Authors: Susan Palwick
Most of the people who’d been walking away had stopped now: good. The man with the quiet voice was hissing. “Rusty, what are you doing?”
“I’m doing what he wants me to do,” Rusty said into the microphone. “I’m, what was that word,
imploring
you to do the right thing.”
He stopped, out of words, and concentrated very hard on what he was going to say next. He caught a flash of purple out of the corner of his left eye. Was that another butterfly? He turned. No: it was a splendid purple bandana. The aide on the platform was waving it at Rusty. Rusty’s heart melted. He fell in love with the bandana. The bandana was the most exquisite thing he had ever seen. Who wouldn’t covet the bandana? And indeed, one of his companions, the one on the left, was snatching at it.
Rusty took a step towards the bandana, and then forced himself to stop. No. The aide was trying to distract him. The aide was cheating. The bandana was a trick. Rusty still had his paperweight. He didn’t need the bandana.
Heartsick, nearly sobbing, Rusty turned back to the podium, dragging the other corpse with him. The other corpse whimpered, but Rusty prevailed. He knew that this was very important. It was as important as the paperweight in his pocket. He could no longer remember why, but he remembered that he had known once.
“Darling!” Linda said, running towards him. “Darling! I forgive you! I love you! Dear Rusty!”
She was wearing a shiny barrette. She never wore barrettes. It was another trick. Rusty began to tremble. “Linda,” he said into the microphone. “Shut up. Shut up and go away, Linda. I have to say something.”
Rusty’s other companion, the one on his right, let out a small squeal and tried to lurch towards Linda, towards the barrette. “No,” Rusty said, keeping desperate hold. “You stay here. Linda, take that shiny thing off! Hide it, Linda!”
“Darling!” she said, and the right-hand corpse broke away from Rusty and hopped off the podium, towards Linda. Linda screamed and ran, the corpse trotting after her. Rusty sighed; the aide groaned again; the quiet man cursed, softly.
“Okay,” Rusty said, “so here’s what I have to tell you.” Some of the people in the crowd who’d turned to watch Linda and her pursuer turned back towards Rusty now, but others didn’t. Well, he couldn’t do anything about that. He had to say this thing. He could remember what he had to say, but he couldn’t remember why. That was all right. He’d say it, and then maybe he’d remember.
“What I have to tell you is, dying hurts,” Rusty said. The crowd murmured. “Dying hurts a lot. It hurts—everybody hurts.” Rusty struggled to remember why this mattered. He dimly remembered dying, remembered other people dying around him. “It hurts everybody. It makes everybody the same. This guy, and that other one who ran away, they hurt too. This is Ari. That was Ahmed. They were the ones who planted the bomb. They didn’t get out in time. They died too.” Gasps, some louder murmurs, louder cursing from the man with the quiet voice. Rusty definitely had everyone’s attention now.
He prodded Ari. “It hurt,” Ari said.
“And?” said Rusty.
“We’re sorry,” said Ari.
“Ahmed’s sorry too,” said Rusty. “He told me. He’d have told you, if he weren’t chasing Linda’s shiny hair thing.”
“If we’d known, we wouldn’t have done it,” Ari said.
“Because?” Rusty said, patiently.
“We did it for the wrong reasons,” Ari said. “We expected things to happen that didn’t happen. Paradise, and, like, virgins.” Ari looked shyly down at his decaying feet. “I’m sorry.”
“More,” Rusty said. “Tell them more.”
“Dying hurts,” said Ari. “It won’t make you happy. It won’t make anybody happy.”
“So please do the right thing,” said Rusty. “Don’t kill anybody else.”
The man with the quiet voice let out a howl and leaped towards Rusty. He grabbed Rusty’s free arm, the right one, and pulled; the arm came off, and the man with the quiet voice started hitting Rusty over the head with it. “You fucking incompetent! You traitor! You said you’d tell them—”
“I said I’d do the right thing,” Rusty said. “I never said my version of the right thing was the same as yours.”
“You lied!”
“No, I didn’t. I misled you, but I told the truth. What are you going to do, kill me?” He looked out at the crowd and said, “We’re the dead. You loved some of us. You hated others. We’re the dead. We’re here to tell you: please don’t kill anybody else. Everybody will be dead soon enough, whether you kill them or not. It hurts.”
