by Steven Price
Which is not you.
The old man sighed. Which is not me.
When did you lose it?
My faith?
Yes.
He lifted his big hands. The dry rasp of ropes as her coffin settled into the earth. The black overcoats under that whitening sky. The slow cold dap of the rain. I don’t know, he said. I just one day looked inside myself and didn’t see any resemblance. There was no echo.
The custodian studied him gravely. I will pray for you, Mr Lear.
He smiled a sad smile but he said nothing.
The custodian returned to the heatstove and wrapped his left hand in a towel and he took up the boiled kettle in his right and with his left hand supporting the base he bore it smoking to the counter. His spectral figure soundless in the grey light. He clapped the ornate lid onto the teapot and set this down onto the table and he sat. The string tags of the tea bags dangling out of the pot. The rising steam luminous in the fallen light.
The old man peered back at the boy curled up on a mat on the floor, his small ribs rising and falling in time. He leaned forward on the table.
I keep thinking about his mother, he said quietly.
The organist studied him. She’s your daughter?
He looked up. No, he said. No, I didn’t know them from before. She lost her daughter during the quake. We didn’t find any sign of her at the hospital and she wasn’t at her school and when she went home the girl hadn’t been there either. A teacher at her school thought he saw her after it hit. But he didn’t. The old man passed a hand across his eyes. He could see the woman’s bruised yellow mouth and her sorrowful eyes and he thought of her weeping in the ruins of that school and he looked up. You tell me, he said. What did she do to deserve that?
The custodian held his spectacles loosely in his fingers and pinched the bridge of his nose and closed and opened his eyes. That’s a terrible thing, he said.
Yes.
He slid back on his spectacles and weighed the old man. I don’t know, he said.
But you think there’s a reason for it.
The custodian went to the stove and unhooked the charcoal poker from a low nail behind the stovepipe. I think there’s a shape to it, he murmured. It’s not the same thing. You said a teacher saw the girl?
The old man nodded.
Then I trust she will be found. You should have faith.
She’ll find her daughter, the organist said. I know she will.
When she said this he looked across at her and he was struck again by the overwhelming presence of his wife. He could not explain it. There was no way to explain it. He sat in silence feeling an enormous gentleness come up in him. The boards above creaked and went still as if someone walked over their heads. The old man looked up and the little girl took his hand gently and touched his wrist and he thought of his wife. No one spoke and he thought of his wife. Her soft fingers cool on his skin and him light-headed and warm in that warm dark.
He glanced across. The boy slept on.
The tablecloth glowed with a soft lustre as if some lamp burned below it and the dark tea smoking in their china cups burned also with a strange light and the old man poured a dollop of milk and watched it bell murkily up out of the depths pale and cloudlike. The organist across the table was stirring her own tea and she tapped her spoon in a flare of steeled light against her saucer and the ringing was dazzling and clear and pure. She held out the spoon to the old man and bent her head down to her granddaughter’s cheek as the heatstove smouldered on. The old man waited. The spoon was shining in that light. He reached out his hand.
Go on, she said. Take it.
I told her I didn’t know if anything of us goes on afterward. I said I wished I believed differently. I guess death never seemed to me half the mystery that life is. She said when you look back on your life what do you see and I said I know that what I lived is not what I recall having lived. Is that any kind of answer? I don’t know. I guess you build something out of it that seems true whether it happened that way or not.
I didn’t tell her about that day. She asked but I wasn’t going to tell her. I remember it was a Sunday. This was April 1964. I was in my studio at the back of the house and didn’t hear the knocking for some minutes. When I opened the front door it was Aza. She was standing with her bony arms folded and then she held them down at her sides and then she folded them again. She was looking at me. She told me Callie had been killed in a car accident the day before. Her taxi had hit a streetcar. I stood there looking at her for a long moment. I didn’t understand. Callie? I said. She nodded. A bus went slowly past in the street behind her. Yesterday? I said. I still had one hand on the door handle and then I let it go. I sort of shook my head. Callie’s boxes were still stacked in the hall and I wondered if Aza had known Callie had left me. I suppose now she probably did. I screwed my face up and it seemed I could feel every muscle in my cheeks, in my expression. I didn’t cry. For many years I was ashamed of that. But I guess there’s no sense in it. We are what we are.
