Six hours later, when Otis was mercifully dead again, his wife told reporters, “Well, Otis was always kind of spacey. That’s why he ran into that tree, I guess.” But it turned out that the other revived dead—tycoons, scientists, gangsters—were spacey too. The dead didn’t care about the same things the living did.
These days, the dead were revived only rarely, usually to testify in criminal cases involving their death or civil cases involving the financial details of their estates. They made bad witnesses. They became distracted by brightly colored neckties, by the reflection of the courtroom lights in the polished wood of the witness box, by the gentle clicking of the clerk’s recording instrument. It was very difficult to keep them on track, to remind them what they were supposed to be thinking about. On the other hand, they had amazingly accurate memories once they could be cajoled into paying attention to the subject at hand. Bribes of balloons and small, brightly colored toys worked well; jurors became used to watching the dead weep in frustration while scolding lawyers held matchbox cars and neon-hued stuffed animals just out of reach. But once the dead gave the information the living sought, they always told the truth. No one had ever caught one of the dead lying, no matter how dishonest the corpse might have been while it was still alive.
It had been very difficult for the man behind the desk to break through Rusty’s fascination with the paperweight. It had taken a lot to get Rusty’s attention. Dirt about Rusty’s affairs and insider deals hadn’t done it. None of that mattered anymore. It was a set of extraneous details, as distant as the moon and as abstract as ethics, which also had no hold on Rusty.
Rusty’s passions and loyalties were much more basic now.
He stood in the elegant office, rocking the paperweight as if it were a baby, crooning to it, sometimes holding it at arm’s length to admire it before bringing it back safely to his chest again. He had another two hours of revival left this time; the man behind the desk would revive him and the others again in a month, for another twenty-four hours. Rusty fully intended to spend every minute of his current two hours in contemplation of the paperweight. When he was revived again in a month, he’d fall in love with something else.
“You idiot,” said the man who had been sitting behind the desk. He wasn’t behind a desk now; he was in a refrigerated warehouse, a month after that meeting with Rusty. He was yelling at his aide. Around him were the revived dead, waiting to climb into refrigerated trucks to be taken to the rally site. It was a lovely, warm spring day, and they’d smell less if they were kept cool for as long as possible. “I don’t want them.” He waved at two of the dead, more mangled than any of the others, charred and lacerated and nearly unrecognizable as human bodies. One was playing with a paperclip that had been lying on the floor; the other opened and closed its hand, trying to catch the dust motes that floated in the shafts of light from the window.
The aide was sweating, despite the chill of the warehouse. “Sir, you said—”
“I know what I said, you moron!”
“Everyone who was there, you said—”
“Idiot.” The voice was very quiet now, very dangerous. “Idiot. Do you know why we’re doing this? Have you been paying attention?”
“Sir,” the aide stuttered. “Yes sir.”
“Oh, really? Because if you’d been paying attention, they wouldn’t be here!”
“But—”
“Prove to me that you understand,” said the dangerously quiet voice. “Tell me why we’re doing this.”
The aide gulped. “To remind people where their loyalties lie. Sir.”
“Yes. And where do their loyalties lie? Or where should their loyalties lie?”
“With innocent victims. Sir.”
“Yes. Exactly. And are those, those things over there”—an impassioned hand waved at the two mangled corpses—“are they innocent victims?”
“No. Sir.”
“No. They aren’t. They’re the monsters who were responsible for all these other innocent victims! They’re the guilty ones, aren’t they?”
“Yes sir.”
“They deserve to be dead, don’t they?”
“Yes sir.” The aide stood miserably twisting his hands.
“The entire point of this rally is to demonstrate that some people deserve to be dead, isn’t it?”
“Yes sir!”
“Right. So why in the name of everything that’s holy were those monsters revived?”
The aide coughed. “We were using the new technique. Sir. The blanket-revival technique. It works over a given geographical area. They were mixed in with the others. We couldn’t be that precise.”
“Fuck that,” said the quiet voice, succinctly.
“It would have been far too expensive to revive all of them individually,” the aide said. “The new technique saved us—”
“Yes, I know how much it saved us! And I know how much we’re going to lose if this doesn’t work! Get rid of them! I don’t want them on the truck! I don’t want them at the rally!”
“Sir! Yes sir!”
The aide, once his boss had left, set about correcting the situation. He told the two unwanted corpses that they weren’t needed. He tried to be polite about it. It was difficult to get their attention away from the paperclip and the dust motes; he had to distract them with a penlight and a Koosh ball, and that worked well enough, except that some of the other corpses got distracted too and began crowding around the aide, cooing and reaching for the Koosh ball. There were maybe twenty of them, the ones who had been closest; the others, thank God, were still off in their own little worlds. But these twenty all wanted that Koosh ball. The aide felt like he was in a preschool in hell, or possibly in a dovecote of extremely deformed and demented pigeons.
“Listen to me!” he said, raising his voice over the cooing. “Listen! You two! You with the paperclip and you with the dust motes! We don’t want you, okay? We just want everyone else! You two, do not get on the trucks! Have you got that? Yes? Is that a nod? Is that a yes?”
“Yesh,” said the corpse with the paperclip, and the one who’d been entranced by the dust motes nodded.
“All right then,” said the aide, and tossed the Koosh ball over their heads into a corner of the warehouse. There was a chorus of happy shrieks and a stampede of corpses. The aide took the opportunity to get out of there, into fresh air. His Dramamine was wearing off. He didn’t know if the message had really gotten through or not, but fuck it: this whole thing was going to be a public-relations disaster, no matter who got on the trucks. He no longer cared if he kept his job. In fact, he hoped he got fired, because that way he could collect unemployment. As soon as the rally was over, he’d go home and start working on his resumé.
Back in the warehouse, Rusty had a firm grip on the Koosh ball. He had purposefully stayed at the back of the crowd. He knew what he had to do, and he had been concentrating very hard on staying focused, although it was difficult not to be distracted by all the wonderful things around him: the aide’s tie, a piece of torn newspaper on the floor, the gleaming hubcaps of the trucks. His mind wasn’t working as well as it had been during his first revival, and it took all his energy to concentrate. He stayed at the back of the crowd and kept his eyes on the Koosh ball, and when the aide tossed it into the corner, Rusty was the first one there. He had it. He picked it up, thrilling at its texture, and did the hardest thing he had ever done: he sacrificed the pleasure of the Koosh ball. He forced himself to let go of it for the greater good. He tossed it into the back of the nearest truck and watched his twenty fellows rush in joy up the loading ramp. Were the two unwanted corpses there? Yes, they were. In the excitement, they had forgotten their promise to the aide.