The cigarette smoke trailed from his mouth, nose, ears, the dark open pits of his eyes. “But that’s all right, you know. He made a mistake, trying to do something good for everyone, and that gave me the foot in the door I’d been needing. He’ll be dead soon, if he’s not already. But you—you seem to be hovering, one foot off the cliff edge, and I can’t for the life of all figure out if you’ll jump.” He blinked, bits of ash drifting from behind his eyelids as they opened again. “So I thought we should have a little talk, just to clarify your goals. So to speak.”
“You don’t just take us whenever you want?” I stared out past the trees, at the merry figures leaping in and out of their own gravesites; flashes of color were all I saw, quick and fleeting as lightning bugs.
“Oh, I could,” he agreed. “But the ones who fight and fight and fight, they intrigue me. So stubborn, for no good reason.” He inhaled again, smoke now seeming to leak out through the pores of his skin. “Ain’t no need to kick up such a fuss. You already figured out it’s all the same thing in the end, death, life, the big merry-go-round, but you keep doin’ it anyway. Befuddles me, Jessie, I don’t mind saying.”
Florian’s voice now. Utterly natural, somehow, to hear it from the split-wide death-mouth that wasn’t Jim’s—Florian, Jim, had I really been talking to someone else all along? My only real friend. Friends, though, they have agendas just like everyone else. Death’s was obvious. And yet, if Death really was Life, in the end . . .
“So what do you want from me?” I asked.
He pointed the half-smoked cigarette at a pear tree. It flared into flowery life, grew glossy leaves and great fistfuls of ripe beautiful pears, dropped them as one to the ground and withered in the course of seconds.
“Wanna play a game?” Joe’s voice now, the teasing affectionate timbre that used to make my stomach tighten in the most pleasant way. “Life and I have been playing forever—but letting it win all the time, just because it seemed like I was supposed to, that got boring.” He settled back against an apple blossom tree, and the pink petals littering the grass instantly turned sickly brown. “So let’s try mass death out for a while, see how the planet copes with it. Can always change my mind, wipe all of you out later and restore the living—so how about it? If you win the game, you get to live.” He gestured around us, at the trees and grass, the berry-covered clusters of bushes in between the graves, the long line of the lakeshore below us. “And if you lose, this isn’t exactly the fires of hell. So what do you say, Jess. A game?”
“I don’t know how to play chess.” I cradled the pear in my palms. “And I’m really bad at riddles. And I have to get to the lakeshore.”
He laughed, patting the grass next to him affectionately. I didn’t sit down.
“Aw, give me a little credit, Jessie,” Billy’s voice argued. “Not that kinda chickenshit game. I was thinking more . . . a wager, y’know? I ask questions, make a little instant bet with
mi compadre Vida
what your answer’s gonna be and may the best entity win. You. Forever.” He smoked down the cigarette, ash floating from his skin as he stubbed it out in the grass. “So whaddaya say?”
“I say that’s a riddle. Or a trial, which is even—”
“It’s a wager, based on honest inquiry.” Jim’s voice, again; I must’ve hit a nerve. “I have no particular answers in mind, and I’m accusing you of no crime. Your lot always tries to play these little semantics games to stall for time, it’s quite boring. Let’s start.”
“Let’s not,” I repeated. My body was shaking again, the heat of fever sending it paradoxically cold, but I felt completely calm, focused, stubborn as hell. “I’ve got things to do.”
He motioned to the graveyard, the trees and grass around us, the dune forests and the lake. “You can only pick one of these places to live in forever—graveyard, orchard, beach. Which do you choose?”
“The shores of Lake Michigan,” I said. “Which that beach isn’t. I have to go there now. Good-bye.”
He lit another cigarette, casual as if I were playing along. “You can spend eternity with only one person, the others you’ll never see again. Just one. Who do you pick?”
I pointed the pear at him, small end forward, like some fat mutated gun. “Everybody dies alone,” I said. “So I guess that’d be myself. But that’s as may be. I’m going to the beach, not eternity, and I intend to have company.”
The two halves of Jim’s shell were withering, like the peeled skin of a fruit left out in the sun; trails of gray smoke now streamed from Death’s/Life’s every pore and orifice. I think I was starting to make him angry. Good.
“Eternity eating only live flesh or dead meat. Which one?”