Then Aza stepped forward and reached up and put her narrow arms around me and she started to cry. And what seemed strangest to me right then was the reality of this second person, this second flesh, touching me. The feel of her knit sweater under my fingertips. That we could be there at all.
Some things you just can’t talk about. Faith is like that. The words just aren’t there. My grandfather didn’t go to church though he believed in God. He didn’t talk about it. When I asked him he said heaven seemed unlikely but hell was a very real possibility. A few years back, out at Esquimalt lagoon, city crews had to halt some excavations on the headland when they found the burial site of a native woman. It was a thousand years old at least. I didn’t know they buried their dead in places like that. Maybe they didn’t usually. Her bones were being exhumed and moved to reserve land. I don’t know what I believe but I guess if there’s any kind of an afterlife, it’s like that. What you were goes on in the world. You just don’t go with it.
She drifted along the high-planked fence of Henderson Field in that slow crowd and she did not speak and the daylight was very pale. The air bloomed with a terrible sweetness. She could see the corners of a scoreboard standing forlornly beyond the tall fence and there were wreaths and photographs tacked to the boards and she observed the lonely and bereaved and otherdead through the afternoon light. The sky ahead was a storm of screeching crows and when she looked back the telephone wires swayed heavy with them.
The crowd poured and poured itself forward. Towards the iron gates.
She passed her hand across her eyes. She was watching a group of children at the fence with their eyes pressed to the knotholes. She listened to the valves of her heart shunting, the moist cumulous sacs of the lungs. As if an act of salvage were at work within her. She did not feel what she thought she would feel and she wondered when it would hit her.
The fug of unwashed flesh, of rags and filth and sour blood, hung over the crowd in a low mist and she pushed on through it. She could hear a bulldozer somewhere near, its heavy treads scraping and hauling down wreckage. She breathed and it hurt. She breathed and it hurt, sorrow stitching itself in her side like a cracked rib. Her son’s face. When he was small the ropy dark arms thrown about her neck in the morning kitchen, the warm pall of breath on her throat whispering I love you a hundred and a hundred and a hundred and a penny and a penny and a penny. The shriek of high laughter, that flour-dusted roller in her fist, then her daughter hiding in the kitchen curtain. Wrapped and mummified and giggling in silhouette. Oh she did not love them enough.
She rubbed her face with her shoulder and she pressed on. When she turned to look back she could not see the old man nor her son. Then someone was calling her name. She saw a man with burnt-looking eyes pushing towards her, his skin yellow. She knew his slouched shoulders, his big soft empty hands. Her daughter’s swimming instructor. He was dressed in a dusty black shirt and he had dark eyes as if he had not slept and when he touched her she shuddere
d as though she had not been touched in a very long time.
Anna Mercia? he said. Jesus. He looked at her arm.
Hey, a man behind him hissed. Hey. He fastened a claw on the instructor’s wrist. You got to get in line like everyone else. You can’t just budge in. Hey.
He glanced back for only a moment. But when he turned again towards her his face looked strangled and all at once something heavy turned over inside of her.
Anna, he started to say.
You found her, she said abruptly. Her voice sounded thick.
He nodded.
She’s inside.
He nodded again but he did not seem able to say anything more.
She understood and yet she did not understand. Then she felt stunned and light-headed and she looked at her trembling legs as if they were not her legs. The instructor gripped her good arm. Deep in the black slough of his eyes some grey weeds adrift like leeched hair.
I’m sorry, he said. I’m so sorry.
She tried to say, You cannot be sorry, you cannot know what it is to be sorry, you cannot, but her voice gave out and she could not get her breath. Then something like a half-strangled sob came out and he drew her to him and her soft face was mashed up against his chest and the thumb of her good hand was at her own throat as if to stopper the words back up. He held her wrist and then her legs gave out and he stumbled to hold her up. She could feel the blood in her skull.
