Published in 2000, Link Yaco’s “Death Goddess of the Lower East Side “ was written for Steven-Elliot Altman’s shared world anthology The Touch: Epidemic of the Millennium,  which invited authors to write stories in a world in which Deprivers are stricken with a disease which causes them to lose their slowly senses. Highly contagious and passed on by physical contact, Deprivers are forced to declare their medical status and cover themselves in clothing to avoid accidentally brushing up against someone and causing them to  become infected.

Maria Terez Lopez is one of the afflicted, living in New York, seeing posers who have adopted the styles used by the Deprivers as a fashion statement, and working as a waitress in a small restaurant that only employs Deprivers and focuses their service on those who are Deprivers or feel a kinship with the Deprivers. Even though she is surrounded by people, her customers, her co-workers, and especially her boss, Jake Nada, who keeps making passes at her, despite the danger to both of them, should she ever accept, there is no sign that she has any deep connections to anyone, keeping everyone at a distance due to her malady.

 

Despite that distance, Maria is not shown to be particularly lonely, nor even fatalistic. She knows her life isn’t what she would like it to be, but she also knows what she must do, to keep others safe as well as herself, because while touching those who are not afflicted is dangerous to them, being touched by the afflicted, including Jake, can exacerbate her symptoms.

Hope and concern come to Maria in the form of two of her customers. One is a student from NYU who claims that she can relieve, or perhaps even cure, Maria through the use of acupressure and homeopathic techniques. The other is a man who seems to look up on Depravers with an eye towards fetishism, uncaring of the impact they would have on him, or perhaps hoping for it.

While either of those storylines could be the focus of Yaco’s work, both of them seem to peter out, pushing the tale of Maria’s relationship with Jake, although even that seems to end rather quickly, and in a manner which is not fully set up by the story that precedes it. Instead, Maria, who has been careful, considerate, and deliberate throughout the story, gives into an impulse following a fleeting encounter, which should not have come as a surprise.

The story feels like a bit of a letdown because the payoff doesn’t connect to the set up. Not only isn’t it earned by the characters, but it actively seems to betray the characterizations which the reader has been shown throughout the short story. The one way the ending is true to Yaco’s setting is that however the story ended, either with the denouement he provides or a different one that was in line with Maria’s character, the ending of “Death Goddess of the Lower East Side” would have to have been a pessimistic, if not downright depressing, ending. The world in which people suffer from the disease that is described can’t be anything but.

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Steven H Silver is a twenty-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference six times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.