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The necromancer that lives near Kaveh’s apartment must be a lazy one. Never once has Kaveh spotted a walking corpse limping out and about.
His shop on the end of the street is beside the butcher, which Kaveh always thought was morbid, like he might reanimate his neighbour’s beef by accident. But the necromancer keeps odd hours, which probably contributes to his lack of business. Does he make any money?
He’s a particular man, or so Kaveh has heard, but Kaveh deals with particular men all the time so he doesn’t feel any unusual apprehension when he pushes open the heavy wooden door to the shop. No bell rings. Despite the appearance of a storefront, inside the place is well-lit and cozy, like Kaveh has walked into a private home instead of the necromancer’s lair. Heavy, hypnotic incense permeates through the air. It does not fit Kaveh’s preconceived notion of hell-raising.
“That was rude,” comes a voice from another room. “It’s closed.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kaveh blurts out. “The lights were on, so I thought… Um, maybe I have the wrong place?” There’s paintings on the wall and there aren’t any flames or wrought iron gates within them. There’s a book on the table about sedimentary rocks.
Still the source of the voice does not make himself apparent. “Presumably you’d like to bring someone back from the dead. You’ve come to the right place at the wrong time. If you walk into people’s homes without knocking I have no interest in your business.”
Kaveh frowns. “I apologize for walking into your home, but this is a place of business and the lights were on.”
Finally the man, who is as tall as Kaveh with odd grey hair and even odder eyes, pokes his head through the doorway to what must be the kitchen. “Your father has been dead for too long. Try a priest instead,” he says, uncanny eyes narrowed. And then he disappears again.
“How do you know about my father?” Kaveh asks. Something about the strange house won’t let him leave. How can a man in a place like this revive the dead? Isn’t it a gruesome, violent affair? Won’t he get something on that nice carpet? On the soft green divan?
“If you need to ask a necromancer how he knows a dead man there’s no hope left for you,” the man says sharply. “Now leave.”
Kaveh looks at the door behind him. It’s an old house. Kaveh could feel the weight of years upon his shoulders as soon as he crossed the threshold. “Wait. Won’t you listen to my request?” he asks desperately.
There’s the sound of running water for a minute and then the man finally emerges fully into the sitting room, shaking out his hands like he didn’t even bother to dry them. A few stray drops of water hit Kaveh’s face. The man is beautiful—how could he practice black magic?
“Your mother lives and you have no friends that you care enough to beg me to resurrect,” the man says flatly. “What could you possibly want?”
Kaveh has never met this strange, grey-haired man before. He certainly would have remembered someone so striking. But the man knows about his mother and father and his friends or lack thereof. It must be his magic, Kaveh decides, and Kaveh does not want to involve himself in this man’s dark art so he doesn’t push anymore.
“It’s not my parents or my friends,” Kaveh explains. “I want you to bring me back to life.”
The man blinks. “What.”
“I said that I—”
“I heard you. You’re not dead. I think I would know.” The man’s cold indifference breaks for just a moment, revealing something red and raw behind it, but soon the minute expression disappears.
“I am, though.” Kaveh gestures vaguely at himself. “How could I be wrong? It’s me.” He feels dead. His limbs ache and his mind wanders; he cannot remember and he does not know what he has forgotten. Everything is at once alien and familiar, like a dream you can’t quite place.
“Say you are dead. What’s the problem?”
“What?”
“You managed to drag your hollow, rotting limbs all the way here,” the man points out. “What more do you want?”
The incense in the air is so thick Kaveh might choke on it. “Why would I want to be dead?” he demands incredulously. “I need you to bring me back.”
The man’s cold gaze pierces Kaveh down to his very soul. He crosses his arms. “How am I supposed to bring you back if you’re already here? Why do you need this?”
Kaveh groans. “I can’t be dead! I have to work! I gave up so much to get here—I have to go on.”
“Hmm,” the man says. “Hmmmmm.”
“So?”
“Come back at this time tomorrow. I will need the tears of a past lover.”
“What the hell,” Kaveh says. “But I don’t have any past lovers. At least I don’t think so. I can’t remember.”
The man shrugs. “Why should I bring back a dead man if no one wanted him when he lived?”
Kaveh shakes his head. “I don’t want anyone to want me. That’s not why I’m doing this. I need to work.”
“I am the necromancer and I say that you need to bring me the tears of someone who loved you,” the man says. “Now leave my house.”
So Kaveh leaves the necromancer’s house, realizing only later he never asked for the man’s name.
Kaveh finds a knit sweater stuffed into the back of his closet, on the top shelf behind the box full of old notebooks he can’t bear to throw out. Since Kaveh doesn’t know his lover’s name, or face, or if she ever existed at all, how can he deliver her tears to the necromancer? Someone else—a living person—could perhaps show up on his lover’s doorstep and stick a knife in some old wounds, and then deliver the handkerchief he used to wipe her tears to the necromancer’s door, but Kaveh’s fuzzy memory left leaves him with only what is contained in the four walls of his tiny apartment.
Now, having turned his tiny apartment inside out searching desperately for anything he might offer to resurrect himself, Kaveh is left with one worn-out sweater that doesn’t fit in with the rest of his belongings. It would have him sweating on even the coldest winter night in Sumeru City, and it’s hideous besides, so it must belong—or it must have once belonged—to someone other than Kaveh. He holds it up by the shoulders and squints. It looks like the sort of thing you might cry into. Kaveh might cry because it’s so ugly. Hopefully the ex he can’t remember and doesn’t fully believe exists did too.
It’s desperation that led Kaveh on this goose chase. Surely if Kaveh had a lover, he’d remember her, murky as his memories are. But the necromancer knew about his mother and his father and the nonexistence of his friends. Maybe he knows something Kaveh doesn’t—maybe he has the pieces Kaveh is missing.
It isn’t the lost memories that concern him. It’s that he can’t work without them. What possessed him to create the Palace of Alcazarzaray? Was it heartbreak, if he had a lover? Or some other feeling Kaveh can’t name because it was lost to him?
When he returns to the cozy shop, sweater in hand, the necromancer is reading on the divan. It looks so bizarrely intimate Kaveh almost turns tail. The incense seems stronger now, thick and cloying.
“Did you remember your lover?” the necromancer asks without looking up from his book once the door clicks shut behind Kaveh.
Kaveh clutches the sweater to his chest. “You never told me your name, you know.”
“You didn’t tell me yours.”
“Oh. How rude of me. I’m Kaveh. I guess I thought… that you’d know, somehow.”
Finally the man snaps his book shut. “You’re right. I did. I’m Al-Haitham.”
Kaveh blinks. “Al-Haitham?”
“Yes?”
“…Nothing. I don’t know. No, I didn’t remember anyone, but I think this sweater might have been hers.”
Al-Haitham frowns. “Hers?”
“You know. My lover’s.”
“I see,” Al-Haitham sighs.
“So can you do it, then? If I give you this?”
Al-Haitham raises his eyebrows. “What, bring you back to life? No.”
Kaveh tightens his grip. “So why did I go through all the trouble of searching for it?”
“It takes more than a measly tear to bring someone back to life,” Al-Haitham says slowly. “Otherwise I’d be out of business.”
“And what a shame that would be,” Kaveh mutters. “Look, I’m… sorry. I’m just frustrated. What else do you need?”
Al-Haitham crosses his arms. “You’re sorry? Whatever. First, we should discuss payment.”
“Right, right. I was wondering if you’d…” Kaveh trails off. What about this man has drained him of his confidence? Something isn’t quite right here—like whenever Kaveh speaks, there’s something else trying to crawl out of the back of his throat—a parasite. “If you’d be interested in some artifacts I’ve found in my travels. I have, um, a petal from the Goddess of Flowers’s hair, and a—”
“I only take mora,” Al-Haitham interrupts.
“How unusual for someone of your profession,” Kaveh says lightly. Though mora will be a problem, he lies, “That won’t be a—”
“But this once I’ll let you off if I can keep the sweater after,” Al-Haitham goes on as if Kaveh did not speak.
“The sweater?” Kaveh squeaks.
“Do I need to repeat myself?”
Kaveh shakes his head. “You can have it.”
What does Al-Haitham want with Kaveh’s sweater—with Kaveh’s ex-lover’s sweater? To make a doll out of the fibres and stick it with needles?
“Next,” Al-Haitham announces, “I’ll need something from your childhood.”
“Anything?”
Al-Haitham only stares.
“Fine,” Kaveh sighs. “Can’t you just give me, like, a list of everything you need at once? Instead of doing it one at a time like this?”
Al-Haitham still does not respond.
“Fine. Whatever.”
Kaveh all but runs home. Something about Al-Haitham sets him on edge. He wants this resurrection out of the way so Kaveh won’t have to see him again. He wheezes his way up the stairs to his third-floor apartment and his hands shake as he unlocks the door.
When he steps inside, dread washes over him. It’s as if Al-Haitham’s strange request opened his eyes: is this really Kaveh’s apartment? It’s so… beige.
The walls are taupe and the sofa is grey, and so are all the blankets and pillows on it; his kitchen is cast in similarly pale neutrals. There’s no colour. It’s as if, when he moved in, he took everything brand-new straight out of a dull and lifeless furniture showroom. It’s disturbing. It’s frightening. Things were different when he was alive. Brighter. Kaveh feels certain of it, certain like he hasn’t felt in years. He must have had different things, nicer things that were his own and gotten rid of them. For some reason.
Perhaps the sweater he’d just given to Al-Haitham was the last vestige of life in this place.
Once again, Kaveh scours the nooks and crannies of his apartment, searching for something that could fulfill Al-Haitham’s request, but he doubts anything will turn up. Wherever Kaveh’s colours went, his childhood memories must have followed, because the oldest thing in Kaveh’s apartment is his diploma from the Akademiya.
He downsized a few years after the Palace’s construction finished, and he must have gotten rid of any keepsakes. He’d mailed some of it to his mother, maybe, and pawned the rest, or maybe Kaveh threw it all out.
He can’t remember.
Why did he get rid of it all? And why didn’t he notice until Al-Haitham reminded him? What would he have found, anyway? A journal, maybe, or an old toy, or, or, or, Kaveh doesn’t know. Certainly he was a child once, and he had a mother and a father, at least for a while. He loved his father until he died and he loved his mother too, but it was different. Yes, it was different, but the details are all gone—what colour were his mother’s eyes? His father liked to read to him, but what did he read about?
Desperation burns in his chest. Lacking any real memories, Kaveh finds his toolbox in the bottom of the closet and takes out the pliers. He finishes off the bottle of wine on his counter for courage and—
The door to Al-Haitham’s shop slams when Kaveh opens it. Lightheaded, he flops onto the divan without a greeting.
“You’re back already?” Al-Haitham asks. He’s in the kitchen, doing… something. Kaveh doesn’t care.
“Yeth,” Kaveh says. “Obviouthly. I have what you athked for.”
Al-Haitham narrows his eyes. “Why are you talking like that?”
“I have gauthe in my mouth.”
“You have what?”
Kaveh reaches into his mouth and removes a bloody piece of gauze. “Gauze.” He drops it on the coffee table.
Al-Haitham stops whatever it is he was doing and stares across the room. “Why do you have gauze in your mouth?”
Swallowing back blood, Kaveh finds his pearly white prize in his pocket and displays it between his thumb and forefinger. “My tooth,” he explains. “It’s a baby tooth I never lost. Does that count?”
“Did you pull that out yourself?” Al-Haitham demands. He disappears into another room for a moment and returns with more gauze. Kneeling before Kaveh, he takes the tooth and pushes the gauze into his hands. “Why did you do that?”
Kaveh squeezes the gauze in his fingers and doesn’t move. “I didn’t have anything. I guess I got rid of it all. My apartment has nothing that’s mine, really, or… it is mine, but it isn’t mine. So that’s the only thing I have left from my childhood, I guess.”
Al-Haitham’s kneeling was already a surprise, so when he pulls open Kaveh’s jaw and sticks the gauze in his mouth himself, Kaveh bites down in shock, hard. Al-Haitham doesn’t react. He doesn’t even take his fingers out of Kaveh’s mouth. Kaveh doesn’t dare move. He couldn’t say why.
“Why should I bring you back to life if you don’t care if you live or die?” Al-Haitham asks, eyes flat. “An infection in your mouth can spread quickly to your brain, you know. And then you’d really be dead. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Why are your fingerth in my mouth,” Kaveh hisses.
Al-Haitham raises an eyebrow. He removes his fingers from Kaveh’s mouth and with his other hand, brushes his hand on Kaveh’s forehead, like he’s checking for a fever. “Answer my question.” His hand, the one wet with Kaveh’s saliva, has blood on it: a mix of Kaveh’s and his own from where Kaveh bit him.
“I don’t know. Why does it matter?” Kaveh stares up at the ceiling so he doesn’t have to look at Al-Haitham’s disappointed stare when he goes on, “I want this badly enough that I don’t care. That’s the truth. Is that good enough for you?” It’s easy to be rude to Al-Haitham even though Kaveh doesn’t know him very well. Something about him puts Kaveh on edge. “What’s the next thing? What else do you need?”
“If I asked you to cut off your arm, would you do it?”
“Yes,” Kaveh says without thinking.
“Hmmm.” Al-Haitham changes the subject. “Why didn’t you write to your mother and ask for something?”
“I haven’t spoken to her in years,” Kaveh says immediately. Then, after a pause: “And I don’t remember her address.”
“Alright.” Al-Haitham’s shoulders drop. He doesn’t say anything more.
“Why’d you stick your fingers in my mouth?” Kaveh demands, angry all at once. Al-Haitham is a stranger. “I mean, what the fuck?”
