Suicide is for Mortals

CHAPTER ONE

Invisible

Miranda Hutchinson

A reasonable person with my history would not be so perverse as to haunt the former Rezarta after her death. Such reasonable people tend not to become ghosts precisely because they make better choices than I did.

The city of Athanoria was founded as the cultural center of Rezarta; it was the New York City of the magical Southwest. When Rezarta ceased to exist, Athanoria became more like a smaller Berlin with a better tan. Since late 2002, it was increasingly a place where mundane struggling artists went for cheap real estate and streets unburdened with the conventions of a privileged old guard.

There were numerous musicians busking on the sidewalks, painters offering portraits on the spot, and upstart filmmakers milking untested narratives from the vast, blue-skied open space. The city's health department was so under-resourced that restaurants basically worked on the honor system, the healthcare facilities were a kludged-together network of earnest though under-qualified medical professionals and alternative medicine practitioners, and the school system was barely existent.

All that said, Athanoria was not a bad place to live if you were a healthy, childless young person with a high tolerance for the eccentric and bizarre. For a bull-headed ghost like me, it was an exercise in masochism until I spotted Meliana Lucas flitting through the paint-smeared hordes.

Many of the recent transplants to Athanoria were clever, expressive aspiring revolutionaries who struggled daily against the threat of invisibility, understanding that anonymity was synonymous with starvation. Meliana was the most talented, least invisible of them all. She had been making gorgeous art since she was less than three years old, and the artistic community tended to agree that there was no such thing as fair competition where she was concerned.

She was the kindest person I'd ever seen whose competitors threatened to break her arms if she didn't price her work far above theirs. Even as she charged fifty dollars for a sidewalk portrait while other painters charged twenty, she had customers lined up for her chair when she set up her easel every Sunday afternoon. She rendered the most thoughtfully detailed likenesses with preternatural effortlessness. She understood that her fellow artists did not dislike her so much as that they warded off the threat of invisibility by placing her at a different standard from themselves.

They had no idea what it meant to be invisible.

Meliana neither sought nor shunned her visibility. It clung to her like a beloved infant strapped to her back. She was extremely tall, but missing the self-consciousness that affected most tall women, carrying her sweet face and enviably luxuriant hair imperturbably above the crowd. She was good-natured, but always observant, unburdened by presupposition. She cared more about making art than about getting credit. She was, in short, the very opposite of a politician.

The sun was brilliant on Sunday afternoons when Meliana set up her easel near Juan Carlo's, the restaurant where her roommate waited tables. That was her chosen spot for sidewalk portraits, and that was where I made a habit of watching her do what she loved. On one of those afternoons in early April, she surprised me. I had been convinced that my total allotment of surprises was spent.

She let four people gather around to watch while she served a forty-year-old woman who wanted a portrait to frame for her mother. I positioned myself right in front of Meliana, just slightly to the right of her customer, and watched her face while she put color on paper. She worked quickly, but not with the least hurry. She was ambidextrous, using a different color pastel in each hand to work on a different layer of the painting on different parts of the canvas at the same time. Her facial expression suggested a fugue state, like there could be nothing else on her mind besides the picture taking shape in front of her. The way her hands moved about the canvas reminded me of a cat's kneading paws. She went into a different world while she made the portrait, and that world was the most natural place for her to be.

When she finished a portrait, she would usually rejoin the citizens of Earth with a cheery smile and show the result to her customer. This time, she sat back in her chair, and with a frown, said, This is odd.

Her customer stood up and joined the handful of bystanders behind her to examine the anomalous artwork. It's beautiful, she replied.

There's this shadow here, Meliana said, pointing to an area towards the right edge of the work, where a mostly transparent, unfocused, though still human face could be seen. If you just give me a few minutes, I'll fix it.

No, don't do that, it's perfect, her customer said, digging into her purse for the necessary cash. I love it just as it is.

