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“We’ll find out right now.” Isabelle walked toward the crossing. Leni peered over both shoulders to make sure that no one else was creeping up on them.

  While walking, Isabelle asked herself what the air smelled like. There were the odors of dryness and dust and earth but something else too. A spice of some sort—cumin or sage? Definitely a cooking smell. Way out here in the middle of this desolate, moon-landscaped nowhere, a very spicy and delicious smell hung in the air.

  Watching her approach, the guards’ faces said nothing. Isabelle took a deep breath and readied her hands to do a lot of gesturing in case she couldn’t communicate with these men through words. She thought she’d try first with English.

  “Hello! Do you speak English? Oder Deutsch??”

  “Both, missus. English and German—whichever you would prefer.” He had an authoritative deep voice and a slight accent she could not place.

  “That’s wonderful. Can you tell me where we are?”

  The man pointed at his feet. “We are in death. Over there is life.” He pointed across the border.

  Leni had caught up and stood next to Isabelle. “Can we go over there? Is it permitted?”

  “Yes missus, of course.”

  Leni looked at her friend and opened her mouth to say something but Isabelle put up a hand to stop her. “Both of us can go over there?”

  “Yes missus.”

  “But I’m still alive and she’s dead.”

  “We know that. We can see your hearts—yours is beating and hers is not.”

  “But still we can both go over there?”

  “Yes, it is not a problem,” the other guard said.

  The women exchanged a look. They were confused by this simple yes—why wasn’t there a problem?

  “Who was that man who went through here before?” Leni pointed toward the other side of the border.

  “A dead man, like you. He is going to visit his mother who is still alive. He comes through here twice a week.”

  “What were all those things on his bicycle?”

  “He uses them to try and communicate with her. He is an imaginative fellow but none of his ideas ever work. No, that’s unfair to say—sometimes they work, but very, very rarely.” This time the guard smiled broadly at his partner who chuckled and coughed into his hand. “Both of you can go over there to life, but you will not be back in life. Do you understand?”

  When the women said nothing, the other guard added, “It will be like going to the aquarium. You will be next to the fishes but there is a very thick glass between you and them.” He spread his hands apart ten inches, as if demonstrating the thickness of the glass.

  Isabelle was too excited by their proximity to life to really register the importance of what he said. She managed to keep a neutral expression on her face, heard the references to the aquarium and thick glass, but none of it made much of an impression. She was bursting with impatience. Life was just over there, which meant Vincent and home and her life again. She didn’t know how long she had been in Simon Haden’s dreamworld since being lured here. It didn’t matter though because life was again so near that she could take fifty steps over to it.

  “Come on, Leni, let’s go.”

  One of the guards went to the gate and raised it for them. The women walked across the border and kept going toward the distant mountains. The guards looked at each other. One of them shook his hand slowly and exaggeratedly to affirm those were two good-looking chicks and he wouldn’t mind diddling either of them. His colleague nodded in agreement but that was the end of it. This was a busy outpost. People passed through it all the time. These men had often seen odd things go by here. Two pretty women was a nice distraction but not all that special. Besides, back in the guard booth a very nice lentil stew was cooking and both men were hungry. The recipe had called for a variety of spices and their pungent smells perfumed the air, a harbinger of good things to eat. The guards preferred to think about their upcoming meal.

  The women walked on, expecting anything, everything, and nothing. The barren landscape around them did not change. Life appeared to be the same as death. When they first crossed the border, both of them had assumed something dramatic was imminent: they would be magically transported to a familiar place or meet up with people they knew in life, but nothing like that happened. They walked beneath the raised gate back into life and down a poorly maintained road full of potholes and large stones. The delicious spicy smell that had accompanied them faded as they walked on and in a little while was gone altogether. Isabelle missed it.

  After they had been going for more than an hour she finally said, “I don’t get it.”

  Leni knew exactly what she meant. “Me neither.”

  “I thought—”

  “Me too.” Feeling sorry for her, and sharing her deep sense of disappointment that nothing had changed, Leni reached over and took Isabelle’s hand. It was unexpected but the perfect thing to do. The two friends had often held hands. They had been doing it along with Flora since they were kids.

  When Isabelle looked over, she saw that Leni was crying.

  “Hey, what’s up?”

  Leni impatiently pushed her free hand across her wet eyes to wipe the tears away. “Nothing. I was just hoping you’d be able to go home now. That’s all.” She let go of Isabelle’s hand. For want of something to do, she bent down and picked a stone up off the road. Feeling its heft, she tossed it up and down while she spoke. “I want you to go back home and have your baby and live happily ever after.” Angrily, with all of her might she flung the rock away. “Tell me about the greatest time you ever had with Vincent. Tell me about the time you loved him most.”

  Isabelle did not hesitate. As they began walking again, she recounted the night she met Vincent and how they had visited both the Kyselak signature and Petras Urbsys’s store. Both of them had their eyes down while she spoke. It was a nice story and they concentrated their full attention on it.

