by Dara Horn
“What happened?”
“What happened?”
“What happened?”
At the far end of the gallery, a loud crack resonated above the screaming voices, then a deep rumble as part of the floor caved in, opening through to the gallery below. Thick black smoke began to billow up in clouds through the hole in the floor, as though a volcano had erupted. The glow from the fires downstairs cast a thin orange light in the upstairs galleries, illuminated the squares of glass on the paintings into panels of sick light, like the eyes of a nocturnal animal. The cloud thickened above the strange fire, a pillar of smoke.
Someone took Ben’s hand. He groped with his other hand for a wall or a bit of floor where he could push himself to his feet. Instead his fingers found shaking shoulders, and a chin coated with drool. Someone grabbed his other hand and pulled him up. Standing, he now smelled something thicker, ash and dust. The room seemed to move. The screams coming through the floor grew louder, anguished moans of men and piercing shrieks that sounded like children. The air had become furry in the dark. Suddenly he heard a man’s voice wail beside him, a sound he had never heard before. It was Leonid. “Sara, the baby—”
“The baby’s fine,” he heard Sara’s voice crack near his knees. “Get us out.”
A thin line of light emerged in the glowing darkness, and Ben saw Leonid throwing himself against the exit door, heaving it open. In the newfound light from the staircase, Ben found Sara crouched on the floor in front of him, and hauled her to her feet. When Leonid grabbed her other hand, Ben stumbled, and then looked behind him. There were more people in the room with them now, a confused crowd moving toward the stairwell door. A thick film of smoke billowed out of a vent near the ceiling, not far above Sara’s painting. Instantly everyone crushed toward the exit. As he piled with the others at the door, Ben heard a hissing noise behind him and looked back one last time. The sprinklers on the ceiling had turned on, drenching the room and the painting in a thick jungle mist. The painting’s glass cover clouded over with mist, then with smoke, as the museum burst into tears. The floating man vanished. Ben stood paralyzed at the sight, until Sara yanked him down the stairs.
Leonid led them as they pushed their way down the concrete stairwell with dozens of other people, pulled through the pinkish glow of the emergency lights. They reached the ground floor quickly, with people pushing them from behind. The doors on the bottom were open, revealing a short foyer and then another door leading to the alleyway outside. The crowds in the stairwell coming through from the ground floor were burned and bleeding. A woman pushed by with deep gashes on her bare arms and a thin wedge of glass embedded in her cheek. One man was running, bleeding from the head, carrying a little boy without legs. As the doors flipped open, Ben looked into the first-floor gallery. By the blackened walls he saw someone seated calmly in a wheelchair, facing a charred painting. The chair stood perfectly still. Nearby an arm rested on the floor.
The chain of Leonid, Sara, and Ben pushed its way through the doors until Leonid burst through into daylight. But as Ben saw the outdoor alleyway looming before him, he suddenly dropped Sara’s hand.
“I’m going down to get Erica,” he said.
“What?” Sara turned around in the doorway, and was quickly shoved to the side by other people coming down the stairs.
“Erica’s office is in the basement. She’s there now. I’m going to go get her.”
Sara stared. “How do you know she’s there?”
He coughed, feeling dizzy. He gripped the railing on the wall. “She is.”
Sara’s eyes widened. “Ben, that’s insane. She—she’ll be fine. They’ll have rescue people there.”
“No, they won’t. It’ll be the last place they look.”
The stairwell was growing hot. More people started pushing through, this time people covered with ash and cement dust as well as blood. As the door to the first floor opened again behind another knot of people, thin wisps of smoke crept out with them. Ben looked up as a screaming little girl, her braids burned into gray sticks and her jeans coated with ashes, tried to turn around and run back into the gallery. Someone caught her and shoved her out the door.
“There’s smoke here,” Sara said quickly. Her lips were shaking. “You won’t be able to get out this way again.”
“There’s another way out from the basement. A tunnel to the park.”
