Grave (49 page)

What was I now? Was I really... everything, even that which only seemed wholly separate from myself? It would kill someone, wouldn’t it, to even imagine they could somehow embody all that, take it all in? And yet it was true.

It was true. Lisa, Stephen, Linc, my mother, Jessie, all them were still themselves and yet, now, they were all also me. And Amy too, the girl who had been Amy, now she was just one of a thousand million facets of this thing called myself. Multitudes upon multitudes, living, dead, undead, dead living. My libations.

“Please don’t die.” Naomi’s voice, pleading. “Lisa, even if it is God’s will, I don’t want them to die—”

“I know. But they’ve been very sick, honey. They’ve been in pain. It’s all right. We have to let them go.”

Lisa’s voice was like a knife between my ribs: her resignation, exhaustion, fathomless sorrow and grief that I’d thought I’d helped assuage for just a little while but now without meaning to I’d brought it rushing back to her, full force. If it weren’t for Naomi she’d have begged me to kill her, I knew it, she’d have pleaded with me to raise my hand up just like he once had and strike her down, let her die. Just like I’d raised my hand up while I was still alive, still human, to strike others down. Thank God for Naomi.

Had I raised my hand up already, just now, without knowing it? Knowing what it meant, what it felt like to do that in life, would I ever have to courage deliberately to do it now?

I pulled away from them all, from Jessie where she lay cradled in Lisa’s arms, from poor Naomi who’d already in six years seen too much for a lifetime. From Stephen and my mother, even though when they said so easily, so unhesitatingly
of course we’re going with you, of course you’ll never be so alone again
my heart grew light and buoyant, despite the dying all around me. I wept for Jessie, for all of them, knowing that it was time for them to go and even if I could stop them, I wouldn’t.

I walked away to give them space and room and nobody tried to stop me. Nick, my Old Nick I thought I’d lost forever, he padded alongside me just like he had since the true beginnings of my life, a far different and better moment than my mere birth. The sound of the calliope was still wheeling mad and drunken through my mind, every separate sad gorgeous note making my head reel and ring with the sound of a thousand, a million secret harmonies, but it wasn’t dizzying or crazymaking, it was just beautiful. It was a drunken crazy steadiness. It was what had always been meant to be there, in the hollow places, all along.

“Beautiful,” he mused. “There’s a word for it.”

He’d come down the ridge, not disappearing and reappearing as he always did but simply walking, trudging toward us, like any ordinary man. He stood there before me, his feet in their mud-caked work boots wide apart in the sand; he had my father’s face, this time, not the man who fathered me as my mother’s price for escaping the lab but the man who called himself my dad, loved me, died when I was only five and barely knew how to imagine where he’d gone. No matter that we’d never been the same flesh and blood—I looked into his face and still swore I saw the same straight, matter-of-fact slope to both our noses, the same shape of jaw and chin, the same little quirk at the right corner of our mouths, a constant permanent uptick like a smile always waiting to happen, and I was satisfied.

“Is it the wrong word for it?” I asked.

“Not at all,” he said. “Not at all. It’s just that it usually takes one so much longer to learn to appreciate it.”

The quirk of the lip became an actual smile, one I remembered well and not just from photographs. Hello, Daddy. I was glad he’d come back again, if only the form of him, that the rotten flesh and tarry blackened blood of him that my mother set ablaze was nothing but the shell, the discarded candy wrapper. He—it—could be anyone, of course, but he gave me my father to talk to. To show me what would happen next. Strange sort of employee’s signing bonus, maybe, but I’d take it. Nick nuzzled around the legs of his jeans, wagging his tail, and he reached down and patted him with rough, easy affection.

“Why me?” I asked. Never mind that I wanted it, that I chose it without hesitation. I still wanted to know. “Why me? And why you—I mean, the person you can’t remember but who you once were? Why us?”

He shrugged. “Why anyone? You were there. I was here. You were willing. Just like I must have been, back in the day. Your friend Jessie, she’ll tell you—we’ve talked before, long before you and I met—I don’t punish, at least not on the individual level. This is no punishment. I—which, of course, is to say
you
—don’t judge. I don’t condemn. I merely take what I need. From each according to their ability, et cetera, did you get that far in school?”

“They didn’t like to teach that stuff in school,” I said.

“I’m not surprised. Mind if I smoke?”

He pulled a lighter and crushed cigarette box from his back pocket without waiting for an answer, lit up, inhaled more deeply than any human could have managed. My dad never smoked, but then he’d never appeared out of nowhere at the averted end of the world either. As he exhaled, the smoke spun like frayed grayish-white thread from his mouth, his nostrils, the pores of his face and hands and every fold and crevice of his clothes. From his eyes, like tears gone to ice and then to fog and mist.

“I, which is to say you,” I repeated. “So we’re... one and the same now? You and I?”

The question seemed to surprise him. “Of course. Just as we’re one and the same with everyone else standing here, everything surrounding us, the whole of all and eternity—and I thought you understood all this already. They really don’t teach you kids much, do they?” He inhaled again, deeply, luxuriously. “We’re sharing that burden, the two of us, for the time being. I mean, you don’t make a transition like that overnight. But once you’ve learned everything you need to know, really learned it, I can give up my share. I’ll be gone. Dead. Just like your friend Florian: I’ll be part of you, but all and eternity will no longer be part of
me
. And the whole of the burden will be yours.”

He exhaled again, spun the lit cigarette between his fingertips, gave me a sidelong glance. “I wonder how long you’ll last, when you have to do
all
the heavy lifting? A few decades, a few centuries—”

“Time’s nothing,” I said. Easy, dismissive. And I meant it. “Time is nothing. I’m already forgetting what it means.”

