Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  Old stories in lost books, stories nobody would ever tell again because there was no one left to hear them. We had summoned Death back from oblivion barely knowing how we’d done it, but all I could think about was Iphigenia, movie theaters, the smell of fake butter and the sugary tastes-like-real-maple-syrup my mother and I had every Friday night, our weekly pancakes and bacon dinner. The dry shuddery feel of Mrs. Acosta’s flyaway gray hair and her nubbly cotton sweater pressing against my skin as she gave me a hug, the strawberry cake my mother bought from a tiny Polish bakery every birthday, the faintest scent-memory of motor oil on my father’s skin, the wild stomach-drop of my first time on a swing set, the big roller coaster at Prospect Fun Park (1,892 Days Without An Environmental Incident). The feel of my own hair against my hand, thick and a little coarse and begging to be washed. The steel wool of Nick’s fur. The waxen sweet of candy-corn pumpkins at Halloween. The lethal apple-cider smell of Dave’s diabetic dying breath. The unyielding discomfort of unbroken Doc Martens, the only gift my aunt ever gave me that I’d liked. The strange lit-up quiet after a heavy snowfall. The first lilacs of spring. Florian’s face, as he told us all goodbye.

  Every memory, every gathered-up impression, every interior scrap and souvenir of what it had been to be alive, and all of it was killing me. It was killing me because as the memories of life rushed through me at quintuple speed, I also felt for the first time, swelling up so hard and fast in me that it shoved aside the air, all the death around me, all the death I’d caused: Ms. Acosta, Mags, Billy, Phoebe even though I hadn’t meant it, Stephen’s final trip to the lab and a slit throat. Probably Natalie, whom I’d deliberately turned my back on and forgotten. And so much more than that, so many more, all the death, the dying, the remnant-ghosts everywhere in the universe. And I felt all the life, too, all the life in everything and myself, swelling up full of air a buoyant balloon and there simply wasn’t one without the other, life and death were a single body and trying to conquer either one only maimed, disfigured, blinded, stifled the heartbeat of all the universe. Without one, there wasn’t the other.

  Ever.

  That was just how it was. That was how it always had to be.

  “Precisely,” Death said to me, nodding with a satisfied, press-lipped smile. “Exactly.”

  You gotta be sure. Sure of what? What was I sure of? Not anything much, just a few things. A very few things. I loved my mother, and Lisa, and Stephen. I was a killer and I was sorry about it, but I couldn’t change it. I wasn’t human, not really, not any more than Jessie or her friends were. Maybe since before Natalie ever touched me, maybe ever since I was born. Maybe that meant something. Maybe it always did. I loved this world, this afterlife, the hidden viscera and lungs of the body that encompassed life, and death, and all. I loved it, and I had to save it from nothingness because I never wanted to leave it. But even now, that wasn’t up to me.

  Was that surety? Was that certitude? It was all I had. It was all I would ever have to offer.

  “Come over here, Amy,” Lisa said quietly. “Jessie. Come and stand with us.”

  We ignored her, our only regard for Death. She, he, it looked different now: a white-haired, dark-skinned, arthritically pinched old man, wrapped in a dirty terrycloth robe exposing sharp shaggy shins and bare callused feet, his expression the baleful glare of someone long used to snapping his fingers and getting his own way. King Lear. I always liked Greek plays better than Shakespeare. Nick left Stephen’s side and padded up to me, the feel of his fur offering comfort, sustenance, in the face of whatever was about to happen.

  “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” the old man said to Jessie, his voice querulous and creaky and nobody’s we recognized. “To see the old stomping grounds, one last time? See your kindly blue-eyed Grandfather Maggot one last time? Well, here he was, and here you are. A little reward, for all that hard work trying to get to me. Enjoy it.”

  Jessie reached up to the oak tree, pulling down a branch and contemplating its leaves like she’d never seen such strange, verdant, tissue-thin things before. Then she let the branch spring back.

  “We know you now,” she said. She was calm, calm and so overwhelmingly tired. “You said it yourself, you tipped your hand. We know you.”

