by Isaac Marion
She looks out the airplane window at the distant mountains. “I tried to talk him down. Tried really hard to keep him here, but over the last couple years it got pretty clear to everyone. He was just . . . gone. I don’t know if anything short of Christ and King Arthur returning to redeem the world could have brought him back. I sure wasn’t enough.” She looks at me. “Will he come back to life, though? As one of you?”
I drop my eyes, remembering the juicy pink taste of his brain. I shake my head.
She is quiet for a while. “It’s not like I’m not sad that he’s gone. I am, I . . .” Her voice wobbles a little. She pauses, clears her throat. “I really am. But he wanted it. I knew he wanted it.” A tear escapes one eye and she seems startled by it. She brushes it away like a mosquito.
I stand up, take her plate, fold it into the trash bin. When I sit back down her eyes are dry but still red. She sniffs and gives me a weak smile. “I guess I talk a lot of shit about Perry, but it’s not like I’m such a shiny happy person either, you know? I’m a wreck too, I’m just . . . still alive. A wreck in progress.” She laughs a quick, broken laugh. “It’s weird, I never talk about this stuff with anyone, but you’re . . . I mean you’re so quiet, you just sit there and listen. It’s like talking to God.” Her smile drifts away and she is absent for a moment. When she speaks again her voice is cautious but flat, and her eyes roam the cabin, studying window rivets and warning labels. “I did a lot of drugs when I was younger. Started when I was twelve and tried almost everything. I still drink and smoke pot when I get the chance. I even had sex with a guy for money once, when I was thirteen. Not because I wanted the money—even back then money was pretty worthless. Just because it was awful, and maybe I felt like I deserved it.” She looks at her wrist, those thin scars like an entry stamp for some horrible concert. “All the shitty stuff people do to themselves . . . it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself.”
There is a long silence. Her eyes roam the floor and mine stay on her face, waiting for her to come home. She takes a deep breath, looks at me, and gives a little shrug. “Shrug,” she says in a small voice, and forces a smile.
Slowly, I stand up and go over to my record player. I pull out one of my favorite LPs, an obscure compilation of Sinatra songs from various albums. I don’t know why I like this one so much. I once spent three full days motionless in front of it, just watching the vinyl spin. I know the grooves in this record better than the grooves in my palms. People used to say music was the great communicator; I wonder if this is still true in this posthuman, posthumous age. I put the record on and begin to move the needle as it plays, skipping measures, skipping songs, dancing through the spirals to find the words I want to fill the air. The phrases are off key, off tempo, punctuated by loud scratches like the ripping of fascia tissue, but the tone is flawless. Frank’s buttery baritone says it better than my croaky vocals ever could had I the diction of a Kennedy. I stand over the record, cutting and pasting the contents of my heart into an airborne collage.
I don’t care if you are called—scratch—when people say you’re—scratch—wicked witchcraft—scratch—don’t change a hair for me, not if you—scratch—’cause you’re sensational—scratch—you just the way you are—scratch—you’re sensational . . . sensational . . . That’s all . . .
I leave the record to play out its normal repertoire and sit back down in front of Julie. She stares at me with damp, red-rimmed eyes. I press my hand against her chest, feeling the gentle thump inside. A tiny voice speaking in code.
Julie sniffs. She wipes a finger across her nose. “What are you?” she asks me for the second time.
I smile a little. Then I get up and exit the plane, leaving her question floating there, still unanswerable. In my palm I can feel the echo of her pulse, standing in for the absence of mine.
• • •
That night, lying on the floor of Gate 12, I fall asleep. The new sleep is different, of course. Our bodies aren’t “tired,” we aren’t “resting.” But every so often, after days or weeks of unrelenting consciousness, our minds simply can’t carry the weight anymore, and we collapse. We allow ourselves to die, to shut down and have no thoughts at all for hours, days, weeks. However long it takes to regather the electrons of our ids, to keep ourselves intact a little longer. There’s nothing peaceful or lovely about it; it’s ugly and compulsory, an iron lung for the wheezing husks of our souls, but tonight . . . something different happens.
I dream.
Underdeveloped, murky, faded to sepia like centuries-old film, scenes from my former life flicker in the void of sleep. Amorphous figures walk through melting doorways into shadowy rooms. Voices crawl through my head, deep and slurring like drunken giants. I play ambiguous sports, I watch incoherent movies, I talk and laugh with anonymous blurs. Among these foggy snapshots of an unexamined life, I catch glimpses of a pastime, some passionate pursuit long ago sacrificed on the blood-soaked altar of pragmatism. Guitar? Dancing? Dirt bikes? Whatever it was, it fails to penetrate the thick smog choking my memory. Everything remains dark. Blank. Nameless.
I have begun to wonder where I came from. The person I am now, this fumbling, stumbling supplicant . . . was I built on the foundations of my old life, or did I rise from the grave a blank slate? How much of me is inherited, and how much is my own creation? Questions that were once just idle musings have begun to feel strangely urgent. Am I firmly rooted to what came before? Or can I choose to deviate?