“What?”
“Two blocks down, through the grate in the sidewalk. Meet me there.”
She squinted, gagged. “Ben—”
“Sara, you’re pregnant and you’re breathing smoke. Get out.”
“Ben, no! You—”
But he had already pushed her out the door, and soon another avalanche of people splattered with blood had made their way through the first-floor doors and shoved her outside with them, where Leonid’s red hair towered in the blue sky. As his sister’s face disappeared into the crowd, Ben squeezed back around the panicked people in the stairwell toward a door marked “Staff Only.” He pulled it open and raced down the emergency-lit steps, as the stairwell by the door filled up with smoke behind him.
THE BASEMENT WAS a dark cave of burning ash. The bomb had blown a crater in the main floor clear through to the basement, and in the dim light from the hole to the smoldering lobby, Ben could see large boulders of ceiling that had crushed the plastic swivel chairs and half the desks to the floor. Soot filled his nostrils as a broken sprinkler pipe dribbled water from what remained of the ceiling. He began picking his way around the broken desks, trying hard to remember where her office had been. But with half the walls blown through, it was impossible. A cell phone started to ring nearby, but no one answered it. The phone chirped in the dark and fell silent.
He was suddenly frightened to call her name, terrified of waiting for an answer. Even if Erica was somewhere else, he thought frantically, shouldn’t there be other people here, other curators, other staff? But no, he was sure she was here. The cave of the basement seemed deserted, reeking with the dizzying smell of smoke. He knelt on the floor, trying to see beneath the smashed tables and chairs. Next to his knee, he saw a man’s leg, detached from its body.
Ben rose to his feet, backing away in slow steps. Then he whirled around, tripped, and began rushing through the ruined basement. He pushed through blown-out walls, moving toward what he thought might be the entrance to the tunnel.
The smashed desks and computers had given way to the storage room, a long chasm of twisted metal shelves that Ben could just barely see in the dim light shining through the broken ceiling. Curled, burnt pages of Hebrew manuscripts were blown against the walls, charred and smoldering; piles of charred paper lay in heaps. Singed handwritten sheets drifted in the dark, and suddenly Ben thought of the papers from the paintings, the entire novel rescued from the murals’ frames. Lost. A pipe had burst, and the floor was covered with a thick clumpy liquid exuding a heavy odor of human waste. Ben sucked in his breath. The sewage on the floor pooled in swirls of black ink, and his shoes sank into the slime. In his confused mind, he thought of the little boy in his mother’s book as he squinted at the floor, looking for a magic ring that he could use to bring the snow and wash it away. Instead all he saw were the glinting rings of silver wine goblets, and partly submerged candlesticks, and the wooden handles of scrolls sunken in the waste. The entrance to the tunnel, Ben saw, was blocked by a large contorted piece of metal that might at one point have been a sculpture or a shelf. So she hadn’t left that way, he thought. Where was she?
Now he remembered where her office was—through the rows of sludge-covered manuscripts and blasted scrolls, to the right, where her flashlight that evening had led them to a dark paradise. Was she still there? She hadn’t left up the stairs; he would have seen her, or at least heard her moving in the dark. The basement was strangely quiet. In the dim light that glowed through the broken ceiling as he made his way toward the row of offices past the storage room, he could see that this part of the basement was less d
amaged than where he had first come in. Most of the walls and doors were intact, though the floor was still flooded with slime. Might she have stayed in her office, unable to escape, the door blocked from behind? Might she be trapped there, underground, her voice muffled by debris? It was possible. Many more things were possible than he had ever previously imagined.