  Death sat down right there on the ground, near a cluster of bushes covered in sprigs of tiny white flowers. The oak leaves were full summer-sized, but nearer the ground, the buttercups, the goldenrod, the violets bloomed in all their color, an endless spring. His heels stuck in the ground like twin trowels, bare brown toes pointing skyward.

  “You were just like us, once,” I said. I wanted to sit down too, to savor the scents of the flowers and the dark soft earth, but part of me insisted on remaining standing even though there was no place to flee, nowhere to run. “You were alive, and human. Then you became something else. You became everything, living and dead.”

  Behind me, Stephen made a startled sound. “That was really true?” he demanded. “I thought... maybe it was a riddle or something. A puzzle we had to solve. It couldn’t be that simple.”

  Death grinned at us, a mouthful of yellowing half-broken teeth. His eyes flared up, very briefly, with the lively pleasure of a far younger thing.

  “It’s just that simple,” he said. “I told you so! I gave myself away. I do that, sometimes. A lot of the time.” The smile faded, his face going calm and serene. “But of course, nothing’s ever really that simple. As you already know full well.”

  I moved to sit down next to him. He shook his head, and I stayed on my feet.

  “Don’t ask me who I was,” he said. “Don’t ask me what I was, what I looked like, how I thought or felt or what I believed about anything, when I was just another human among humans. Don’t ask me what made me into this.” He rested his palms on his cloth-covered knees. “Not that those are taboo questions. It’s just been so long, and I’ve since become so many things at once, that I don’t remember. I don’t remember what I was, or how I became otherwise. Not at all.”

  “I barely remember being human either,” Jessie said. Her words were slower, more careful than I’d yet heard from her: smooth pebbles, each held on her tongue and dropped steadily from her lips, as if she feared the wrong one would explode the world. As well it might. “And it was only... ten years ago, fifteen, that that’s all I was. And I’ve still only ever been one person, the same person, even since. I’ve never held every living thing inside me, every dead thing. I’ve never been all of existence.”

  Death thought that over. “I’m not all-knowing,” he said. “I’m not all-seeing. Being everything doesn’t mean you understand everything, any more than being human means you comprehend every last aspect of humanity. You lot never do stop surprising me, usually in unpleasant ways.”

  “Like now,” Jessie said. “With the labs.”

  “Like now,” he agreed.

  He slipped a hand into his bathrobe pocket, taking out a dull green lake stone broken up with a few mud-colored, zigzagging streaks. It looked exactly like the one Florian had left in the woods, exactly like the one I’d slipped into my own pocket; I didn’t need to check now, to know that pocket was empty.

  “The thing is,” he said, the soul of calm, the very voice of reason, “the earth, poor thing, it’s been out of balance for so very long, so impossibly long—nearly as long as humanity’s been around, to make the place worse and worse and worse with your meddling, your industrial filth, your insane conviction that you alone among any living thing are special, chosen, important enough to slip the bonds of your own mortality.” He shook his head, soft ominous laughter rising from his sunken throat. “And not just immortal, but eternally strong, eternally young, eternally rich and powerful and alluring—the greed. The insane, sickening greed!”

  He clenched his fingers tight and I heard a sudden snapping sound, so much like bones being broken that I jumped. His hand unfurled again and the lake stone was just so much ash, inky ash spilling from his palm and spinning on the wind. My mouth
felt suddenly dry-caked with grit, a tormenting need to cough, but I knew that’d give no relief.

  “Greed,” he repeated. “Let’s face it, I think we all realize you’re entirely beyond help, you lot of humanity. Nothing to be done. You certainly can’t police yourselves, you never leave anything well enough alone—” He looked up at me and laughed, an avuncular little chuckle that made the skin at the back of my neck tighten up. “It’s like I said to you before, I’m sick and tired of it. I’m sick. I’m tired.” He reached over and pulled a buttercup from its stem, examining it, his thumb caressing the soft yellow petals like they were the only thing in existence that had never let him down. “I am, as our dear Jessica phrased it, ‘dusty.’ In other words, I have decided—I have realized—that I am simply too damned old for all of this.”