  Leni was the first one to look up, but did so only because she heard something impossible three separate times and that third was just too much to resist. She had to take a look because damn it, she was certain she heard a seagull. In the middle of this wherever-they-were desolate landlocked countryside, Leni heard a seagull call out. She knew the sound well because her parents’ apartment was near the river in Vienna. She had grown up hearing gulls squawk and talk to each other.

  When she looked up now, she saw that they were passing the bench next to the Danube Canal where she had been found dead. They were back in Vienna. A large seagull was flying directly overhead. She said quietly, “Isabelle, look up.”

  She did and her first reaction was to reach for Leni’s hand. “What happened?”

  “I do not know, but we’re here.”

  “I want to go to our apartment. I want to see Vincent.”

  “That’s fine, but I think we’d better walk there. Who knows how things work here for us and I would truly hate to get stuck on the subway for all eternity.”

  The city was at its most beautiful. Summer afternoon sunlight poured across the buildings, illuminating the gargoyles, busts, and stone wreaths on their facades. They were among many details, many visual treasures one didn’t notice normally but couldn’t miss on this sublimely sunny, clear day. It reminded them once again of how generous much of the Viennese architecture was; it offered so much to see and take in.

  The outdoor cafés they passed were full of tanned bare skin, extravagant cakes with schlag and everyone wearing sunglasses. Horse-drawn carriages clopped slowly around the Ringstrasse, indifferent to the cars whizzing by them. In the Burggarten families ambled around eating ice cream cones. Lovers lay sleeping on the grass in each other’s arms. At a sidewalk fruit stand peaches the size of grapefruits were for sale.

  The women met the first dead person they knew at the corner of the Getreidemarkt and Mariahilferstrasse. One of their high school classmates, Uschi Stein, had died in an airplane crash the year after they graduated. When Isabelle and Leni r
eached a busy intersection just a few blocks from the Secession Museum, they saw her walking toward them and smiling.

  “Uschi?”

  “Hey you two. Where’s Flora?” She looked exactly as she had in high school; exactly as she had the day she died.

  Trying to keep her voice under control, Isabelle asked her, “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for my stupid mother; she’s never on time for anything. We had a date for lunch. You’d think it would be easy to find your own mother when you’d arranged a time to meet, but not today.”

  Uschi had been dead fifteen years.

  “Look, I’ve got to go find my mom. I’ll see you guys around, huh? Let’s have coffee or something.” She walked toward Mariahilferstrasse without looking back.

  When she was far enough away, Isabelle murmured, “She doesn’t know! She doesn’t know she’s dead.”

  Unfazed, Leni agreed. “No, and she never will. She’s a ghost; ghosts never know they’re dead. They’re only confused forever. That’s why she’s still hanging around here looking for her mother.”

  “But what about you and Simon? Why aren’t you like her?”

  “Because Chaos got to her first after she died. We were lucky. Chaos creates ghosts; that’s where they come from. One of its more modern and clever inventions; only a few thousand years old. If you totally confuse a soul, it’ll never be able to find its way to the mosaic.”

  Walking down through the Naschmarkt on their way to Isabelle’s apartment, they passed eleven more ghosts. Among them was a transvestite, an old woman sitting by a window in an apartment house directly across from the open market, a bum who somehow managed to stay drunk even in death, and a Turkish child who had died a week before of encephalitis. These dead and more were part of the crowd they passed. Leni could distinguish them from the living, Isabelle could not. The only Vienna the friends could see now was the Vienna they had experienced together.

  They were talking about coffee when the accident occurred almost directly in front of them. They had just walked past the Café Odeon. Leni saw the place and mentioned the night the three of them had ended up there very late after a party. They drank one Irish coffee after another and talked talked talked until the place closed.

  “I had so much caffeine that night; I don’t think I slept for a week.”

  There was a high screech of brakes and then that horrifying, instantly recognizable sound of something being hit by a car.

  It came from in front of them on the busy Linke Wienzeile. A man in a hurry and absorbed in a conversation on his cell phone stepped out between parked cars without looking and was immediately struck by a gigantic yellow moving van from Holland. He was hit a glancing blow and might even have survived had he not been knocked back into a thick tree that was planted between the sidewalk and the street. The back of his head smacked into the tree first and that was it. He was dead before the rest of his body dropped to the ground.

  The women were hurrying toward him by the time his soul began to rise out of the top of his head like smoke. Both of them saw this; Leni because she was dead, Isabelle because she existed now in this no-man’s-land between life and death where souls are visible when exposed.

  It was white. The dead man’s soul was white as are all souls, contrary to what many people believe. The crows saw it too. Chaos likes birds. It likes their nervousness and paranoia, their incessant shrieking, their uselessness, and the way they shit on everything. Because birds are everywhere on earth, save the middle of the oceans and deserts, Chaos often uses them to do small errands. One is to snatch the souls from the dead before they get away to the mosaic. Sometimes a soul does not leave a body for a long time because it is lost and cannot find the proper way out. That is why vultures can be so effective in certain situations. Because they are the only bird that knows patience; they know how to wait.

  The crows in Vienna come from Russia. Normally they arrive around the end of October, spend the winter, and then return home at the beginning of spring. But there are always some lazy ones, a few that don’t want to make the long flight east again. Or those that find the temperate Austrian climate suits them. Every year a handful stick around. They’re noticeable because as the weather turns warmer, the color of their feathers changes from slick shiny black to a mixture of matte black and dirty gray, sort of like bum penguins.

