Lament for the Afterlife

by Lisa L. Hannett

  At random, it seems, people are selected from the crowd and escorted to the caravan of vehicles encircling the encampment. From the outside, the library seems utilitarian, the convoy towed mostly by oxen, stout horses and mules. Yellow school buses like Esther’s and longer, articulated orange-and-whites. Armoured trucks and trailers and delivery vans. Covered stock-wagons. Refrigerated transports minus the refrigeration. “Still cooler inside than some,” Esther says, directing Peytr to the library’s heart. The planet to these satellite cars. The enormous, long-haul main branch.

  Whatever fuel the Librarians are given is siphoned into the eighteen-wheeler, its engine rigged to drag seventy-two extra wheels behind it. All told, the branch has five great white cargo holds hitched and jiggered together, modular gangways connecting them, and a long steel ramp leading visitors into the caboose. On its other side, a safe distance away from the archives, a square bullpen has been knocked together beside a separate, smaller one, for the horses and mules. Chicken coops and goat runs are aligned atop drays, with rabbit hutches swinging between the cartwheels. A congregating stink—and noise—wafts across the camp. The bleating of many voices. The smacking of tongues and lips. The pungent oil of sun-warmed hides and decaying motors. Wet fur mixed with the salt-sweat of bodies. Stale sawdust and rotting feed. Musk and mildew. Hoofs stomping on shit. Cascades of piss and snot and tears—and over it all, a heady perfume, brewed from roses, maybe, and also their thorns, the incense burning outside in sand-filled pots exacerbating the stench instead of masking it.

  It’s wonderful, Peyt thinks, wrinkling his brow. A whole, mobile world.

  A world built for long distances, long dreams.

  “Of course,” says Esther, and Peyt realises he’s let his lid slip. Fuckin’ sun, he thinks. Fuckin’ heat. But Esther ignores his scowl. “What use is it otherwise? Stories migrate from place to place—so should libraries. It’s our duty to collect, to amass—and, yes, to mobilise. Not to remain static. So many accounts, so many histories… . They certainly cannot be stored all together, not all in one place. Imagine the consequences! Just think of the museums …”

  She sighs as Peytr fumbles with his hood.

  “Like wordwinds,” she says, taking his hand, openly reading his uncovered thoughts, “knowledge belongs in perpetual motion. It has to circulate, to spin wherever it needs, to mingle with exciting, novel ideas. To expand through contact.” Esther winks and threads her fingers through his. “It’s only natural.”

  Her touch is strong, reassuring, her skin smooth as paper. She smells bittersweet, he thinks. Like lemon curd and almonds. Like trust. Her ’wind is stark and steady and bold. Rattled, Peytr drops his gaze. A few seconds later, his hood follows. Her nails are polished, a deep sparkling burgundy. They trace secret patterns on the back of his hand.

  Palms damp, he follows Esther like a sleepwalker, coasting, soles skimming dirt. She dodges guywires and ropes stretching down from the furthest canopies, steps over thick wooden pegs near the library’s main ramp. He drifts by her side. He ghosts. Puffs of dirt and dust kick up behind her heels, greying her red slippers, leaving a dark ring on the loose cuffs of her pants. Peyt glides behind her, afloat.

  I should go, he thinks, legs suddenly jerking as though pinched by grey talons. Arms shaking so hard Esther lets go his hand. “This way,” she says, ambling up the ramp. Giving him time to lurch and joggle. Once he enters the archive, joining the others climbing the plank in dribs and drabs, Esther smiles and Peyt’s trembling subsides.

  The library’s interior is as gaudy and vibrant as its exterior is drab. In the first chamber there is a riot of books—hardcover and soft, arranged by height, not colour—and a jubilee of cushions, embroidered, striped, crocheted: large on the floor, small on benches and steamer trunks and ottomans. Cats and mice are carved into lintels, reclaimed rafters, and glass-fronted cabinets—in which wooden boxes bristle with quills, pencils, erasers, plastic markers, ink bottles and blotters. Between bookshelves and cupboards, a bestiary romps across the walls: spiders and polar bears, peacocks and gazelles, lemurs with bulbous eyes. Robust succulents hang in pots, spikes scraping spots off giraffes, leopards, and stallions. Bushels of reeds shoot from urns in the corners and filigreed screens cordon off interview spaces. Skylights brighten the aisles with squares of sunshine, but glass baubles also dangle from the ceiling; lanterns to be filled with words and shaken, shaken until they effervesce and glow.

