When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3)

by Laura Giebfried

  When I Am Laid in Earth

  Book Three in the Damnatio Memoriae Series

  By Laura Giebfried

  Copyright © 2014 by Laura Giebfried

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Josh Pesavento

  (modifications made)

  https://www.flickr.com/photos/pezz/3232968751/

  For Jeanne Marie Hart,

  whose stories are more entertaining

  and far darker than mine.

  Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me,

  On thy bosom let me rest,

  More I would, but Death invades me;

  Death is now a welcome guest.

  When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create

  No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;

  Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

  Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

  - from Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell

  Ch. 1

  They must have just erected the headstone, for it was so smooth that it caught the reflection of the others around it and created a clear picture of the surrounding cemetery on the slab where the name ought to have shown, and it was uncovered even though it had just snowed the night before. It stood there in black misery against the expanse of white all around it, a bit farther out than the other graves as though it had been separated for some unknown reason, and the rectangle of earth that had been dug out from the frozen ground scattered the area messily. I took a step forward and cautiously prodded it with my foot, fearing that if I stepped on it before the grass had regrown that I might fall into the hole where the coffin was resting, but the ground was as solid as ever beneath me.A line of people surrounded the grave in semi-circle of black, their heads bent low and their faces covered by plaster casts. Death masks, I thought, squinting my eyes at them. Like the Romans used to wear. They were undoubtedly professional mourners who had been hired by the family to attend the funeral, too, as the Romans had done – otherwise no one would have been there besides for me. I ran my eyes over them and tried to detect if I recognized any of their forms beneath the white plaster and black attire, but they were each as unknown as the next. My father and Karl hadn't come, and neither had Jack. The cold must have kept them away.

  The priest was reciting a prayer in Latin, but he was murmuring too softly for me to hear the words properly and the wind was blowing them in the other direction: it would have hardly mattered if he was saying a prayer or uttering nonsense. I felt as though I ought to have stopped him and chimed in with something more appropriate, but no words would form at the base of my throat. Still, the thought of leaving the coffin in silence even just a moment sooner than necessary twisted my insides uncomfortably. Someone should have said something meaningful before the corpse was laid to rest forever, but the life that had ended had had no meaning, so it was a rather difficult thing to do.

  As I considered as much, I took another step forward and knelt down so that I was eye level with the stone. The ground was so still and unmoving beneath me, the last telltale sign that the person resting below would never stir again, and the line of mourners who neither knew nor cared for the dead was the last indication of what a wasted life had come and gone. I scooted forward until my boat shoes had half-submerged into the frozen clumps of dirt and reached out my hand to block the glare of sunlight that was making the stone unreadable. Situated right in front of it, I could finally read the name that shined in white from the pale winter light hitting the etching.

  March 15, 1987 – March 15, 2009

  Sit tibi terra levis

  Enim Lund

  Something materialized in my throat and I gagged, causing it to lurch forward into my mouth. The cold metal pressed momentarily against my tongue before I spit it out into my hand. It was Charon's obol, the coin placed into the mouths of the dead so that they could pay to be ferried into the underworld. I dropped it to the dirt and made to step back, stumbling over the frozen dirt as I realized what it all meant, but the earth over the coffin that had felt so solid moments beforehand had begun to seep downwards and the circle of masked mourners had closed in around me, locking me in –

  I jolted awake as a spray of applause sounded around me, barely managing to keep myself from toppling out of the bed and onto the floor. My heart was thumping beneath my shirt and my hair was wet with sweat, and the room was uncomfortably warm even though it was wintertime. As my eyes adjusted to the darkened room, it finally occurred to me that the audio player had turned on on its own accord and the audience was clapping as an overture ended. I quickly swung my legs over the side of the bed and crossed the room to shut it off.

  It was a dream. I pushed my hair from my eyes and leaned my forehead against the window so that the cold glass could cool my skin. It had only taken me a moment to realize that I was in my bedroom and not the cemetery, and yet the latter place had somehow seemed much more real. Even after nearly four years of staying there, I was rather disconnected from the room that Karl had cleared out in his apartment for me. Glancing at the clock, I noted that it was just after two in the morning and gave a sigh. It was my birthday.

  “Great,” I muttered, remembering as much and crossing back to the bed to sit down. The mattress was already cold again, and the sheets were stiff and frigid as I pulled them up around my shoulders. Even though Karl kept the heat up during the night, the chill always made its way in through the bedroom window anyhow. I pulled the comforter up until it covered my head and breathed out against the white, warming the air with partially suffocated breaths and trying to will myself back to sleep, but though I was still tired, my mind had awoken and I knew that there would be no quieting it for several hours.

