“Where?”
“Central Four,” said the screen.
Central Four? All right. He would find the way. He changed into fresh clothing and went down the long vinyl-floored hallway to the lobby. Night had come; street lamps were glowing; under cloak of darkness the city’s ugliness was no longer so obtrusive, and there was even a kind of controlled beauty about the brutal regularity of its streets.
The streets were unmarked, though, and deserted. Klein walked at random for ten minutes, hoping to meet someone heading for the Central Four commissary. But when he did come upon someone, a tall and regal woman well advanced in years, he found himself incapable of approaching her. (Never ask a direct question. Never lean on anybody’s arm.) He walked alongside her, in silence and at a distance, until she turned suddenly to enter a house. For ten minutes more he wandered alone again. This is ridiculous, he thought: dead or warm, I’m a stranger in town, I should be entitled to a little assistance. Maybe Dolorosa was just trying to complicate things. On the next corner, when Klein caught sight of a man hunched away from the wind, lighting a cigarette, he went boldly over to him. “Excuse me, but—”
The other looked up. “Klein?” he said. “Yes. Of course. Well, so you’ve made the crossing too!”
He was one of Sybille’s Zanzibar companions, Klein realized. The quick-eyed, sharp-edged one—Mortimer. A member of her pseudo- familial grouping, whatever that might be. Klein stared sullenly at him. This had to be the moment when his imposture would be exposed, for only some six weeks had passed since he had argued with Mortimer in the gardens of Sybille’s Zanzibar hotel, not nearly enough time for someone to have died and been rekindled and gone through his drying-off. But a moment passed and Mortimer said nothing. At length Klein said, “I just got here. Pablo showed me to the house of strangers and now I’m looking for the commissary.”
“Central Four? I’m going there myself. How lucky for you.” No sign of suspicion in Mortimer’s face. Perhaps an elusive smile revealed his awareness that Klein could not be what he claimed to be. Keep in mind that to a dead the whole universe is plastic, it’s all only a joke. “I’m waiting for Nerita,” Mortimer said. “We can all eat together.”
Klein said heavily, “I was rekindled in Albany Cold Town. I’ve just emerged.”
“How nice,” Mortimer said.
Nerita Tracy stepped out of a building just beyond the corner—a slim, athletic-looking woman, about forty, with short reddish-brown hair. As she swept toward them, Mortimer said, “Here’s Klein, who we met in Zanzibar, just rekindled, out of Albany.”
“Sybille will be amused.”
“Is she in town?” Klein blurted.
Mortimer and Nerita exchanged sly glances. Klein felt abashed. Never ask a direct question. Damn Dolorosa!
Nerita said, “You’ll see her before long. Shall we go to dinner?”
The commissary was less austere than Klein had expected: actually quite an inviting restaurant, elaborately constructed on five or six levels divided by lustrous dark hangings into small, secluded dining areas. It had the warm, rich look of a tropical resort.
But the food, which came automat-style out of revolving dispensers, was prefabricated and cheerless—another jarring contradiction. Only a joke, friend, only a joke. In any case he was less hungry than he had imagined at the hotel. He sat with Mortimer and Nerita, picking at his meal, while their conversation flowed past him at several times the speed of thought. They spoke in fragments and ellipses, in periphrastics and aposiopeses, in a style abundant in chiasmus, metonymy, meiosis, oxymoron, and zeugma; their dazzling rhetorical techniques left him baffled and uncomfortable, which beyond much doubt was their intention. Now and again they would dart from a thicket of indirection to skewer him with a quick corroborative stab: Isn’t that so, they would say, and he would smile and nod, nod and smile, saying, Yes, yes, absolutely. Did they know he was a fake, and were they merely playing with him, or had they, somehow, impossibly, accepted him as one of them? So subtle was their style that he could not tell. A very new member of the society of the rekindled, he told himself, would be nearly as much at sea here as a warm in deadface.
Then Nerita said—no verbal games, this time—“You still miss her terribly, don’t you?”
“I do. Some things evidently never perish.”
“Everything perishes,” Mortimer said. “The dodo, the aurochs, the Holy Roman Empire, the T’ang Dynasty, the walls of Byzantium, the language of Mohenjo-daro.”
“But not the Great Pyramid, the Yangtze, the coelacanth, or the skullcap of Pithecanthropus,” Klein countered. “Some things persist and endure. And some can be regenerated. Lost languages have been deciphered. I believe the dodo and the aurochs are hunted in a certain African park in this very era.”
“Replicas,” Mortimer said.
“Convincing replicas. Simulations as good as the original.”
“Is that what you want?” Nerita asked.
“I want what’s possible to have.”
“A convincing replica of lost love?”
“I might be willing to settle for five minutes of conversation with her.”
“You’ll have it. Not tonight. See? There she is. But don’t bother her now.” Nerita nodded across the gulf in the center of the restaurant; on the far side, three levels up from where they sat, Sybille and Kent Zacharias had appeared. They stood for a brief while at the edge of their dining alcove, staring blandly and emotionlessly into the restaurant’s central well. Klein felt a muscle jerking uncontrollably in his cheek, a damning revelation of undeadlike uncoolness, and pressed his hand over it, so that it twanged and throbbed against his palm. She was like a goddess up there, manifesting herself in her sanctum to her worshipers, a pale shimmering figure, more beautiful even than she had become to him through the anguished enhancements of memory, and it seemed impossible to him that that being had ever been his wife, that he had known her when her eyes were puffy and reddened from a night of study, that he had looked down at her face as they made love and had seen her lips pull back in that spasm of ecstasy that is so close to a grimace of pain, that he had known her crochety and unkind in her illness, short-tempered and impatient in health, a person of flaws and weaknesses, of odors and blemishes, in short a human being, this goddess, this unreal rekindled creature, this object of his quest, this Sybille. Serenely she turned, serenely she vanished into her cloaked alcove. “She knows you’re here,” Nerita told him. “You’ll see her. Perhaps tomorrow.” Then Mortimer said something maddeningly oblique, and Nerita replied with the same off-center mystification, and Klein once more was plunged into the river of their easy dancing wordplay, down into it, down and down and down, and as he struggled to keep from drowning, as he fought to comprehend their interchanges, he never once looked toward the place where Sybille sat, not even once, and congratulated himself on having accomplished that much at least in his masquerade.
That night, lying alone in his room at the house of strangers, he wonders what he will say to Sybille when they finally meet, and what she will say to him. Will he dare bluntly to ask her to describe to him the quality of her new existence? That is all that he wants from her, really, that knowledge, that opening of an aperture into her transfigured self; that is as much as he hopes to get from her, knowing as he does that there is scarcely a chance of regaining her, but will he dare to ask, will he dare even that? Of course his asking such things will reveal to her that he is still a warm, too dense and gross of perception to comprehend the life of a dead; but he is certain she will sense that anyway, instantly. What will he say, what will he say? He plays out an imagined script of their conversation in the theater of his mind: