Free Novelties & Souvenirs by John Crowley Page A

from the lawyer’s: some bonds and such stuff,and a small steel case, velvet lined, that contained a key, a key deeply notched on both sides and headed with smooth plastic, like the key to an expensive car.
     
    Why did I go to The Park that first time? Mostly because I had forgotten about it: getting that key in the mail was like coming across a pile of old snapshots you hadn’t cared to look at when they were new but which after they have aged come to contain the past, as they did not contain the present. I was curious.
    I understood very well that The Park and its access concept were very probably only another cruel joke on the rich, preserving the illusion that they can buy what can’t be bought, like the cryonics fad of thirty years before. Once in Ibiza, Georgie and I met a German couple who also had a contract with The Park; their Wasp hovered over them like a Paraclete and made them self-conscious in the extreme—they seemed to be constantly rehearsing the eternal show being stored up for their descendants. Their deaths had taken over their lives, as though they were pharaohs. Did they, Georgie wondered, exclude the Wasp from their bedroom? Or did its presence there stir them to greater efforts, proofs of undying love and admirable vigor for the unborn to see?
    No, death wasn’t to be cheated that way, any more than by pyramids, by masses said in perpetuity. It wasn’t Georgie saved from death that I would find. But there were eight thousand hours of her life with me, genuine hours, stored there more carefully than they could be in my porous memory; Georgie hadn’t excluded the Wasp from her bedroom, our bedroom, and she who had never performed for anybody could not have conceived of performing for it. And there would be me, too, undoubtedly, caught unintentionally by the Wasp’s attention: out of those thousands of hours therewould be hundreds of myself, and myself had just then begun to be problematic to me, something that had to be figured out, something about which evidence had to be gathered and weighed. I was thirty-eight years old.
    That summer, then, I borrowed a Highway Access Permit (the old HAPpy card of those days) from a county lawyer I knew and drove the coast highway up to where The Park was, at the end of a pretty beach road, all alone above the sea. It looked from the outside like the best, most peaceful kind of Italian country cemetery, a low stucco wall topped with urns, amid cypresses, an arched gate in the center. A small brass plaque on the gate: PLEASE USE YOUR KEY . The gate opened, not to a square of shaded tombstones but onto a ramped corridor going down: the cemetery wall was an illusion, the works were underground. Silence, or nameless Muzak like silence; solitude—either the necessary technicians were discreetly hidden or none were needed. Certainly the access concept turned out to be simplicity itself, in operation anyway. Even I, who am an idiot about information technology, could tell that. The Wasp was genuine state-of-the-art stuff, but what we mourners got was as ordinary as home movies, as old letters tied up in ribbon.
    A display screen near the entrance told me down which corridor to find Georgie, and my key let me into a small screening room where there was a moderate-size TV monitor, two comfortable chairs, and dark walls of chocolate-brown carpeting. The sweet-sad Muzak. Georgie herself was evidently somewhere in the vicinity, in the wall or under the floor, they weren’t specific about the charnel-house aspect of the place. In the control panel before the TV were a keyhole for my key and two bars: ACCESS and RESET .
    I sat, feeling foolish and a little afraid, too, made more uncomfortable by being so deliberately soothed by neutral furnishingsand sober tools. I imagined, around me, down other corridors, in other chambers, that others communed with their dead as I was about to do; that the dead were murmuring to them beneath the stream of Muzak; that they wept to see