He slipped on the waste-flooded floor, regained his balance, and then saw the first door on the right—the same door he had entered that day when she interrogated him, and again when she kissed him. The door was charred near the cracked ceiling, but it was all in one piece. He pressed a hand to the metal surface: it was cool. As he glanced around the door’s edges, he thought of the encyclopedia entry on Schrödinger’s cat, the strange imaginary impossible world where each potential outcome, both life and death, was actually taking place simultaneously, until the moment one opened the door. But how was it possible to be both dead and alive? It was. No one in our town has ever really died, he remembered, because no one in our town has ever really lived! He slipped in the mud again, pawed at the walls, pulled himself up to stand, and reached for the doorknob.
Later, in the time she had created for him, the laws of gravity would be repealed and Ben would hover over the city, looking down and seeing every possibility, all at once: the buildings crooked and straight, the trees stunted and flourishing, the streets cast in shadows and sunlight, the invisible tombstones pushing through the sidewalks beneath leaves and a cloud. And then he would soar through the blue and black and orange sky, and he would know what she meant, even if it was only what she meant to him. But right now, he stood at the door that was not yet open.
“Erica?” he called, and listened for her answer. And then he opened the door and entered the world to come.
19
IT IS a great injustice that those who die are often people we know, while those who are born are people we don’t know at all. We name children after the dead in the dim hope that they will resemble them, pretending to blunt the loss of the person we knew while struggling to make the person we don’t know into less of a stranger. It’s compelling, this idea that the new person is so tightly bound to the old, but most of us are afraid to believe it. But what if we are right? Not that the new person is the reincarnation of the old, but rather, more subtly, that they know each other, that the already-weres and the not-yets of our world, the mortals and the natals, are bound together somewhere just past where we can see, in a knot of eternal life?
In our world, we are free to wonder about this for a lifetime. But the world to come is a busy place, and the not-yets in it have only nine months to wonder. All of them have been sentenced to birth. And Daniel—his parents don’t yet know that he is Daniel; in fact, no one anywhere on earth knows yet that he is Daniel—is afraid of being born.
AT THE HOUR when the future Daniel Ziskind Shcharansky was conceived, he hurried, with all of the other not-yets conceived in the same hour, to his first day of school. He and the others had hardly taken their celestial seats when the teacher—an ancient already-was who had lived centuries ago, though Daniel, knowing nothing, didn’t recognize his name—entered the room, carrying an enormous book.
“Welcome to the world to come,” the teacher announced. He opened the book in front of the students, and its enormous pages fluttered above them. Each page had a single name written at the top, and nothing else. The teacher turned the pages and called the roll. One by one, each of the not-yets rose as their names were called. Daniel listened, not sure what he was listening for. But when the teacher called his name, he recognized it, and rose.
“Daniel, son of Leonid and Sara.” It was the first time that anyone had ever spoken his name.
“Here I am,” he said.
Daniel’s name was the last on the list, and he trembled with the others as all of them, not yet people, but already known by name, hovered in the air. He peered around the room. Were there some who were absent, who were cutting class, who had chosen not to exist?
“All present and accounted for,” the teacher muttered to himself, making a note in the book. As the not-yets settled into their seats, bewildered, their teacher held the book up in the air. “Each of your names is written in this book, and every single one of you will sign it with your deeds,” he said. Then he slammed the book shut. “I suspect you’ve heard it’s paradise here. It is. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have a lot to learn. So pay close attention to everything we teach you here during the next nine months. At the end, there will be a test.”
A test? Daniel shuddered, horrified. He knew nothing. He didn’t even know how to learn. How could he pass a test? But an instant later, the lesson had already begun.
What do they learn in the world to come? Much of the school day is devoted to studying history. But of course it isn’t anything like history classes on earth. The famous figures here are unheard of there. Instead, the not-yets study the people who really did create the history of the world: mothers, teachers, brothers, sisters, fathers, aunts, uncles, friends—because, as one of Daniel’s teachers was fond of saying, “Time itself is created through deeds of true kindness.” Daniel found these lessons particularly difficult; he had trouble sorting out the important from the unimportant, and it was hard to tell what mattered out of all the things the teacher brought up in class. Worried about the test, though, he listened carefully to every word.
