The Ashes of Around Twenty-Three Strangers

by Jeremy Packert Burke

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  At breakfast, Lucy decides she is ready to bury the ashes at the base of the god. “I think I have enough now,” she tells Carve.

  “Godspeed,” Carve says. He sits across from her, nose wrinkled at the substitute eggs. The silver contours of his wheelchair shine bright beneath the kitchen’s bare forty-watt bulb.

  “I need you to come,” Lucy says. “You know I can’t drive your car.” It had been modified, on account of Carve’s legs. He lost them before the world fell apart, in an accident with a city bus. The settlement money had paid for this house, the car. These days it does less and less good.

  The ashes belong to nearly two dozen dead strangers—a substitute for the body of her brother, Noel. It is, more or less, what he would have wanted.

  “If you’d grown up going, you wouldn’t think it was anything much.”

  “The end’s coming, Carve. How will you find your legs if you don’t remember the way?” She does not want to seem desperate. Does not want him to know—though of course he already knows—how badly she needs this.

  He bites his lip and looks at everything but her. Lucy spoons the last of their canned tomatoes onto the mealy egg product. Carve’s house, all around them, holds steady.

  “Okay,” Carve said. “Fine. We’ll go.”

  * * *

  The landscape out the window is ill-formed. Trees snarl in on themselves, each new year recorded by thinner rings. The grass is a jigsaw puzzle turned over, what was once bright now flat and cardboard. Carve adjusts his hands on the grips that jut from the steering wheel, accelerating slowly as he can. The road is otherwise empty.

  He seems calmer, more at home behind the wheel of the car than anywhere else. “You haven’t been down here once in all the time I’ve known you,” Lucy says.

  “No.”

  They pass old billboard PSAs reminding people that interior rain can come at any moment, advising them to get their houses in order. Clouds might form above their beds in the middle of the night; they might wake gasping, half-drowning. Lucy can attest that no one ever believes the rains will hit their home. How could you believe such a thing? How would you live your life?

  But this is the way the world is: all the storms have moved inside. A cloud hasn’t touched the sky for over two years.

  People abandon their homes when the storms come, hastened off by imminent collapse. They leave behind old jewelry, copper wiring, the ashes of cremated relatives. Lucy goes in and salvages—a little here, a little there, in case anyone comes back for what’s theirs. It’s taken her a year to get a brother’s worth of ashes. The devout are burned and buried by the gods so that they might be reassembled on the day the world ends, but she never recovered Noel’s body from their storm-wrecked house. She was not able to cremate him, to bury him properly. Instead, she has a clear plastic peanut butter jar; a sky-blue lid above waves of ash and fragments of greasy, unfamiliar bone. She hopes it’s the right thing for Noel. She’s never believed in the gods, the rituals around them.

  Carve has tested every argument against salvage—it’s illegal, it’s gross, it’s not a solution to anything. But she knows his real worry: that she will die in a rain-ravaged house and he will be left alone, again, in this collapsing world.

  The ashes sit between her knees, shaken into dunes by the slow motion of the car. Carve has been uncharacteristically quiet. Lucy flips through her eighty-slot CD binder. “What do they look like?” she asks. “The gods?”

  “Haven’t you seen photos?”

  “Yeah, but you know they’re impossible to photograph. They’re all out of focus, like a hoax.”

  Carve shrugs, studies the speedometer. “They vary,” he says. “The ones out west tend to be bigger—people say it’s so they’re not dwarfed by the mountains. But they’re all the same shade of gray, and scaly. If you had the right shoes you could climb them.” His eyes flit to the rearview mirror, the shining bulk of his wheelchair in the back seat. “Our church used to take trips down there every summer. We sang songs around the fire and made yarn art and studied their bodies, half-sunk into the earth like it’s memory foam. We were reminded daily that these beings once walked the world, that all existence sprung from their will.”

  To their right is a relo camp: tents and temporary houses and long lines for the bathroom. Soldiers with small guns and ill-fitting jackets patrol the fenceless border, while men and women dressed in white pile onto a bus. Painted on the side is FOR THE GLORY OF GODS AND MAN. Lucy is glad to live with Carve, to have avoided such a camp when her old house fell; glad that she, in the middle of her loss, did not have to sit and wait for a new, empty, government-issued house.

  “It isn’t hard to imagine that paradise surrounds them, the gods. All the lush grass, the fruit trees sprouting as if by some hidden engine.” Carve gestures at the world. “It must be something about the weather, the way the wind moves.”

  Lucy tries to remember the last time she saw rain that wasn’t spilling from a house’s open door. Channeled through tubes to reservoirs and fields. She can understand how, with the gods’ landscapes so lush, the interior rain would seem to be their doing—as if all the world’s water was theirs to command.

  Carve continues. “You go back year after year, though, and you see that nothing changes. Nothing rots. Nothing covers their enormous bodies.” He shakes his head. “You start to think: Is this really divinity? Or the epitome of what it means to be human?”

