by Douglas Kolacki
Sam Fitzsimmons shifted uneasily on his feet and sized up the uniformed customs official on the other side of the glass. The Frau’s chiseled face and aquiline nose reminded him of Mussolini—not a good sign—and contrasted with the WILLKOMMEN IN BERLIN banner with its black, red, and gold stripes spanning the hallway ahead that led out to Baggage Claim. The young couple who had been ahead of him in line (and who had cuddled and whispered in the row ahead of his for the whole eight-hour flight from Boston) ran underneath the banner and disappeared down an escalator, their hands interlocked.
The official was fortyish, traces of gray here and there in her dark hair. Her jaw was clenched, her eyes hard, as if she had just fought with her husband.
From among the items in front of her, she picked up a plastic Ziploc sandwich bag about a third full of earth. Holding it up, she eyed it as if it contained white powder instead. She turned it this way and that, examining it from all angles. Finally, she turned back to Sam.
“Dirt?”
“It’s… allowed, isn’t it?”
Putting down the bag, she lifted another one containing three bits of granite ranging in size from thumbnail to aspirin jar lid. “And this?”
Oh, yes—those. Sam sort of regretted it now, sneaking in there after dark with a hammer and chisel to get a piece of the girl’s tombstone like a damned grave robber. What was he thinking? And the dirt from her grave, no, no, too many marks of her death, that wasn’t the way to do it! Crap! He felt sick now about the tombstone. His handiwork had left notches on its lower rear left corner; maybe her relatives wouldn’t notice. From the bouquet and roses he had found, her relatives still visited fairly often, more than a year after the atrocity.
The official was not done yet. “And these. These are ferns?”
“A few cut sprigs.” Dried out and zipped into a third bag. Those were among the better ideas, like a bracelet that had been the girl’s until she passed it to a friend, who in turn passed it to him. As for the ferns, they were from her memorial garden at the Billings, Montana university she had attended. The main prize was her driver’s license—a copy of it, anyway—representing her life. Those were what he needed, not the damned tombstone.
The official was now manhandling the driver’s license, the bracelet, and the ferns as well as the earth from her grave. No relic was spared. She grabbed them up and banged them down, scrutinized them like laboratory specimens with her hard face still unchanged.
Sam decided to try a phrase. “Bitte leicht sein?” (Please be easy?)
She returned her gaze to him, holding up bracelet in one hand and driver’s license in the other like exhibits at a trial. “This concerns that robot?”
Sam cringed as if his clothes had fallen off. She knew about that? Was he blushing? Why shouldn’t she know? Sam himself had known, right? And he lived in San Diego.
“Yes. It does.”
She harrumphed, put the license down with the rest of the relics, and pushed them back through the slot in the bottom of her window. “Perhaps it is fun for you.”
Relieved, Sam recovered the items. “Nicht für Spass,” he huffed, clutching them to his chest, trying to secure his grip on the ferns, and struggling to hold everything steady as he started away from the booth. This was certainly not for fun.
“Just a moment.”
He stopped and looked over his shoulder. She was holding up his passport. “Do you have a return itinerary?”
With a deliberate casualness, he walked back to the window with his arms full of relics. “I showed you—” the bag of dirt was slipping out of his grip. He struggled to maintain it. “—my return ticket-“
“But we need your itinerary.”
“I—ah—well, I have my itinerary to here, but…”
“On your phone, perhaps?”
There went the bag of dirt, landing with a soft plop by his left black gym shoe. He regarded it somberly, feeling his heart sinking. It was as if he had failed the girl somehow.
After a few moments, he looked up. “It doesn’t have service over here.”
The official blew out a breath and rolled her eyes. The people in line behind him, some bent over with heavy-looking packs on their backs, were watching him.
She slid his passport out to him. “Next time, bring an itinerary.”
###
Boarding the FEX airport express train, he doffed his green camouflage slouch hat and looked out the window. Bad move. It showed a ghost of his own reflection: tall, but brown hair graying, and most of it thinning out altogether. Eyes, blinking through his glasses, too much like a doe’s. He looked away.
