Among These Bones

by Amanda Luzzader

He murmured at me without looking up.

  That night I awoke sweating and panting from some terrible dream, but unable to recall what had scared me so. The floorboards moaned and squawked as I left my bed to get some water. In the hallway, I saw a line of yellow light beneath Arie’s door.

  Thinking he might have fallen asleep and left some candles burning, I went to his door and listened for a moment. I heard the faint crackle of turning pages. I opened the door.

  Arie was awake and in the same place as before, huddled over the papers and books. The bowl of soup remained on the dresser, undisturbed and cold. A few of the candles were still lit, burned down to cool flames in warm pools of wax that spread and dripped.

  “Arie,” I cried.

  He raised his head. Deep dark bags drooped beneath his bloodshot eyes. He seemed barely able to hold himself up. The notebook was open to a page of dense, orderly writing, but I couldn’t make it out in the dim candlelight.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I’ll eat in a minute.” Lowering his eyes to the notebook again, he said, “Just put it over there. I’m close. I’ve almost got it down.”

  “What are you doing? Do you know what time it is?”

  “I’m seeing connections I never saw before,” he said. “This is amazing.”

  “Go to bed right now,” I said.

  “In a second,” he said.

  “No. Now.” I grabbed his arm and pulled him up.

  Piles of books toppled and slid as he reluctantly allowed me to steer him to his bed. I cleared away the books and papers, and he lay down stiffly, muttering about his notes, about his indexing. I blew out the candles.

  “Get some sleep,” I told him. “You can finish later.”

  I went downstairs and got a drink of water. When I came back up, I heard the floorboards in his room creaking, and a moment later I saw candlelight flickering from the space beneath the door.

  I sighed and went to bed.

  In the morning I went to his room expecting to find him asleep on the floor amongst his papers. But he was still awake, staring transfixed at a magazine open on his lap.

  “Did you sleep at all?” I demanded.

  “You know what?” he said, tapping the open page of the magazine.

  I looked closer. It was a photo of a line of people waiting to get into a hospital or shelter. There were soldiers with guns.

  “You know what?” he said again. “I think I remember this. From before. This place, this day.”

  His face was paler now, and a thin layer of oily perspiration covered his skin.

  “You’re frying your brain is what you’re doing. Leave it alone for a bit. I want you to go out to the Tanner’s and help them fix that wheel barrow of theirs.”

  “Could you do it? I don’t want to lose my place.” His face was pallid. “I have a system going on.” He waved his hands over the notebook as if casting a magic spell. “It’s complicated. I need to finish.”

  “I can’t go, Arie. I’ve got to soak a batch of beans do the laundry and caulk those windows downstairs before it gets seriously cold. And the bearings on that barrow need to be repacked. You’re the only one who knows how—”

  A drop of blood fell from his nose and splattered on the open magazine.

  “Arie? You’re bleeding. My god, you’ve got to stop. Now!”

  He tilted his head back. “Oh, it’s just a doze bleed,” he said, pinching his nose. “Dis stuff is so dusty.”

  “You have to stop.”

  “I’ll be done by dinner, okay? I promise.”

  I sighed. Where did his stubbornness come from?

  “You’ll be done by dinner,” I repeated.

  The afternoon was long and dim. The sky was gray the entire day. It was cold, and we’d probably see the first snows in another couple weeks. I got the water and soaked the beans and strung the laundry on lines we’d nailed up throughout the house. Then I went to the Tanners with Arie’s tools. Together with Peggy and one of her boys we figured out how to pack the bearings and put the wheelbarrow back together, but our hands were raw and numb by the time we finished. At sundown I was tired and eager to eat.

  I called Arie’s name as I climbed the stairs. He didn’t answer.

  “You said you’d be done for dinner,” I said, testily pushing open his door.

  He was spread out on the floor on a layer of notebooks and papers, and he was convulsing. Paper crinkled and ripped beneath his kicking legs, and blood oozed from his ears and nose. A red foam bubbled out his mouth.