The crowd stared; the cameras whirred. None of the living there that day had ever heard such long speeches from the dead. It was truly a historic occasion. A group of aides had managed to drag away the man with the quiet voice, who was still brandishing Rusty’s arm; Rusty, with his one arm, stood at the podium with Ari.
“Look,” Rusty said. He let go of Ari’s hand and reached around to pull the paperweight out of his pocket. He held it up in front of the crowd. Ari cooed and reached for it, entranced, but Rusty held it above his head. “Look at this! Look at the shiny glass. Look at the flower. It’s beautiful. You have all this stuff in your life, all this beautiful stuff. Sunshine and grass and butterflies. Barrettes. Bandanas. You don’t have that when you’re dead. That’s why dying hurts.”
And Rusty shivered, and remembered: he remembered dying, knowing he’d never see trees again, never drink coffee, never smell flowers or see buildings reflected in windows. He remembered that pain, the pain of knowing what he was losing only when it was too late. And he knew that the living wouldn’t understand, couldn’t understand. Or maybe some of them did, but the others would only make fun of them. He finished his speech lamely, miserably, knowing that everyone would say it was just a cliché. “Enjoy the while you have it.”
The woman who had heckled the man with the quiet voice was frowning. “You’re advocating greed! That’s what gets people killed. People murder each other for stuff!”
“No,” Rusty said. He was exhausted. She didn’t understand. She’d probably never understand unless she died and got revived. “Just enjoy it. Look at it. Don’t fight. You don’t get it, do you?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
Rusty shrugged. He was too tired; he couldn’t keep his focus anymore. He no longer cared if the woman got it or not. The man with the quiet voice had been taken away, and Rusty had done what he had wanted to do, although it seemed much less important now than it had even a month ago, when he was first revived. He remembered, dimly, that no one had ever managed to teach the living anything much. Some of them might get it. He’d done what he could. He’d told them what mattered.
His attention wandered away from the woman, away from the crowd. He brought the paperweight back down to chest level, and then he sat down on the edge of the platform, and Ari sat with him, and they both stared at the paperweight, touching it, humming in happiness there in the sunshine.
The crowd watched them for a while, and then it wandered away, too. The other corpses had already wandered. The dead meandered through the beautiful budding park, all of them in love: one with a sparrow on the walk, one with a silk scarf a woman in the audience had given him, one with an empty, semi-crushed milk carton she had plucked out of a trashcan. The dead fell in love, and they walked or they sat, carrying what they loved or letting it hold them in place. They loved their beautiful stuff for the rest of the day, until the sun went down; and then they lay down too, their treasures beside them, and slept again, and this time did not wake.
The contractions have started. They hurt as much as everyone said they would, and they’ll be worse before it’s over. Between spasms, which are about ten minutes apart now, I find myself wondering if this is the child’s revenge for all the pain she’s already suffered.
During the contractions I can’t think about anything except the pain. Pain has always done that to me, making me oblivious to anything else, so that now I can’t even be properly grateful for Joni, with her oranges and sponges and constant reassurance, who’s seen me through all this, who would think I was insane if she knew the whole story. Maybe I am. During the contractions or between them, I find it hard to tell.
Somebody in one of the childbirth classes asked me once if I could pinpoint the moment of conception. “Yes,” I said, but no one would have believed me if I talked about it, not even Joni, who unwittingly started it during that phone conversation.
Oh, God, that horrible day—it was raining and cold, one of those days when I hated the city and my job and myself, myself even worse than usual because I hadn’t done anything right at work and I couldn’t seem to do anything to get anyone to smile at me, or say hello, or be pleasant—all day it was like that, like being in a vacuum, and then I got home and went and put out the garbage and the bag broke, spilling coffee grounds and tuna cans and wadded up paper towels all over the floor… so I called Joni out in the suburbs, because I was terrified that if I didn’t talk to someone I’d really go mad, right there; and she listened, two-year-old Joshua squealing in the background, as I poured out everything. It was a lousy connection on top of everything else and even as I talked I hated myself for calling her, for going through the old routine both of us know so well, for taking her away from her happy child and her considerate husband and her white clapboard house with the garden and the car and the two cats.
“I’m sorry,” I said when I was done with all of it, and my voice was shaking because I’d started crying again. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry, why am I bothering you with this—I don’t know how you put up with it anyway. I don’t know how I can ask people to like me when I’m like this.”
