Айзек Марион - The Living

Addis swallows. His hands clench. Are we? Can we?

A concussive thump jolts the floor. Not a grenade or a rocket or any of the other noises from the war outside. A resonant boom from deep underground.

Below the plastic dome, below the stadium’s sagging roof, Huntress Tomsen dances in the street in the red glare of the fireball. She leaps and laughs as Julie’s metal house collapses. She whoops and waves her fists as it sinks into the earth, burying the smoldering remains of BABL. She dances like a demon, but every nerve is singing hymns. She can feel the fog of noise evaporating. She doesn’t need her radio to know the air is clear, but she pulls it out anyway, spins the dial away from Fed FM, and cranks the volume.

Soft static. Background radiation from the birth of the universe, and nothing more. And then a click. A breath. A voice.

Hello?

“ Hi !” she screams into the radio, but that’s all she can manage before it falls from her shaky hands. She’s too overwhelmed to converse right now, too jittery. It’s enough to know that she can. That everyone can.

Her legs give out. She drops to the ashy pavement. “We did it, Dad,” she whispers, making no effort to wipe the tears from her eyes or the snot from her nose. “We can finally go home.”

Addis reads all this in our fluttering pages. It joins the swirl of other moments circling his head. He has been tallying them for a long time, counting up good and bad, weighing the balance on some imaginary scale of justice, but he is suddenly ashamed of this petty bean-counting. His grand calculations shrink to a human scale as they play out on the stage in front of him. He sees people trying. He sees compassion and love and selfless sacrifice. He sees blood willingly shed and tears that are more than grief and people continuing to fight long after their strength is gone.

He sees goodness. He sees a lot of it.

He sees enough.

Addis closes his eyes. He drifts into the dim expanse of the Library, surrounded by our whispering books.

Will you do it now? he asks us.

We don’t answer.

You’ve never been so full, and we’ve never been so thirsty. Will you pour yourself out? Will you do it?

We don’t answer.

He opens his eyes. Nora is examining the hole in R’s chest. Julie and Joan and Alex are kneeling by his side, all quietly pleading.

I said will you do it? Addis shouts into our vastness, sounding much older than seven or even fourteen. Answer me!

His conviction seizes our vacillating voices. He presses them into a decision.

We won’t do it , we tell him. You will.

And then he hears the hum.

For a moment he thinks it could be the wind. Just innocent air whistling through the windows, playing the dome like an ocarina. R has everyone’s attention except Sprout’s, who remains by her father’s side. The grownups give no sign that they hear anything, but as the noise rises from a hum to a howl, Sprout looks up. She turns her head and catches Addis’s gaze. The fear in her wet eyes confirms it—this is not the wind.

Addis approaches the door. No one notices, not even Joan and Alex, and this is good. They might want him to stop, and he can’t stop. He feels something filling him, inflating him, like he’s inhaling continuously with no need to breathe out, an exhilarating absence of limit.

He opens the door and steps out into the hazy sun, the hot wind, the hammering din of war.

They’re here. One hand, then another, sharp fingers digging into the edge of the roof and dragging skulls and spines behind them. Their hum fills Addis’s mind, louder than the gunfire. He lacks the vocabulary to describe what he’s hearing, but we have all the words ever spoken, and we know this sound even better than he does. We have been enduring it for billions of years as it churns up from the Library’s sub-basement: the dissonant drone of a tone-deaf choir, the raspy chant of a thousand geriatric monks. It’s a sour chord built on an atonal root and it never pauses to retune, it just drones and drones, forever faithful to a pitch established by accident in some dark jungle swamp long before the world had heard music.

Join, it tells him as the skeletons crawl up the roof. Follow. Eat.

No, Addis says.

The hum twists into even harsher discord, tones and overtones grinding against each other. There is nothing else. Only this.

Addis’s eyes blaze like molten sulfur. How well he knows these creatures. Whether or not any of this crowd ever crossed his path in the airport, he knows them, because they are defined by their sameness. They are the toxic byproduct of unity. Cult, regime, unquestioned custom, party line, canon, convention, taboo. For the past seven years, since the day they killed him, they have been dragging him through the stations of their parodic civilization, assigning him parents and shoving him into homes, drilling him on loathsome skills and meaningless mashups of tradition, and he has followed them because he had no one else.

Now he does.

Now he has all of us, and he sees these creatures clearly. They are empty. They are hollow. The wind whistles through them.

As they creep toward the dome like insects toward meat, eager to eat him and everyone he loves, Addis does something that doesn’t make sense. Instead of running away like all prey should, he steps forward. He advances on the predators.

They stop.

Addis stands in a clear circle surrounded by the swarm. He is waist-high to most of the skeletons, and those behind the first row can’t even see him, but skeletons don’t have eyes. They don’t see light bouncing off matter, the detail and nuance of reality. They perceive only broad concepts, vague shapes in the extrasensory fog that surrounds their shriveled brains. They see with notions and assumptions, predictions and preconceptions, so what they see now moving toward them is not a harmless little boy. Like Dobermans cowed by a Dachshund, what they see is the boldness of his challenge.

The skeletons step back.

You can’t, they say, a statement without a predicate, a meaningless noise of negation.

We’re bored of your game, Addis replies. Play it by yourself.

He feels his hands on the living ladder, the rungs of generations warm in his grip, and he climbs.

There is no up or down, they tell him in their detuned chorus, only here.

He climbs toward that bright ceiling, as distant as the sun, and he feels its warmth on his cold skin. He feels its gravity pulling him upward, easing his ascent, and he silently thanks us. The books around him are more beautiful with every shelf, thick tomes bound in oil paintings with pages of green leaves and yellow flowers and living human skin, books of glass and books of water with words in floating coils, spherical books with nested pages that he doesn’t know how to turn—experiences beyond his understanding. But he doesn’t need to turn every page to share in the wealth we’ve gathered. The words flutter out to meet him and he breathes them in, expanding ever larger, filling himself with the Higher in this endless inhalation.

There is nothing above us, the skeletons hiss from a thousand miles below. Never has been, never will be.

Addis inhales the breaths of every life that’s ever lived.

Addis exhales an answer.

IAM FLOATING DOWN A RIVER.

I am lying on my back, gazing at the stars. I take quick breaths, keeping my lungs filled; my arms and legs trail limply behind me. It feels good to fill my lungs. I fill them tight and feel a shuddering pleasure, like stretching my limbs after years in a cramped cell. The air is warm and sweet and it saturates my blood. I am buoyant. I can float forever.