  I screamed his name.

  After crashing through the piles of books and paper, all I could do was cradle his bloody head in my lap. I didn’t know what else to do. His body jerked and twisted. I brushed away the foam from his lips.

  “Wake up, Arie,” I cried. I said it again and again.

  CHAPTER 7

  When it was clear Arie wouldn’t respond, I ran to a neighbor’s house and pounded on their door. Arie’s blood was on my hands, and I left smudges of it on the door. I thought of the woman who came to our house in the dark that night a week before. She was covered in blood, too, and she shouted desperately for help. Would my neighbors ignore me?

  The door opened.

  “Ron, thank god,” I cried.

  “Alison? What’s going on?”

  “It’s Arie. He’s—something’s wrong with him. It’s bad. You have to come.”

  “Let me get Steve. He’s out back. We’ll be right over.”

  When I returned to Arie’s bedroom, his teeth had clamped down on his tongue, and his mouth was full of blood. His open eyes were glazed.

  Ron and Steve appeared in the doorway of Arie’s bedroom.

  “He’s having a seizure,” Ron said.

  Holding his head in my hands, I rocked back and forth, tears were dripping from my chin onto Arie’s face. I could barely breathe.

  “What do I do?” I begged.

  They surveyed the room with incredulous looks, then turned to one another for explanation. Finding none, they turned to me.

  “What happened?” asked Steve.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” I shook my head.

  “We should take him to the infirmary,” said Steve. “Right away.”

  Ron recoiled, and a look of dread flashed in his face for just a second. I understood. It was our instinct to avoid the sick, to fear any sign of illness. But Ron pressed his lips together, and he and Steve stepped into the room.

  I got out of their way, and the two men struggled to hold onto Arie’s kicking legs and flailing arms.

  Time went fast and slow.

  I held his head as they lifted him, but there wasn’t room for all of us to move, so I let go. Arie’s head lolled and he thrashed like a giant fish. It was only with great difficulty that they got him out of the house and down the street.

  It was dark when we got to the infirmary, and Ron and Steve were soaked in sweat. Workers in hazmat suits swarmed out into the courtyard and surrounded us. Their headlamps cast wild distorted shadows onto the pavement and the cinderblock walls. Someone cut Arie’s shirt off.

  “I need to speak to Gary Gosford,” I cried hoarsely. “Gosford. He’s a—supervisor. Senior supervisor.”

  They ignored me, shouting for a stretcher, examining Arie, scanning his ID chip. Ron and Steve disappeared in the commotion. I would have, too. When the Agency workers turned their attention to me, they scanned me and fired off a series of questions about Arie. I may have answered some of them. I don’t remember.

  They placed Arie on a gurney and rolled him inside. I tried to follow, told them to contact Gary, but they kept me out and the door shut behind them and locked. I stood there breathless, watching through the small window on the door. No one said anything to me. No one had told me I should wait or what would happen next.

  They took my Arie away.

  I stood there for a long while—staring at the empty hallway through the window of the door. After what could have been more than an hour, I realized
that I was terribly cold. Physically, yes—I had no coat or even a jacket. But there was a cold, mental sluggishness deep inside me, too, which made it difficult to think or even move. I knew I’d be cold until I saw Arie again.

  Rewind.

  Day after day, I went back to the infirmary and waited outside with my dread and my regrets. I wished that I’d had one more look at him. Just to really see him. The small details—the flecks of color in the irises of his eyes, the dimple in his cheek. I wished that I’d held on a little longer when we’d last embraced, and that I wasn’t always in such a rush to do other things. Maybe if I’d have been more firm in sending him to bed that night, or if I’d paid closer attention, I might have known he was so sick. If only I could go back—rewind, rewind.

  After ten days with no information at all, my instincts told me to pound on the infirmary emergency admittance door until either they answered or it fell down. But I did not.

