Kevin Brockmeier - The Brief History of the Dead

Insofar as love generates hope, perhaps, the second part said. But love doesn't always generate hope. Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much love or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It's like your sunlight and water – the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it.

Coleman let the two voices rumble on at each other, thundering back and forth, though which was the thunder of his gut and which was the thunder of his sky, he couldn't say. It was only when he noticed the other people in the elevator staring at him that he realized he was speaking out loud. He found a package of rice cakes and a jar of peanut butter in the cabinets of his apartment, and he fell upon them with great hunger, and that was the second day.

The verse that actually alluded to the Wandering Jew was not John 21:22, of course, but Matthew 16:28, THERE BE SOME OF THEM THAT STAND HERE, WHICH SHALL IN NO WISE TASTE OF DEATH, TILL THEY SEE THE SON OF MAN COMING IN HIS KINGDOM, and that was the verse that he carried on his sign the next day. The Wandering Jew, known variously as Ahasuerus, Carthaphilus, and John Buttadaeus, was the cobbler reported to have taunted Jesus, "Go on quicker," as he carried His cross through Jerusalem, to which Jesus answered, "I go, but thou shalt tarry till I return," thus condemning the cobbler to walk the world until the Second Coming. Coleman knew that the story did not appear in the pages of the Bible and that many Christians doubted it, but he himself had always found it persuasive, just as he was persuaded that the snake in the Garden of Eden was actually Satan and that St. Peter was crucified hanging upside down so that he would not die in the same manner as Jesus – two stories that also relied on the evidence of tradition rather than the evidence of Scripture, and nobody doubted them.

The blanket of clouds had drifted to the edge of the sky during the night, but the sun was tiny, and it had lost all its power. It was half the morning before the dew evaporated from the grass. Coleman took up a position on the verge of the road to proclaim the Good Word of God. Nobody on the path stopped to listen, but there was one man who settled on a nearby bench as though he wanted to eavesdrop. Coleman tried to cast his voice in the man's direction, for he knew that even the most reluctant listener might be swayed by the Truth of the Lord. But then he noticed the man feeding the birds, tossing cheese curls into their beaks from a plastic sack, and he leapt from the verge and crushed the cheese curls beneath his feet and he chased the man away.

He ate lunch with the mail carrier Joseph, who was his friend, and while they were throwing their wrappers away in the garbage can, Joseph said, "You know, when I was a kid I thought that everyone was born with three wishes. I remember using one of mine to wish that I would never have to go to the bathroom again. It didn't work, of course. I was mad at God for a long time about that."

To which Coleman said, "I think you're confusing God with a genie."

He meant it as a statement of fact, but something about it must have struck Joseph as funny, for he would not stop laughing until Coleman had taken up his sign and left.

The problem was that if the Wandering Jew was real, if he truly existed, the city ought to have been much more heavily populated than it was. Everyone seemed to accept that the people of the city were sustained there by the memories of the living, which was yet another story without scriptural provenance. But there they all were – that much was certain – and Coleman had no reason to doubt the explanation. So why, then, wasn't the city filled with all the millions of souls the Jew had encountered in the two-some millennia since the crucifixion of Jesus?

There were three possibilities, as Coleman saw it: either the Jew had died in the virus, in which case the virus had coincided with the Second Coming. Or he was still alive, in which case there must be other pockets of humanity in the city, or even other whole cities out there somewhere. And then there was the final possibility, which was that the Wandering Jew had never existed at all.

He could not decide which possibility was the most likely, an uncertainty that disturbed him greatly, and for the rest of the day he found his mind returning to the matter as he preached, his voice lapsing into silence while he listened to the wings of the question beating around inside his head. The people of the city flowed around him like water around a stone, and finally he gave up and went home and sat on the edge of his bed, and he watched the shadows as they shifted across the floor of his room, and he listened to a girl who was jumping rope on the street below his window. The girl was chanting a rhyme that went "Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black," and he stepped through the two glass doors onto his balcony and called down to her, "You there, what's your name?"

The rope fell slack at the girl's feet, like a ribbon of seaweed bleached by the sun. She stared up at him without answering.

He called, "Aren't you even going to ask me my name?"

She hesitated for a moment, then said, "I know who you are. You're the Birdman."

"No, my name is Mr. Coleman Kinzler."

"That's not what we call you. We call you the Birdman of Alcatraz."

There was a heaviness to the girl's features that made him wonder if she might be a bit feebleminded. He used his gentlest voice to ask her, "Do you know about Jesus Christ?"

To which she said, "Yep. He died on the cross to save us from our sins."

"Good girl," Coleman said. If he had had a toy at hand – a doll, for instance, or a pinwheel – he might have thrown it down to her as a present. But the only items on the balcony were a rusted lawn chair, a spider plant that had gone crisp from neglect, and a stack of signs attached to white wooden pickets, including the one he was planning to carry tomorrow, which read, JESUS IS THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE. So instead of a present, and because it was the best he could do, he held the sign up and showed it to the girl, waving it back and forth, until she shrugged and picked up her jump rope and went skipping away down the sidewalk.

And that was three days.

The birds were dinosaurs.

He had read about it in a book once – how in the time of the great dying the largest of the dinosaurs had been killed off by disease and starvation, but the smallest had survived, and over the centuries they had changed, and finally they had become the birds. So the birds were dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs were reptiles, and the reptiles, as everybody knew, were demons. It took a diligent eye to see through all the disguises that were in place.

He peeled the bandage from his chin to investigate the scrape he had gotten in the fall. Though the injury was shallow, it had not yet sealed over, and he carefully probed at the edges with his fingers to see whether a crust had formed there, and, if so, whether it had begun to curl away from his skin. Did people heal from the outside in or from the inside out? He wasn't sure. But he himself did not seem to be healing at all. He cleaned the scrape and replaced the bandage and got his sign from the balcony, and later that day, when he was eating lunch with Joseph, he said to him, "I'm no better today than I was yesterday," and Joseph said, "Well, I can't say that I find that very surprising."

"Why not?"

"I don't know that any of us ever gets any better. I have a hard time believing that people change at all."

Coleman disagreed. "We are all changed by the hand of the Lord. God gave Saul a new heart, the Bible says. Both Sauls, in fact – King Saul and that Saul who became the Apostle Paul. But I wasn't talking about my heart. I was talking about my chin."