As Meliana sprayed the board with fixative and covered it in a black trash bag for her satisfied patron, I floated above the crowd, no longer seeing the mortals who negotiated for their turn in the subject's chair. I had underestimated Meliana. Everyone knew she was exceptional, but at that moment I knew she was more than talented. She had the eye to see ghosts. I would have to get to know her better, but first I needed to learn more about her.

I'm the late Miranda Hutchinson, forty-second President of the United States. In 2007, I died from complications of alcoholism.

CHAPTER TWO

Who's to Blame?

Alchemisia Online: Young People Who Think for Themselves

February 2010 feature story:

Who's to Blame for the Fall of Rezarta?

The Curious Millennial's Guide to the State of Magical America

By Scanlon Ness

The pre-industrial atrocities of witch-hunting and witch-burning ceased in Europe and North America in the early 18th century when it became undeniable that no actual magic-handlers were among those persecuted and killed for supposed magical abuses.

Not all sorcerers have the skill set to defend themselves from mundane violence, but all have the will to protect other sorcerers. Prior to the Open Magic movement of the aforementioned time period, sorcerers strove to keep their gifts a secret from the general populace. It wasn't fear that motivated their secrecy so much as a sense of superiority. According to most magical historians, this sense of superiority began to weaken when magic-handlers sought to increase their numbers. They made an organized effort to discover and train individuals who were the first in their families to develop magical talent. It was this growing population of Family Firsts that awakened the magical community to the unfairness of allowing defenseless old women to be scapegoated and executed for misdeeds they didn't have the power to commit. The Open Magic movement grew out of this awareness, and led to the present-day magical culture of visibility.

It is not a part of the recognized historical record, but widely understood at the cultural level that the proponents of Open Magic were also the earliest Opportunists. The divide between Opportunists and Purists is the most historically significant conflict in American magical culture, and arguably the world over.

The labels of Purist and Opportunist describe not their actions so much as their general attitude toward magical-mundane relations. Purists think those with magic skills should have as little interaction with mundanes as possible. They're the ones who refuse to use magic for mundanes' benefit, regardless of compensation, but they also make it a point never to use their skills to hurt mundanes. Their argument is that if they keep magic as strictly segregated away from mundanity as possible, the mundanes will have no reason to persecute them.

The Opportunists are, if you want my honest opinion, less moral but far more pragmatic. These are the folks who say there is nothing wrong with doing magic for mundanes who are willing to pay for it. Many make an argument that it is not only their prerogative but their responsibility to offer their services to their fellow mortals to fill the gaps left open by technology and social structure.

Some aren't exactly scrupulous about the quality of the services they provide, or the contributions their services make to society, but the magic-handling community didn't seriously begin to discuss the ethics of magical/mundane transactions until quite recently. There was always an all-or-nothing quality to their debates. They were so preoccupied with the question of whether they could do business with mundanes, they never had time for the matter of how.

The Purists' national hero was a fellow named Arturo Reza. Very charismatic, persuasive, suspicious of mundanes, and very rich. He was tired of seeing his fellow sorcerers pressured into using their powers for the benefit of people who could not possibly understand them. He also had the idea that if the magic-handling community had a place of their own, they would naturally see the logic of magical separatism.

Reza bought up a chunk of land in southwestern New Mexico and built a new little town where he invited magic-handlers to buy his houses on cut-rate real estate in the late 1940s. Anyone who had a non-magical spouse or child would have to leave them behind or stay where they were.

The initial community, which he modestly dubbed Rezarta, filled up and soon required more housing. He answered by building more residential villages at the edges, which he would later use as the base points of further expansion. I got to visit the area a few times before it all became the Area Formerly Known as Rezarta, and I have to hand it to him, he made some beautiful things happen. Many of the younger Opportunists moved out there to improve their skills with the help of older and more knowledgeable sorcerers. They knew the mundane world was still eager to throw money at them, but while they were in Rezarta, they were impressed.