Thirty minutes delivered him to the Hauptbahnhof, the sprawling multi-level terminal that spiderwebbed train tracks out to much of Germany and every part of Berlin. He carried only his backpack (he preferred the German term “rucksack”) with two changes of clothes and his toothbrush. The main items were the relics, the ones that the Iron-Chancellor customs official back at the airport had to single out for manhandling.
He was thinking, however, of the hotel where he would stay his two nights— tonight, and tomorrow—for the Convergence.
Last year’s Returned is supposed to be there. Like, right at this moment.
Hauling his rucksack out the Hauptbahnhof’s front entrance and hurrying into an unknown city, he decided to splurge. According to his map, the walk all the way up Alt-Moabit Strasse would take another thirty minutes. His budget was limited, but he was pretty sure he could swing it. He waved down a cab.
Each year, the Returned from last year’s Convergence put in an appearance the night before the next. Just to remind everyone anew that, yes, this was real.
Sam had no trouble spotting his hotel as the cab approached. A modest gray budget-minded cinderblock of four stories on a quiet industrial street, he saw the crowd spilling out its glass door as if a movie star had dropped in. His heart racing, he threw a twenty-euro note at the driver and jumped out, wriggling into the crowd and letting it sweep him in.
The door opened into a room that ran from front to back of the building with no walls, all gray and black with modernist sharp angles. The room changed as it went: first, a lobby with the check-in desk to the right, a divider in the middle with stools and a flat-screen television showing the news, and beyond that, a dining room for breakfast. It was here where the Returned stood, the tables and chairs pushed to the wall, the place filling up in a hurry.
There was no possibility of getting up close. Sam saw that pretty quickly, but standing a little over six feet, he could see over most of the heads well enough to catch a good (if distant) view.
Holy. Hell.
Even from some forty feet away, she stood out. He could have picked her out in any crowd. The sight of her changed the room’s ambiance, just enough for his eyes to perceive that something was unusual, the light of the room different. She was natural, but not how he had always defined natural- the sight of this person, somehow, called into question whether he had ever defined it correctly. He could study her for an hour: her face, her snowy hair and shape, her eyes, and even though he had never heard it, the sound of her voice. When he saw her, he forgot all about gynoids or robots, anything mechanical or man-made. She was—
Sam flinched back. Angel was the word in his mind, of course, and he pushed it down. He shook his head. His mind had to be doing this, enhancing and embellishing.
But no matter. She was alive. That was what had drawn everyone, what they had come to see. Not an artificial female activated to electronic life like the bride of Frankenstein birthed violently by a lightning strike. This was a human powered by the noiseless, sightless energy that powers all living things, yet more than human. It was as if— Sam had heard this more than once—-she had brought back something of heaven with her.
Now imagine Dee like that. Dee Katherine Sawyer, whose tombstone noted the twenty-two years she had been allowed to live. Whose picture he had first seen in a copy of USA Today someone had left on a bus on the way to the call center. Her abduction from a mall parking lot, the search, the discovery of her only next spring after the snow melted. Her grieving parents, family, boyfriend— yes, of course she’d had a boyfriend.
This was a year ago last November. It took ten days to find the perpetrator. Arrested and interrogated, he declined to lead the police to her remains even after DNA confirmed all. Eventually, she was found, and he confessed. Still, he was put on trial and the trial still ground on, for what reasons Sam was not sure. Now, it was May, and the Convergence was tomorrow.
The press had come too. They showed up every year, as if this were the first one. Tonight, they were allowed; tomorrow, photography and recording devices would be strictly verboten. Cameras appeared, flashbulbs popping. One paparazzo stood next to Sam and the flash blinded him, stinging his eyes. This light was different, harsh, the kind that glares in the interrogation room while the detective asks where you were on such and such a night. He wished the guy would cut it out.
Sam moved away, elbowing through the crowd and catching one more flashbulb in the face, but finally getting a closer gaze at the Returned with her gentle smile, radiant like a bride, before she glided out a side door. This one, so he had heard, was named Elise, and she was from Salzburg, Austria. Mozart’s hometown would never be the same.
He drifted toward the check-in counter in a sort of dream, rucksack heavy on his back, people’s faces passing before him, guests talking among themselves. A sign hung over the desk announcing CONVERGENCE CHECK-IN in five languages.