Joni sighed. “Cara, whatever happened to the little kid in you who
expects
to be liked?” She couldn’t have expected an answer, because we both knew what had happened.
“Dead,” I said, anyway, and Joni grunted; I could imagine her shaking her head on the other end of the phone in New Jersey.
“Cara, that never dies. Never. It just doesn’t. Everybody’s got that inside, somewhere.”
Bullshit
, I thought. I didn’t say anything and she tried to tell me about Joshua’s nursery school, except Joshua himself interrupted again, wanting juice, and then she had to go because dinner was ready.
I saw the commercial later that night. I was sitting on the couch in front of the
Late Late Show
, because I was afraid that if I went to sleep I’d have nightmares. I’d finished crying but I had a splitting headache, which always happens after I cry. I dozed off a little bit and all of a sudden there was the sound of a blow and a child’s wail, and I yelled myself and came awake tense, ready to run away, every nerve wired. It was only a commercial, one of those “prevent child abuse” things, with a number to call if you knew a kid who was being hurt, but it didn’t matter that it was just TV, because of the kid’s scream.
That scream was echoing inside me somewhere, and I sat there shaking and remembered Joni talking about the kid inside me, the one who expects to be liked, and I suddenly realized no, no, that kid isn’t dead, she’s the one who’s screaming, dear God, she’s in me now—and I saw her. I saw her face, which had been mine when I was six or seven, very pale and tense, and I felt her huddling away inside me somewhere, trying to keep from being hurt, cowering against my ribcage. She was covered with bruises—bruises dealt out brutally, methodically, in places where they’d hurt like hell but wouldn’t show, the way it was before Daddy died, and I knew who was beating her up, that skinny kid inside me.
I was.
I was
, because you can’t expect to be liked without getting hit for it, without getting stomped on and hurt, and she was the reason I’d suffered so much, gone through so much hell; she was the part of me that kept expecting life to be decent despite all the evidence, that kept putting me in a position to have people spit in my face and ignore me. She wasn’t dead at all.
She was dying, though, and in pain, and I sat on the couch and cried again, harder this time, because I’d done it to her and I’d had it done to me and I knew what it felt like, and I just sat there, crying, hugging myself, thinking, I’m sorry, oh, God, I’m sorry. I didn’t know; I never meant to hurt you. I’ll get you out of there, I promise. You don’t deserve that. Nobody should have to be in such a lousy place. I’m sorry! I’ll set you free if I can. I promise. I promise.
Five weeks later, after a routine pelvic exam, the Ob/Gyn told me I was pregnant. He swore it up and down and sideways, said both the urinalysis and the pelvic proved it conclusively. I told him he was crazy, that it was impossible, and he told me I hadn’t been careful enough, or maybe I’d been careful and gotten pregnant anyway because it can always happen, can’t it?
And I thought, not to me, you bastard, not to Cara who hasn’t had sex for four years because every unmarried man in New York is gay and I can’t stand intercourse unless I’m dead drunk, anyway.
The doctor started talking about abortions, and I was listening until I remembered the TV commercial and the kid cowering inside my gut and the promise I’d made to it, and even though being pregnant was still impossible, it might make sense. I went home to get drunk, but I got sick first, and then I remembered that morning sickness doesn’t have to happen in the morning, and I panicked. Just panicked, dead cold sweaty fear, but there’d been something in some psych course I’d had in school about how sometimes women who want to be pregnant get all the symptoms except the baby. I couldn’t remember if they could get symptoms convincing enough to fool a doctor, and I had to know, so I dug into the old cartons in my closet trying to find the textbook.
It wasn’t there—maybe I’d given it to Joni, maybe it had gotten thrown out—but I found a poetry book from some lit class and remembered there was a poem I liked in it, one of the few things I’d liked in school, and flipped through the pages until I found it. It was a poem about an elephant, by somebody named Carlos Drummond de Andrade. It starts out, “I made an elephant from the little I have,” and talks about how he builds the elephant out of glue and wood from old furniture, and how the elephant goes out into the world looking for friends and nobody pays any attention to it and finally it comes back home, exhausted, and falls apart, just “collapses like paper,” because it’s been searching for something it can’t find. It lies there in a messy heap on the rug, “like a myth torn apart,” with feathers and cotton and everything else that had been stuffed into it spilling all over the place.