You don’t want to go in there, he was saying. Anna Mercia? Look at me. I can ID her for you.
How did she look? she whispered.
Jesus.
Joshua.
Yes?
How did she look?
The instructor swallowed and blinked and looked away.
She was still shaking her head foolishly and then she started to cry. My little girl, she said. O my little girl.
He pulled himself free after a time and lifted her to her feet and she just stood breathing, very quietly breathing, just very quietly gulping air. A lady in the crowd turned and looked at her and then glanced away in embarrassment. Across the street she saw an old woman in a lawn chair get to her feet and fold shut her chair and go into her house. The crows on the telephone lines plunged off flapping then lifted and circled and cried.
A white van passed and the crowd parted slowly. The mesh gates at the far end were unchained and rolled wide and the van went in. She wiped her eyes angrily. The grey light felt scrubbed and raw.
She could hear the steady clack of typewriters behind the iron gates. There were folding tables set up in rows just beyond the entrance and the crowd swelled up against the gate chain and then fell back. A man in a red shirt unpinned the chain and counted through twenty visitants and refastened the chain and his eyes roved the crowd as he spoke into a radio. She watched this, feeling gutted. What had been her heart now just darkness and heat.
Then the man waved them past and they were in.
It was a small ballpark in a small suburb. She had been here before. A softball game in the late summer dusk, hot dogs and mustard and beer in big plastic cups. Her daughter asleep in her lap. The air was afire with the stink of disinfectant now and under this a steady sickening sweetness. She knew that smell.
They were led past a sign reading Sanitary Carpet and they stood in a row upon a swath of tarps spread out on the asphalt behind the locked and shuttered concession booth. A small wooden sign for the ladies’ toilets creaked in the wind.
The instructor pointed to a line of tables along the fence with computers set up to a generator. Over there they should have a record of her on file, he said. Go to the Identified Table. He furrowed his brow slightly. If you need anything.
Yes. Thanks.
I mean it.
Yes.
If I don’t see you again.
It’s okay.
He looked like he might hug her and she turned aside and then he did not. He returned to his place in the line as volunteers in white coveralls and white haircaps and bearing whirring disinfectant units strapped to their shoulders made their way among them. They handed out face masks and thin plastic gloves. The tanks tilted and slouched as they moved and were slung crosswise from hip to shoulder, the steel cylinders vibrating fiercely.
A man gestured for her to raise her good arm. He wrapped her sling in a clear plastic bag and tied it off under her armpit. She slid the cloth mask over her mouth and stood with her legs wide as a volunteer with brown eyes approached. His voice was muffled through his mask.
It’s the Formol, he said. Shut your eyes.
She shut her eyes.
As he sprayed, her skin felt chilled and though she held her breath the sharp peppery stink of the chemicals made her choke. When he tapped her shoulder she nodded blindly and he waved her through and as she left she could see him rubbing the toe of his boot across the place where she’d stood as if to erase her passing.
Her bloodied hand had clouded up the inside of its glove and she stood a moment regarding it and then looked up. Her skin was grey in the slats of shadow where she stood below the bleachers. She walked to the ramp. Past the folding tables where typists filled in the brown cards of the dead she pushed into the crowds that lined the edge of the field then stood and shielded her eyes.
The first thing she saw were the gulls. Circling and alighting and slapping back into the air. The smell was brutal even where she stood. She saw rows of low mounded tarps amid bags of ice and these she knew were the dead. There were figures walking the rows slowly, stopping and staring and then going on. At the far fence under a tarpaulin tied to the batters’ cages she could see an area marked Remains and she thought of the bodies there poured out, dumped in, zippered up in the black bags and then she remembered suddenly waking in that field of the dead after the quake and she turned and made her way under the bleachers.
She went to the tables the instructor had indicated and stood in line. When she reached the front a man with a thin white moustache and spectacles gestured her near. A stack of papers in a manila folder at his elbow, a pencil behind one ear. Sad brown eyes. He was wearing a shirt with silver tassels in a fringe across the pockets and she looked at them uncomprehending.
He glanced at his computer screen then back at her and he nodded. His voice was high, thin, scratchy. Yes? he said.