  Three of them flew in and landed on a telephone wire nearby immediately after the accident. Crows are not quiet birds. They are forever fussing loudly; they like the world to know they are there. But these three silently watched the man die. After a short time Leni noticed them and she knew why they were near. She was unable to do anything about it however because the dead cannot interfere. She thought about asking Isabelle to try but that was too risky; who knows what it might have brought? Isabelle’s only task now, and it was an urgent one, was to find a way back to her life.

  The dead man’s soul had separated completely from his body and hung unmoving in the air above it. This was always the crucial stage; this was when a soul was most vulnerable. One of the crows flapped its wings several times but did not move off the wire. The birds were watching to see what happened next. They were impatient but they were careful. They had done this many times before.

  People—the living—the helpful, the curious, and the dismayed, began to move toward the slumped body to see if there was anything they could do, or just to stare. The driver of the truck had stopped the vehicle and thrown open the door, but he did not move from his seat in the high cab. Terrified, the little-boy part of him still living somewhere inside thought If I don’t move, this will go away. If I stay up here in my safe place it will stop.

  The first crow jumped off the wire and dropped toward the floating soul. Unexpectedly when it was very close, the big bird stopped its dive and, cawing raucously, veered off and flew away.

  “Did you see that? Did you see that big crow? What was it doing?”

  “Checking. Testing to see if the coast is clear.”

  “To see if what coast is clear? Leni, what are you talking about?”

  From a distance they heard the sound of a siren approaching. Slowly the soul began to rise. The women watched it and the crows watched it. People had gathered around the body, close but not too close. Some squatted down on their haunches, others stood with grim faces and arms crossed. A young mother gripped too hard the handle of the blue and brown baby carriage she was pushing. Another woman had found the dead man’s cell phone and laid it gently on the ground beside the body. In a while it began to ring. People jerked as if the phone were the dead man suddenly come back to life. Others cringed at the absolute wrongness of that familiar sound now.

  “Is that his soul in the air, Leni?”

  “Yes.”

  The second crow dropped off the telephone wire and swooped down toward the soul. The baby in the carriage began to cry and then to scream. It was so immediately loud and distraught that one would have thought something was hurting it. The crow squawked, outraged, but flew away.

  “Good!” Leni made a triumphant fist and pressed it to her side. “Chaos sent those crows to steal the soul. But see—the baby’s cries keep them away.”

  “Why? How?” Isabelle’s thoughts went to her own unborn child.

  Leni shrugged. “I don’t really know; maybe because babies are innocent and so new to life. Their pureness reminds a soul what it’s really here for and where it’s supposed to go when it’s finished. But I’m only guessing.”

  The mother took the infant out of the carriage, hefted it over her shoulder, and patted its back the way mothers do. From where they were standing, the baby was only a small bundle of pink although its cries were surprisingly loud. The last crow walked back and forth on the telephone wire dipping its head forward and back, opening and closing its beak again and again but no sound came out of it.

  “How long does a soul have to wait before it’s safe?”

  Leni did not look at Isabelle when she answered
. “That depends on the life the person led.”

  Soothed now, the baby stopped crying. The soul began to rise again. At the same time it also began to very slowly disperse like water vapor. From out of nowhere, the first or second crow came sweeping back in, snatched up the fragile white soul in its open beak like a rag, and flew off with it. The crow still on the telephone wire dipped its head up and down, up and down, up and down, cawing like crazy.

  Because the two women were watching all this, rapt, they did not see the immaculately dressed little man emerge from inside the baby carriage, climb over the edge of it, and drop to the ground. No one saw this happen because those who could see him were watching the soul snatcher, and those that couldn’t were looking at the dead body sprawled against the base of the tree.

  The little man spent time brushing himself off and straightening his beige drape-cut suit. When he was satisfied with his appearance, he walked over to Isabelle and Leni.

  “Hello ladies.”

  “Broximon!”

  Leni looked down at him and then over at Isabelle. “You know this man?”

  “I do. What are you doing here?”

  Broximon hiked a thumb over his shoulder. “Pinching that baby. But it didn’t do much good. The crow still got the soul, huh? I couldn’t see from in there.”

  “You were the one making the baby cry?”

  “Yup. Sometimes one good pinch will make them cry for half an hour. Half an hour usually does the trick. Chaos doesn’t have the patience to wait around longer than that. But sometimes these babies shut right up even after you’ve given them a hell of a pinch. Then there’s not much else you can do. Did either of you know the dead guy?”

  Isabelle looked at Leni. “No. But what are you doing here?”

  “I came to help you get out of here.”

  “By pinching little babies?” Leni demanded.

  Broximon stayed cool. “If needs be, yes. Babies recover—souls don’t.”

  The siren they heard belonged to a police car. It pulled up behind the moving van, blue lights flashing. Two cops got out, a man and a woman. The woman walked right over to the body and looked at it coolly and appraisingly. Her partner talked to different people in the crowd who were only too happy to fill the police in on what had happened.