  * * *

  After Lucy and Noel’s parents died, she did her best to take care of her brother. She sent him money at college. She called him on his birthday and sent him another volume of a Great Books course. Perhaps it was the Great Books that pushed him over the edge—all those thirteenth-century mystics. She didn’t see his slide into zealotry, only the abstract religious icons, the theological tomes he brought when he moved back into their childhood home. As the interior rains poxed the world, Noel fled deeper into his obsession.

  And so it was that, on the day she met Carve, Lucy found herself outside a pharmacy, watching her brother ring a bell and hand out tracts and speak of the gods’ glory. “The gods have given themselves to the earth,” he said, calm above the bell’s ostinato. “One day soon, the sun and stars will be unobscured by the false firmaments of ceilings.” He sounded almost reasonable. He smiled and bowed shallowly at each person who came to the pharmacy. Lucy scuttled around him like a futile goalie, hoping that if she kept him from delivering his tracts, his news, he would lose interest.

  “Noel,” Lucy said. “Noelly-Polley, come on. Let’s go home.” She knew s
he must look wilder than he, hair a mess and color high. They’d walked here and the day was burning. She felt sick with fear that this was the end of a certain kind of life. He’d never proselytized like this before.

  “Lucy, look, you can leave.” He did not turn to her, as if openly acknowledging her would weaken his message. He called to passersby: “Your body is a house, your house a body! The world will make us into rivers and we will meet in the ocean of Godly glory.”

  It was a year and a day before he would die.

  Exhausted and headachy, Lucy retreated into the pharmacy to buy an iced tea. A few minutes later she heard the bell stop, left her tea, and rushed back out. But Noel was only packing up his bell and tracts. Before him sat a man in a wheelchair, looking quite pleased. “I’m going home,” Noel said.

  “Nice talking to you,” the man called after him. “Happy to give you a ride, if you want.” But Noel was already clomping home.

  Lucy didn’t know whether to go or stay. The man nodded at Noel’s back. “He your brother?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “What did you say to him?”

  “Only what he’d remember from scripture, if he was more than a two-bit fanatic.” The man smiled. His voice was gravelly, as if he hadn’t spoken to anyone all day.

  “And what’s that?”

  “Works, not words, convince people.”

  “Thank you,” Lucy said. She did not know whether to trust him or not, this man who had appeared out of nowhere. Did not know if he was, perhaps, a fanatic of a higher order. She worried her uncertainty was worsened by his disability—he looked too big for his wheelchair, as if he might erupt from it at any moment. “Are you in the church?”

  “Used to be. Can still pull out the teachings when it’s needed.” Lucy stooped, picking up a stray tract that was scuttling across the sidewalk.

  “Why’d you leave it? What changed?”

  “Who knows. It was sunny, it was cloudy. It was unseasonably warm, it was exactly as cold as you’d expect. Things come and go.” He laughed. “Even losing my legs didn’t put me out. I thought the gods might like it, me kneeling all the time. Then one day, I was done. Had enough, I guess.”

  “Do you ever miss it?”

  Carve did not pause to think. “I miss the knowing.”

  Down the road, Lucy could just make out the retreating speck of her brother. She felt calm for the first time in days. “Thank you,” she said again.

  “Hey, what else is a heretic good for?”

  They ended up at a fast-food restaurant a block away. Carve bought milkshakes. “My parents were obsessed with Noel’s success,” Lucy said. They sat at a low, hard plastic table. The thick malted chocolate cool relief on her tongue. “He won a national science fair prize when he was eleven and from then on, they’d shell out any amount of money to send him to physics camp, space camp, wherever. They told their friends he was going to be an astronaut, or make quantum computers. He was going to save the world.”

  All those lost days of toy circuit boards and computer programs. Noel racing around, foam altimeter in hand, exclaiming about how high his model rocket had gone. Meanwhile, Lucy played cello with a practice mute on to avoid bothering her parents. The ringing strings so tinny and small that they made you feel something was wrong with your ears. She’d bought the cello with her own money, working in the same record shop she worked in now. She didn’t play anymore.

  Noel had answered big questions as if he were bragging:

  What happened when we died?

  We disappear, Luce. Oblivion, obliviated.

  What could they do about the ice caps, the rain forests, the dying birds?

  Take to the stars.

  Was it right to bomb a country if it would save lives at home?

  Obviously.

  “Do you feel like that was time and money ill-spent?” Carve asked.

  She could not have put a name to it at the time, but she was jealous of Noel’s view of the world. For him, everything was explicable and pure and reasonable, if only emotions didn’t get in the way. He trusted so much in what his senses told him that of course, in time, he came to think of the gods—stretched out and enormous and smothering the earth—as divine.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said. She slurped her milkshake dry, leaving only a hollow burbling.

