NINE

Dead Body State

[Outside Time]

Finch and I found ourselves outside on the street, but it wasn’t clear how we’d gotten here. We’d been inside the apartment – what I’d thought was my apartment, only I’d learned that it wasn’t mine any longer – and now we weren’t. Now… we were walking the street in the city, somewhere downtown, loping along the wide sidewalks of what appeared the financial district, past tall buildings with solid edifices and flat planes of brick, steel and glass that stretched upwards, skywards, reaching at the clouds overhead. “You’ll get used to it, these transitions,” Finch explained. “It’s a problem, I know. At least it seems like one. Nothing stays put, nothing stays the same. You’re in one place, and then you’re not. But like I say, you do get used to it. It isn’t as bad as you might think.” The street today as always was crowded with pedestrians and motor traffic. To my surprise, people moved out of our way. They didn’t look at us – if anyone saw us, they gave no obvious sign – but at the same time they didn’t walk straight through us either. There was some small comfort in that.

“Did you ever stop to wonder why, Finch?” I asked him. “Why is it that you can be in one place one moment and not be there the next? And why is it that people don’t see you? In so many years, I’d think that should trouble you at least a little.” I couldn’t say why it was that I kept harping on him like this. I guess I just wanted for him to admit that he was dead. But why was it so important? Was it just because he wouldn’t do it that it seemed to matter?

“Yeah, it troubles me,” he said. “I’ll tell you what troubles me. People are just rude. People don’t care. You’d think they could give you the time of day at least, but no one can be bothered.”

“Yes, Finch, but why?”

He had nothing to say to that.

Traffic in the lanes of the avenue moved with painstaking slowness, and I was glad not to be stuck in it. For what it was worth, to be in a car under these conditions was no better than to be on foot. You certainly went no more quickly for it. But it was curious to see how many of these gridlocked cars were of an older style, like those I’d seen up on Madison earlier. Was this some kind of rally trying to happen? If so, these conventioneers sure had a funny idea of a good time, getting themselves stuck in this nonsense for the sake of parading around their vintage automobiles. And from what I could see, nobody took that much pride in their old cars either – not that many were clean, much less buffed and polished to a shine, as you’d expect. There was even an Edsel (what I took to be an Edsel) with a massive dent in a rear fender! This was the laziest and worst-organized old-car club I’d ever seen.

“Hey, what’d you think of that girl, Prot? She was something.”

I winced at his abbreviation of my name… but then I’d always had a problem with my name to begin with. “I’m definitely not comfortable with creeping around on somebody like that,” I said. “But yeah, I gotta hand it to her, she did know how to deal with my neighbor. Better than I ever did. Did she…?”

“See us? No, I don’t think she could see us. And she said as much, too, didn’t she? ‘I can’t see you.’ It’s a funny thing to say, when you think of it, since we were just right there. It seemed like she could feel something, though. Or smell it. That was a little unusual.”

“No – I meant, did she send us away? Just by saying she didn’t want us there?”

Finch rolled his eyes upward toward the sky, leaning back, his hands stuck deep into his pockets.

“What? You’re telling me she couldn’t do that?”

“How could she? What would that make us? We’re here. You and I, we go where we like, to where we want to go. We do what we want –”

But Finch’s breath was knocked from him when a short, squat man walked straight into him and cut him short. “Hey, asshole! Watch where the fuck you’re goin’!” the man spat at him, then stepped around tall Finch and went on down the road. Finch just stood there, dumbstruck, in disbelief, his hands up at his sides as though something sticky had just spilled all over him. He looked back over his shoulder at the dense little man, who by now seemed to have forgotten him, with his jaw hung open.

Finally, when he could speak again, Finch said, “That’s the first time… s-since you… that anybody… has ever…”

“What, so maybe you’re not so dead anymore?” Which I figured after the fact was maybe not a fair thing to say, since Finch now looked at me in such painful bewilderment. “Forget it,” I said. “Hey, I have an idea. Wasn’t there someplace you wanted to get to? Some special kind of place? What was it? The Unreal…”

“Fake City…” Finch said, shaking his hands and flicking his fingers in the air, as if to get the nonexistent gooey mess off him. We started slowly walking again, our footsteps falling more or less in synch to each other.

“Right. Fake City. Sounds like a nice place… I guess. Why not just go there? What’s to stop you?”

“I… uh, don’t have any money, for starters.” Finch stared ahead of himself now – far ahead, as if what were up there might be worth looking at.

“Oh, come on!” I goaded him. “Who needs money? What was it you told me? That it’s behind every city, since it’s what, the first and the last of all the cities?”

“Well, yeah, more or less.”

“So… if that’s the case, it can’t be very far away. So then a bus ride to it, say, can’t cost all that much. We could maybe even walk there. C’mon, you told me how you… you really wanted to go. I say, let’s go there. Let’s go to Fake City.”