It probably would have gone on forever and been absolutely perfect if not for the vampires.

You may now be thinking that a horde of vampires came riding into Rezarta and ruined everything, but the problem was exactly the opposite. Magic-handlers, as a group, are able to fend off vampires, but mundanes are vulnerable.

Rezarta was almost a vampire-free zone. The almost is important, because Reza was not just ambitious, he was so ballsy as to think he could tame vampires. One of his pet projects was to have his researchers and other lackeys round up an assortment of vampires from around the States and Canada and do experiments on them. As much as this sounds like the prologue to Doomsday, I am aware that they got some interesting results. They found that if vampires stay under certain conditions for a given period of time, they start acting more like humans again. The curse still holds, they still drink human blood, and they can't survive exposure to sunlight, but they supposedly become less aggressive, more civilized, if you will.

To Reza's credit, his tame vampires behaved nicely for Daddy for as long as Rezarta was on the map, but I remain unconvinced. It's one thing for a society of sorcerers to keep a bunch of vampires under control with a steady stream of healthy blood extracted from consenting donors, but if they truly cared about keeping their fellow mortals safe from exsanguination, they would have staked those vamps rather than feed them.

No, Rezarta's real problem was with the vampires who stayed outside its reach. The more magic-handlers went to join the new Utopia of Sorcery, the fewer were left in the rest of the country, and the fewer magic-handlers were around to help the mundanes defend themselves, the more bodies were found drained of blood. While the population of sorcerers grew in Rezarta, the population of vampires increased by 23% in the lower forty-eight. It is surprisingly rare for vampires to turn mortals. Their food is a fiercely-protected commodity extracted from large mammals that are slow to breed, slow to mature, and frustratingly competent at self-preservation. The last thing vampires need is any more competition. When the American vampire population began creating more of their own kind, it wasn't because mortals had higher birth rates than usual. It was because they were easier to attack.

Under normal conditions, with magic-handlers spread evenly throughout a human population, vampires feed off the most invisible, marginalized people. They attack homeless people, streetwalkers, illegal drug addicts, convicted sex offenders, runaways, and trafficking victims. When the percentage of magic-handlers drops, vampires become more interested in undocumented immigrants, foster children, people living below the poverty line, and those living in segregated, poorly policed communities. The population of sufficiently vulnerable people expands, and vampires have more to eat and are thus more interested in having a larger population of their own.

That expansion enabled the murders of my colleague Daniel Lucas's family. The Lucases themselves were quite well-off and well-respected, but since they lived in a predominantly African-American neighborhood with an uncomfortable relationship with the police force and no magic-handlers to speak of, the vampires made an easy meal of them. Since Rezarta was disbanded by the federal government in the early 2000s and its residents were forced to reintegrate with mundanes, neighborhoods like the one in which Daniel grew up are mostly safe again from vampires, who have had to go back to preying mostly on people who have no settled community.

The salient point in the history of Rezarta is that the exodus of people who could effectively keep the vamps away soon led to a refugee situation.

As the body counts racked up, traumatized mundanes streamed into Rezarta, where they would be safe from predation. The presence of mundanes was not necessarily a problem even for the Purists, as long as the refugees kept to themselves and asked for nothing. There was plenty of menial work to be done that didn't require magical abilities, and since Rezarta was little more than a rapidly metastasizing homeowners' association, they had no legal standing to exclude anyone.

There were the refugees, and then there were the townies whom the new magic-handlers hadn't yet displaced. Many of the re-settled mundanes who had to disperse following the failed secession like to blame the original mundane population for stirring up tensions between the magic-handlers and refugees, but I am more inclined to blame the Purists for acting like the refugees had spontaneously sprung up from the ground.

It was the most predictable thing in the world when the magic-handlers failed to play nice with the mundanes who insisted on taking up space in their ostensibly utopian little kingdom. It was also unsurprising when the established population, being economically marginalized by the sudden shift to a magic-dominated economy, took out their frustrations on the magic-handlers. It was not appropriate when gangs of mundane thugs ambushed and brutalized lone magic-handlers, but with the way the Purist settlers treated mundanes like a lower species, it was to be expected.