Al-Haitham looks at the blood on his hand. Characteristically, his answer makes no sense: “My grandmother had a baby tooth into adulthood, just like you. It fell out, apparently for no reason, when she was sixty-seven. She had a pen pal in Nod-Krai that she sent it to. I couldn’t imagine why. When my grandmother passed, I wrote to the pen pal, and her only reply was to send me back the tooth. I suppose I have a collection now.”
Kaveh frowned. “Al-Haitham, that didn’t answer my question at all.”
Al-Haitham ignores him. “There’s something else I’d usually ask for you to bring, but I’m not so sure anymore.”
“So, what, you’re giving up on me? After I ripped out my tooth for you?”
At this Al-Haitham scowls. “You ripped out your tooth for yourself, because you think you’re dead.”
“I am dead.”
“If I asked you to bring me a drop of blood, you might tear your heart out.”
“Is that it? A drop of blood?”
“No.”
“So what do you need?”
“If you’re dead, tell me who killed you.”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“That’s your problem. Now goodbye. You have blood on your mouth.” And with that, Al-Haitham returns to the kitchen.
Kaveh’s bottom lip tastes like iron. He lets the door slam behind him.
The problem is:
Kaveh knows who killed him. Sort of. Maybe. There’s a contract in the bottom of his desk, and whenever he takes it out, he starts to cry without knowing why, so he always puts it back. Nothing else makes him feel like that, because nothing else makes him feel much of anything, even pulling his tooth out with an old pair of pliers. So he brings the contract to Al-Haitham’s and presents it to him.
As Al-Haitham reads, Kaveh looks around. “I’ve never seen anyone else here,” he observes. “I’d have assumed you were busy.”
Al-Haitham looks up. “Most people think I’m insane. Do you really believe I can bring people back from the dead?”
“You can’t?” Kaveh demands. “Then what’s all this—”
“I can. It’s just that no one believes me.” Al-Haitham looks down at the paper in his lap. His voice is oddly quiet when he goes on, “You must be stupid to sell your soul to the Lord Sangemah Bay. And only to finish the Palace?”
“Is that what that is?” Kaveh asks faintly. “I never… I never read it.”
So he sold his soul, and all his memories went with it. It makes a sick sort of sense.
Al-Haitham returns the contract to him with a terse frown. “I’m not surprised.”
“You knew me?”
“Once,” Al-Haitham answers cryptically. “Do you believe me now? That you’re not dead? Souls aren’t any of my business.”
Kaveh blinked. “I’d have thought there was overlap,” he said stupidly, unable to put together a meaningful response. “With you and the… the souls, I mean. Um, I guess you were right.”
“That’s the first time you’ve ever said that to me,” Al-Haitham says sadly. “If that’s all, please leave me alone.”
“Wait, Al-Haitham—how do I get it back? My soul?” Kaveh thought of his empty apartment and wanted to die.
“I don’t know. I don’t deal with her.”
“Can’t you bring back someone for her, or something?” Kaveh begs. “I’ll be in your debt forever.”
“Stop offering yourself up for nothing,” Al-Haitham hisses. “And I can’t. She asked me once. But her sister’s been dead for too long. Promise her another palace, or cut out your tongue.”
“You think she’d take my tongue?”
“No. You think your voice would rival a soul, given willingly?”
“I was just—whatever.” Kaveh scoffs. “You knew me, right? How did we know each other?”
Al-Haitham makes uncomfortable eye contact. “That sweater you gave me was mine. Rather, it was my grandmother’s. A friend knitted it for her. When she was older, she was always cold. I let you borrow it, I can’t remember why, and never saw it again. Until now.”
“We were lovers,” Kaveh surmises. His stomach churns. Why Al-Haitham? “Why did we…”
“Because you’re a workaholic.”
Kaveh huffs, angry even without understanding what happened. “And because you’re an asshole, right?”
“And because I’m an asshole,” Al-Haitham agrees easily.
“You must have known that you couldn’t fix me,” Kaveh accuses. He narrows his eyes. “Why did you keep asking me for stuff?”
“I just wanted you to keep coming back. But I rethought it after the tooth. You needn’t concern yourself with me anymore if you like. But what are you going to do?”
Kaveh wrings his hands together in his lap. Al-Haitham wanted him to keep coming back? “I don’t know. I’m… broke, I guess, because it’s been so hard to do anything, really, and I don’t know how I’m going to figure this out. I’m kind of losing my mind.”
“If you’re having trouble, I can help,” Al-Haitham offers. “You can stay here with me.”
“I don’t even know you. I don’t want your charity.”
“Sell me your soul once you get it back if you don’t want my help for free.”
Kaveh looks away. He doesn’t know Al-Haitham. But it couldn’t have been a coincidence that he showed up here.
“Alright,” Kaveh hears himself say.