He reached the young clerk in her white blouse, black vest and tie, who had—woah—a pixie cut just like Dee’s, whose relics he carried. This girl was a brunette, though.
How many are participating? Sam wanted to ask. Were you here last year? Did you witness the moment it happened?
But everyone must have been firing these questions at her. Best not add to it. He registered, signed the bottom of the form, and surrendered his relics one by one. Fleetingly, he considered skipping the dirt and the tombstone shards, keeping them instead. Perhaps, even, making a second stop at the cemetery to put them back where he had found them? But, no; he lacked the budget. And what if they actually could help? Best make use of every item available—everyone else certainly would—he handed them over.
The girl with the pixie cut treated them with the care they deserved. Sam watched as she placed them, one by one, in a plastic tray marked with his name and the number 8103D22. If the Convergence did not favor Dee at 11:59 tomorrow night, when it invariably happened, he would get them back.
He thanked her in the little German he could pronounce and be understood (“vielen dank”) and sleepwalked up to his room, card key in hand, thinking: these are all humans, yes, flesh and blood clothing the body’s skeletal framework, an array of organs and network of nerves. Yes. of course.
And yet, somehow, The Returneds were not like humans.
###
What would living with a Returned be like?
Some of their husbands were guarded, never able to bond completely. They spoke of feeling “alien” around these seeming angels whose radiance never went out. The wives often spoke with a wisdom they had not expressed in their previous lives, and which their husbands could not match. One man expressed irritation at his spouse seemingly having “all the answers,” when before she had not been too smart, nor too dumb, but just right.
As his iPod Touch chimed him awake the next morning, Sam lay still and mined his memory for the previous night. He was not sure at first if it had really happened. His “reality” memories, the way he normally recalled everything— the flight, the arrival— those rested easily enough in his head. But his preview of the Convergence, the living proof that yes, this was real,-he remembered as one does dreams.
The hotel appeared differently in the daytime, the way the Vegas and Hollywood strips lose their luster when the day dawns and the glittering lights go out. The dirt on the sidewalks, the smudges, the grime show. Not that the hotel was dirty, but it had lost the enchantment of the previous night. Sam appreciated this; however; it helped ground him again.
In a display case that had been placed in the center of the breakfast room stood the Returned’s opposite number.
From across the room, it looked simply like a mannequin in a white dress, but as one approached, its features and nuances showed themselves. Those who inspected it closer, as all the participants did, pinpointed the shoulder and thigh, knee joints, the eyes reportedly fabricated from a type of glass used only for the Convergence, the ropy hair purposefully left colorless. The mouth could open and shut when activated, and a titanium larynx fit neatly into the rubber throat, ready to transform when the moment came like the rest of the artificial body.
Most Returneds patiently allowed doctors to examine and x-ray them. One turned out to have plastic joints in the fingers of her right hand. Another’s larynx was a curious interweaving of titanium and cartilage— her voice sounded perfectly normal. A third retained the cobalt-chromium knee joint in her left leg only. In these, at least, bits and pieces of the gynoid still remained to remind the world how these fair creatures had started out.
This, now, struck Sam with how ordinary it was. He squinted through the glass. This cost millions of euros to build? For each year, bereaved parents, loved ones of victims, contributed to an international escrow to finance next year’s event. Its pale surface was even scuffed on the right leg, the chest with its two bumps, and the left foot. He was a little taken aback— how could there be scuff marks? Then he felt silly. It was only the pupa before the butterfly, if one liked.
“A beauty, isn’t she?”
Sam jolted. The man next to him laughed. He had the build of an athlete and aluminum hair combed back over his head, confident and at ease. “Say, friend. I’ve been watching you this morning.”
Sam stiffened, on the defensive. He nearly always did around other men. “You have?”
A flick of the wrist produced an I.D. “I’m with the Russian government.”
Sam bent to examine the card. Russia? The man barely had an accent… His English, which even included contractions, rang truer than Sam’s own, and Sam was a born citizen from Long Beach, California. He grew up in Ohio before escaping from an insane mother into the Navy, and four years later, finding his way back to California, settling in San Diego.