While the local police force was mostly displaced and otherwise failed to adapt to the changing population, it was a further non-surprise when Opportunists exacted revenge on mundanes by selling dangerous goods and services to any mundanes foolish enough to pay for magic, most of whom were refugees. When Purists got together and attacked Opportunists for their dealings with the mundanes, that wasn't really what Arturo Reza had in mind. However, since Reza and his inner circle never came up with a strategy for responding to the refugee situation except shun them and they'll go away, they couldn't put the blame entirely on the Opportunists. The settlers, try as they might, could not convincingly blame the mundane population for the tensions that arose when the mundanes' hometowns were annexed.

Granted, the magic-handlers did not have a monopoly on hostility. The original mundane population regarded the settlers as the worst kind of interlopers, and seeing what happened to the employment statistics of those who weren’t displaced, the sentiment was understandable. The mundanes could also harbor some fascinating superstitions, and the settlers made a convenient screen on which the original population could project their anxieties. The townies became increasingly insular and hostile to the settlers, and their hostility made life no easier for the refugees who came streaming in to escape the vampires. The townies would fetishize the magic-handlers, sometimes openly, like they were exotic animals rather than highly skilled human beings. The Opportunists, ever pragmatic, were happy to rise to the occasion, and a roaring trade in magic-enhanced sex work sprang up to capitalize on the mundane fetishization of sorcery. This was, strictly speaking, not legal, but after a certain point, Rezarta came to think of itself as its own country.

By the time Arturo Reza died in the late 90s, Rezarta had spread west to Arizona and south to the border with Mexico, which opened up a new dimension of populist hostility. The magic-handlers, particularly the Opportunists, had no problems loosening up the border and giving Mexicans an easy way into the U.S. Even the Purists found they got along better with Mexican mundanes than with the Anglophone Americans who'd been going in and out of Rezarta for decades. There was a predictable increase in the number of low-skilled workers coming in from Mexico, which further weakened the economic landscape for the mundane population.

After Reza's death, his old friends, cronies and advisors started thinking they were on to something. They decided that they could get along quite nicely with mundanes as long as they were grateful to be where they were. If they could have legal grounds to expel the townies and choose which mundanes they allowed to stay, then their problems would be solved.

On Christmas Day of 2001, Rezarta announced its secession from the United States. If they'd tried it ten years earlier, they might have succeeded, but 2001 was in the second term of President Miranda Hutchinson, who was having none of that bullshit.

Hutchinson was known in some corners of Congress as Godzilla, and they didn't mean the nickname affectionately. She was the first female president, the first openly non-religious president, and the first one to serve more than eight years since FDR. She had been a high school Spanish teacher before her first term in the House of Representatives, where it is rumored that she gathered blackmail-worthy information on half of Congress and part of the Senate, a skill which she continued to hone during her tenure as VP.

She made a surprising running mate to her predecessor, President Dale Geoffreys, who was impeached out of office due to ethics violations in 1995. Vice President Hutchinson took his place and won two terms on her own power. She was aware of her controversial status as the new POTUS after Geoffreys' impeachment, so she played it safe until after the 1996 election.

Her first major risk in the office of President was to overhaul the nation's educational system. In short, when she was finished pissing off everyone in Washington, the country actually had a national educational system. This left the Congressional GOP and many state governors huffing and puffing that she would pay the consequences of her overreach. They had already failed to stop her, however, and her approval rating shot up to the low 80s when the changes were implemented in schools.

Before her first full term was up, she wrangled Congress into passing single-payer healthcare, and in the throes of her second presidential campaign, she orchestrated legalization of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and most other recreational drugs with a system of regulations, taxes, and treatment programs that effectively cut new prison sentences down to less than 40% of their previous numbers. This move was regarded by political scientists as the biggest middle finger ever issued to the cultural Right by a politician in national office.

