He faced us all, and announced, “Ethan’s gone.”
One of the distant aunts broke the silence with a tremulous, “Are you sure?”
“He is dead now,” Zuvicek said, putting a slight emphasis on the word now. “There is no respiration, no movement, no reaction to stimulus, no sign of additional transformation. For the last four hours he has done nothing but cool. It is safe, as safe and as decent as it ever could be, to now declare him gone and go on with our lives. We may say goodbye to him.”
Our distant aunt valued being part of the drama too much to do the sensible thing and just keep her mouth shut. “But are you sure?”
Zuvicek just raised an eyebrow at her and let the silence grow teeth.
I hugged Jean and considered how easy and how terrible it would have been for Ethan’s disorder to strike either one of us instead.
“Almost free,” she whispered.
“Just a little bit longer,” I assured her.
I endured a shoulder squeeze from one of the many cousins jingling car keys and thanked the handful of others who offered spoken condolences. Most couldn’t wait to rush outside, to retrieve the funeral urns they had brought. Jean and I were not so lucky. We had to follow Zuvicek upstairs, and aid my mother in parceling out Ethan’s pieces.
This was the last necessary duty we’d spent so many years dreading. The very nature of Ethan’s curse is that he changed. He changed without purpose and he changed without limit and he changed without end. It had taken him years of changing from one foul thing into another to finally change into something without breath, without heart, without voice, without any signs of whatever life meant if you were talking about something like Ethan: something that seemed content to remain what it was and could therefore be considered dead enough for a funeral.
But we couldn’t afford to just bury, or even cremate, him. Unlike the more limited shape-changers of the old horror pictures, Ethan had not been granted the dignity of being restored to humanity as he lay dying. He’d remained whatever he was at the moment he stopped moving, and there was no way to know for sure that his corpse was anything but another cruel transformation, one that wouldn’t decide, an hour or day or a decade later, that it was just another transition state to be abandoned as soon as it could change back to something alive.
Nor would it have helped to cremate him. After all, so many of the things he’d turned into, over his tormented lifetime, had been on fire. He’d been ashes several times, and had always turned back to living tissue.
There was no way to be sure. There never would be.
So his only funeral was a diaspora. His pallbearers all climbed our stairs bearing empty urns and all descended with full ones, each heavier than its mere weight could account for. They piled into their respective cars and made their way back to homes in fourteen states and three foreign countries, burying his pieces in desert sands or sinking them in wetland ooze. They fed pieces of him into raging furnaces and tossed other pieces of him over the railings of cruise ships. They left pieces of him in landfills and in the concrete foundations of office buildings, pieces of him broiling in the world’s sun-blasted deserts or forming ice crystals beneath permafrost.
Nobody was going to be half-assed enough to dispose of their pieces of Ethan in any location too close to anybody else’s; they’d all heard the terrible sounds from upstairs, and knew that they did not want to be responsible for the pieces of Ethan ever finding each other, congealing, and coming back. So notes had been compared, and maps consulted.
Sometime in the hours between midnight and dawn, they were all gone: all except Dr. Zuvicek, who sat with us on the living room, his own piece of Ethan sealed in a little jar beside his chair.
The house seemed emptier than the mere departure of our extended family could account for; it was as if the great family grief that had laid claim to our home for so long, so vast in its scope that the walls had seemed to creak and warp with the strain of containing it, had left only a void. Mom sat holding a teacup in both hands, staring at the tepid drink as if expecting to find some answers there; Jean and I shared the opposite couch, looking anywhere but at the sealed jar containing our own last piece of our doomed little brother.
Zuvicek had just finished saying that he was going to bring his own piece of Ethan back to the old country, where the farmland once owned by our great-grandparents and still likely our property—that being difficult to determine, so many wars and governments later—had grown wild and been reclaimed by forest primeval; he believed he could identify the spot where the old mansion had stood, and bury his piece of Ethan there. “After I’m done,” he said, his eyes far away, “I think I’ll do a little wandering before my return to these shores. I know I will never again have another patient quite as difficult as this one, but I have still had enough of sickbeds and death vigils for the time being; it is time to . . . re-grow myself.”
“Good luck with that,” Mother said.
Zuvicek must have detected the bitterness in her voice. “You should do the same thing. It is a shame that your dear husband,” he hesitated, and looked at us, “your father, did not live to enter this time of healing. And a shame that the rest of the family can only help you so much, that the final step can only be completed by parents and blood siblings. But once you are done with that duty, you should not be afraid to embrace life again. As soon as it is decent, go somewhere fun and do something stupid. Remind yourselves who you are, when you don’t have such a terrible thing hanging over you.”
Mother covered her eyes. “I’m not sure I remember anymore.”
“I understand. But you are still a young woman, with many years of life left to you. And you have two fine healthy children who will help you remember, with their own lives, and someday with the blessing of healthy grandchildren. Remember that.” He grabbed his hat and his bag and his piece of Ethan, and stood before us hesitating, searching for the words that would define the moment with as much gravity as it deserved. “You should all move away, when you are done. This has become a bad place for you.”
“I know,” she said.
Zuvicek bade farewell, accepted our thanks, and departed.
