The House of Lazarus a short story by James Lovegrove Visitors were welcome at the House of Lazarus at all times of day and night, but it was cheaper to come at night, when off-peak rates applied. Then, too, the great cathedral-like building was less frequented, and it was possible to have a certain amount of privacy in the company of your dear departed. Because it was dark out, the receptionist in the cool colonnaded atrium betrayed a flicker of amusement that Joey was wearing sunglasses. Then, recognising his face, she smiled at him like an old friend, although she didn't actually use his name until after he had asked to see his mother, Mrs Delgado, and she had called up the relevant file on her terminal. "It's young Joseph, isn't it?" she said, squinting at the screen. She couldn't have been more than three years Joey's senior. The query was chased by another over-familiar smile. "We haven't seen you for a couple of weeks, have we?" "I've been busy," Joey said. "Busy" didn't even begin to describe his life, now that he had taken on a second job at a bar on Wiltshire Street, but he didn't think the receptionist wanted to hear about that, and, more to the point, he was too tired and irritable to want to enlighten her. The receptionist folded her hands on the long slab of marble that formed her desktop. "It's not my place to tell you what to do, Joseph," she said, "but you are Mrs Delgado's only living relative, and we do like our residents to get as much stimulation as possible. As you know, we wake them for an hour of news and information every morning and an hour of light music every evening, but it's not the same as actual verbal interaction. Think of it as mental exercise for minds that don't get out much. Conversation keeps them supple." "I come whenever I can." "Of course you do. Of course you do." That smile again, that smile of old acquaintance, of intimacy that has passed way beyond the need for forgiveness. "I'm not criticising. I'm merely suggesting." "Well, thank you for the suggestion," he said, handing her his credit card. The receptionist went through the business of swiping it, then pressed a button on a panel set into the desktop. A man in a white orderly's uniform appeared. "Arlene Delgado," the receptionist told the orderly. "Stack 339, Drawer 41." "This way, sir." The orderly ushered Joey through a pair of large doors on which were depicted, in copper bas-relief, a man and a woman, decorously naked, serenely asleep, with electrodes attached to their temples, chests and arms. As they entered the next room, a vast windowless chamber, the ambient temperature dropped abruptly. Cold air fell over Joey's face like a veil freshly dipped in water, and his skin buzzed with gooseflesh. He craned his neck to look up. No matter how many times he came here, the wall never ceased to amaze him. At least a hundred and fifty feet high and well over a mile long, it consisted of stacks of steel drawers, each about half as large again as an adult's coffin. Each stack began roughly six feet above the floor and rose all the way to the roof. The wall, comprising a thousand of these stacks all told, loomed like a sheer unscalable cliff, lit from above by arc-lights that shot beams of pure white brightness down its face. Sometimes it was hard to believe that each drawer contained a human being. At the foot of the wall plush leather armchairs were arranged in rows, ten-deep, all facing the same way like pews in a church. About a quarter of them were occupied by people murmuring quietly, as if to themselves. Every so often someone would nod or gesticulate, and silent pauses were frequent. The human sibilance was echoed by the sound of machinery, thousands of cryogenic units all whirring and whispering at once, fans exhaling, unseen tubes pumping liquid nitrogen. The orderly walked down the aisle between the chairs and the wall, with Joey in tow. Some acoustical trick carried the clack of Joey's boot-heels up to the metal rafters but kept the squelch of the orderly's cr?pe soles earthbound. Arriving at Stack 339, the orderly gestured to Joey to take the nearest seat, then began tapping commands into a portable console the size of a large wallet. Without needing to be asked, Joey picked up the mic-and-earphones headset that was wired into a panel in the armrest of the chair and fitted the skeletal black device over his head. He took off his sunglasses and folded them into his breast pocket. The orderly glanced twice at the dark purple rings beneath Joey's eyes. Joey looked as if he had been punched, but the rings were just very heavy bags of exhaustion, packed with long days and late nights. Realising he was staring, the orderly returned his gaze to his console. "Right," he said. "I've given her a nudge. Can you hear anything?" Joey shook his head. "She may take a moment or two to wake up. Press the red button if you need me and push the blue switch to 'Disconnect' when you're done. OK?" Joey nodded. "Pleasant chat," said the orderly, and left, squelching along to a door set into the wall. The door was marked "STRICTLY PRIVATE" and could only be opened by tapping a five-digit code-number into the keypad set into its frame. It hissed slowly shut on a pneumatic spring. Joey sat and waited, his gaze fixed somewhere near the top of the stack of drawers, where his mother lay. The first sounds came as if from deep underwater, where whales wail and the mouths of drowned sailors gape and close with the come and go of the currents. Up they surged in the earphones, these subaquatic groans, bubbling up to the surface in waves. Indistinct syllables, tiny glottal clucks and stutters, the gummy munches of a waking infant, the wet weaning mewls of still-blind kittens ?? up they came from the darkness, taking form, taking strength, slowly evolving into things that resembled words, white-noise dream-thoughts being tuned down to a signal of speech, babel finding a single voice. >wuhwhy the ?? dear? is that ?? huhhh ?? nuhnnnno, nothing, no, no, nothing ?? on the table, you'll find them on the ?? huhhhello? ?? she never said that to me ?? hello? is there someone ?? hrrrhhh ?? dear, I'm talking to you, now please ?? it's these shoes, you know ?? wuhwwwwell, if you want to buy it, buy it ?? someone at the door, would you ?? yes ?? hahhhhhello? is someone listening? I know someone's listening. Hello? Hello? Who is that? Who's there, please?< "Hi, Mum," said Joey. "It's me." >Joey! How nice of you to drop by. It's so good to hear your voice. Been a while, hasn't it?< "Just three days, Mum." >Three days? It seems an awful lot longer than that. It's so easy to lose track of time, isn't it? Well, anyway? How have you been keeping?< "I'm well. And you?" >I must be all right, mustn't I? Nothing much changes in here, so I suppose I must be staying the same. Are you quite sure it's only been three days? I try and keep a count of the number of times they wake me. The news. And that dreadful music. Mantovani, Manilow?< "OK, maybe not three. A few days." >You shouldn't feel you have to lie to me, Joey.< "I've been meaning to get down more often, Mum, but what with one thing and another?" >It's all right, Joey. I do understand. There are plenty of things more important than your old mother. Plenty of things. How's work?< "Oh, OK. Same as usual." >It's not a job for a bright boy like you, taking shopping orders. It's a waste of your talents.< "It's all I could get, Mum. I'm lucky to have a job at all." >And have you found yourself a nice girl yet?< "Not yet." >Don't make it sound like such a trial, Joey. I'm only asking. This isn't an interrogation. I only want to know if you're happy.< "I'm happy, Mum." >Well, that's good, then. And the flat? Have you had the cockroach problem sorted out?< "I rang the Council yesterday. They said they'd already sent a man round to deal with it, but he never turned up. I think he must have been mugged on the way. I read somewhere there's a thriving black market in bug-dust. You can sell it to rich kids as cocaine and poor kids as heroin." >Really, Joey, you ought to have moved out of the wharf district by now. Even with a job like yours, surely you can afford somewhere a bit nicer. There's lots of new property being built. I heard it on the news. Residential blocks are popping up all over the city like mushrooms. Why do you insist on staying where you are?< "I like it there." >That's as maybe, but I don't like the idea of you being there.< "I can't afford the down-payment on another place." >Oh, rot! There must be more than enough left over from the money your f...
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