  The elderly man in the bathrobe wavered, faded, and in his place came the man I’d seen back at Jessie’s beach, blue-jeaned and work-shirted, with a head of barely graying hair and a broad, self-satisfied smile. Jessie shook her head in disgust.

  “Why,” she asked, “do you always have to come back as Jim? Of every living thing that ever was, why?”

  Death laughed again. “C’mon now, sis, I know you’ve always had a hopeless temper—just like Dad, and I bet you can’t even see it—but you don’t have to be so petty! After all, we owe so much of what’s happened to good old Jim.”

  He flickered again. Changed again. “And to me,” said Natalie, with unmistakable pride. “Especially to me.”

  My stomach soured. I knew that Natalie wouldn’t live through this, somehow I just knew back when we all left her there in the ruins of her own lab. And I left her there anyway. No matter that she’d killed me, no matter what else she’d tried to do to all of us. Another death at my feet. Like he could hear what I was thinking, Nick snuffled and whined and pressed paws against my leg as if trying to coax me away from the clearing. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. No wish to do either one. I patted him, and swallowed.

  “I meant what I said, before,” I told Death. “That I was sorry I ever stole anything from you, accidentally or not. That I was sorry about everything. You could...” I glanced at my mother, who watched me with fearful eyes and clenched fists but made no move to stop me, and leapt into the breach. “Natalie was right, wasn’t she, that we’re sort of... unique? All of us made this way by the lab? You could have me as a sort ofÖ a sacrifice. Something toÖ that could maybe expiate what happened, or something.” This had all sounded a lot more eloquent in my head, and in my head I hadn’t stammered and stumbled through it with a dust-dry tongue and acid creeping toward my throat, but then Iphigenia and Polyxena had had the best talent in Athens for speechwriters while I only had myself. I stretched my arms out wide. “I mean, here I am. You can have me.”

  “And me,” my mother said immediately. She was by my side before I’d ever heard her steps. “I’m no different than she is. I’m made as differently as she is. You can have me too. You can have me instead.”

  “And me,” said Stephen.

  “No,” Lisa said. Her arms were wrapped around Naomi, roping the little girl to her body. “No.”

  But nobody was listening to her.

  Death, still in Natalie’s form, stared at us each in turn. Then Natalie was Jim once again and Jim slowly, mockingly, shook his head, a familiar malice dancing in his eyes.

  “For Amy so loved being-ness that she gave her one and only self, that whatever exists et cetera, et cetera...” He flicked dismissive fingers at me, stretching his legs out more comfortably on the earth. “We’ve all heard that old chestnut before, and it means nothing—other than that, predictably, you still don’t understand. You can’t sacrifice to someone what’s already theirs, and like all human beings since the dawn of humanity, you just can’t accept that the second you’re conceived, that very second, you’re mine. Everything everywhere is mine.”

  His face flushed, darkened with a breathless anger, then just as suddenly he was composed and smiling, methodically pulverizing the buttercup’s petals between his fingertips. “There’s death and life in everything, everywhere. They’re one and the same. They’re all simply being. As you already figured out for yourself—and if you hadn’t, I wouldn’t be bothering with you right now.”

  Linc and Renee exchanged glances. Then Linc walked up to where Death sat among his flowers. “So you really are dying,” he said. You’re crumbling away, just like—”

  “Am I?” Death mused. “Is that what this feeling is? I really don’t know. I don’t know if this was always going to happen. I don’t know if this is the long-delayed old age of the human being I was... whoever that was, whenever that was. Or simply the vessel of existence—namely me—cracking down the middle and snapping, what with how humanity keeps gleefully flinging me to the floor. I do not know.” He shrugged. “But I do know that whatever the truth is, I feel so old. I feel as though I’ve been as I am forever, and that it never comes to anything. I feel as though I could lie down forever.” His voice was so soft now, insinuating, a dangerously tempting lull. “And that feeling of falling, that you humans have sometimes when you’re losing yourselves to sleep? I could fall myself, fall and fall through a dark chasm of nothingness and never stop. Never land.” A barely audible whisper of longing. “Because there will be nowhere left to land, and nothing left that falls.”

  We’d failed. He’d never really meant us even to try to succeed. I was shaking. Stephen stroked my arm, a quick nervous touch of reassurance. His fingers were trembling too.

