Eventually the plague passed, as all terrible illnesses do.
In one oral version of this tale, Ba’u-Asitu becomes so famed for her skill at stripping the flesh from the dead that she is known as Ba’u-Asitu the Fox-Woman: an immortal figure who still hunts under an occluded moon with an army of foxes. Screams in the night are attributed to her work. The plague has never spread far again.
To Kaššaya, my lady, and Innin-Etirat, my lady: your servant Šamaš-ereš. May Anu and Ishtar keep you both well!
You write: “No one in Uruk or Babylon can say whether the omens we saw before the plague have appeared before. Is there anything in the ruined cities of the north that will help us understand these omens and how to respond to them?”
Nothing I have found yet will help. I do not think that this plague ever afflicted these old cities. The fox in the well of Aššur may have been alive, signifying a different omen. The omens described on the tablets found by Innin-Etirat’s servant and lost between Babylon and Uruk may have been the same. Nothing I have found suggests that they were important.
I will continue to search the ruins.
Let us hope that this plague never afflicts Babylon again!
Let the foxes of Ba’u-Asitu watch over us!
What Maisie Knew
David Liss
There was never a time when keeping Maisie in the apartment felt right to me. It was always a bad deal, right from the get-go, but there were no good deals, and this was the least-bad deal going. I couldn’t let her stay out in the world, knowing what she knew, blurting out what she did. It probably would have been fine if I’d left it alone, but I could not live with such a flimsy guarantee. It was the chance that things would not be fine that nagged at me, that kept me awake at night, that made me jump every time the phone rang. I had a wife I loved, and we had a child on the way. I had a life, and I wanted to keep it. A person can’t live like that, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and so I did the only thing I could do—the only thing I could think of. It was the right call, but it just so happened that it didn’t turn out the way I wanted.
It should have been fine. Everything I knew about reanimates told me it should be fine. I’d been around them almost all my life. My parents could barely make car payments, but they rushed out to buy a Series One from General Reanimation when they first came on the market. Kids growing up today can’t even imagine what those early models were like—buggy and twitchy, with those ugly uniforms, like weird green tuxedos. I was only five at the time, and the reanimate creeped the hell out of me when it would lumber into my room to check on me at night or when it would babysit while my parents were out. I still remember watching it shamble toward me, a TV dinner clutched hard in its shaky hands. I wasn’t phobic the way some people are. I simply didn’t like them. Dead people should remain dead. That’s one of those things that always made sense, maybe now more than ever.
So I hated going to that apartment where I kept my dead girl, which, on top of everything else, was hard to afford and which I had to hide from my wife, who managed most of the household finances.
I’d have rather been anywhere else—at the dentist, the DMV, a tax audit, a prostate exam. But I was there, at the apartment. I opened the front door and walked in, smelled the weird chemical smell that reanimates emitted, and the feeling washed over me that I had no business being there. My name was on the lease, but I felt like an intruder.
It was a crappy apartment on the cusp of the very wrong side of town, cheap, but not too dangerous. The place was a one bedroom—more space than Maisie needed, since she supposedly didn’t need any space at all. She wasn’t supposed to, but I always wondered. Sometime when I came to check on her, the chairs around the cheap kitchen table would look out of place. I always pushed my chairs in, but these were pulled out at odd angles or even halfway across the floor, as though advertising that they’d been moved. I supposed there was nothing wrong with her taking a seat or moving things around if that was what she wanted to do, but she wasn’t supposed to want to do it. That’s what bothered me.
When I went in that day, she was standing precisely where I last left her, her back to the far wall of the living area, her face to the door, light from the slightly parted curtains streaming over her. I watched the dust motes dance around her eyes, visible through the mask, wide and doll-like and unblinking.
Maisie was a black-market reanimate, but she wore the green-and-white uniform of a licensed General Reanimation unit, and of course she wore that matching green-and-white mask, which made her look, to my eyes, like a Mexican wrestler. Plenty of people, even people who liked having reanimates around, found the mask a bit disconcerting, but they all admitted it was better than the alternative.
No one wants to check into a hotel and discover that the reanimate bellboy is one’s own dead relative. No one wants to go to a cocktail party and see a dead spouse offering a tray of shrimp pâté on ciabatta.
I hated the uniform—slick and stain resistant, made of some sort of soft plastic. It was oversized and baggy, making it almost impossible to tell that Maisie was female. I hated the full-face mask, but I had her wear it in case there was a fire or the building manager had to send in a repairman to fix something or even if there was a break-in. I didn’t want anyone knowing I owned an illegal reanimate. I didn’t need that kind of trouble.
I stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind me.
“Hello, Maisie. You may take off the mask if you like.”
She remained motionless, as still as a mannequin.
“Maisie, please take off the mask.”
With her left hand, she reached up and pulled it off but held on to it. I hadn’t told her to put it anywhere, and so letting it go would not occur to her dead brain. Underneath the mask, I saw her face, pale and puffy, hanging loose from her skull, but strangely still pretty.
She had long, flowing curls of reddish blond hair, her pale blue eyes—I’m sure very arresting in life—dull and cloudy in un-death.
I came to check in on Maisie maybe once a week. I should not have to, of course. I ought to have been able to leave her alone for months, but I knew it was a good idea for reanimates to get some exercise lest they gum up. That was part of it. The other part was that I wanted to be sure she wasn’t up to no good. Reanimates weren’t supposed to have it in them to be up to no good, but if she hadn’t been Maisie, had not acted like herself, she wouldn’t be in the apartment to begin with.
“How have you been, Maisie?”
Of course there was no response. What was left of her brain couldn’t process so abstract a question. That’s what Ryan said, and he seemed to think he knew what he was talking about.
“Maisie, get me a beer from the refrigerator.
I could get my own beer, of course, but I needed to find excuses to make her move. I had to specify one from the refrigerator, because otherwise she might get me a warm one from the pantry or she might end up looking for a beer in the medicine cabinet.
Maisie walked off to the kitchen. I followed but only for something to do. I was always bored and uneasy when I came to the apartment. I felt strange, like I was playacting for some invisible audience, like I was a grown-up furtively trying to recapture the magic of childhood toys. Nothing I said to her or did with her felt natural. Christ, I could talk to a dog and feel less like I was talking to myself.