But the man’s I.D., whose square-jawed picture looked a lot sterner than he did in person, included official-looking print in Cyrillic.
Another flick, and the I.D. disappeared. “Have you heard of the isotope?”
“Yes.”
“What do you know about it?”
Sam, American that he was, felt a pressing need to represent his country well— to hold the Yank end up, as this man was doing so effortlessly for his country. He drew himself up.
“Well,” he said, “it was discovered about five years back, along the banks of the Spree River. And the Convergence that year, well, two parents went to the river and stayed there, walking up and down its banks. And they won that year. So the story got out that it can seep into you, or something, and somehow help.”
“Increasing your chances.”
“Yes.” Sam felt as if he had passed a test. “And hopefully not poisoning you or anything. I don’t know about that myself, though.”
“May I ask your name?”
“What? Oh, Sam.”
“Pleased to meet you, Sam. I am Anton. I would like to make you an offer.” He spoke without glancing around, without any caution about anyone possibly overhearing. Maybe he was making the rounds of all the participants. Of course he was. Sam was just one more prospect.
“I have with me,” Anton continued, “three rings and a necklace, suffused with the isotope.” He drew a plastic bag from his suit jacket, the same sort of Ziploc bag Sam himself used. The innocent-looking items were inside, just costume jewelry from a ninety-nine-cent store. The important part was supposedly hidden inside, like LSD in sugar cubes.
Anton held the bag in view for a few seconds, then slid it back in. “These might help you to win, if you decide to assist us. We will wire you for sound, along with a miniature camera. We want to study the process.”
This was nothing new. Everyone wanted to study it. Other governments worked the conference too. It was no secret.
“What if it doesn’t work?” Sam asked.
“We will compensate you for your time in any case. Fifty thousand euros.”
Curiously, he pronounced it the German way, “oy-rohs.” “Twenty now, and thirty after-“
Sam was already shaking his head. That would be dishonest. Even if the miracle happened to Dee, it would forever bother him that he had cheated to bring it about, even if the isotope really had nothing to do with it. It would start her new life off on the wrong foot. In Navy boot camp he had cheated on tests by looking at the other recruits’ papers, and that still bothered him now, more than twenty years later.
Of course, if he didn’t take the offer, someone else might…
“No.” He backed away. “Thanks, but, I’d really better not.”
Anton nodded. “That’s all right. If you should reconsider, I’ll be around. Good day.” He ambled across the lobby to vanish among the other guests and hopefuls.
Sam fled out the door.
###
Though he tried not to, Sam kept catching himself entertaining fantasies about the future. They kept returning unbidden, like all the life milestones that had shaped his views of people, leading him to avoid and suspect them. The fantasies were much more pleasant than the memories, however. He would return home not as a forlorn castoff of society, but loved, yes, by a beautiful woman who loved him in that way, bestowing her affections not on a buddy or a shipmate while he watched in silence, but upon him. Radiant and redeemed, married and well-matriculated into the ways of marriage, hand-in-hand with his unearthly bride. Passersby would stop to watch as the happy couple walked by in perfect step, rings glittering on their fingers, the gold made even brighter by the bride’s inner holy glow.
He scowled as he pushed through the hotel’s glass door to the outside. This thought surfaced a little too often, and he dismissed it each time. A silly fantasy, he called it, and it certainly was not the first or last he would have in his life.
No Returned’s life could ever continue just as before. They usually turned out to have Mensa-level I.Q.’s, and like near-death survivors, often carried a sense of mission. Several had started foundations for the help of mankind. One had built, and now ran, an orphanage in India.
They also seemed to age slowly. Some experts estimated they might well live to see the next century, and since several of the Returneds had settled one great question by marrying and having children—normal children, by all accounts—they might see several generations of descendants.
Sam stiffened. Walking north on Franklinstrasse with the Spree River right up the street, he glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, a man in a baggy brown suit overtaking him on the right.
His nerves snapped taut. “Incoming!” his mind warned though he had no conscious thought of this. He almost never did. By the time the intruder fell into step beside Sam, the man was completely odious to him.
Sam increased his pace and the man hurried to keep up. Persistent. Sam’s tension spiked more still.
