The Man Who Can't Die: A Novel of Low-Tech Noir

The morning of the day his wife, Dr. Ruth Bryson, was to arrive Leonard Bryson awoke with an almost adolescent shudder of anticipation. He had not been a reflective man, more a sensation seeker bent on satisfying his own curiosity, a doer, but he had, since retirement, surveyed his personal conduct with a shock. It seemed that since his marriage there was rarely a time when he wasn’t sexually involved with a woman considerably younger than himself. Right at this moment he was sleeping with one of his neighbors, a thirty-year-old woman named Sky who worked a commune with her brother and sister and her brother’s wife and child…

Something, growing suspicion perhaps, propelled Dr. Ruth Bryson from Owen Bradlee’s apartment, down the elevator and into a Personal Commuter Pod station a block away. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth.

Veronica was much closer to death than the Medivac team had led on. They had gotten to her in time however and there was no permanent damage done to her brain or liver. The wounds to her arms were superficial and would heal, but without cosmetic surgery there’d be scars.

As Felix unlocked his silver bike in a pool of blue street light filled with billows of mosquitoes and gnats he thought that he might as well go straight to Les Jardeen and call home from there. If Veronica wanted to join him for dinner (which he doubted) she could ride into town. Normally (whatever that meant) he preferred to shower and change before dinner but he was extremely tense and couldn’t face the scene at home. In public they would have to pretend nothing was wrong. A drink first would give him time to decompress. Anyway, the most likely outcome was that she wouldn’t join him at all. Lately she was going to bed early, another way of saying that she passed out by nine o’clock. So he mounted the bike and joined the others riding up the little hill, wooded on both sides, to Main Street, the village center.

The time bell went off and the screen shrank to a dot. He stood his lifeless body up, removed the squeaky skull cap of CellPack, reached for the ceiling, touched his toes and marched out the door to join the others. His bladder was backing up into his kidneys, poisoning his blood. Something was using a nerve in his lower back for a kick drum. The usual Friday crowd stood around outside the steel doors to the bathroom, nobody but a few jawbones talking.

For most of his life, starting as far back as he could remember, Felix Clay had a feeling that something was wrong. Usually he felt like something was wrong with him but it was very easy for him to turn it around and feel that something was wrong with the world. Things didn’t fit right, one with the other. It was like the bones of the universe were in need of a chiropractic adjustment.

Once Veronica Clay was certain her husband Felix was at work, she set about her business in a very deliberate way. First she fluffed the cantaloupe and kiwi colored throw pillows on the couch, a grey futon folded against the wall on a tatami mat. She dusted the slate floor, straightened the pen and ink drawing of a shawled girl crossing an empty road, hung about two metres above this couch, on a wall painted to look like the mouth of a weathered nautilus. There were two tea mugs and two plates in the porcelain sink, a fork, two margarine covered knives and a spoon with a coffee drop drying in its dipper. These she washed and placed in the ceramic drainer.

Shortly after dawn Bryson awoke, unable to sleep. She belched gin. Her stomach was in flames. Bradlee’s wallet and keys were on a steel table and his pants and suit were draped over the back of a black folding chair. She took his white, monogrammed robe off the back of the bedroom door and walked into the living room to look at the blue glass and steel of the city adjacent to her window. She wanted to watch them sway in the morning wind, against the dull, far off bricks and, below them, the composite buildings, constructed of fused landfill. Impermeable. Flexible. Extrudable. Cheap.

The lounge was dark, and almost cool after the choking heat of the night air, breezeless and slightly dank with canal water. No one was there. The walls were painted a neutral grey darkened by years of cigarette tar. Brass sconces with amber chandelier lights lit the red tabletops and punctured black cushions of the booths. Small ceiling fans whirled quickly on the shadowed ceiling, between recessed, colored accent lights. She took a seat at the huge, horseshoe shaped bar. On either side of the mirror were liquor cabinets, with illuminated stained glass panels chipped here and there. There was a champagne cork embedded in the wall with a circle drawn around it, Big Al’s eye died here written in laconic letters. Jammed in at the top of the mirrors were two signs. One of a parrot, with red and green and yellow and blue feathers, bending down to pick up a beer in its beak, which it then lifted and drank, replacing it with a squawk and ecstatic blinking. The other was of a dancing leprechaun, green top hat and red cheeks, seeming to toast the bird with a yellow martini glass. The colors were warm and vivid; they bounced off of a curved wall of windows on the long side of the room. It cheered her up. She could watch that bird drink for hours.