  I was twenty-two. I couldn't decide if I liked the sound of it or not, though I certainly didn't like the idea of it. I had never been particularly fond of birthdays, and the aversion had only increased in the past several years. My seventeenth had been spent getting yelled at for the stunt that Jack and I had pulled with the opossum at Bickerby, my eighteenth had resolved in my admittance into psychiatric care, and the last few had come and gone with little to no recognition given that I had resolved to get a handle on my disorder by cutting myself off from the outside world. Though I hadn't had another episode for quite some time, this birthday seemed no more celebratory than the last few had been. In fact, if Karl hadn't insisted on taking me into the city to see an opera the night before and my father hadn't left a message asking me to come over for dinner that night, then I would have let the day pass like any other. The only person that I remotely wanted to spend the day with was Jack, but he wouldn't be there.

  After what had happened on Bardom Island, we had decided that it would be in both of our interests to go our separate ways for a while. Karl had managed to keep us out of any serious trouble for our parts in Albertson and Ilona's deaths, as well as keeping Jack out of trouble for evading arrest, though the latter was largely due to the fact that he had not mentioned that Jack had left the country on a stolen passport and forged documents to stay in France all the while there had been a warrant out for his arrest. As Jack wasn't responsible for the crime that he had been accused of in the first place, he had managed to get off with a fine and several dozen hours of community service that he had chosen to serve in Kipling, Maine, where he had continued to stay well after the service was paid.

  And I was still in Connecticut. I couldn't complain, of course – I had wanted to return there to live with Karl, as he had been the only one to support my decision to not take the medication to treat the schizophrenia. The year afterwards my father had transferred back there, as well,
along with his new wife and children, though even now that we were in the same city, we hardly saw one another more than we had since he had gone to Holland. The only reason that I consented to go over to his house at all for dinner every now and again was to showcase just how unerring and normal he had always wanted me to be.

  And I was normal. I scratched at the bridge of my nose as I considered it, still sheltered beneath the white sheets and breathing lowly into the reused air, and the feeling magnified tenfold. There was nothing special about me, and I had no greater cause or important role to fulfill, and – despite what my mother had led me to believe for all of those years – there was no secret that the universe was harboring that was waiting for me to unlock it. I was nothing more than I would ever be, and I was far less than what I had hoped: just plain, just unusable – throwaway, even – and life was pointless but to get through. The mere fact that I could admit as much to myself solidified that the schizophrenia was in remission, though I would have repeated it to myself daily even if it hadn't been, all the same. It was the closest thing to a true answer that I had ever found, and yet, after searching for one for so long, I would have taken back every hallucination and altered thought just to believe that I had a purpose again.

  I still heard the music, of course. Along with my flat affect and aversion to forming relationships, it was the last bit of the illness that clung on and wouldn't go away without medication. It wasn't the haunting type that followed me late at night anymore, though. I would sit at the piano in the main room and play along to it: sometimes it would be a song that I knew, and other times it would be something unfamiliar. Karl had taken to leaving my phone on the recording mode so that I could play the music back later and copy down the notes. He encouraged the idea of me composing music rather than simply playing distant songs that my mother once had, though I wondered if he would have been so quick to praise them if he knew where I was getting them from.

  A little innocuous music wasn't my concern, anyhow. In fact, if I thought about it, I didn't really have any concerns at all. I had gotten my GED when I was nineteen, and there was nothing pushing me to go to college to get a higher degree. I still had money from my mother's inheritance, and even if I didn't I could have easily lived without it seeing as Karl had consented to let me stay with him indefinitely. We seemed to need each other even though we weren't particularly good for one another: I needed someone to watch over me, and he needed someone to take care of. I often wondered if we were even capable of living without one another anymore. It seemed as though some invisible force-field was doming us in, and neither of us had any intention of trying to see if we could escape from it.

  I wandered into the kitchen when it was late enough and fiddled with the coffee machine to make myself a cup. Even though it was a Sunday and Karl didn't need to get up to go to work, he would undoubtedly step into the kitchen at quarter-past six as he always did, even so. He needed his schedules as much as he needed his kitchen to be immaculate, and so I was rather surprised that he altered the former in order to take me to the opera the night before. I leaned against the counter and watched coffee drizzle into the clear, rounded pot. As there was no chance that he would consent to let me sit through Turandot or Rusalka, he had taken me to see Dido and Aeneas instead, hoping that the familiar context might overshadow the fact that he was distancing me from everything that had created such issues in the past. What he undoubtedly didn't realize, however, was that though I had read The Aeneid in school and had never felt anything other than indifference towards it beforehand, in light of the fact that Albertson had turned out to be behind the horrifying events on Bardom Island, the story harbored just as many unsettling memories as either Turandot or Rusalka ever had.

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  I hadn't heard Karl come into the kitchen, but barely startled upon hearing his voice. Turning around to face him, I realized that I had been tapping my fingers against the counter-top as though playing the aria on the piano. I quickly pushed my hands into my pockets and cleared my throat accordingly.

  “It was good.”

  He was looping his tie around his neck and a frown had appeared on his face, though I couldn't tell if it was because he was concentrating or discontent with my answer. I fixed my face and tried again.