After she won her second and final election to the Presidency, Rezarta declared their new status as a sovereign nation. There was much buzz around Washington that this would be President Godzilla's Achilles heel. It was one thing for a crafty, observant woman to make opposing politicians cooperate, but how would a mundane leader deal with magic-handlers?

Hutchinson's foreign policy up until then had mostly been to downsize the American military presence in other countries, and she was widely regarded as being talented at domestic affairs at the expense of military competence. There were plenty of jokes going around the punditocracy about women in the military, but as it turned out, she had enough Opportunists working for the Department of Defense to get around the Rezartans' magical protections. She took all the Army and Air Force troops she'd brought home from our bases abroad and sent them to put down the secession.

Once she finished smacking down their nonsense, she organized the Magical Resettlement Act, which assigned new homes in other parts of the country to 90% of the magic-handlers in the affected area. Many of the people in question did not go quietly, but the military didn't leave the area until all the sorcerers were relocated. If the military intervention didn't put an end to Reza's pet projects and experiments, the Resettlement did. I would like to say that the captive vampires who were kept quiet on donated blood were all staked before their handlers were forced to move out, but according to all accounts, the captive undead were sent out to the wilderness, where I have no doubt they are preying on the trafficked, homeless, and destitute as vampires are wont to do when left unsupervised.

While magic-handlers, including many who had never moved to Rezarta, were enraged at the Magical Resettlement Act, the race that appreciated the dispersal of Rezarta the most were fairies. Anything that makes fairies especially excited is cause for concern.

Fairies are shape-shifters that can take any form as long as it maintains the same mass. When they are developed enough to function outside of their gestational pouches, they weigh between four and ten pounds. When they reach their full size, they weigh between one-hundred and two-hundred pounds. The similarities to human biology are limited to size.

Fairies eat by drawing gases straight from the air. Their digestion is extremely efficient, so their diet is very parsimonious. If they live in areas where the air is either thin or heavily polluted, they supplement their diets by eating the occasional flower. Since it takes a huge volume of air to support a fairy, they are sparsely populated. They take around a hundred-ten years to reach their full size, and are accordingly slow to reproduce, which they do parthenogenetically. They are not technically immortal, but they seem that way to humans because they live for several hundred years and are vulnerable to so few causes of death.

With their expansive life expectancies and scant numbers, one might think fairies would be wise, steady creatures. In fact, they are widely recognized as the village idiots of the magical world. Even after they reach full size, they take decades longer to achieve what passes among them for emotional maturity. They have nothing to fear from vampires and are in no way dependent on humans, yet they seem to enjoy living in a world that's densely populated with mortals.

They like to play with humans, especially mundanes, in the sense that humans are the fairies' toys. The relocation of magic-handlers back into the general population was a boon to fairies, as it allowed more humans to relax and spend more time outside. Unlike merfolk, fairies can interact with humans at their leisure, often while successfully passing for human themselves. Unlike vampires, they are not constrained by daylight or property rights. Unlike any other sentient race, there are no means of control on their actions.

While fairies celebrated the return of their good-humored mortals, Miranda Hutchinson began to self-destruct. According to White House insiders of the early 2000s, the Resettlement was the most ambitious endeavor of President Hutchinson's already impressive career, but it was also the beginning of her downward spiral. She began showing up drunk to Cabinet meetings. She was sometimes so hung-over that she couldn't come to work, and her VP, Edward Bialik, had more to do in her stead. She muddled through her public appearances without destroying anything, she continued to sign and veto bills from Congress, and she did not enact any more major initiatives for the rest of the term. In her second campaign, she had talked much about decriminalization of prostitution and enacting protections and regulations for sex workers, but this never came to pass.

In 2004, Bialik was elected the new President, and Hutchinson managed to stay functional through his Inauguration. After seeing him into the White House, Hutchinson moved to her sister's horse ranch in Oregon, ostensibly to spend more time with her teenage nephew and niece.