“Late in the spring of 1987,” his teacher began one morning, writing the names and dates on the celestial blackboard before them, “Leonid Shcharansky discovered that his father had betrayed his mother, and he vowed that when he grew up, he would never betray his own wife. It wasn’t until the winter of 1991, however, that he finally vowed not to betray himself.”
Not to betray himself, Daniel wrote down. He underlined it twice, suspecting that it might be on the test. After all, the name and date were on the board. But the teacher was already moving ahead, or backward, in a pattern he couldn’t quite follow. He took notes as quickly as possible, trying his best to keep up.
“In the winter of 1986, a revolution occurred when Sara Ziskind’s mother told her that once you are alive, there are no rehearsals for life. From that moment forward, Sara began to really see.”
No rehearsals for life, Daniel noted. But why not? He raised his hand, but the class had already moved on.
“Shortly after his mother died and his first wife left him, Benjamin Ziskind decided that he had been cheated too many times, and that he wouldn’t believe anyone anymore. It’s true that trust is dangerous. More dangerous than anything else. But eventually someone reminded him that trust is also the only thing that makes life worth living.”
Trust—dangerous, but makes life worth living, Daniel scribbled. But why? And if—
“During the course of his life, which lasted from 1909 to 1952, Boris Kulbak once met a painter and a writer, and he learned about the dangers of people who imagine more than they see. Imagination can be a beautiful thing, but it’s also a trap. The wisest people are those who use their imaginations when they are children, and then learn to see the actual as adults. Boris Kulbak did it backwards. He saw too much as a child, then imagined too much as an adult.”
Imagination: beautiful, but trap, Daniel noted. But what did it mean? He glanced over his shoulder at the notebook of the not-yet sitting next to him, wondering if he was writing down the right things. To his surprise, though, he saw that the not-yet next to him had taken a completely different set of notes, with completely different names and dates. Enrique Calderon, 1971, accident, she had written. Then she had underlined: Memory is less important than happiness. He stared again at his own notes, puzzled. Were they really in the same class? He shrugged. If she wanted to fail the test, that was her problem.
“On June thirteenth, 1965, Daniel Ziskind tore up the letter his father had sent him in Vietnam, in which his father had sworn never to read Daniel’s letters ever again. He regretted it for days afterward. Even when he returned home crippled, he still
regretted it, but he didn’t forgive his father, or do anything to try to win back his father’s love. By the time he realized that he should have tried harder, that there was no reason to exclude his own father from his children’s lives, his father had already passed away. When something matters, don’t wait.”
Don’t wait, Daniel scribbled. Would this be on the test?
DANIEL WAS A good student, but history was his least favorite subject. He much preferred science classes, where the secrets of the universe were revealed one by one. He especially liked the lab experiments. One time they had to plant microscopic cells of betrayal in petri dishes, inspecting their growth over the course of the class. Daniel stared at the dish and was astonished by how quickly the cells multiplied, by how a surface that was pristine moments before metamorphosed within minutes into a gangrenous plate of rot. A similar experiment was done involving a grudge, with identical results. Envy, on the other hand, proved itself not to be contagious at all; instead, it ate its carrier alive. Another lab result that intrigued Daniel was when the class measured the speed of gossip as it traveled through various media, determining how its speed was affected by whether it was transmitted through speech, writing, broadcast, or silence. To his surprise, the fastest means of travel was silence, which allowed the gossip to move faster simply by refusing to stop it, facilitated through listeners who should have created some kind of friction to slow it down but instead failed to rise to the subject’s defense. Daniel was slightly repulsed by the lab involving the dissection of lies, a gory procedure in which he and a partner had to slice through layers of smooth skinlike surfaces and pin them back to reveal the innards, which mostly consisted of disgusting rotting guts of self-loathing and fear. (Some not-yets had asked for permission to sit out the dissections, claiming that it was against their religious beliefs. Permission was never granted.)