The Future Is Blue

Savonarola introduces her to a small, dark woman with a beautiful, delicate mouth. The woman is called Awo. She has an extraneous thumb on her left hand, small and withered and purpled. Pietta touches the objects on Awo’s handkerchief, running her hands over them gently. They awake feelings in her that do not belong to her: a drinking cup, a set of sewing needles, a red brick, a pot of white paint, several ballpoint pens, and a length of faded paisley fabric. When Pietta touches the sewing needles, she remembers the feeling of embroidering her daughter’s wedding dress. But Pietta had only sons, and they are babies yet.

“You have lovely things,” Pietta whispers.

“Oh, they aren’t mine,” Awo says. The wind off of the mountain dampens all their voices. “I long ago traded away the objects I brought with me into this place. And traded what I got in return, and traded that again, and so on and so forth and again and again. Everything in the world, it turns out, is escapable except economy. Those objects which were once so dear to me I can no longer even name. Did I come with a cup? A belt? A signet ring? I cannot say. Now, what will you give me for my fabric? Savonarola says you have scissors.”

Pietta touches her ribs, where she hid the shears. She looks away, into the crystal doors of a massive lantern and the flames within. “But what are these things? What is this place? Why do I have this pair of scissors in this city at this moment?”

Savonarola and Awo glance at one another.

“They are your last belongings,” Savonarola says. “The things you lingered over on your last day.”

Rain comes to the city. It falls from every dark cloud and splashes against the lanterns, the tables, the buyers and the sellers. Everyone runs for their rain barrels, dragging them into the piazza, the copper bottoms scraping the stone. The rain that falls is not water but wine, red and strong.

Pietta remembers the feeling of dying alone.

Sixth Terrace: The Wrathful

Detective Belacqua stood over the woman’s body. He let a long, low whistle out of his beak and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. Sergeant Tomek opened his black jaws; a ball of blue flame floated on his tongue. Belacqua lit his wrinkled, broken stump of tobacco and breathed deep.

“Isn’t there someone else we can hand this off to? Someone higher up. Someone…better?”

Tomek stared down at the corpse as it lay face down on the slick blue-black cobblestones of the road that connects the city and the mountain. The blue of the gas lamps made her congealing blood look like cold ink.

“You had the watch, Detective Inspector,” he said, emphasizing his soon-to-come promotion. But they both knew this woman, the very fact of her, made all ranks and systems irrelevant.

Belacqua scratched the longer feathers at the nape of his neck. The clouds boiled and swam above them, raveling, unraveling, spooling grey into grey. He could not remember the last time he’d set foot outside the city. Probably sometime around the invention of music. The air smelled of crackling pre-lightning ozone and, bizarrely, nutmeg fruits, when they are wet and new and look like nothing so much as black, bleeding hearts.

“Is she going to…rot, do you think?” Sergeant Tomek mused.

“Well, I don’t bloody well know, do I?” the man with the heron’s head snapped back. Detective Belacqua had closed thousands of cases in his infinite career. The Nowhere locals got up to all manner of nonsense and he didn’t blame them in the least. On the contrary, he felt deeply for the poor blasted things, and when it fell to him to hand out punishments, he was as lenient as the rules allowed. He was a creature of rules, was Belacqua. But the vast majority of his experience lay in vandalism, petty theft, minor assault, and public drunkenness. Every so often something spicier came his way: attempted desertion, adultery, assaults upon the person of a strigil. But never this. Of course never this. This was against the rules. The first rule. The foundational rule. So foundational that until tonight he had not even thought to call it a rule at all.

Detective Belacqua knelt to examine the body. He suspected that was the sort of thing to do. Just pretend it was a bit of burglary. Nothing out of the ordinary. Scene of the crime and all that. Good. First step. Go on, then.

“Right. Erm. The deceased? Should we say deceased? Are you writing this down, Tomek? For God’s sake. The, em, re-deceased is female, approximately twenty-odd-something years of age. Is that right? It’s so hard to tell with people. I don’t mean to be insensitive, of course—”

“Oh, certainly not, sir.”

“It’s just that they all look a little alike, don’t they, Sergeant?”

Tomek looked distinctly uncomfortable. His dark ruff bristled. “About forty, I should say, Detective Inspector.”

“Ah, yes, thank you. Forty years of age, brunette, olive complected, quite tall, nearly six foot as I reckon it. Her hood seems to have gone missing and her clothes are…well, there’s not much left of them, is there? Just write ‘in disarray.’ Spare her some dignity.” Now that he’d begun, Belacqua found he could hardly stop. It came so naturally, like a song. “Cause of death appears to be a lateral cut across the throat and exsanguination, though where she got all that blood I can’t begin to think. Bruises, well, everywhere, really. But particularly bad on her belly and the backs of her thighs. And there’s the…markings. Do you think that happened before or, well, I mean to say, after, Tomek?”

The raven-sergeant’s black eyes flickered helplessly between the corpse and the detective. “Sir,” he swallowed finally, “how can we possibly tell?”

Belacqua remembered the book he’d devoured so greedily in that sad little vandal’s cell, the book without a cover and yellow-stained pages, a book in which many people had died and gotten their dead selves puzzled over.

“I’ve an idea about that, Sergeant,” he said finally. “Write down that she’s got patience carved into her back in Greek—not too neatly, either, it looks like someone went at her with a pair of scissors—then get the boys to carry her up to my office before anyone else decides to have a look out their window and starts ringing up a panic. Carefully! Don’t…don’t damage her any more than she already is.” Belacqua gazed up at the great mountain that faced his city, into the wind and the lantern lights and the constant oncoming night. “Poor lamb,” he sighed, and when the patrolmen came to lift her up, he pressed his feathered cheek against hers for a moment, his belly full of something he very well thought might be grief.

Seventh Terrace: The Excommunicate

Savonarola, Awo, and Pietta sit around a brimming rain barrel. The storm has passed. The sky is, for once, almost clear, barnacled with fiery stars. They drink with their hands, cupping fingers and dipping into the silky red wine, slurping without shame. The dead know how t

o savor as the living never can. The wine is heavy but dry. Much debate has filled the halls of Nowhere over the centuries—is it a Beaujolais? Montrachet? Plain Chianti? Savonarola is firmly in the Montrachet camp. Awo thinks it is most certainly an Algerian Carignan. Pietta thinks it is soft, and sour, and kind.

“Memory is a bad houseguest in this place,” Savonarola says softly. Red raindrops streak his face like a statue of a saint weeping blood. “For you, the worst of it will come in twenty years or so. Dying is the blow, memory is the bruise. It takes time to develop, to reach a full and purple lividity. Around eighty years in Nowhere, give or take. Then the pain will take you and it will not give you back again for autumns upon winters. You will know everything you were, and everything you lost. But the bruise of having lived will fade, too, and your time in Nowhere will dwarf your time in the world such that all life will seem to be a letter you wrote as a child, addressed to a stranger, and never delivered.”

Awo sucks the wine from her brown, slender fingers. “Awo Alive feels to me like a character in a film I saw when I was young and loved. Awo and her husband Kofi who wore glasses and her three daughters and seven grandchildren and her degree in electrical engineering and the day she saw Accra for the first time, Accra and the sea. I am fond of all of them, but I see them now from very far away. If I remember anything, if I tilt my head or say a word as she would have done, it is like quoting from that film, not like being Awo.”