Now, without wanting to draw too much attention to it, I’d started noticing some things about the city around us. First, in a city that was famous for its hills, especially downtown, the terrain was decidedly flat. And since it seemed that we were heading north along what looked like 4th Ave, that meant that to the right of us, there should have been a rather sharp incline up toward First Hill. And there were hills there. I could see them through the gap between skyscrapers; some brownish, scrubby-looking sort of hills in the distance, with vast lettering stuck in the side spelling HOLLYWOO (no “D,” go figure) – which was not in Seattle, no matter what else may be going on – and when again I got a look both the sign and the hills were gone. The horizon, as such, had been replaced by the depthless sky, and the sky itself was less a mantle of cloud, as one might expect, than a hazed gray-brown veiling some lifeless shade of blue. To the left, where we should have seen water, and lots of it, there was only more murky sky. Yet up ahead, I could still just make out that antenna-spiked disk of early 1970sera sci-fi design the Space Needle, floating up above it all, rising higher than anything that yet surrounded it. Not all the city had changed yet, but I expected that familiar landmark to be gone soon as well, and seen vaguely through a similar haze of smog and distance, it too was less distinct already than it had been… or should be. I was going on a theory, yet I was pretty certain that, at the same time, this theory was correct.

Not the least of it was that every car around us now was ancient. Or, to put it more properly, displaced from time altogether.

I pressed on. “Forget about how you’d imagined it should be. All the ticker-tape parade, the dancing girls, whatever. I don’t think anyone even uses ticker tape anymore. But that’s not important. What’s important… what’s important, Finch, is a fresh start… for you! Finch. You get to be one hundred percent Finch, all the time. And not just some goofy old ghost! Doesn’t that just sound wonderful? Doesn’t it?” I didn’t even know what I was saying by this point.

Finch was uncertain. “Well, I… I dunno.” He wore a worried look.

“Sure it does! Come on! I think… now maybe I’m wrong, but I think, if we just keep walking, well, we’re gonna be there in no time. No time at all.”

“I’m recognizing things…” he stammered. His frightened eyes stared directly ahead. Those nearby us on the pavement, those moving around us and past, those moving in our direction and from either side, at the merging flow of the crosswalk where we stopped, stood, waited for the change, paid us little mind, staring off toward their own distraction. But they did notice that we were objects, and that much was something, and as objects, the consensus was we were best avoided if possible – those more recent collisions notwithstanding. The signal changed and we moved forward again, crossing the busy street. “Things,” Finch said, “I think I’ve seen before.”

“That’s it! Finch! That’s what I’m talking about!” I punched at the air. “It’s just what I told you before, there is no one better qualified… to be… your…” But I too had been caught short by uncertainty, staring at the entry of some vast and improbably tall building. I couldn’t say what about it had so captured me, but I found myself suddenly blank-minded and confused. It wasn’t an especially nice building that stood at the opposite corner. It took up the entire block in its foundation and ground floor, reaching from that basis upward, endlessly it seemed, its peak invisible, tucked well into the haze above. Its deco stylings were rather dull in fact. Its color was dun, its demeanor dour, its facade, really, just nothing to look at. Some investment group or something. Some bank. Some… who knew? Because who knew what BOX meant, the name in and of itself? That’s what was on the building. The sign above the door, etched into concrete, said BOX, and nothing else.

The angry bleating of some delivery truck directly beside me shocked me back to myself. I’d not realized I’d stopped in the middle of the street. And now the light had changed again – Finch had wandered on, still in his anxious daze, and kept going – so I held a palm up at the driver (who I couldn’t see through the shining windshield of the truck) and darted to the other side, just as the lineup of traffic started surging ahead, their engines racing, as it seems they would’ve done no matter if I’d gotten out of their way or not. Jogging to catch up with him, I found Finch muttering to himself. No doubt, he thought he was muttering to me and had never realized I was missing. But now as I joined him I heard, in his nervous, subdued and miserable tone, “… only saw a glimpse of it that one time… lost sight of it then… That time should specialize… I mean, I mean spatialize… Or no, I do mean specialize. Do I? I don’t know what I mean. Because I was there, I was here… and, but, I saw it… only for a moment. You understand. But it was everything. Everywhere I’d been, everything I’d done… but more than that… everything I was going to do, too. And that…” That was when I realized that he wasn’t talking to me, but had taken up with some fella who also walked beside him. But this wasn’t just any fella. No. It was the worst-dressed person I’d ever seen. I mean, it took some extraordinary knack of coordination and planning to put together a wardrobe as mismatched as his: leather pants and a purple corduroy jacket with extra wide lapels, and some kind of little beret in green, like an Irish peasant. Caubeen, I thought, is what that’s called, and, Good God, how do I know that? “It’s what I couldn’t hardly stand,” continued Finch, “what I hadn’t done yet. Do you know what I mean?” He looked to his companion, whose thick shock of white hair shot out from under the hat like an explosion barely contained.

“Finch?” I said, though I wasn’t heard.

The older fella nodded as he walked alongside, keeping step with the younger one, Finch. “Oh yes, son, I do,” he said. “And you are absolutely right about time. Well, time, now… it will specialize there. More even than it does in this place. You see, there is more than one way to be dead!” And with that he looked to me, past dazed Finch, right into my eyes, and smiled.