Dead Americans (27 page)

Are you talking from the point of view of a musician who is not in the care of a large label?

You saying it’s jealousy?

Just asking.

The answer’s no. The type of music I make has never been mainstream enough for that.

Why do you think Malik became involved in the business side?

You read her interviews and she’ll tell you that she believed in the music—in Brown’s music especially. She said it needed an outlet and she provided one.

Do you believe that?

No one is that altruistic. I mean, it’s not like she did this for free.

Inside the envelope was a series of blue x-rays. Zarina pulled out the smooth sheets and looked at them on the table, held them up to the light, and then placed them back on the table. She had never seen an x-ray before and had no idea what she was looking at. But she knew that it was important for Lee that she examine each.

On the five sheets was the image of a skull, the bones displayed with a grey stain of skin and blood and veins around it and in the centre. Placing the final image down on the table, she returned her gaze to Lee, who was sitting straight up in his chair, the girls in sunflower dresses lined up behind him like soldiers. She said, “I have no idea what I’m looking at.”

“It’s a skull,” he said.

“I know that.”

“It’s
my
skull.”

“I know that, too,” she replied gently. “I don’t know what’s wrong with it, though. I can’t read these things.”

“Can’t you see that there’s nothing in it?” His voice became strained: a desperate note caught on the tight cord held between his hands. “Can’t you see?”

“Yes.” She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t a doctor, that she didn’t know enough, but even though she felt that these images were not right, that something was definitely missing, she didn’t think he should take it to mean that his head was empty. Instead, all she said was, “Yes.”

“You don’t understand!” He released the cord, flung it on the table where it lashed across the envelope. “There’s
nothing
in there. My head is completely empty. It’s just bone and skin and the only thing that keeps me alive is thoughts that I can keep there.”

“You can’t live like that.”

“I know!” he cried out, kicking back his chair to stand. “You don’t think I know this? I’m not stupid!”

“I never said that.”

“Stand up!”

“Lee,” Zarina began.

“Stand up,” he said, pushing the words through his teeth. “Stand up.”

Zarina rose slowly and sadly. She knew what would happen, but found herself without anger. She regretted that she hadn’t listened to Sara and stayed at home, but at the same time, with Lee trembling with anger in front of her, his gaze seeing something that she couldn’t even begin to understand, there was only sadness. As when she had first seen him perform, her thoughts were of nothing but him, his presence all that she was aware of.

With a sudden movement, Lee snatched her hands. She closed her eyes, waiting, unwilling to watch . . . and heard a heavy thud. Opening her eyes, Zarina saw that Lee had fallen to his knees and lowered his head towards her, while bringing up her hands. At first, she could feel nothing but his hair, thinner than she had thought, and then, slowly, small puckered scars, the shape of a drill head or screwdriver.

“What is this?” she whispered.

“They examined me,” he replied, his voice hollow. “When I stopped sleeping and reading, my father took me to a doctor who ran his tests. When he found that my head was empty, he ran more.”

“More.”

“We didn’t have health insurance, but the doctor worked for free. He said he had never seen anyone like me. That I was special. He laid me out on a bed and shaved my head. There were injections. I could feel nothing, but I watched as he took his metal instruments and dug them into my skull. He told me as he worked that beneath the skin, past the bone, there was nothing but emptiness. Nothing but black.”

Zarina wanted to remove her hands, but couldn’t. She wanted to tell him how sick and awful this was, but the words would not emerge from her throat. It was dry, choked, and he pressed his head into her fingers, taking pleasure from her touch, starved for attention and affection in ways that she would never be able to understand. And she, knowing this, revolted but unable to deny him, stroked his scarred and tortured head, drew it into her grasp like a mother with her child.

“That’s why I can’t sleep,” he whispered, his voice slurring its vowels heavily in what Zarina would realize, a moment later, were tears. “I’ll die if I sleep. All my thoughts will cease to exist. All the music I hear and feel will go. It’ll fade away. I can’t let that happen. I can’t let it die. I have to make music in my mind.”

Do you think he’s dead?

Yeah.

Yeah, I do.

I’ve heard the theories that he’s not. A kind of Elvis thing for the new century that says Lee just got tired and left and that wasn’t really him with his veins cut open, but that’s wrong. Even with that last interview with him saying he was tired all the time, it’s wrong.

Lee couldn’t leave music. It meant too much him. He was impossible to play with, but he loved it. You couldn’t deny that. It was all he had.

So that’s it?

Yeah. There are no encores here.

Short story collections leave a trail of people to thank. First and foremost, the editors who published the individual stories originally: Forrest Aguirre, Shane Cummings and Angela Challis, Jay Lake and Deborah Layne, Ben Payne and Robert Hoge, Ekatrina Sedia, Cat Sparks, and Sean Wallace. A big acknowledgement goes to Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi, who looked at all the individual parts and agreed that it would make a collection, to Stephen Michell for his work on it, and to Erik Mohr who provided the wonderful cover.

Authors also owe a debt to the authors who have come before them. First and foremost for myself is Octavia E. Butler. The story in her name is the smallest debt that I can pay.

To those of you who have not read her work, I can only hope that I have pointed you in the direction you must go.

“There Is Something So Quiet and Empty Inside of You That It Must Be Precious” is original to this volume.

“The Dreaming City” was in
Leviathan Four: Cities
, ed.
Forrest Aguirre
,
The Ministry of Whimsy Press
, 2004.

“John Wayne (As Written by a Non-American)” was in
Aurealis
, #37,
Chimaera Press
, 2007.

“Possession” was in
Fantasy Magazine
online, 2007.

“Under the Red Sun” was in
Fantasy Magazine
, #4, 2006.

“The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little Boys” was in
Agog! Ripping Reads
, ed. Cat Sparks, Agog! Press, 2006.

“The Funeral, Ruined” was in
Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy
, ed.
Ekaterina Sedia
,
Senses Five
, 2008.

“Johnny Cash (A Tale in Questionnaire Results)” was in
Shadowed Realms
#4, 2005.

“Octavia E. Butler” is original to this volume.

“theleeharveyoswaldband” was in
Polyphony Six
, ed.
Deborah Layne
and
Jay Lake
,
Wheatland Press
, 2006.

Sydney-based author Ben Peek’s previous novels are
Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, Black Sheep
, and
Above/Below
with Stephanie Campisi. His short fiction has appeared in
Steampunk: Revolution, Polyphony, Leviathan, Paper Cities, Aurealis, Overland, Fantasy Magazine, Clarkesworld
, and various
Year’s Best
volumes. He is the creator of the
Urban Sprawl Project
, a pyschogeography pamphlet given out in the suburbs of Sydney, and with artist Anna Brown, the autobiographical comic,
Nowhere Near Savannah
. Later in the year,
Immolation
, the first novel in his series Children, will be released. He lives with his partner, the photographer, Nikilyn Nevins, a cat, and a tree that both paid a lot of money to save. But it is a nice tree, and the man who poured seven litres of copper naphthenate into it, agreed.

Dead Americans
2014 by Ben Peek
Cover artwork © 2014 by Erik Mohr
Cover design © 2014 by by Dan Seljak
Interior design © 2014 by by Dan Seljak

All rights reserved.

Published by ChiZine Publications

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

EPub Edition MARCH 2014 ISBN: 978-1-77148-172-4

All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
[email protected]

Edited by Stephen Michell
Copyedited and proofread by Kelsi Morris

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

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