The three remaining members of our immediate family sat in silence for several seconds, neither enjoying nor understanding the sudden emptiness of a home that had until now been driven by the engine of unrelenting pain.
For lack of anything better to do, Jean surveyed the detritus of Ethan’s deathwatch: the dirty glasses on their coasters, the plates stained with the remnants of condiments or cake, the extra chairs hauled up from the basement that would need to be folded up and put away. “We’ll help you clean up.”
“That can wait until morning,” Mom said. “We have to say our own goodbyes.”
I said, “I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”
“Neither am I. But he was your brother, my child, our blood. We owe him our strength.”
Mom meant that, of course, but we all knew the other thought that had to cower behind the one she could bear to speak out loud. And besides, this needs to be over. He needs to be gone. This house needs to be quit of him.
I grabbed the vase. “Right. Might as well get this over with.”
The three of us went outside, the screen door slamming behind us. The driveway, all but abandoned by the cars of family members, now only bore my borrowed junker and Jean’s secondhand Yaris, each resting part on gravel and part on lawn. The stars above us were few, thanks to light pollution from the new houses that had come to crowd our beleaguered estate, but the few I could see were bright, distant points of fire that still seemed sharp enough to burn.
The moon was just a waning crescent, points curving upward like the grin of the Cheshire cat. It might have been more appropriate full, of course, but if Ethan’s life story had any moral at all in the context of our family, it was that nobody can control everything, and that some of us are damned to control less than others.
We went together into the backyard, which was
still enclosed by the stone wall and protected by what remaining forest the advancing suburbs had left.
Just before I took the stopper off the urn, its contents shifted with a perverse suddenness that startled me and almost made me drop it. The ceramic rang like a bell, and the grisly contents shifted again: willful, insistent, helpless, defiant, and angry.
My voice cracked. “Oh my God, he’s still moving—”
Then the jar lurched again. This time I dropped it, enduring the century and a half it took to hit the ground, feeling myself break even as it broke, releasing what was left of Ethan to explode like a balloon of blood. In the moonlight it looked black and shiny, a lot like an afterbirth. Something like an eye floated to the surface and then popped, leaving ripples that smoothed over and became a surface as placid as any mirror.
I said, “He’s alive—”
Mom put a hand on my wrist. “Lawrence. Stop putting this off.”
“Mom, it’s not over, he’s moving—”
Her fingernails dug into my flesh, drawing blood.
I gasped and looked her in the face, expecting anger but seeing only an ethereal calm.
“It’s over,” she said.
Behind me, Jean had already taken off all her clothes, her breasts hanging pale and white beneath the slivered light. It wasn’t just the change. Even before the fur started to sprout from her cheeks, she looked taller than she had in years, more beautiful, more at peace, and more defiantly free.
“Like you said inside,” she reminded me, her soft voice turning coarse as her jaw began its transformation to elongated snout. “Let’s get this over with.”
By then Mom was midway through her own change; not into the common vulpine creature my sister could become, but into the thing that had never borne a name in any human tongue, the thing that had drawn my father to her in the old-country revels. Our extended family has a saying that we each choose our other skins, and what Mom had chosen, in her youth, was broad and powerful and wrapped in a snow-white mantle that glowed with inner fire.
Watching, I could only wonder how many years this self had been lost to her; how many years she’d been condemned to a life of nothing but dull humanity, as she cared for the child whose body had been incapable of making the permanent choice all of our bodies had made.
I decided. Mom and Jean were right. It was time.
I peeled off my shirt, before it could be damaged by the emergence of my girdle of arms. Then we dropped to all fours, lowered ourselves to our departed blood, and began to feed.
The Boy and the Box
The boy looked like any other boy his age, except that, thanks to him, there had been for some time now no other boys his age, or of any other age. The elimination of all others had transformed him into the entirety of a subset that had once numbered billions. He was now the platonic ideal of his type, not just a boy but the boy.
As the last of his kind currently existing in what he had allowed to remain of the world, he had soft downy cheeks, a pug nose, a fan of freckles across both cheeks, and hazel eyes that went well with lips arrested in a permanent affronted pout. He hadn’t had any means of washing up since he’d made everything go away, so he smelled unclean and wore permanent smudges on his palms and cheeks. His once-short sandy hair now formed a rat’s nest . . . though that was a meaningless statement as well, as rats were one of the things he’d gotten rid of and there was no longer any need for their nests.
The boy had not only put all the people away in his box, but also all the animals, and all the trees, and all the buildings, and all the surface detail that made the world even at its most unbearable interesting to look at. Had the boy needed water he would have died of thirst. Had he needed food he would have starved. Had the temperature been anything but neutral he would have frozen or sweltered. But he’d put away all these concerns as well. He was self-contained, invulnerable, immortal, and free.
He had been wandering around doing nothing for longer than we have the capacity to measure when he got tired of looking at a horizon that offered nothing but a single unbroken flat line and paused in his endless wandering to take out some toys.