I watched the deer stroll through the dune forest and bend down at their ease to feed, the squirrels amble up and down the tree trunks. “I’ll feed off you,” I said. “That way I get both at once, and won’t have to hurt any animals. But there’s plenty more at the lakeshore, I won’t have to choose. I’m going there now.”
He shucked the last remains of Jim’s skin like an uncomfortable sweater. The face-splitting grin, the dark bottomless hollows where eyes should have been, the skeletal nakedness were like Florian’s body at the very end and I felt a strange, nostalgic sadness, remembering his eyes melting from their sockets like ice cream in the sun, the knocking banging bone-to-bone tremors that scraped him into dust.
“Ice cream in the sun,” he, it, murmured as it stared at me. “That’s as good a question as any. Vanilla or chocolate?”
“Butter pecan.” I held tighter to the pear, as if it could protect me. “I think. I don’t remember what ice cream tastes like anymore.”
“Apples or oranges?”
“Raspberries. Blueberries. Turkish delight, what the hell do you care?”
“A train leaves San Francisco at five P.M. going east at ninety-five miles per hour, and another train—”
“I’m leaving now,” I said. “I’m going.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” He had human eyes again, very suddenly, and they gave me the pitying glance you offer a drunk, a bum on the street. A stupid child. “Nowhere ever again.”
When he rose to his skeletal feet he towered over my head, casting a shadow that blotted out the trees, the shoreline, the sun. I was in the dark again, lying in a wooden box in a concrete shell in an oblong of dirt; I was walking under a new moon watching the human world wind down and die, every light burned out, shot out, useless and extinguished. Lying in the woods, torn limb from limb, waiting to be eaten up just like Joe. He, it, them, loomed over me with eternal light in one eye, eternal night in the other. Judge. Jury. Executioner.
“You lose,” it said.
I’d always known. We always do. Lose, that is. We never know or learn a damned thing.
“Are we being punished for something?” I asked.
An almost dainty snort of derision. “Don’t be stupid.”
“So you’re just bored. Want to shake things up a little. All of this really means nothing.”
It shrugged and laughed, a dry hollow chortle. “I keep trying to explain to you, I don’t test, I don’t judge, I don’t calibrate, I don’t
care.
This is just how it is. Has always been. May always be.” He, it, put a hand on my shoulder, bare finger bones thick with dirt and the desiccated remains of skin. “And now it’s time to go. It’s time for all of you, every one of you, to go.”
Time to go. Time to give up the ghost, hand over my poor body like some sort of worn, creased-up pool pass. Because you say so, even though you’ve got billions, trillions, just like me but I need
this
body to get to the beaches, to save everyone, it may not be much but it’s all I’ve got, this poor little body shaking and trembling with starving sickness, its scalp nearly bald. (I had a damned potato skull, not like Renee’s, thank God I’d never tried shaving it while I was alive.) It belonged to
me
, however many times it got ripped to its roots and changed all over again, and it wasn’t such a bad thing to have: the arm that hugged Joe (before he turned on me), the fist that fought Teresa (and lost), the hair (all fallen out) Linc liked to stroke when he thought I was asleep. A weird sensation, feeling a protective, maternal sort of love for your own remains. Motherly narcissism. Sick, really, when you thought about it. But that’s too bad. It’s mine. Not yours.
“I’m not going,” I said. My fingers broke through the pear’s thin skin, sinking into the soft, overripe sugar grit of the flesh beneath. “Sorry. I’ve got things to do. Not now.”
“You don’t get to make that decision,” it said. Its bony hand tightened. “It’s time.”
“You have billions just like me,” I said. “Trillions. You’ll never miss just one—”
“Each one unique.” It stared right through me, sweeping over me with a blinding sulfurous searchlight and suffocating shadow: eternal light, eternal night. “Each one itself. Each death really
does
diminish, Jessie—human, inhuman, man, woman, child, infant, animal, insect. There are no trivial losses. Which, of course, means I make no trivial gains. I can’t do without you, Jessie. Without you in particular.”
“You’ll get me eventually anyway,” I said. I felt no fear. Fear and panic wouldn’t penetrate here, wherever this place was, perhaps because they meant nothing to this entity that ruled it. “You can wait.”