  Dangerous, Peytr thinks, seeing those lamps, remembering Jean’s warnings. You must choose your words carefully. Your aim must be precise. You are your own, most precious resource—don’t waste it. There is only one of you. Use yourself wisely.

  Librarians, of all people, must know how to cap such power.

  They know so many things …

  I should go, Peyt thinks again. But it is all so busy and productive and, somehow, calm. I should go with them.

  Colours blur into wet and run down his cheeks.

  “You are brimming, Peytr Borysson,” Esther says, giving him a quick, shameless hug. “Come in, come in, and spill. We’ll both be better for it.”

  He sits where instructed, a small table behind a decorative screen. When Esther sits across from him, familiar notepaper in hand, he yearns, he yearns to cooperate. But there is no beginning to the mass of words in his throat. There is no discernible end. So he sits, pulling his drawstrings out of habit, and studies the mural behind Esther’s head. A tawny owl inspects him, golden gaze lazy and undemanding. Peytr blinks at the creature in silent converse. He is captivated. Mesmerised. Utterly thoughtless.

  A glorious feeling.

  Esther sighs and puts down her pen.

  Peytr crouches in the covered wagon, clinging to the driver’s seat, peering over the rough-hewn slats of its back. For two days, he’s been allowed to loiter at the library, sleeping on a cot in Esther’s bus, sharing her rations and, in Guillaume’s words, moping. “Your pet needs to earn his keep,” he overheard the old woman say before breakfast, when Esther went out to fill the kettle. “He can’t keep borrowing without making a return.”

  So when Esther was assigned a morning trip to the outskirts—to chronicle news and articles from anyone too old or infirm to visit the library—Peyt volunteered to be her second.

  Fuckin’ idiot, he tells himself now, flinching every time the hacks balk, flinching when the wheels jam in ruts, flinching at corners and shadows. Jacket stuffed in his bag, hoodstrings set on garrotte, he shivers in his overwashed undershirt. What were they thinking, forcing him back out here? With no weapon, no backup, no fuckin’ Whitey to screech when the greys fuckin’ jump them. And only a few shells in his pack. Not enough for the onslaught. Not enough for the greys. Crouching, taking cover, he scans the low scrub for twickerings of movement. Stares at the tenements and portable units growing ever-taller on the horizon. Peels his eyelids wide. Refuses to blink. Glares at the concrete city wall crumbling around the buildings, willing himself to see through it. He hooks callused hands on the seat back, leaves damp fingerprints on the weathered wood. Legs flexing, left right left. Muscles taut, ready to spring.

  Though the day is warm, goosebumps sprout all over his body. As if his own skin is recoiling, trying to distance itself from the coward who wears it. Overhead, black flecks dart between clouds, swooping, catching thermals, like words untethered, lofty and meaningless and free. Shading her eyes, Esther pulls the reins to slow the horses and watches the flyers arc and dive. The beasts’ ears flick annoyance, pace unchanged. As if sensing the driver’s distraction, one veers away from the beaten path, noses through patches of scrub by the roadside. Between hills and city, the land is flat, mostly gravel and shale. Cratered where grey mines once detonated—the hollows, Peyt imagines, are littered with travellers’ fragmented bones. A shallow creek bed echoes the curve of the shantytown barnacling the city’s tumbledown wall; it cuts across their path, dry as the bleached lichen dotting rocks along its shores. Reins laced through her fingers, Esther reaches bac
k to touch Peyt’s speckled wrist.

  “Have you ever seen the skybunker girls? Up close, I mean. Have you seen their gliders? Woven from final thoughts, the last wishes and prayers of the dying. What colour, such fabric? What hue? Do the words radiate? Are they pure spirit taken flight? We have no official written records—no eyewitness accounts. Certainly no firsthand accounts.” She laughs, but it isn’t the hearty or impish sound Peyt’s getting used to hearing. There’s a new solemnity to her wondering. A wistfulness that, from anyone else, would seem bitter. “It’s a soldier’s privilege to see such marvels in action. And his bond, I suppose, to keep these visions under his lid. Are there rules about such things? Regulations?”

  “I see what you’re doing.”

  “Pondering?” Esther says, tattooed innocence. She yanks on the reins, chirrups the animals back on track. “Making conversation?”

  “Right.”