I wake up staring at the distant ceiling. The memories, empty as they already were, evaporate completely. It’s still night, and I can hear my wife having sex with her new lover behind the door of a nearby staff room. I try to ignore them. I already walked in on them once today. I heard noises, the door was wide open, so I walked in. There they were, naked, awkwardly slamming their bodies together, grunting and groping each other’s pale flesh. He was limp. She was dry. They watched each other with puzzled expressions, as if some unknown force had shoved them together into this moist tangle of limbs. Their eyes seemed to ask each other, “Who the hell are you?” as they jiggled and jerked like meat marionettes.
They didn’t stop when they noticed me. They just looked at me and kept grinding. I nodded, and walked back to Gate 12, and this was the final weight that broke my mind’s kneecaps. I crumpled to the floor and slept.
I don’t know why I’m awake already, after just a few feverish hours. I still feel the weight of my accumulated thoughts bearing down on my tender brain, but I don’t think I can sleep anymore. A burr and a buzz tickle my mind, keeping me alert. I reach for the only thing that’s ever helped in times like these. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last chunk of cerebrum.
As residual life energy fades from the brain, the useless clutter is first to go. The movie quotes, the radio jingles, the celebrity gossip and political slogans, they all melt away, leaving only the most potent and wrenching of the memories. As the brain dies, the life inside clarifies and distills. It ages like a fine wine.
The piece in my hand has shriveled somewhat, taking on a brownish gray tint. I’ll be lucky to get another few minutes of Perry’s life out of this, but what blazing, urgent minutes these will be. Closing my eyes, I pop it into my mouth and chew, thinking, Don’t leave me yet, Perry. Just a little longer. Just a little more. Please.
• • •
I erupt from the dark, crushing tunnel into a flash of light and noise. A new kind of air surrounds me, dry and cold as they wipe the last smears of home off my skin. I feel a sharp pain as they snip something, and suddenly I am less. I am no one but myself, tiny and feeble and utterly alone. I am lifted and swung through great heights across yawning distances and given to Her. She wraps around me, so much bigger and softer than I ever imagined from inside, and I strain my eyes open. I see Her. She is immense, cosmic. She is the world. The world smiles down on me, and when She speaks it’s the voice of God, vast and resonant wi
th meaning, but words unknowable, ringing gibberish in my blank white mind.
She says—
• • •
I am in a dark, crooked room, gathering medical supplies and loading them into boxes. A small crew of civilian recruits is with me on this salvage, all of them handpicked by Colonel Rosso except one. One of them picked herself. One of them saw a look in my eyes and worried. One of them wants to save me.
“Did you hear that?” Julie says, glancing around.
“No,” I reply instantly, and keep loading.
“I did,” Nora says, brushing her frizzy curls out of her eyes. “Pear, maybe we should—”
“We’re fine. We scoped it out, we’re secure. Just work.”
They watch me constantly, tensed like hospital orderlies, ready to intervene. It changes nothing. I won’t endanger them but I’ll still find a way. When I’m alone, when no one’s looking, I’ll do it. I’ll make it happen. They keep trying and trying but the beauty of their love only drives me deeper. Why can’t they understand it’s too late?
A noise. I hear it now. A rumble of footsteps up the staircase, a chorus of groans. Are Julie’s ears so much more sensitive or have I stopped listening? I pick up my shotgun and turn—
No, I blurt into the middle of the vision. Not this. This isn’t what I want to see.
To my surprise, everything halts. Perry looks up at me, the voice in the sky. “These are my memories, remember? You’re the guest here. If you don’t want to see it, you can spit it out.”
This is a shock. The memory has come unscripted. Am I having a conversation with the very mind I’m digesting? I don’t know how much of this is actually Perry and how much is just me, but I’m swept along.
We should be seeing your life! I shout down at him. Not this! Why would you want your last thought to be a replay of your dirty, meaningless death?
“You think death isn’t meaningful?” he retorts, chambering a round in his shotgun. Julie and the others wait in their positions like background props, fidgeting impatiently. “Wouldn’t you want to remember yours if you could? How else are you going to reverse-engineer yourself into something new?”
Something new?
“Of course, you dumb corpse.” He puts his eye to the sight and makes a slow scan of the room, holding for a moment on Berg. “There are a thousand kinds of life and death across the whole metaphysical spectrum, not to mention the metaphorical. You don’t want to stay dead for the rest of your life, do you?”
Well, no . . .
“Then relax, and let me do what I need to do.”
I swallow the lump in my throat and say, Okay . . .
• • •
—pick up my shotgun and turn, just as the thundering footfalls reach our floor. The door blows open and they burst inside, roaring. We shoot them, we shoot them, we shoot them, but there are too many, and they’re fast. I crouch over Julie, shielding her as best I can.
No. Oh God. This is not what I wanted.
A tall skinny one is suddenly behind me, grabbing my legs. I fall and hit the table and my vision flashes red. Everything is wrong, but as the red fades to black I still allow an exultant shout, one last selfish orgasm before I go to sleep forever:
Finally. Finally!
And then—
• • •
“Perry.” A jab in my ribs. “Perry!”
“What?”