“Sir?” The man seemed to chirp more than speak. He was another American, not so self-assured as Anton… oh, damn it all to hell! Sam obliged him and stopped.
“What is it?” he asked.
The man looked at him with an expression both imploring and somewhat lost, maybe because his spectacles over-enlarged his eyes. His glasses had to be two sizes too big for him. His look also reminded Sam of the times people had remarked, out of the blue, that he appeared “lost” or “confused.” That did not help.
“Sir. My name is—ah—Chester Arthur. What’s your name?
“Sam.”
“Glad to meet you, Sam.”
“Okay, but what’s up?”
“We’re both out here for the same reason, correct? Those traces of energy are supposed to be around here.”
“So why are you telling me this?”
The man looked startled, his eyes momentarily blank. This piqued Sam’s sympathy a bit, for he himself had that same trait. Sam did not want to look down on anyone. His dad had noted once when he was younger, he tended to do that, but some people were just weird. How? Hard to say. But these ones that struck him as weird evidently seemed to pop up in front of him, approach him, and try to get his attention too often for comfort, even here across the ocean.
“Sam,” Arthur was saying, “I had a dear, sweet daughter, the jewel of my life. Here’s her picture. Her mother and I named her Annabelle. That’s a sweet name, don’t you think? It was her grandmother’s name. She lived to be no more than fourteen. If you and I could maybe, you know, pick up some of the energy, and then, when the time comes, perhaps you would consider sending your thoughts Annabelle’s way?”
Stop! Sam’s mind was shouting. No, no, I sympathize but I am here for Dee. I can’t get distracted with all the others, I know they all deserve it, but—
Sam jolted, realizing he had said Stop! out loud.
Arthur stared. He eyed Sam curiously, squinting slightly and seeming to size him up as if wondering: Is this guy for real? It was a look Sam knew all too well.
“Ah, sorry, didn’t mean to—” Sam sputtered. “Look, maybe I should tell you about mine too?” He fumbled in the pockets of his green, camouflage cargo shorts.
“Your daughter was college-age, right?”
What? Then it dawned on Sam, he had no picture of Dee, only the copy of her driver’s license, and he had turned that in at the hotel. What was he rummaging in his pockets for? He straightened up, returning his hands to his side. How was he to explain this? Hadn’t any well, well-wishers ever come for the Convergence? Not relatives, but just admirers or whoever?
“We all have to look out for our own,” he finally blurted and tore himself away. Even if Dee wasn’t actually his own…Turn around. Walk. Just walk. He strode off step by step, braced for a parting shot from Arthur. It did not come.
Reaching the river, he loitered on the pavement bridge until he began to feel silly. How did you know when you “picked up” any of the isotope? Or when you had enough for an edge? Some had mentioned feeling tingles on their skin or seeing light glinting off boats or car windshields on cloudy days. Any number of things. Likely just wishful thinking playing tricks.
Setting out again in no particular direction, just walking, his feet getting sore inside his gym shoes, he eventually reached the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe with its labyrinth of cut stones, paths falling and rising, the stones all different sizes and heights, never allowing one to grow quite comfortable.
People speculated—why should the Convergence favor Berlin? Around the world, bereaved relatives built boxy attempts at robots, or even purchased mannequins from shops, propping them up in their living rooms and hoping for the best. But so far, the Convergence had favored only this city, and only the specially built gynoid.
Was it something like the combined life energy from all the violently deceased over the years, hanging over the city like an aurora, settling in certain places? But why not in Poland, or in Russia? Or other sites like Cambodia, China or Rwanda? No, Sam thought; coincidence.
Still, something had made it Berlin…
Wandering on, he came to Potsdamer Platz. Several graffiti-covered slabs of the late wall stood there but no longer confined anyone. The wall had been broken up and broken again into far too many pieces in too many souvenir shops to hold anyone inside anywhere now.
In the train station, he found a pastry stand, baked wares lined up inside a display case. One pastry at the end of the case had been discovered by bees. They crawled over and buzzed around it. No one seemed to notice.
Sam ambled over and watched; then, he called to the vendor. “Look–sehen Sie?” He pointed at the bees.