  Instead I sat outside, staring at the stupid door. I stared at it so long that I memorized every detail of it. I stared at the edge where the paint was flaking off, at the residue of masking tape where a sign had once been posted. I stared at that infernal door so long that I saw it when I closed my eyes, when all I wanted to see was Arie’s face.

  I didn’t know where my son was, and the only thing that stopped me from tearing the door down was knowing that they would keep him from me if I did.

  So, I waited. Every day, outside, where the wind grew colder and colder. It tore at me, made my jaw and ears ache. I stayed all day and left only long after it was dark. I hardly ate. As soon as I could, I’d return to continue my vigil at the door.

  The door would open once, maybe twice a day. Patients came and went, eyeing me warily. Workers and Agency goons appeared sometimes and I would rush to the door and question them. Sometimes I followed them as they walked away.

  “My son. Arie. He was sick. He’s in there. I just need to know if he’s okay. I just want to see him.”

  I was never told anything.

  “My Zone supervisor is Gary Gosford. Just tell him my name. Please. He said he’d help.”

  Nothing. The door was shut in my face.

  Sometimes I was too numb to think. Not knowing was the worst. At the beginning of that year, I didn’t know Arie. I’d been told he was my son. How strange it was to think about in that ghastly courtyard with the late autumn’s chill settled around me like concrete. How strange it’d been to ask, “I have a son?” and then in the very next moment state, “I have a son.”

  I’d started to believe maybe there is something inside us that allows us to know when we love somebody. Something that we don’t have to remember, something that is simply a part of us. The way I sometimes found things in the empty houses we searched, things that spoke to me. I couldn’t explain it. But I would gladly give up my life for Arie. The boy I couldn’t remember; the boy I could never forget. I loved him and I knew that I had before, even if I had to be reminded of it.

  The other people in town watched me. From a distance. They were curious, maybe a little afraid. No one said anything to me.

  On the fifteenth day, the sky was gray. A fog settled around the infirmary, so that I could not see the edges or top of the building, so that nothing existed but the cinder block wall and the hated door and me and the space between. I hunched in my coat with the collar turned up and an old scarf wrapped around my face. I sighed deeply, and from the scarf there came a cloud of whiteness like dragon smoke that dissolved in the air.

  Everything was frozen. The ground, the water in the rain barrel at our house, the puddles along the streets, even the air. And me.

  I gazed up into the fog and spotted a single snowflake falling. It was the only one I saw. It floated to the ground and landed at my feet. I watched for more, but none fell. At some point, maybe soon, the ground would be piled high with snow. But at that moment, only one snowflake had fallen.

  The door opened. It was Gary Gosford.

  I was on my feet in an instant. “Where’s Arie?” I asked, rushing to the door.

  Gary held the door open for me. “This way,” he said.

  He led me deep into the building to a small room that had a table and two chairs.

  “I’ve been waiting for days,” I said as I sat down. “For two weeks. Why won’t anyone tell me what’s going on?”

  Gosford sat down across from me. His face was bristly with stubble.

  “Alison, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. Things don’t always work smoothly in the Agency. They’re very busy. We’re all so busy.”

  “Where is he? When can I see him? When can he come home?”

  “Keep in mind, Arie was very sick.”

  “Was?” I felt suddenly weak. “Where is he?”

  “I cared for Arie, too, Alison. You know how I felt about the two of you.”

  Gosford kept talking. He wasn’t told, he said. He took my hands in his and squeezed. He said he didn’t know. I didn’t hear everything. Just the words, “Arie’s gone.” And once I heard them, I heard them again, over and over, increasing in volume until they resounded in my head like the world cracked open.

  CHAPTER 8

  When I finally returned to my cold and empty house, I crawled into my bed and slept for what I guess was several days. How long I actually lay there, fleeing one nightmare into another, I can’t say. It felt like years. It felt like forever. I cried until the skin around my eyes became raw and abraded. I cried until I had no more tears.