  * * *

  When they pull off the highway, they are still miles away from the god. It’s invisible from the road, but birds turn abruptly this way and that, uneased by its bulk. “Hold on,” Lucy says. They pass a house shedding water in sheets, a glassine carpet rolled out for them. She presses her hands to the window. It looks just fresh enough to be safe. “Carve, let’s go back. I’ll be real quick.”

  “There could still be people inside.”

  “The door’s open, there’s no car in the drive.”

  Carve huffs. “Luce—”

  “I know.” She knows he only wants her to be safe. But what do you do with that? What do you do when what is best and what you need do not match? She looks at the light reflected in the walls of her makeshift urn and does not feel ready to advance.

  “One last time, okay?” she says. Carve looks at her. “This is it; I promise. Besides, there might be something we can trade. We’re out of tomatoes. And maybe there’s a Western novel you haven’t read.”

  “Unlikely.”

  “Well, maybe.”

  He sighs, says, “Need I remind you?”

  “You needn’t.”

  He slows and executes a perfect three-point turn. Lucy can see, briefly, the joy that this smooth motion brings him, the simple action of pointing back the way they came. He has often told her how he used to love driving, used to take his car into the hills at night and let the headlights trace twin trails of light across the darkened road.

  Now he claims gas is too expensive, the world too imperiled, but Lucy does not believe that this is the reason he stopped. She wonders who else might have once gone on those late-night rides. He’d told her, while drunk, that when he lost his faith he lost everyone who understood him, that everyone he’d met since treated him with pity or disgust. She didn’t know if that included her, and if so which one she was.

  The house’s lawn is sopping. Water splashes Lucy’s calves as she walks. She wishes she had her boots, her bag—the tools of her pillage. Her socks are already soaked. She turns back to find Carve with his fist pressed to his mouth and asks, “Why are you biting your hand?”

  “I’m trying to tear hair out with my teeth, thanks for asking.”

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “Absolutely not.” He eyes the house. Inside, barely visible, is the dark bruise of rolling clouds and rain. She thinks, Here it comes, but Carve only says “Be careful, Lucy.” She is surprised to see his eyes wet with tears. For a moment, she wants to rewind it all—the drive, the ashes, every journey into a waterlogged house. She wants to hold Carve’s hands in her own in a kind of secular prayer and prove to him that they will not die today or ever.

  “Of course,” she says. They both know that no amount of care will save a house that wants to fall.

  “Okay.” Carve looks at the ground as if wishing he could kick a stone. He makes a joke about silently circling the house, waiting until she’s outside, and blowing a trumpet to bring the walls down.

  Lucy isn’t listening. She’s eyeing the door, and the water that flows free.

  * * *

  In the months after they met, Lucy and Carve hung out more nights than not. They drank beer and talked and, if they were at Lucy’s house, listened to Noel’s soft chanting in his room above. Carve liked to talk about the past, his own and in general. He held on to things some people would rather forget, and Lucy appreciated this about him.

  Some nights, Carve invited her and Noel over to eat dinner and drink champagne and listen to old dance records. He’d cook up enormous quantities of sausage. “You can never have too much sausage at a celebration.”

  “Ah yes, that old bit of
liturgical wisdom,” Noel replied.

  Lucy did not know how Carve did this—bringing out a side of Noel she had not seen since childhood. Wry and open to the world, if only just.

  They’d talk of the way the world had been, talk of what they’d lost. As the night wore on, Lucy turned the music up and they three—drunk and full of bubbles and sausage and light—danced around the living room. With each other, or by themselves, or with the dying plants Carve held on to out of some sense of obligation. Lucy could feel the bass in the middle of her chest, feel the world opening up, feel that life was more than a slow slide to oblivion.

  * * *

  The abandoned house is nearer its end than Lucy realized. The floors are spongy beneath her feet. Books fallen from their shelves splay like dead, ink-smeared birds. She easily spots places picked clear: walls emptied of photos, foodless kitchen cabinets. Holes in the damp drywall where wiring was ripped free. There’s nothing here worth taking.

  Through the kitchen window, Lucy spots Carve and waves at him but he doesn’t see her. Rain roars on the second floor. Dark stains splinter and meet across the plaster sky. There is the small echo of thunder in empty rooms, the smell of ozone.

  Lucy knows that she should leave. There is no use in remaining, nothing on offer but the threat of extinction. But she can’t bring herself to go.

  Every house she enters, her fear comes back like a too-catchy song, stuck in her head and the rhythm of her breath. It is like stepping into both past and future: to the day her house fell, to the day all houses will fall. But there is hope in each new house, inexplicable hope. As if she would find Noel there, body cloaked again in rain, and could this time drag him to safety.

  And so in spite of herself, she keeps looking. Not for anything, only looking.

  Pinned to the dead fridge is a lottery number for the relo camps. Lucy wonders how many more times the people who had lived here would have to move. She studies nicks and scuffs on the floors and walls, muddy traces of child-sized shoes, penciled records of growth on the wall. All the little histories, the petty squabbles and triumphs. Where will they go when it falls? A house is a record of more than what can be taken from it.