First he pulled a favorite squat rock, now the rock, out of the box and placed it on the ground, in order to sit on it. It was a comfortable rock, the best of a number he’d tested and approved for squatting purposes. He rested his weight on it and found it just as superlative as it had been during his previous indulgences, then pulled his box from the pocket of his jacket and regarded it the same way any boy would have regarded any familiar but important possession.
There was nothing special about the box. It was not some cosmic vault, glowing with portent, surrounded by a crackle of blinding energy. It was just a jewelry box, lined with soft blue velvet and embossed with the trademark of a well-known retail establishment that, like the ring it had once contained and the store that had once sold it, were now safely stored inside. In the world now stored away, the gift had been removed to be placed on a woman’s finger, and the box seized in delight by the toddler the boy then was. He’d loved the soft texture of that crushed velvet, and the way a line drawn on that fabric with a fingertip caught the light differently from the unmarked material around it. He had taken a deep childish pleasure in the popping noise the lid made when shut, which he’d imagined to be a lot like the snapping of some hungry monster’s jaws. Sometimes, even now, he opened the box and ignored all the panicked cacophony of billions so he could hear that snap again on shutting it . . . but this was not the diversion he wanted right now, not the kind of game he wanted to play.
The boy did not find it difficult to reach into a space that should have been too small to admit his entire hand, let alone his full arm up to the shoulder. Nor was it any strain to pull out a grown man who should have been far too large to pass through the opening or too heavy for the boy to lift. The boy didn’t worry about it. He just did.
The grown man the boy had selected tumbled out, rolling as if tossed onto the hard baked surface that was now the universe’s only landscape. He pulled himself to his hands and knees and wept, heaving if denied air for so long that he now found its weight hard to stomach. After long minutes, he peered up and faced the boy, cowering as was only appropriate for him to do, before a creature of such infinite power and limited empathy.
“You can get up if you want,” the boy said.
The man remained on his knees longer than he should have after that instruction but found the strength to rise, though he didn’t draw any closer to the boy than he had to. He was a stoop-shouldered, pale figure with a high forehead, crooked nose, and weak chin, wearing a blue button-down shirt that had come undone from his khaki pants; and even as he stood he didn’t look at the boy, instead facing some neutral spot between his tasseled brown loafers.
The boy asked, “What’s your name?”
The man resisted answering, but after a few seconds said, “Lyle Danton.”
“I didn’t ask you for your last name. I don’t need to know your last name. Last names are stupid.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That doesn’t help now,” the boy said. “You still wasted my time with it. I think I’m going to make it go away so you won’t bother me with it again. What’s your name now?”
“Lyle . . . ” the man began, his voice rising at the end as if something else would tagged at the end of it. Nothing arrived. “Lyle.”
“Lyle,” the boy repeated, as if weighing it on his tongue. “No. Come to think of it, I think that’s a stupid name, too.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It sounds too much like liar.”
“No,” said the man, who winced upon realizing who he’d just corrected. “It’s Lyle. Lyle. With another L.”
“It’s a stupid name, Lyle. You can’t use it anymore. What’s your name now?”
The man whose name had been Lyle opened his mouth, then closed it again, lost for answers. “I d-don’t think I have one.”
“You’ll need one if
we’re going to have a conversation. I think I’ll call you Stupid-Face. What did you do in the world, Stupid-Face?”
“I was . . . a lawyer,” said Stupid-Face. He blinked multiple times and then, very quickly, said, “It’s, it’s dark in there. I can hear my wife and my kids screaming. I can’t get to them, but I can hear them screaming. You . . . put everybody in there, didn’t you? You’re not God, you’re just a kid. How did you put the whole world . . . ”
The boy shushed him. “I’ll get back to you, Stupid-Face.”
Back Stupid-Face went, into the box.
The boy rummaged around a little more, and pulled out a woman. She was in her late fifties and had the look some women have, or more accurately once had, if they reached a point in life where they gave up on youthful beauty and satisfied themselves with being presentable. The boy didn’t know that the official word for this had been matronly, but had observed the principle in a number of maternal aunts. This one was dressed in a gray knee-length skirt, a white silk blouse with a ridiculous bow at the collar, and a gray jacket. Her lipstick was too red for her complexion. She didn’t fall to her knees as quickly as Stupid-Face had, but instead swayed, dizzy at the sudden return of sound and light and space.
“Tell me how much you love me,” the boy said.
The woman blinked, her eyes resisting comprehension. “What?”
“I’ll save you for later,” said the boy.
Back she went into the box.
The boy sat his knee supporting his elbow and his knuckles supporting his chin, contemplating the box as he flipped it over and over in his hand. The bridge of his nose wrinkled. He reached into the box again and this time pulled out a very big man in an orange prison jumpsuit. The big man had a shaved head, a handlebar moustache, and a swastika tattoo on his neck. His arms bulged like great stones under his sleeves. Another tattoo, a snake’s head which may have been some other color once but was now faded to a dull purple, emerged from his right sleeve and sat displayed on the back of his hand, spitting a forked tongue. He didn’t fall to his knees as Stupid-Face had, but instead tumbled onto his back, butt-crawling as far away from the boy as he could before his initial panic failed him and he stopped moving, his eyes black dots floating in wide white circles.
Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories Page 22