Amber Sparks: May We Shed These Human Bodies

When the children finish singing “O Holy Night,” another old person enters the hall and heads for an empty chair in the back. The children watch him, mesmerized by his measured, glacial pace. The skin drapes off his wrists and elbows and flops about. Old people, whispers Anna to her brother, are actually half-robot. Only a robot could walk that slow. If they were people, they would fall right over.

And, says Jeff Stephens, it takes forever for old people to just, like, walk into a restaurant, and then like three hundred years to eat their food, and then like four decades to quit talking about old people stuff, like popping pills and who’s dead or dying, and then it takes like sixteen centuries for them to get back in the car.

The children start the next song, the one where Chris Otelo has a solo, and the old people start to sway a little in their metal chairs. They’re swaying in unison, right, left, right. The children grow uneasy; the old people have never been this active before. One of the old ladies wipes some drool from the side of her mouth. Her nails are dagger-sharp and long and pink.

The song ends and Anna’s brother whispers, No one listens to the old people. At home, we just pretend to. And they try to give you things, like old batteries and pictures of people you don’t even know.

Chris Otelo nods. We don’t listen to our old people either, he whispers back. Ours drink half a can of Sprite, and that’s it. Nothing else.

Ewww, says Anna’s brother, wiping wet off his cheek. He’s forgotten that Chris Otelo is a spit-whisperer.

The choir director glares at Anna’s brother, and raises his hands to cue the next song. Away in a manger, no crib for a bed, the children sing. The old people stand up and push their metal chairs back, hiking elastic waistbands up under their armpits and tying terry cloth bibs around their saggy necks. The children’s voices grow quieter, worried-sounding. Some children forget the words to the song. The choir director is scowling at his choir; he doesn’t notice the old people shuffling forward like zombies behind him. Now they have utensils, knives in their right hands and forks in their left hands. Their hair is white and flat in the back and you can see their pink scalps underneath. They are walking like monsters with wide, deliberate steps. The children all stop, except Corey Anthony, who is nearsighted and won’t wear glasses in public. The cattle are lowing, he sings, and then trails off, realizing no one else is singing.

The choir director turns around, finally, but it is too late; one of the old people stabs him in the neck with a fork and blood sprays out from somewhere near his vocal cords. The children scream and try to run, but it’s like a movie: the old people are slow but many, and they surround the children, coming close enough for the choir to see the brown scabs on their faces and their tiny, murderous eyes.

The children are savory and tender, more delicious than the Grand Slam breakfast at Denny’s. The old people pick bits of children from between their remaining teeth and smile big, camera-ready smiles. They are as full and friendly as babies.

Happy New Year, they say to each other.

I. Practice Problems

You should know this before the first blast turns you cold, before the first wave of sympathy strikes: there will always be two kinds of people. The first kind will want to tell you about the time their dog died, or their best friend died, or their father or wife or child or aunt or grandmother died. This is fine; this is necessary. This is how they measure grief or pain or loss, and the raw, hard cost of death.

The second kind will sit with you in silence. They will have nothing to say, because they will understand that pain is not something that can be shared or solved, that pain is not a checklist or a questionnaire. They will understand that pain is not only loss, is not only sad, is not only one thing and not sometimes another thing altogether. That pain is not quantitative, but that it can be marked off with chalk lines on a cell wall just the same. That pain is not a landscape, and yet we carefully map its roads, its quick peaks, its long dips and even the smudges on the page that obscure intention and effect. That pain is not psychic, but that it does sometimes offer a moment of brief, bright clarity.

That pain is not you, but it is yours, and you cannot return it ever. That it will be with you like an old war wound or a scarred-over burn, even when you've forgotten what it means or where it came from or who drilled it into your skin, when the very first nerve ache began.

II. Subtraction

Well, here’s something awful. This is what your mind will say to you, stalwartly, like an old British colonel. Well, here’s something awful; while you lay yourself down across the living room floor, carpet fibers carving creases into your cheek and palms. Oh, my God, your mother will say. Since childhood she has been best friends with Danny’s mother, but she will not cry and you will fight about that later and often.

Holy shit, your best friend Marie will say, and she will cry, and for that you will accuse her of being in love with Danny ever since the three of you were small.

You were always jealous! you will shout, and fling your arm out like Sarah Bernhardt, and she will never forgive you. Years later, you will bump into one another in a department store and smile too much. You will be flustered because she has grown thin and pretty, and because when you were both eight you made all of your Barbies lesbians, though you didn’t know the word then, and you swore a pact never to have anything to do with boys. You both hated Danny, because when he and your brother played Star Wars they made you be Princess Leia, even though you wanted to be Darth Vader and fight with a light saber. And poor, fat Marie always had to be Jabba the Hutt.

This is your first death, and it will slightly separate you from your mind. It will turn you and your mind into cordial neighbors. At first your mind will try to give counsel, will say things like: Come on old girl, stiff upper lip and all that. And: Now then, mustn’t carry on so. Your mind has always been embarrassed by excess.

Your body will ignore your mind. It will learn new tricks all on its own, tricks like: curling up into a ball at the foot of the bed. And: betraying you utterly in front of absolute strangers. It will become desperate to telegraph your grief. When you think people may have forgotten about Danny, it will force you to remind them by bursting into tears during AP Psych and also sometimes by fainting in the middle of Homeroom.

This is not to say that your sadness will only be acted. Truly, you will feel small and lost and separated, just a bit, as if someone has strung a bed sheet between you and everyone else. Your teachers will sympathize and award you just-passing grades, even when the only homework you turn in all semester is a comparative study of Anne Boleyn and Danny. Over egg salad sandwiches in the lunchroom and well out of your hearing, your European History teacher will remark to your Senior Choir teacher that any common sense you used to possess must have been drained drop by drop over the last few months.

Your classmates will not be so kind. Corey Fletcher will tell everyone that you’re a drama queen, milking tragedy for all it’s worth. Marie will tell everyone that you’re just as crazy as Danny was. She’ll probably slit her wrists eventually, you’ll overhear her telling her new friends as you pass by her locker. You will be sent home that day for putting a long deep scratch down the side of Marie’s face with your painted-black-on-purpose fingernails.

Eventually you will reject all of your friends, especially the ones that didn’t cry.