  “Enlightenment isn’t simply a matter of possessing knowledge,” she says. “It’s about insight. Asking questions. Talking. Thinking aloud. I could own all the books in the world, but without questioning what’s in them—without discussion—they are only so many coffins for meaningless words.”

  Peytr squints at her, and they ride for a while in silence. His legs are cramping, so he crab-walks through the wagon’s clutter, unearths a box sturdy enough to sit on, brings it up to the front. There’s plenty of room on the seat beside Esther, but Peyt can’t straighten. Can’t climb over, not now, not when he’s so exposed.

  The city looms closer, only a mile or two away. They’ll be there and back again before that ball of nonsense in the sky reaches its zenith. If not, Peyt thinks, there will be no search party. Librarians are gatherers, not hunters. They congregate where predators don’t. Deadzones. Ruins. Cities where inhabitants aren’t worth stealing, their eyes vacant as the buildings that house them. The library will take whatever scraps of story these shells have to offer—but at the first sign of threat, they’ll scatter like minnows.

  Peytr drapes an arm over the seatback and inches toward Esther. With the other hand, he unconsciously pats his waistband, searching for a pistol that isn’t there. He looks up at the clouds, thinking. The skybunker girls have all gone.

  “Is Guillaume really your Nan?”

  “No,” Esther admits. She speaks quietly, forcing him to lean in close. His cheek brushes her arm. Beard scratching flesh, he recoils. Clears his throat. Kneels on the box, raising his head to the level of her shoulder. Clinging to the wooden barrier between them.

  “So why are you trying to spite her?”

  “Quite the opposite. As always, I’m hoping to please her.”

  “Seems she’d be happier with me gone. I’m no scholar. I mean, I don’t know much about debates and philosophy. I know what I know, that’s all. And what I don’t …” He shakes his head. Changes his mind, changes tack. He doesn’t have the words to ask about that. Not yet. Instead, he wonders: “Why am I still here?”

  “Do you like to read?”

  And before Peyt can get annoyed—oh, you’re so fond of questions you’ll avoid mine—she runs her fingers through her curls. Caresses the heavy strands with personal, sensual gestures. As if she was alone and naked, washing her hair. Wanting him to notice, mixed in with her namesake’s lyrics—Dot 25. Aria: How can I stay (Tenor)… . Dot 26. Recitative: With inward joy (2 Tenors) …—her wordwind, raw and bare.

  In her phrases, he’s beautiful. Despite the beard. Maybe because of it. He’s different. Intriguing. A hide-bound manuscript brimming—yes, she likes that word—brimming … brimming … brimming … with stories freshly inked. Ballads of smoke-filled battles. Odes to friends lost. Love letters to an old sweetheart. Esther imagines he is lean, not skinny. Cheekbones chiselled, not staved-in with want. Smelling of leather and oil and tobacco. She thinks he’s strong. She thinks he’s young. She thinks, stupid girl, he’s whole.

  And, openly, confidently, she lets him see it all. This invented Peyt. His attractive imperfections. She reveals the mould she’s made for him, believing it isn’t such a tight squeeze. It fits, she thinks. He fits.

  Dot 4. Recitative: Our souls with ardour glow (Tenor)… .

  “Sit up here.” Esther turns and pats the seat beside her. As if checking to make sure it’s—he’s—still there. Her breath brushes his brow, spiced liquorice and mint. Her ’wind hovers too close to read. “The view,” she gestures vaguely at everything and nothing, “is much better from here.”

  She’s nervous, Peyt realises. She’s blushing.

  Steeling himself, he stands on unsteady legs. Esther beams. He adjusts his grip, tenses and leans. Esther nods, encouraging with eyes and thoughts. Air whooshes from Peyt’s lungs. Deep breath, he thinks, closing his eyes. Inhaling.

  The hacks swerve for a patch of pale weeds, throwing Peytr off balance. He sputters and snorts, choking on an ellipsis. Gagging Esther’s ardour down his throat. The letters wriggle and squirm, tickling his tongue, throttling, suffocating. He coughs until ribbons of saliva flutter from his lips. An ‘o’ clings to his beard, a stray ‘r’.

  Knees buckling, he half-lands, half-crashes onto the box in the back. Slumps forward, deflating. Buries his face in the crook of his arms. Hears Esther lashing the reins. Scolding the horses. Turning the wagon around for home.

  Sorry, he thinks, without looking up. Without saying a word.

  After dark, Esther burns candles instead of oil and doesn’t snuff them until dawn.