“You’re so sure about that?” The death grip on my shoulder was tightening, crushing, hard enough to snap bones, but I felt no pain, no pain just like no fear. A little attempted inducement, that, a silent hard sell. “Maybe if I don’t get you now, I won’t ever get you at all. I mean, a smashed-in skull won’t kill you anymore, or being torn limb from limb, or heat, or cold, or rot, or overwork, or a knife blade, or bullets, or flamethrowers—”
“You said it yourself, didn’t you? You can always change your mind and wipe us all out. So you don’t need me just now.”
Silence. Then those skeletal, preternaturally strong fingers had me fast, crushing me in their hold like grain between millstones; my feet flew straight off the soft grassy ground as I dangled before the light and night of bottomless eye sockets, above the yawning chasm of a dark, sticky mouth.
“You belong to me,” it whispered. “Since before you even existed, all of you have always belonged to me.”
That great hole of its mouth was wet and black, oozing with murk, like coffin liquor from a gutted undead. Like a primordial mud, bubbling up from the earth back when it was new: death, which was life, which was exactly the same thing. That’s the thing, isn’t it, I thought, as I dangled over the defanged precipice, waiting to be swallowed whole: You’re right. You’ve always had me. Which means you’ll always have me. Which means you don’t need to take me now, you don’t need to take me ever, you’re inside me and a part of me just like Florian and Ben and Sam and Joe and Ron and my mother and father and all those other losses that’ve gone into the making of me—why the hell do you need my poor pathetic
corpse
to make that real, a flesh-and-blood tool you’ll just let sit unused and rusting in the box? How can you be so fixated on the least important thing?
“Your pleas don’t move me,” said its voice, not coming from that gaping canyon mouth now but from somewhere far beyond. “Not at all.”
Pleas? Fuck pleading. This is just how it
is.
I need this body, not you. You’ve never needed to take our bodies to have us and maybe you’ll understand that now that Death rules the earth, these are my legs and not yours kicking at the air, at the bubbling tar swallowing them, my hands trying to pry your fingers free, my teeth scrabbling for a sink-hold on your nonexistent flesh, I’ll take your eyes, I’ve done it before, I’m not going—going to die—I’m not going—the sky blotted out, sticky wet nothingness, choking and drowning and I can’t go now, I need to get to the beaches, I’m not letting you, I’m snarling and growling like the old days and my hands are throttling your great bony throat the beach is gone the trees the graves are gone the deer the night the moon the great black tarry mouth I’m not going with you I’m suffocating I’m dying I’m not—
The night sky, not wet overwhelming blackness but a distant, peaceful deep gray. No graveyard. No farm. I lay curled knees to chin near a rusted-out marquee sign next to a peeling, peacock blue abandoned shrimp shack on a roadside in Gary, my road, my shack, my world. I was sick again, bile coating my throat and mouth, but when I was gasping and finished, my gut actually subsided, my stomach unknotting and breath slowing to normal. Breath. Normal. I’d never get used to having working lungs. I was drenched in sweat, soaked head to foot and shivering, but I could move without every muscle clenching, stretch my legs without spasms, when I raised my head the earth didn’t dip and spin but stayed courteously still.
I rose to my knees, then my feet. Shaky, still shivering, weak and hollow-limbed but steady enough. Shockingly steady. My clothes, skin, what was left of my hair were grimy, stiff, maddeningly itchy with the layers of dirt, sweat, blood, dried puke, hardened grease, streaks of feeding fat and I had a sudden, powerful urge I hadn’t felt since before that long-ago car accident, years and years past: the need to bathe. It actually made me laugh. Laughing hurt, wore me out.
I was clutching something sticky and sugar-grit soft tight in one hand. I opened my fingers and saw not rotten pear but the hard remains of a lake stone, snapped into pieces. The stones none of us could break open, grind, crush, bite down on for trying. Like blood from a sliced vein, juice from a ripe fruit, something oozed from the pieces and ran onto my skin: tarry and black like coffin liquor but as it hit the air it dried out, hardened, became grainy and lighter colored and seeped grittily from my opened fingers onto the ground. Sand. A low-humming, barely audible singing sand. Where it touched my skin I felt soothed, stronger, like something inside it was buzzing and burrowing deep into my cells and nerves to protect me, restore me. Keep me walking, when I should long since have been dead.