The male, thirty-ish vendor calmly reached in with his tongs, took hold of the pastry beside the one swarmed with bees, and began drawing it out.
“No! Nein!” Sam shook his head, pointed. “The bees!” He knew not the German word for them. “They’ve—well, they’ve gotten to it?”
The man just looked at him, perplexed. The man was giving him The Look—squinting slightly, sizing him up and thinking, is this guy for real?—which reminded Sam of Arthur. Hold on. Sam stiffened, but for a different reason this time. Did he feel a tingle on his right arm, his right leg, when he looked at those insects? His right side was closest to them.
His breathing quickened. People had also mentioned unusual manifestations like this. Frogs turning up inside a church, gathered around one spot in a corner. Crows flapping inside an old Trabant car displayed deep in the DDR Museum, no one able to explain how they had gotten there.
Sam realized, though he often did not, that he was tense. Relax. The vendor still watched him, tongs in hand.
Sam could not leave yet, but he couldn’t just loiter. He was aware of his mouth opening and words coming out. “I keep asking myself…why am I here now?”
He spoke in English and hoped the vendor did not understand him, though he had seen and heard a surprising amount of English in this city. He listened to himself continue.
“I already meant to visit this city, just to sightsee—saved up for the past two years, in fact—hadn’t made any actual plans yet about when, or where I’d stay, and I happened to see her picture in USA Today, and bam! That was when the idea hit me, maybe, maybe…” He paused. “I guess it’s always been my secret dream, to rescue a pretty girl. And this would be the ultimate rescue, wouldn’t it? From death itself. Girl returns, girl learns who she owes it to, and perhaps…?” He watched the bees. “This is something I never thought I would get…a chance to redeem my life at last.”
Well damn, he thought without saying, am I doing this more for her, or for myself? Is this really just a selfish thing? That’s what it’s sounding like.
“But I know the score, of course,” he hastened to add, “I’m aging. I’m forty-three, but young girls keep catching my eye. I’ve never even been in the same state with Dee. She was from Montana, I’m from California. Anyway…”
The vendor still watched him—everyone must have been watching—but for once, Sam was relaxed. “My mind knows all that, sure, but the heart… no. Never listens to reason. It’s the heart after all, not the brain, and all it knows is it wants its dream. It wants its companion.”
And so, Sam’s imagination had taken off. Dee would win. He was sure of it. She would return in triumph to ignite the gynoid into the newest Returned, beyond human now and the eleventh to grace the earth, more than a conqueror, and when she saw the humble man who had made it possible, who had believed in her enough to research, to collect and come here and champion her—it helped that he’d had the savings to come, while her relatives presumably did not—then the two would “hit it off” in an electric moment. Then all those songs about I-was-alone-thought-I’d-have-to-get-by-without-love-but-then-you-appeared-now-everything-is-sunshine would come true at last.
“And that’s when I have to snap out of it!” He shook his head, as if to drive home the point. The vendor jerked back, looking alarmed. “And remember—always remember—that if she gets her life back, nothing matters except that.”
The bees still crawled over their pastry, some buzzing here and there under the glass. Sam glanced around. Everyone was watching him all right, and now his normal responses kicked in. He stiffened, the sudden self-consciousness like an electric shock. Crap! But maybe now he had picked up enough of the isotope, if that’s what it was. Did his right arm just tingle again? Maybe he should turn his left side toward it, see if he felt it there too…
He waved. “Sorry, entschuldigung, thank you for your time.” He fled across the plaza, dodging a couple of people on bicycles.
The sun descended; the sky darkened. Sam retraced his steps, found his way back across the river to the hotel. Flopping on his bed, he set his alarm for 11:30 and fell asleep with gratifying quickness.
###
He awoke to shouting from downstairs.
Fumbling in the dark for his iPod, he sought the time—11:24. Swinging his legs to the floor, he listened.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
A placating, supplicating voice answered: “Sir. I did nothing more than—”
“Security! Security!”
Throwing open his door, Sam ran down four flights of stairs, not waiting for the elevator.