Was that a bad thing? Should I have been scared about it? What would it really mean, anyway, if eternity and ten seconds were to become interchangeable for me? Maybe I’d never leave this new life, this new afterlife. Maybe I’d never have to, never get old and tired like he had. Like whoever came before him must have. But what difference did it make, really? All in due time. An eternity away.

“They can come with me, can’t they?” I asked. I’d just assumed they could, but suddenly I was afraid. “Stephen, my mother—”

He shrugged. “Why not? As you folks like to say, it’s their funeral.” Exhale. In through the mouth, out through the nose, pores, eyelids, scalp. “Better you have some company anyway. I mean, we already know you don’t do so well, left all to your own devices.”

“No man is an island.”

“No man is an island. They’re already something
other
to you, aren’t they? Human beings, I mean? Something else. So soon. It almost surprises me.”

“They always were,” I said, and there was a quiet relief in speaking the words out loud. Like the first time I’d ever said them to Stephen, the first he ever said them back to someone else. The first night we were together. “I never felt like one of them. Not superior, I mean—just the opposite. I was always falling short. I was never really good enough, to make it as human.” Or fake it. Even that. “Maybe this is still falling short. But it’s what I’m ready for. I’m already too changed to feel like one of them, if I ever were at all—”

“Doesn’t mean you won’t live to regret it.” He folded his arms, gazing down at me with a bemused, almost grandfatherly merriment. Still, even now, enjoying a good quiet laugh at my expense. “Live and live and live to regret it. Of course, too late now.”

Maybe I would. Maybe sooner than I imagined. But so what? I didn’t have to do this.
You ain’t gotta.
But I wanted to. Just as, too long ago to fathom, he too might have wanted to. Maybe the real crime never was that we stole from Death—willingly or not—but that Death kept stealing and stealing our willingness, our eye-open consent, from us. Maybe if just one of us said yes, just the one, everyone else could rest better with not being able to tell Death no.

“Did I... kill them?” I asked, inclining my head toward Jessie, the others. “I didn’t—were they, you know, my first?”

Smoke kept streaming from his eyes, his skin, the cloth of his shirt. “Define ‘I.’” he said, smiling.

But then he seemed to take pity on me. “One last benevolent gesture, courtesy of yours truly. It’s what they wanted, isn’t it? Weren’t they just saying so? You can’t rend your garments about it now.”

And so soon, they would be gone. But not gone, just faded from immediate view, part of the sun and sky and trees and sand and the air everyone took into their lungs and the electrical impulses making up every thought, every memory, every feeling and longing and wish. Just like everyone, everywhere, who ever lived and died. Every atom tells a story, don’t it.

Death just stood there, looking at me and Nick. Watching us watch the small, sorrowing crowd at the other end of the beach.

“There’s something else I wanted to ask for,” I said.

“Name it.”

“A guitar.” My own frivolity made me laugh, but this was important to me and I had a feeling I wouldn’t get another chance. “I want—I want music. I need music. I really do.” Lisa figured that out, quickly, when we first met. Poor Lisa. Even though we’d meet again, in what was already no more than a heartbeat for me, I was going to miss her so much. I never wanted to make her sad. I never wanted her to lose someone all over again. “Please.”

Death just shrugged. “And here I thought you were going to demand something outrageous.” He inhaled. Held it for a painful few seconds. Exhaled. “Music. That’s nothing.”

“Not to me, it isn’t,” I said.

He pivoted on his heel, studied the lab building up on the ridge like he’d never seen it before in his life. I closed my own eyes and somewhere behind my actual vision, behind the pulsing dark red trying to slip through my eyelids, I saw rooms clean as the first hours of springtime, flooded with sunlight; every window was open to the outside air and every day, even when the sky was blue-black midnight or sparkling harsh after a snowstorm or subdued and gray with rain, was a perpetual peaceful mid-May dawn. No more closed-in rooms, no more prisoner’s windows stuck small and high on the topmost walls, but the hallways would still be there, more numerous and byzantine than I’d ever imagined. I could live there, if I liked. I could spend hours, years wandering through that maze of hallways, never getting lost but also never quite finding what lay at the end. In my house there were many, many rooms. And the air in all of them, even the most subterranean depths, would be so clean and sweet. So full of perpetual light.

I was ready.

“A guitar,” Death repeated. “Music. That can be arranged. Most things can be, you’ll find...”

The smoldering remains of his cigarette fell from his mouth, dropped to the sand; his heel crushed it out harshly, his foot making a wide encompassing sweep, like a little kid taking aim at a colony of anthills. My master, everyone’s master, from before any of us were ever born. My brother. Myself. I turned my back on him, Nick following at my heels, and went to rejoin the others.

THIRTY-THREE

JESSIE

I
was dying. At long last, I was actually dying.

There were footsteps above me and a throb and hum of voices, but I couldn’t make out what any one person was saying, it all just blended together like the buzz of ten thousand flies—no. Lisa’s voice, I could make hers out, and Amy’s, and that little girl stuck to Lisa’s side whose name I couldn’t remember anymore. Linc was beside me and my head was on his shoulder and Renee’s head was in my lap, my fingers in her hair. For a moment I thought we were back in the nature preserve at the height of the plague, but the plague was over, the apocalypse that aborted itself was over, the fight was over. Finally. Long last.

Was I scared? I wasn’t sure. I just wanted this to be the end, the last, no cheats or tricks or backtracks. Not anymore.

Voices. Somebody was saying something. Linc. He raised his head up and I could feel the effort it took him, the rusty broken machinery of his body creaking and groaning to turn the gears one final time. He said my name,
Jessie
, and those mere two syllables cost him so much energy that he crashed right back into the sand. Of course it made sense, that he would die first of all of us. He’d cheated Death, been cheated out of death, for decades now, so much longer than me or Renee. I reached a hand up and touched his face.