  Mostly I dreamed of how Arie might have died. What was wrong with him? What sickness had it been? Had he been in pain, crying out for me? I wondered when and why they finally gave up on him. Had it been a sudden ending, or had he slipped into unconsciousness and then to nothing without a sound? Or was he fevered, thrashing, like he’d been in his bedroom that night. Was he by himself? And which would be worse—alone in some corner of the dreary infirmary, or surrounded by indifferent Agency medical technicians, taking note of his condition but unable or unwilling to comfort him?

  And then what? What did they do with him when it was over? The prospect broke and re-broke my mother heart. I must have dreamed of every possibility, no matter how grisly.

  But the final nightmare was more frightful than all the rest.

  I dreamed that Arie was still alive.

  I dreamed that he was still up in his bedroom, indexing his information, sorting the books and news magazines he’d gathered over the past year. I made him soup and when I opened the door to bring it to him, he looked up and smiled at me in the candlelight.

  “Smells terrible,” he said, grinning.

  I laughed.

  Setting the papers aside, he said, “Thanks, Mom. Oh, man, I’m starved. I think I’ll quit. Head to bed.”

  In this dream the books and notes were not strewn in manic mounds like the nest of some mad librarian. And they weren’t on the floor, either. Instead, they were stacked on tables and neatly ordered. There was a system to their arrangement. An authority, even.

  When Arie was alive, he never could tell me exactly why we searched the abandoned houses, scavenging for news reports and computer disks and the journals of children. Or he never would tell me. But he seemed to know that we needed them, and I knew only that I believed him. Despite how much it scared me to search the houses, I knew that, for Arie, I needed to.

  In this final nightmare, the purpose of the information was clearer, and I eventually understood that somehow it would save us all, make us happier.

  And I dreamed that Arie could actually explain it to me, opening one notebook, then another, pointing, reading to me. Little by little, he taught me his system, showed me the secrets he’d unlocked. And when he set the last notebook aside, I knew that something incredible was about to happen to us.

  Then the dream changed. I saw notebooks on fire, notebooks sodden and moldering, torn pages blowing like dross down a forlorn road. Arie’s explanations, which had filled me with such hope, became raving gibberish. The orderl
y stacks of notebooks now stood in wretched towers that teetered, threatening to tumble and bury us. And in the ghastly lachrymose glow of the low-burning candlelights, when Arie lifted his gaze from his ragged haphazard papers, his face was twisted with hysteria.

  Then the dream seated me outside the door of the infirmary again, the edges of the dark unfeeling structure vanishing into the sullen mist in all directions, as if that oppressive building was all that existed.

  The rest of the dream I knew already. The rest was my new reality. My new, less-complicated reality.

  I opened my eyes.

  My journal was on the bedside table, as if beckoning me to record the dream, record it all. Write it down. I pushed it to the floor. There was no sense in writing down anything anymore. No sense in writing about Arie, about us together. Why would I want to remember any of this? It would only make things worse. And after the treatment—what would be the point of being reminded of such?

  I rose from bed and went downstairs to sit in the big chair by the front window. The house was so quiet now. Through the window I watched the snow fall. First it covered the weeds and crumbling sidewalks. Then it buried the rotting cars. The temperature dropped. No one was seen outside. It kept snowing for three days.

  In a few months, I’d go back to the infirmary and they’d put the needles in my arm. All of the horror of the last year wouldn’t just disappear, it would be as though it never happened, as though this version of me never existed. Instead of a curse, I began to see it as a blessing. With a little extra paperwork and red tape, I could have my record amended to show that I’d never had a child at all. I wouldn’t have to feel this pain. I could burn the journals beforehand—mine and Arie’s. I could burn them as fuel to boil enough water for a long, hot bath, take the serum, and when I awoke on the other side, there would be no life or love to miss or mourn. For the first time in nine or ten months, I longed for the end of the year.

  I longed to be erased.

  There were times when I slept through the day and didn’t so much as open my eyes until it was dark, which left me with the impression that the sun had stopped rising.