  “You can’t,” he told Death. “You were a living mortal thing once, too, you said so, and you never asked to be born. You can’t just take existence away from everything, just because you’re angry, or tired, when you only ever contained it, you never created—that’s worse than anything Natalie or anyone else ever tried to do.”

  Death contemplated Stephen’s words. His face crinkled up in a bemused frown.

  “Please,” he told Stephen, “do not tell me that was somehow meant to shame me.”

  Stephen glanced fearfully around at us, as though we were all going to ambush him, force him to stop talking. We couldn’t. We wouldn’t. “What’s beyond you?” he asked Death. “What... lies beyond you? You’re existence, but did something else bring existence itself into—”

  “Yes.” Death nodded. “Don’t ask me what, or how, or why, because I don’t know. I don’t know, any more than anything else that exists has ever known its first cause. But the answer is yes. And that is the last you ever get from me.”

  “Which means,” Stephen said, barely hearing him, pushing doggedly onward, “that you never created life itself. Or any of this, right here, anything beyond life. You said it yourself. You’re just a vessel. You simply embody.” Death shrugged, just a little lift of the shoulders. “You only ever contained it. You wouldn’t even be destroying your own work. It’d be the worst crime, the worst—”

  “Sin,” Lisa said. Very quietly.

  “Fine. If you want. The worst sin, that there ever was.”

  Death smiled. “And such,” he said, “is the nature of oblivion, that once the crime is committed, it never really happened at all. After all, its victim never was.”

  Stephen sputtered, lost for words. My mother opened her mouth to speak. “I—”

  “I think we’re through now,” Death said. “In fact, I think everything, everywhere, is finally and forever through.”

  He stretched out on the ground, lying on his side, an arm cradling his head. “Go along now, pets,” he said, still with Jim’s body and face but Florian’s hoarse, reedy timbre coming from his mouth. “Go along. I’m tired.”

  I had lost my peripheral vision without realizing it, all my sights telescoping down to him as the sky, the trees, the ground lost their form and dissolved. It wasn’t him doing that to me, or to the chimera of woods around us, it was my own fear. I felt something cold and wet nudge my palm once more and could have cried with relief because Nick was still there,
Nick would be there beside me no matter what, I couldn’t do this all alone. Even if I was sure. Even if I was absolutely sure.

  Was I sure? Would I ever really know? Would I ever even remember?

  “You’re old,” I said. “You’re tired. You’re wearing out.”

  A hand rested gently, fleetingly on my shoulder. I turned, expecting to see Stephen, my mother, but it was Jessie. She knew, she knew what was about to happen. Maybe she had all along. What had she said? Old wine in new bottles. Exactly. She knew.

  “You don’t remember what you were, or when you became what you are now.” I rocked from foot to foot where I stood, to keep myself from turning tail and running away. There was nowhere else to go. There never had been. He showed me that, back when I first saw him face to face. “But you didn’t begin that way, you became it. You know that much. Which means... you took someone else’s place. Someone else who had this burden, this everything, and grew old, or disgusted, or tired, and gave it all up.”

  He turned his head where he lay and his eyes, fixed on me, were wide and dark and fathomless. We could all fall and fall through them and never stop. Never land.

  “Someone else could take it from you,” I said. “Couldn’t they. Someone else could become what you—”

  “Stop,” Lisa said. She looked around at Stephen, at my mother, in disbelief that nobody else tried to stop me. That they knew they couldn’t stop me. “Amy, Jessie? Do not say another word.”

  But I wasn’t listening to her, because there was no time left. We had no time left. Death’s black chasms of eyes had turned to a hard pounding light that overwhelmed, blinded, a spotlight shone straight on our faces. Jessie and I turned to each other and she looked so wretched, every inch of her outlined in sorrow and remorse, that I smiled and touched her face the way a mother might touch her child because there was no call for that, absolutely no call at all. I knew what I was going to do and I had for such a long time now and it was all right, it was all truly all right. We could have been friends, maybe, she and I, in another kind of life. Maybe, just now, we’d turned out the best friends each other ever had.