“Don’t you go to sleep on me now.”
I open my eyes. An hour of sun glaring through my closed lids has faded all the colors of the world to bluish gray, like an old movie poster in a dying local video store. I turn my head to look at her. She smiles wickedly and jabs me again. “Never mind. Go ahead and sleep.”
Beyond her face I see the looming white posts of the stadium roof arches, and beyond that, the deep cerulean sky. I slowly alternate my focus between her and the sky, letting her face blur into a peach-and-gold cloud, then refocusing it.
“What?” she says.
“Tell me something hopeful.”
“What kind of hopeful?”
I sit up, crossing my arms over my knees. I look out at the surrounding city, the crumbling buildings, the empty streets and lonely sky, clean and blue and deathly quiet without its white-sketching airplanes.
“Tell me this isn’t the end of the world.”
She lies there for a minute, looking up at the sky. Then she sits up and pulls one of her earbuds out of her tangled blond hair. She gently plugs it into my ear.
The warbled strumming of a broken guitar, the swelling of an orchestra, the oohs and ahhs of a studio choir, and John Lennon’s weary, woozy voice, singing limitless undying love. Everyone playing this song is now bones in a grave, but here they are anyway, exciting and inviting me, calling me on and on. The final fadeout breaks something inside me, and tears squeeze out of my eyes. The brilliant truth and the inescapable lie, sitting side by side just like Julie and I. Can I have both? Can I survive in this doomed world and still love Julie, who dreams above it? For this moment at least, tied to her brain by the white wire between our ears, I feel like I can.
Nothing’s gonna change my world, Lennon chants, over and over. Nothing’s gonna change my world.
Julie sings a high harmony and I murmur a low. There on the hot white roof of humanity’s last outpost, we look out over our rapidly, hopelessly, irretrievably changing world, and we sing:
Nothing’s gonna change my world. Nothing’s gonna change my world.
• • •
I am staring at the airport ceiling again. I drop the last chunk of Perry’s brain into my mouth and chew, but nothing happens. I spit it out like gristle. The story is over. The life is gone.
I find my eyes burning again, craving tears that my ducts can’t supply. I feel as if I’ve lost someone dear. A brother. A twin. Where is his soul now? Am I Perry Kelvin’s afterlife?
I finally drift back to sleep. I’m in the darkness. The molecules of my mind are still scattered, and I float through oily black space, trying to swipe them up like fireflies. Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping that when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn’t been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below. Hoping you pull up anything at all. Maybe this is why I sleep only a few hours a month. I don’t want to die again. This has become clearer and clearer to me recently, a desire so sharp and focused I can hardly believe it’s mine: I don’t want to die. I don’t want to disappear. I want to stay.
I AWAKE to the sound of screaming.
My eyes snap open and I spit a few bugs out of my mouth. I lurch upright. The sound is far away but it’s not from the school. It lacks the plaintive panic of the school’s still-breathing cadavers. I recognize the defiant spark in these screams, the relentless hope in the face of undeniable hopelessness. I leap to my feet and run faster than any zombie has ever run.
Following the screams, I find Julie at the Departures gate. She is backed into a corner, surrounded by six drooling Dead. They close in on her, rearing back a little each time she swings her smoke-belching hedge trimmer but advancing steadily. I rush at them from behind and crash into their tight circle, scattering them like bowling pins. The one closest to Julie I punch so hard the bones of my hand shatter into seashell crumbs. His face cracks inward and he drops. The next closest I ram into the wall, then grab his head and smash it into the concrete until his brain pops and he goes down. One of them grabs me from behind and takes a bite out of my rib meat. I reach back, tear off his rotten arm, and swing it at him like Babe Ruth. His head spins a full three-sixty on his neck, then tilts, tears, and falls off. I stand there in front of Julie, brandishing the musclebound limb, and the Dead stop advancing.
“Julie!” I snarl at them while pointing at her. “Julie!”
They stare at me. They sway back and forth.
“Julie!” I say again, not sure how else to put it. I walk up
to her and press my hand against her heart. I drop the arm-club and put my other hand on my own heart. “Julie.”
The room is silent except for the low grumble of her hedge trimmer. The air is thick with the rotten-apricot smell of stabilized gasoline, and I notice several decapitated corpses I had nothing to do with lying at her feet. Well done, Julie, I think with a faint smile. You are a lady and a scholar.
“What . . . the fuck!” growls a deep voice behind me.
A tall, bulky form is picking itself up off the floor. It’s the first one I attacked, the one I punched in the face. It’s M. I didn’t even recognize him in the heat of the moment. Now, with his cheekbone crushed into his head, he’s even harder to identify. He glares at me and rubs his face. “What are . . . doing, you . . .” He trails off, at a loss for even simple words.
“Julie,” I say yet again, as if this is an irrefutable argument. And in a way, it is. That one word, a fully fleshed name. It’s having the effect of a glowing, chattering cell phone raised before a mob of primitives. All the remaining Dead stare at Julie in hushed silence, except M. He is baffled and enraged.
“Living!” he sputters. “Eat!”
I shake my head. “No.”
“Eat!”
“No!”