I’m looking for my daughter. I was told if I came here.
Yes. She’s been identified?
She nodded.
Last name?
Clarke.
I’m sorry?
Clarke. With an e.
He typed with the first two fingers of either hand and studied the screen and after a minute he dropped his chin and looked at her over his spectacles. It’s not here. Would she be under another name?
She shook her head. Kat? Katherine? With a k.
I’m sorry. Do you have her identification number?
Her what?
ID number.
She stared at him foolishly. I was just told she was here, she said. A friend, he knows Kat, he saw her in here. I don’t know. She’s sixteen. She’s an inch shorter than me. Her hair is—
But the man had shut his eyes and he was shaking his head. He removed his eyeglasses, held them in one hand, rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Mrs Clarke, he said unhappily. Please understand. There’s hundreds of bodies here. When we ID them we give them a number and then we file them according to that number.
I know.
Without that number there’s only one way to find her.
You can’t look it up?
It’s not here. I don’t see her name here.
She nodded but did not understand.
Listen, he said. I need a name or a number. Something that’ll come up here. You start one of two places. If she’s here, that is. It seems everyone’s getting told conflicting accounts and I imagine you’re no different. But if your daughter is here she’ll be in either Identified or Unidentified. Did your friend identify her?
Yes. He was sure.
/> But did he report it. I mean, to someone here.
She was afraid she might start to cry again.
The man leaned forward. Mrs Clarke? Mrs Clarke. Listen to me. Without that number there’s just no way of knowing.
She swallowed.
Mrs Clarke?
Just give me a minute. Please.
Okay.
After a moment she murmured, Can’t you check again? Maybe it’s spelled differently.
He folded his hands in front of him. We could be here all day, he said. If you really want to find your daughter you need to go out there yourself. It’s the only way to be sure. I am—
I know. You’re sorry. Everyone’s sorry.
He watched her with his sad eyes.
Then she was on the field. She was walking out onto the turf feeling hushed and strange with her mask itching at the corners of her mouth. There were papers blowing across the field and trash in the wires of the fence and everywhere she looked she saw the lonely seekers of the dead. She could hear hammers at work behind the dugouts where stacks of unpainted coffins leaned, pale and hastily cut, and under that the cries of the grieving calling across the field. All of this she heard muted and dim as if through water.
Where she walked the grass lay trampled in little yellow clumps and as she passed a cordon a volunteer in tennis shoes who had been studying a clipboard looked up and nodded to her. Twin steel chairs marked the Unidentified section, a rope tied to one and looped in the grass. On the pitcher’s mound a wooden sign had been nailed to a post and two soldiers stood beside it in the dirt, their rifles lowered. They wore very white cloth masks over their mouths.
She went past them. Past them and into the bodies.
All at once she could hear no sound except her breathing. Her ankles were cold where she walked. Many of the coverings had been kicked aside and left in crumpled heaps and she walked with her eyes to the ground and she did not look at the dead. She did not see a naked woman with blonde hair, heavy breasts flattened, her pubis shaved. There was no long red incision seared across her abdomen. Nor did she see a little boy with his bruised eyes open, his blue lips upturned in an eerie grin. Nor an old lady whose seamed face looked peaceful, unblemished, without a mark on her, as if she were only dreaming. Her body below the sternum was not mangled, was not horribly pulped. Nor a boy with his legs crushed holding a baseball glove to his chest. Nor a man with a swollen belly, the flesh gone soft as molasses. Nor another with his throat torn out and a newspaper stuffed in the wound. Nor a plump girl in pink pajamas, her cheeks pocked with acne. Nor two brothers in yellow sweaters, their faces dirtied, blood in their ears and hair. Nor a baby gone grey in the face with its black tongue poking between its lips nor a man with no hands nor a naked boy in sunglasses nor did all of their faces in the late clarity of that day seem to her peculiarly beautiful. She did not see these dead nor did she see across the rows a crow hop off a boy’s chest with something in its beak and she did not see one of the soldiers walk towards it and it did not flap lazily away. She swallowed in the cold light.