Most of the thirty-three participants had arrived in the breakfast room, standing around the gynoid in its glass case. One of them was Chester Arthur. Another participant, a hairy bear of a man, bent down to shout in Arthur’s face in a different language while two others flanked him. The bear’s own nationality was hard to tell, he had some sort of accent, but he advanced on the brown-suited American as Arthur backed up a step for each one the shouting man took forward. Soon, he would be flat against the wall.
A man in a blue uniform ran up, complete with a cap that would remain squarely on his head the whole time as he tried to wriggle in between, saying something, but the bear was not done shouting. He turned it on the guard instead. Arthur stopped, breathing hard, and Sam saw the trouble: his jacket had come unbuttoned, revealing white and red wires, as well as a tiny lens dangling from his collar that must have been the camera. Miniature camera, Anton had said.
The guard, though smaller than the bear, held him back. The bear tried to shake him off, but the guard did a good job of maintaining his hold, talking soothingly the whole time in another language. Did he know the bear’s nationality? Sam still could not place the accent, or the few words of the guard’s he caught over the scuffle and the bear’s continuing rant.
One other participant, then another grabbed onto the bear. The guard fought to keep his hold on the man’s arm, but his hands were slipping and Sam (he only now realized) just stood and gawked like the damned deer in the headlights he had always been.
And then it happened.
The time was 11:33. Why now and not 11:59? No one could know. The gynoid’s glass case shattered all at once, like a chandelier hitting the floor. The container had to be cast out of the way like the stone rolled away for Lazarus. The men’s shouts changed in an instant to cries of surprise, and then they hushed.
Most of it was beyond Sam’s senses. His eyes registered only the flash, the utter white like the sun seen from space. It would not show up on any spectrum. His eyes tried and kept trying, but they could only see the whiteness, watering. He covered them. It’s happening, it’s happening! He was shocked and unbelieving, but not afraid. It never occurred to him to be scared. Fear had no place here, and death especially had no place.
Gradually, the dazzle faded from his eyes.
She—Dee—was looking at him.
He knew it was her before he met her eyes. She was unreal. She was an intrusion of heaven into the mundane world, rendering everything around her drab and dirty. She looked exactly like her pictures but dipped in a heavenly light. Her snowy hair flowed over her shoulders, no longer the pixie cut, her eyes bright and blue and her arms motioning, her legs floating her forward with a perfect grace, the hem of her dress swishing around her feet, weaving between the pieces of broken glass on the floor without even looking down. She may or may not have retained her exact height from before, likely a little taller or smaller, but no one ever cared about this.
She moved forward, the men around her backing away, gazing at her with eyes Sam knew mirrored his own. No one spoke. She approached him, and he found himself wanting to also back away, even flee. He was not good enough to grace such a creature’s presence, and they both knew it. But she came on, stopping in front of him.
“Thank you,” she said.
Her voice was the first thing about her that registered as ordinary, but this did not break the spell. He swallowed. Did she know, somehow? Had she guessed? His fantasies, his idiot fantasies! It was like thinking he could marry Aphrodite. She would return home to her relatives, to her boyfriend. Of course she would. He should have known better.
“We will never forget what you have done,” she said.
###
Sam flew home the next day as planned.
Sitting on the airliner, he let his thoughts wander, for they wandered in a better direction now. He had witnessed, with his own eyes, a murder undone. A murder. Undone. And he had made it possible. The ultimate rescue, from death itself, he had somehow pulled it off. He could scarcely believe it.
The relics, his lingering at Potsdamer Platz, had those made the difference? No one could ever know. But it would always be a fact: he had given a mother and father back their daughter, and a man his beloved. Like Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, now that he thought of it.
Except Sam could go on living. The miracle lit up his living mind and would do so for every single remaining day of his life. From now on, he would see his life in terms of before and after the miracle.
He slouched back on the plane droning over the Atlantic, an old man with bad breath snoring in the seat beside him. Trying to sleep but knowing he would get none, the dazzle of the Returned still in his eyes, he thought, “If they end up getting married, maybe they’ll name their firstborn after me.”
Douglas Kolacki began writing while stationed with the Navy in Naples, Italy. Since then he has placed fiction in such publications as Weird Tales, Liquid Imagination Online and The Fifth Dimension. He currently haunts Providence, Rhode Island.