Ramona Ausubel - No One is Here Except All of Us

“You have a beautiful world,” the stranger said. “Have you appreciated it?” Had anyone even gone down the river at night to go swimming? Had anyone closed his eyes and paid attention to the smell of the rain? Did we love everything wonderful around us? Had we kissed the old women on the tops of their warm heads? The children on their sticky cheeks? “We are trying very hard to be good,” Igor said.

“Yes, we really are trying,” the jeweler said.

The stranger asked, “How will we look after the new world? You don’t get to keep things unless you take care of them.”

“Let’s divide the jobs up,” the once wheat cutter, now silver polisher suggested. After some discussion and several small arguments, we decided on a system. The rain ran her fingers down the windows of the barn and the animals got used to our company as we designated committees of appreciation.

The Committee for the Appreciation of the River. The Committee for the Appreciation of the Grass. Committees for the Appreciation of Our Village, the Way We Build Our Houses, the Way We Feed the Dogs, the Way We Care for the Wounded, the Way We Slaughter the Cows. The Committee for Treating All Ailments, which consisted only of the healer. The Committee for the Appreciation of the Barn Which Is Also the House of God. The Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It. The Committee for the Appreciation of Our Stranger, the Recorder. The Committee Against Using the Rain as an Excuse to Be Unkind. And of course, the Committee for Apologies.

We tore up the plans for the temple with the library and the ebony bookshelves and promised to appreciate the barn. The jeweler took the two bowls and the hat out from inside the piano. The hat he wore, floppy and mold-green. The bowls he threw to the ground, where they smashed. Old women covered their eyes.

“What are you doing ?” they asked.

“These are our stars,” the jeweler told us, smiling along with the piano. “One piece at a time, we build the sky. Everything broken becomes whole again.”

He was thrilled to see the stranger smile at him. The children, especially the banker’s lot, were thrilled that the most dutiful thing they could do was to go home and break things. The grandparents were thrilled to see the children hopping up and down with excitement having something to do with God, although the children did not think of it that way.

When the rain turned to mist and wrapped us in foggy arms, we made tiles. Outside each house, the sound of smashing porcelain plates and bowls rang out. We smashed on rocks, mostly, and on logs, too. We sang as we smashed. We smashed and gathered the pieces. The colors we put into baskets for the sky and the whites we put into baskets for the stars.

Our heavens waited there, broken and unassembled.

The world was cooperative in her remaking. As the rest of the continent’s towns and villages were emptied out, ours grew more and more peaceful. But, unknown to us, the new world also had a helper. A pair of human hands to sweep the dust off our threshold.

As afternoons slunk away, the stranger went for her walk. We knew she walked, but we did not ask her why or where. It never occurred to us that it was anything but a pleasant stroll: fresh air, birdsong. She followed the path to the river, listening to woodpeckers drill their way home. Listening to the rain, our constant friend. Mud and clay, snapped branches and feathers made her path. The feathers put her in mind of mother birds out to gather food for their helpless, bald young, nest bound and hungry. Hawks and eagles, prowling for baby swallows; mother swallows prowling for worms. Who eats first is all that matters. The stranger felt like a hunter, a village full of wide-eyed, hairless babies at her back, as helpless as anything on earth, trusting in a safe world made only for them, for no reason except the story was told that way. But she was not a hunter who brought things back, she was the opposite — her job was to keep the worms out. To catch the prey, but then bury it in the tree roots rather than bring it home in her beak.

The stranger patrolled the edge of our world where river met land, and the tendon that kept our peninsula from becoming an island. It was there, in the now overgrown brushwoods between us and everything else, where the stranger went each evening — the rest of us eating a meal with our families — to keep the gate. She was protecting us, but also herself. The new world had saved her life — the least she could do was protect it.

Behind her was the cupped palm of our spit of land; in front the flat, pale arm and the body — enormous and complete — beyond. No mountains marked an edge in this direction, no horizon except the spilling away of the earth itself. A birch forest was a troop of tall spirits in the distance. Fields were watered by our river, siphoned off as veins. Where the road used to lead from our village out, now thorns, blackberries, weeds and young oaks stopped up the hole. They were a thick seal, as resolute as every other resident. But hard as they might have tried to block the way, the stranger knew a path through to the other side. Her arms were scratched by brambles trying to talk her out of leaving. Cuts stung and bled — shining drops, the precious treasure of the body, dug up.

The stranger sat on the other side on a stump. She waited. Nothing had burst into flame when she had crossed over. No bolt of lightning, no chasm. She wiped her cuts with the hem of her dress. The sky was still blue above her, but it was rusted like a forgotten tool all around the edges. Stars popped through. Another day wilted away in front of her eyes. Up the road, a shadow, a figure, like a hole in the landscape. As it came closer, it earned a nose and a beard. Eyes reflecting the last of the day’s light. It turned into a man, and in his hand, a bag.

“Madam,” the man said, close enough to have a scent, bitter as stepped-on milkweed, “good evening to you.”

“Good evening,” the stranger said.

“Beautiful out,” said the man, panting, tired from his journey. He sat on the ground next to the stranger’s stump, looped his arms around his knees. The man and the stranger looked out, and the earth provided facts to be conversed over. The stranger noted the temperature, which was cool but comfortable, and the man commented that it always seemed to be raining when he came. “Mmm,” the stranger sighed, “wet here.”

“Helpful for growing,” the man told her. She nodded. The sky turned purple, which was a beautiful thing just then, and the stranger memorized the color. “You don’t get flooding?” The stranger shook her head. She did not mention the high water that had carried her here. “I suppose it drains to the river.” The man looked at the stranger and asked her, “Is anyone else here? Are you all alone?”

“In a way,” she half lied. She did not want to admit to an outsider that a whole healthy village existed there. “Anything for me?” the stranger asked, knowing he would not have come if the answer was no. The man opened two brass buckles on his leather bag and held up several pieces of paper to the dying light. He squinted at each one, shuffling them to the back of the pile until he found what he was looking for, and handed the letter to the stranger.

“That’s all.”

MORDECAI GLASSMAN, the envelope demanded. Take me to Mordecai Glassman.

“Thank you,” the stranger said, shaking the man’s hand. He did not look like he wanted to stand up. The walk, the dark, the cold settling in. “I can’t invite you to stay. I’m sorry. I have to send you home.”

They batted politeness back and forth while the thorns were waiting for the stranger, vengeful.

The stranger made pools each time her feet sank into the riverbank. She rolled the letter into a tube, looked through. A particular grouping of stars. A shadowy willow grove on the other side of the river. She smelled the letter, but detected nothing of the forbidden place it tried to import. No cinnamon or myrrh. No churned butter, pine smoke, mutton stew. The stranger heard the long-lost wind chimes of a child’s voice tink through her head: Why is this night different from all other nights? The stranger did not have to think long before she had the answer — because tonight, under the whole world’s sky, she was not going to allow the rain and mud to destroy the letter unread, buried in the flower patch behind the barn with many others. Tonight, the stranger was going to read the message, carried by the man in his bag, from another planet.