  For three days, Peyt’s busied himself at the library. Reading myths from the golden age, religious treatises, political tracts. Glutting himself with story, with poetry, like he used to before. Looking at photographs, so many different peaks and points, yet all flat on matte paper: visual nonsenses of fashion, geography, porn. Blurs of grey, ghosts captured in chemical and light. He mucks out the bullpen without being asked. Cleans the rabbit hutches. Gathers eggs. When new visitors arrive, far fewer now than earlier in the week, he directs them to Parrot or Guillaume, to the archivists at the head of the convoy, to genealogists in the armoured truck. He offers no food—it’s not his to give—nor does he eat. His guts heave at the smell of bread, fruit, nuts. He can barely stomach water and only in sips, not gulps. Even so, when it’s daylight, when he’s busy, Peyt’s tremors are hardly noticeable. There’s comfort in systems, he realises. Solace in order and routine, slotting things onto their appropriate shelves, disposing of crap, following logic, arranging. Avoiding unpredictable, flyaway feelings.

  At night there are different distractions.

  At night, the library is so dark. There are no campfires outside, no torches, no sparks unattended. Esther’s candles, dim hope, are the only glimmers against stifling blackness. Against the creeping greys who, Peyt’s convinced, sneak into Esther’s bus and gnaw at his legs while he’s asleep. So he doesn’t sleep anymore. Eyes open or closed, it’s all part of the same nightmare. He isn’t sleeping, never sleeps, until Esther shakes him awake.

  “Shhhhhhh,” she says, crawling back into her den of pillows. “It’s just a dream.”

  Of course it is. He knows it is. It’s an illumination flare blazing through his skull. An interlude in the darkness. Grass, luminous green against the backs of his eyelids. Airships with banners whipping from their tailfins, dropping gifts and bubbles. A zephyr teasing the downy hair on his chest. The salt tang of ocean air. Waves buffeting a long pebbled shore in the distance. A sea of bodies, limbs, wheels, blood, grenades, letters lapping up his frozen thighs. Slurping higher and higher with each uneven breath …

  Peyt looks at Esther. Her hair unbound, a bunched mess under her head. Cotton nightie so thin, her tatts show through the sleeves. Dingy ribbons unlaced to the breastbone, revealing a sheen of brown skin. Chest rising and falling slowly, reclaiming the rhythm of sleep.

  He kicks off his sheet, pads over to her bed. His shadow falls, a veil across her face that can’t dim the glint in her eyes when she opens them. She pulls back the blanket. Makes room for him
to climb in.

  “Tell me about meadows,” he says once he’s settled.

  Esther’s laughter tickles the nape of his neck. She doesn’t ask why he hasn’t said much more than “Morning” and “’Night” to her in three days. Doesn’t mention the wagon. The coughing. The rejection.

  “All right.” That’s it. No demands, no self-pity.

  “All right,” she says, instantly the better man.

  As Esther talks, the knot in Peyt’s belly tightens and loosens. She describes places where cars are flattened and stacked into towers, some more than thirty feet high. Where broken glass frosts the ground like sugar-snow. Where bald tires, reeking of rubber and tar so strong it greases the nostrils, are lobbed in great piles. Where hundreds of mirrors hang from the junkman’s shack, reflecting scavengers back to themselves in hundreds of pieces, shattering them, making them tiny, insignificant enough to fit inside the crook’s dark little shed, the little tin can, to pay him for the nuts and bolts he’ll sell at exorbitant prices.

  “No,” Peyt interrupts. “Not like that. Be serious.”

  But Esther is nervous. She teases by default.

  There are crowded bazaars, she explains. Stall after stall cramped into halls and spilling into alleyways. “Ten times the library’s size,” she says. Then, correcting: “Dozens of times.” Beneath bright-woven awnings, merchants and collectors sell watchworks by the bucket load—cogs and gears and chains of bronze and gold and silver, laid out by size and function—and baskets of gems, rubies and sapphires and opals cheap as chalk—and reams of silk that nobody buys, “Nobody buys it! Not a stitch! While the tanner’s putrid booth is daily cleaned-out of its wares”—and there are falcons and owls and songbirds in cages—“Cruel,” Peytr says, but Esther ignores him. She’s on a roll now; her imagination, he knows, has gotten the better of her. She conjures potatoes and carrots and rutabagas so bountiful, if any roll from the wagons, they’re left on the ground, they’re trampled, even, a feast for rats.