that I cannot return?

You will be angry, I know, when you read this. You will see it as betrayal. I do not wish for you to do so, but you will.

If I—

I will find you, Linette. I will talk to you—the Surgeon is in front of me right now, and she is urging me to finish, so I must. But I fill find you, after—I will.

For a moment, he looked just like the man she remembered: slender, pale, blond, with a blade of a smile that revealed his crooked, yellow teeth. Except, of course, that they were not crooked, and therein the truth was told. They were straight, and white, and he was, she knew, dead.

The room was quiet with the pause between words and action. Linette (and, she assumed, Mrs. Fraé) could hear the faint murmur of machinery that surrounded the man before her, much in the way that insects create a susurration of noise in the evening. If allowed, it would slip into the background, become a familiar, normal buzz; if it could be allowed, that is. To Linette, the sound only served to remind her of the fact that, beneath his pale skin, he was no longer bones, no longer blood, no longer all the things that she was. Instead, he was bronze and brass bones circled by copper and silver wiring and with a complex motor in the centre of his chest. The skin, like the pale red pants and black shirt he wore, was just another piece of clothing—a piece of fashion, to allow him to look as if he were part of the world.

"Nothing to say?" he said, finally. He remained standing in the doorway to the room, the orange light behind him bathing him in an artificial warmth. "I came all this way—"

"You should leave." Her voice was hard. "I don't want you here."

"Linette—"

"No."

"I—"

"Mrs. Fraé, please." Linette turned to the elderly Mortician, who had been watching the exchange calmly. "Can you do nothing?"

"Don't look to her," he said, a hint of smugness in his voice. "How do you think I am here? She left the door open. She agreed to my plan to meet you here."

Mrs. Fraé smiled faintly, apologetically, and Linette felt the betrayal deeply. It was true that she did not follow the same faith as the Mortician, and that her tattoos were about grief, not God. Her words were a closure she could not get elsewhere else in life, but she had begun to trust the older woman as she trusted few. As the work on her back drew to an end, Linette had felt a bond with Mrs. Fraé, and to feel that connection severed so sharply, so quickly, so instantly, hurt her more than she would have ever considered.

"I thought seeing him would help," Mrs. Fraé explained. "You have an irrational—"

Linette jumped off the table and stalked towards the door. Her body was tense as she approached him, but her gaze held his, and she knew, knew, that if he touched her, she would lash out.

"Linette, please, listen—" The murmur of his body grew louder when he opened his mouth. "Please. Stop. Listen to us."

His hand moved to her, but she reacted quickly, slapping it aside. "Don't touch me," she hissed. She could feel her grief and anger mixing, close to hysteria, and she fought it back as best she could to retain her control. "Don't ever touch me. Never, do you understand? Never. Don't come anywhere near me. I know your kind, and you may think you're someone I know, but you are not. You're not him. He's dead. You're just the copy of him. You're nothing but a tool—an object. Something to be used. Something to be sent in to kill men with. Something that can pretend that it's dead so that you can sneak in like an assassin and kill them without remorse. Something that can switch off every emotion because it is just a wire. Something that lets me switch off my emotions. Something that lets me kill one, kill ten—kill fifty! Something that allows me to kill as many people as I please because—"

"Linette."

"Because you make death meaningless."

Silence. His mouth opened, the hint of growling mechanics growing into an artificial shout, but she shouldered past, bashed past him, threw him off balance with his new, heavy weight, and his voice did not emerge. Her damaged arm throbbed in a sharp, renewed pain. Good, she thought. Good. She wanted to feel the pain. The pain would stop the tears, would hide the hurt, the betrayal, and if, perhaps, while she stalked along the streets of Issuer back to her house . . . if perhaps tears slipped out from the corner of her eyes, then she would know it was the pain in her arm, and nothing else.

 

For all the differences we have, for the all the difficulties that we have faced since your return, Linette, I want you to know that I am still dedicated to us. To preserving us.

 

Antony.

The tears had stopped by the time Linette reached her house, but her body was covered in a sheen of sweat, as if it had begun to weep silently now that her eyes were dry.

She was conscious of the twin shapes of the Ovens behind her, and the finality that they represented. It was a small comfort, and as she stood at the side of her house and gazed back at Issuer, with its barely populated streets that were threaded together by shadowy lines of electricity and punctuated by bronze windmills, she took that comfort for as much as she could. Even though the city had betrayed her—no, not Issuer itself, but a part of the city, part of its trade, its life—the Ovens sat, unmoving, waiting, the period that put everything into perspective for her. The period that gave her security. She took from the Ovens everything that she could, and when she entered the house finally and saw his letter, leaning against the kettle just as it had before, her previous anger and hurt failed to rise.

She could throw it away, and knew, perhaps that she should. She could rip it, cut it up, drown it, burn it . . .

And yet, despite herself, she did not.

 

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<sub>Ben Peek is a Sydney based author. His books include the experimental autobiography, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and the dystopian novel,Black Sheep. He has a bunch of short fiction round, and it has appeared in anthologies such as Polyphony, Leviathan, Agog, and Year's Best Books. He is also the writer of the comic Nowhere Near Savannah, which is illustrated by Anna Brown. He keeps a lo-fi blog at http://benpeek.livejournal.com

Paper Cities was published by Senses Five Press where you can find more information on the anthology and read another story by Catherynne M. Valente. it was released in April 2008 and is available to order.

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