For all I know, she may have been a very attentive aunt when she was not intoxicated to the point of incoherence, but she was found unresponsive one morning in mid-2007. Her sister rushed her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with stroke. After ten days without a change, her sister had her taken off life support. She was fifty-three. Current members of Congress who were in office during her Presidency still refer to her as Godzilla.

Scanlon Ness has been writing about magical issues of concern to mundane Americans since 1986. His 2004 story in Newsweek, Where the Vampires Are, won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism. He lives in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

CHAPTER THREE

Hydrangea Blossoms

Miranda Hutchinson

By far, the most frustrating thing about staying behind after death is the one-sidedness of our relationship with the living. At any given time, there are millions of departed souls still hanging around in this world, but most living people have no idea of who we are.

How infuriating, that they understand vampires, unicorns, merfolk, and fairies so much better than their own deceased. I'd like to say it's not their fault they can't hear us even when we want to be heard, but this is a weakness I never found charming in humanity: they can't see what's in front of their eyes. So many mortals are either so confident about what they see, or so certain of what they don't see, they're oblivious to what's really around them. It's a rare mortal who can get out of the way of his own senses.

There was one way that I could communicate with the living, and that was through their dreams. The communication was much like approaching a stranger at a coffee shop; you couldn't make them talk, and if they said anything, there was no guarantee it would be truthful. I found that mortals were more open to talking to strangers in their dreams, but many also lost their ability to make sense. How much I got out of that conversation was not up to me.

After that day in which I appeared in one of Meliana's portraits, I waited until the wee hours of the morning and invited myself into her apartment. I had been under the impression that real estate in Athanoria was super cheap, and I'd assumed that she and her roommate could afford more than that one-bedroom place along with her studio. It was my own damn fault when I floated into their bedroom and felt all foolish to note the single king-sized bed taking up the middle of the room, where Meliana slept contentedly tangled up with the woman who helped her set up her easel every Sunday before her lunch shift.

All the same, something handy about talking to a dreaming person is that the one sharing her bed doesn't need to hear a thing. I waited for Meliana's eyelids to start moving in the telltale pattern, and I made contact.

When I make contact with a dreaming mortal, the room around us appears to change into her dream world. From her side, I guess her dream simply has me in it. I knew that with Meliana, the dream world would be something utterly weird, and I was not disappointed.

On that particular night, I found her exploring what appeared to be a 3D fractal constructed of striated minerals. Mortals can range from friendly to hostile to unresponsive, and she was happy to see me floating along with her through that cavern of malachite carved to infinitely dividing curves and points. She appeared to be examining the malachite structures as we floated along, but it soon became apparent that she was sculpting her surroundings.

She crouched down to a particular outgrowth of fractal rock and the brilliant green turned red, blooming out to navy blue and then back to green. As we floated along through her cavernous dream sculpture, the jewel-toned malachite turned to pastel marble, and the shapes became less rounded and more elongated. It looked less like a fractal in solid form and more like a room carved into ornate columns.

She seemed comfortable with me following along in her dream, aware of my presence and content to have a companion, but making no effort to interact.

Meliana, do you know who I am?

She looked up from smoothing down a sharp edge on some pale green marble and answered: Yes. You look like former President Joy Greenbird, who led us through the Mytho-Revolutionary Fields of Hydrangea Blossoms.

She started off answering correctly, but the way she veered off could mean she didn't understand or her verbal ability fell apart in sleep. In my experiences with dreaming mortals, either was a possibility.

I’ve seen you doing portraits outside the restaurant. She gave me a pleasant smile but made no comment. Is that how you make your living? Only portraits? I knew that was only a fraction of her work. I needed to get a handle on her answering style.

No, I also make peony folds in paper frames for the glass ivy opalescent frameworks, and when the--

I interrupted her. "Meli, what's the name