Toni Sala - The Boys

“It’s a lie, at the worst moment. It’s not for the dead; it’s for the living, out of fear. The burial isn’t to see them off; it’s for those who are left behind, like Mom said. To be there for me. To make it clear to me.”

“To be there for you and for the four of us, to be together in a difficult moment,” said Mireia. “It would be selfish of me not to go.”

“So, me not wanting a funeral for myself, is that selfish too?”

“The last thing we want to separate from is people. If you forgo a funeral, that means that you’re absolutely positive that everything ends in this world.”

“Maybe I just don’t want to cling to it desperately. Maybe because I trust that everything doesn’t end here.”

“But we even bury our animals.”

“For the sake of hygiene,” said Iona. “No one asks the clinic for their dead animals back. Even here in Vidreres, people call the vet to get rid of a dead dog. I’d rather you didn’t come. It’s using the dead. We’ll parade Xavi and Jaume around, carry them to the church, and have them blessed to make ourselves feel better. There are fifty thousand better places to take them, Mireia. You think Jaume spent much time thinking about God? You think that was on his mind? And what right do we have. . But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it does make sense to take them to the church. To show that they’re nothing now, and we can do whatever we want with them. To make it clear who’s in charge. It’s not important, I don’t want you to come if you’re tired; in fact, I wish you wouldn’t. In fact, I wish you’d decided not to come because you have a party to go to, or something else, something that has nothing to do with Jaume and Xavi.”

“Iona. .” said their mother.

“I’ll go,” said Mireia. “I changed my mind.”

“Mireia, if you don’t want to use them to make yourself feel better, if you want to waive that right, then everyone should understand.”

“Your father would be very upset.”

“I’m gonna go,” said Iona, “but for me it’ll be just as if I didn’t. I’ll be watching it through a pane of glass.”

“There is no glass,” said her mother.

Her father came in. He had heard the conversation from the entryway. He sat down and said, “Mireia, you will go to the service like everyone else. I went by the funeral home. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Iona thought about Xavi and Jaume’s parents, killed by the accident’s shock waves. They’d rather forget about her. She would too. She planned to avoid them. As a future daughter-in-law she was dead too. She didn’t want to be a zombie daughter-in-law who said “hi” to her zombie in-laws every time she ran into them. Everyone saw them as completely devastated — the way they must see her — but that didn’t mean the boys’ parents weren’t denying the accident. Otherwise, how could they have a wake for them? How could they even breathe? The body is perfidious, but it was also that everyone else was now looking at them through a black filter. But for Jaume and Xavi’s parents their two sons weren’t dead. They just hadn’t heard from them in several hours, they were late coming home, that happened a lot when they went out. And the funeral home and the figures in the coffins? A joke in poor taste. There’s plenty of malice in the world.

The living dead lined up at Santa Maria church, slow, pallid, dressed in black, praying. Weeping, mute, secretly violent zombies, making a murmur of moans and sighs between the bare stone walls, sitting on the uncomfortable planks of the pews, coming to pieces, flesh falling, avoiding looking at each other in their embarrassment, and because if they moved, they might lose a leg or an arm, and their heads could roll off their necks and onto the floor. They sat and listened in silence to the mass and would stick it out for all the rest of it, too. They watched the two pale wooden coffins pass between the pews, one with Jaume in it and the other with Xavi, and Iona had the feeling that she was the only living person at the funeral; that only she retained, preserved, and maintained life.

Iona saw Nil Dalmau leaving the church. She had dodged her zombies-in-law, half hiding around a corner, waiting for her parents and her sister to finish what she, because of her privilege as the zombie widow, could shirk. That was when she saw him. It seemed that he was looking for her in the crowd, and was surprised to find her staring at him. She smiled. He was the least strange zombie at the party. The one closest to the world of the living. Everyone should’ve had to dress as monstrously as him that day — come to the party in costume like clowns to the circus. It had been a while since she’d seen him around town. He hung out with other people, from outside Vidreres, and she’d never seen him with Jaume or Xavi.

She knew him from school, where he was a few grades ahead of her. Later, they’d sent him to private school in Girona. Every once in a long while she’d hear something about what he was up to. She knew he was studying fine arts in Barcelona, or maybe he’d already finished his degree. He was dressed in black from head to toe, he was the blackest of them all, black tie. Outside, he put on a black hat. He wore his hair in two ponytails like an Indian, and had an incipient beard with no moustache. But what turned people’s heads, first curious and then repulsed, was his left ear. The lobe looked like the handle of a pitcher. He wore a metal ring inside a large open hole in the earlobe, which was dilated like a tire made of flesh.

If that meant something, Iona wasn’t in on it. In the final years of her degree they were studying tropical veterinary science. Recently, iguanas and dragons, snakes, salamanders, chameleons, spiders, and scorpions had become more and more popular; people were tired of the usual four-legged friends. The fad was creatures that were like living fossils, autistic and prelapsarian pets, an incomprehensible world, but, just like those in the know could interpret their friends’ terrariums and knew the significance of a certain ophidian, lepidosauria, or amphibian, every eccentric piece of clothing that boy wore must mean. . what? What did it mean? Everything he’d added over the years to separate himself from the already somewhat strange little kid she’d known? And the blue tattoo of a star on the back of his hand? And the longer fingernails on his pinkies?

They greeted each other with a glance. She avoided him, but after the burial, at home, while Mireia and their mother sat in the dining room and their father was helping some trucker unload bales of hay for the horses, she opened up the computer and found that Nil Dalmau had started a chat with her. If she hadn’t just seen him, she would have thought his photograph was a joke.

How are you?

What can I say

Can we talk?

Yeah

How are you?

I don’t know

When you know you won’t want to talk to me

Probably not

I want to ask you a favor

What

Tonight

What do you want?

To talk to you

Talk now

I want to show you something

What

Some videos

Send them to me

It’s dangerous

I can’t go out

Yes you can

Not today

Noon tomorrow at the club

First thing in the morning on Wednesday, Iona turned on the computer and got a message. “I really enjoyed meeting you.” That was the second guy to contact her since the accident. Some loser, at least ten years older than her, some guy she didn’t know from Adam, had sent her a message he’d written to himself: I did it, I dangled the bait. Period. Wasn’t there an understood grieving period, some buffer from the world to protect her from these little violations?