Айзек Марион - The Living

I wonder where my friends are. Will they be waiting for me in the parking lot with their tubes already packed in the car, impatient with my leisurely pace? I must have lost my tube. It must have popped and sank. I must have been on this river all day, back-floating effortlessly as the sun went down and the sky turned pink and then purple and then this inky blue spattered with stars.

How far might I have drifted in all those hours? Far past my friends, certainly. Well on my way to wherever this river ends.

But now the river is a road.

I hover three feet off the pavement, gliding like a parade float through downtown Missoula. The town is empty. The buildings are charred. I hear the echoing taunts of children as I drift past the remains of my school— Rear End! Reject! and of course, Retard!— all the clever names they invented to replace my mother’s puzzling choice, and then silence.

I drift past my church and I hear my pastor’s operatic shouting, the congregation’s simian hooting, then silence. Past my house. My father’s snarled scriptures. My mother’s secret sobs. Then silence.

I drift through the doors of a prison.

Through the training yard, where I learned how to fight. Past my old cell, where I learned how to kill. Past the bones of forgotten prisoners, left to die and come back and die again.

“Wow, R,” Julie says. “Hard to imagine you in a place like this. You don’t exactly have that ‘hardened convict’ vibe.”

“Although if I were a judge,” Perry says, “I’d convict you of first-degree cheese for that speech you made out there.”

They walk on either side of me as I float, like pallbearers. I don’t like that comparison, so I send my mind elsewhere in search of a better scene.

I am dreaming.

But if every moment is shared on the shelves of the Library, how real might a dream be? If the thoughts that compose us exist outside us, beyond the sealed vault of our skulls, who’s to say it’s not really Julie—or some loose fragment of her—walking next to me? Who’s to say it’s not really Perry—though he’s long dead—strolling on my left?

The prison’s stained ceiling is gone, replaced by a blue sky. We are on the roof of the stadium, and Julie and Perry sit on a red blanket while I float a foot above it. I worry that the wind will blow me away, but Julie keeps a hand on my foot, anchoring me.

I feel a wet warmth in my chest. I hear a steady dripping beneath my back. Memory creeps in like an unwelcome guest.

“Did I say it?” I ask, staring at the sky.

“You said enough,” Julie says.

“Did they listen?”

“We’ll find out,” Perry says.

“Am I dying?”

They both look at each other.

“No,” Julie says, and I notice moisture in her eyes. “You’re not dying.”

“Everyone’s dying,” Perry says. “But especially you.”

“Shut up, Perry,” Julie says.

The sky looks different. Deeper, somehow, like a bottomless lake. “Will I come back?” My voice sounds smaller with every question. “Will I start over again?”

“Maybe you would have”—Perry slaps my thigh—“but those rules are about to change. I think we’re just about done with the whole zombie thing.”

“Can you wait?” I plead. “Just until I come back?”

He tilts his head, disappointed. “Come on, corpse, do you really want to repeat yourself? You’ve learned all you can in this halfway house. Either die or start living.”

“No moving back,” Julie says with a sad smile. “Move forward.”

I’m in a forest. The sky is hidden behind a canopy of trees, but the sun glows around the leaves, leaking through in sparkling flashes. My friends stand around me in a circle, their hair and clothes whipping in the wind. Has it already happened? Will I be lowered into the earth now? Will I watch their faces recede from me in that rectangle of daylight, smaller and smaller until the first shovelful covers my face?

Lawrence Rosso smiles down at me. He is dressed like a priest, but the book in his hands is no particular scripture. It flickers through sizes and shapes, from gilded leather tomes to yellowed pulp paperbacks.

“Is it good to die?” I ask him desperately. “Is there a better place?”

His smile turns bittersweet. “There are other places,” he says. “Other forms, other ways . They’re too big for the narrow valve of your brain, and when you experience them you’ll gasp and weep.” He shakes his head ruefully. “But there’s nothing like living. There’s nothing like being in the world. A ripe pear. A soft hand. The sun behind leaves.” He closes his eyes and sighs. “This is your home, R, for as long as you’re here. Never be eager to leave.”

I clench my teeth. I ball my fists. I squeeze my dreaming eyes shut to gather my will, and in that darkness within darkness, I overhear a conversation.

Can you see it?

He’s hurt bad.

A boy and a girl, speaking in simple pulses of thought.

How bad? Alex asks Joan.

Just a little hole, Joan says. But it’s bleeding a lot.

I don’t want him to die, Alex says.

A pause.

Maybe we can fix it, Joan says.

Like how we fixed the window?

Sure. It’s such a little hole, and if it’s not there he won’t die. It’s silly, isn’t it?

It’s stupid, Alex says. I hate it.

So maybe we can make the hole forget it’s there. Maybe we can decide it’s not. And then he won’t have to die.

I feel a stirring in my faraway body. I hear a rustling of pages and a scratching of pens, old words crossed out, new ones written.

You’re not going to die, my son tells me.

You’re not going to die, my daughter tells me.

I feel the sensation of pulling out earplugs. The world rushes in, real voices now with breath and spittle.

“What was that?” Nora says. “Did he just say something?”

I hear the swish of their clothing. The creak of their knees. I hear Julie’s breath as she leans close to me, distinctly hers even before she shapes it into words. “R?” Her voice is raw and cracked. “Can you hear me?”

I feel two fingers on my throat.

“I don’t get it,” Nora mumbles. “Pulse is still strong. Why is the bleeding…?”

I open my eyes. I expect to see their faces hovering over me, but instead I see the backs of their heads. I see myself, sprawled on the floor in a red puddle. A tall, pale man in a ragged shirt and tie, his sad face in need of a shave.

Look at him. Look at that strange assemblage. How did nature ever arrive at this shape? When did that mass of organs decide to sprout those bony stalks, to stand up and walk, to reach out and grasp? Eyes, ears, nose, mouth. Does the whole wide river of the world pour into me through those seven little holes in my head?

I turn away from my heap of flesh and begin to drift upward. The grotesque plastic dome is gone, replaced by a blue sky of incredible depth and volume, and although my eyes are already open…I open them again.

The sky splits and sweeps aside like a second set of lids, and behind it is another place.

I’m in the Library.

The walls of books curve around me in a column and I’m floating in its center, rising toward that unfathomably distant light. And I am dissolving. Tiny pieces of me fly away from my body and into the shelves around me. Some go up toward the glow, others fall straight down. Empty spaces appear in my hands, my arms; I’ll be gone before I reach the next floor.

We are weary of death.

I hear Perry’s voice in the chorus. Rosso’s too, but it’s not just people who’ve died. Julie is in there. Nora and Marcus, Sprout and Addis and my kids—everyone. Perhaps even my mother and father, their voices faint, their contributions small but still counted. Everything is counted, gathered, and pooled, and the best of it glows above me.