  “The orchestra was especially good.”

  “It was a bit quieter than usual,” he said, finishing the last loop and smoothing the tie down before looking at me thoughtfully. “Or maybe I'm just getting old.”

  “No, it was quiet,” I said.

  I hadn't really noticed, though it was surely a better response than admitting that he really was getting old. I had just turned twenty-two, but he would be fifty in the spring. And he looked fifty, I decided, taking in the way his hair was now light with gray rather than blond and his face was visibly lined even in the dark of the kitchen. But he had looked old in his forties, too, and he must have felt so. I wasn't even half his age, and already I was longing for it to be over.

  “Anyway, it was a bit of a departure from the usual, so I thought that it might be …” he hesitated as he searched for the words to finish the sentence and reached for an empty mug for his tea. “... good for you.”

  “Yeah, it was good.”

  “Good.”

  He got to work putting the kettle on and took out the toaster and a loaf of bread. I watched him set his spot the same way that he always did: mug at the upper right hand of the plate, butter knife and jam to the left, glass of juice hugging the mug, and a napkin laying alongside the plate. He set it up in the same motions, as well, going back and forth to the refrigerator at the same speed and order as always. It felt rather like re-watching the beginning of a very dull film every morning. Occasionally I got the urge to hide the jam on him or move the napkins to the other side of the room just to alter his routine, but as it would have no effect on the outcome, I rather didn't see the point.

  “What time does your father want you over?” Karl asked, sitting down and tucking his napkin over his lap.

  I picked up my coffee and wandered over to sit across from him, taking a leftover roll from dinner the night before as I went.

  “Five-thirty.”

  “We should leave at five, then,” he said, smoothing the preserves over his toast in a long, careful line. “There might be traffic.”

  There undoubtedly wouldn't be traffic, much less traffic that would entail a thirty minute delay, but I nodded all the same. Karl would rather sit out front of my father's house for four hours in the bitter cold than drop me off a minute later than had been asked, and since I felt at least partially responsible for the fact that the two hadn't spoken in five years, I was happy to leave whenever he liked.

  I returned to my room when I had finished eating and set my newly refilled coffee cup on the bedside table while I dressed. The closet was split into the familiar line of khakis, white shirts, and blue sweaters that I saw no reason to alter despite having worn the same thing for nearly ten years now. Karl's only objection was that I still wore my boat shoes even in the dead of winter, but as I almost never left the house, it didn't seem to be a problem anymore.

  He left around eight to run errands and buy groceries for the week, and I wandered into the main room to sit at the piano. There was a slightly unsettled sound in the empty apartment now that he had gone, like the buzzing of a bee trapped behind the curtain, and I raised my hands over the piano to silence it with noise. The aria from the opera that he had taken me to see the night before had gotten trapped in my head and was bringing thoughts of old Albertson and Ilona back, and I repeated the mantra about life's pointlessness again to myself rather than lingering on the memories of either of them. There was nothing else that could have happened to the two of them but death anyhow; and even if they had lived – if she had lived, rather, I thought with a pang of guilt – it would have been a sorrowful existence.

  “You memorized that quickly,” Karl said when he returned that afternoon. I hadn't reali
zed how long I had been playing the song over and over again, and my fingers were stiff and my back bent an at odd angle that made it difficult to straighten again. Hoping that he had not noticed that I had been repeating the aria, either, I watched as he walked past me to place the grocery bags on the kitchen table. He systematically put each item away and folded up the paper bags to put in the recycling, no hint of discontent on his features, before coming back to the main room to finish his thought. “That's the aria from Dido and Aeneas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you look up the sheet music?”

  “No, just remembered it.”

  “After only hearing it once?”

  He gave me a look of part surprise and part admiration as I nodded.

  “I never realized you could do that,” he said.

  “Only with certain songs,” I replied, swinging my legs around on the piano bench so that I was facing him, but then changed my mind and turned my face away to look across the room instead. The song had gotten stuck in my head much like the arias from Turandot and Rusalka had years beforehand, and as he had taken me to the opera as a marker of how much I had seemingly accomplished in the past few years, I couldn't bring myself to tell him that it had been a bad idea. “Ones I like, I mean.”

  “It was good, wasn't it?” he said, but he was distracted as he brushed the last of snow from his coat and removed it to hang on the wall. It occurred to me once I saw how cold his hands were and how the hems of his pants were soaked with snow that one of the errands he had run that morning must have been a drive to the cemetery to visit my mother's grave. Though he never mentioned when he went, there was always something darkened about his eyes when he returned and he was a bit less sharp than usual. He normally only went on Saturdays as far as I could tell, but must have seen fit to go again today because it was my birthday. I couldn't for the life of me imagine why he went, nor why he went so often, though: she could hear him no more clearly when he stood above her disintegrated bones than she could in any other place, including the bed where she had laid at the end of the hallway at my grandmother's old house.