The Dead Sleep in the Wilderness

by Yukako Kabeif

  While Harvey and the old man absorbed themselves in stories of the past, Kieli left the examination room and took a look around the clinic.

  On the second floor, the balcony she saw from the gate was directly ahead of her, and a white hall lined with doors stretched out to her right and left, like on the first floor. Staring out of the corner of her eye at the green leaves that had returned to the pots on the balcony, she wandered down the hall to the right and peered through a few of the doors. One room after another was plain but clean-looking with one or two beds under the windows. The rooms were probably for inpatients.

  “This is a nice place,” the radio said quietly, and Kieli smiled and said, “Yeah.”

  There was no sign of extravagance, and while she couldn’t deny its old age, a sense of cleanliness and a humble warmth filled every place she looked, and she could see what kind of a person ran the clinic. It was a quiet home, befitting someone who had the heart to care lovingly for potted plants on this world where there was nothing but rocky wilderness, oceans of quicksand, and exhausted coal mines.

  She walked down the hall, feeling somehow that this place had healed even her, but she soon stopped in surprise.

  Someone was at the hall’s intersection. He was in front of the door farthest down the hall, clinging to the wall, and peering into the room. He looked like a little boy, even smaller than Kieli.

  “Um…?”

  The minute she spoke to him, Kieli’s consciousness was drawn inside the boy, and before she knew it, she was looking into the room from the boy’s point of view.

  It was a room with clean white walls, just like the others. A potted plant, different from the ones on the balcony, decorated the windowsill with its gentle green leaves.

  There was a patient on the bed by the window. He was a young man Kieli knew well, with copper-colored hair. His hair was a little longer than now, and hopelessly unkempt. He sat up with his back against a pillow, but he leaned heavily to the left, apparently unable to use the right side of his body — or rather, half of it wasn’t there. There was nothing filling his white shirt from the right shoulder down — only an empty sleeve dangled beside his body, and there was nothing under the sheet where his right leg should have been. He gazed at the half-done room with a vacant expression that suggested that half of his brain had fallen out as well, and he would blink only occasionally in response to the sounds outdoors that sometimes came through the window.

  Kieli, overlapping the boy, observed him very cautiously from the door’s shadow.

  Be friends with him, Tadai.

  Suddenly hearing a voice from behind her, she turned around and saw a man that looked much like the old man from earlier, but a little younger. Father, came to Kieli’s lips. Then she felt a light push on her back and timidly went into the room. The youth on the bed moved very sluggishly and turned a somewhat unfocused gaze in her direction. Urged from behind by the father, she extended a hand — starting with her right but then switching to the left — to the young man. After a little time, he tried to raise his left hand, too, and that instant, he lost his balance and sank to the left. He kept going and fell off the bed.

  She panicked and rushed to help him up, but she couldn’t help laughing at such a magnificent fall; and then she got the feeling that the youth, whose empty expression hadn’t shifted an inch until then, showed just a little smile. It was a really, really faint smile, but it was a smile.

  When a sudden crash brought Kieli back to herself, she was standing alone inside the room. The boy and his father were both gone, and the bed was empty except for a white sheet.

  “Corporal, did you see that…?” she murmured, looking around the room. Under her chin, the radio answered simply, “Yeah.”

  She heard another violent clatter from downstairs. Still a little dazed, she went to the window and looked outside to see Harvey unceremoniously kick open the ill-fitted glass doors at the entrance and come out into the front yard.

  “Are you going somewhere?” She tried to open the window, but there was no glass there to begin with, so Kieli just leaned out of it and called down to him. She’d be in trouble if he left her here.

  The sky was gradually changing from the orange of dusk to the blue-gray of night, and the air had grown chill. The last rays of the sun cast long shadows on the yard, stretching Harvey’s already-tall figure.

  Harvey turned around to look up at her, and, a cigarette in his mouth, said, “For a smoke,” in an unfriendly voice. It took Kieli a few seconds to figure out that he was going out into the yard to smoke a cigarette. “I’ll get in trouble if I smoke inside. Smoking is strictly prohibited in the clinic,” he added in explanation, responding to her blank stare. He smirked and ducked his head a little.

  “Eh? But this house isn’t…” Kieli started to protest, tilting her head in confusion. Then, “He’s conscientious about strange things,” a voice came from behind her. She turned to see the old man smiling wryly in the doorway. She stood rooted to her spot at the windowsill, at a loss for how to react. The old man took on a kind tone and said, “Would you like to see some old photographs?”

  “I would!” Kieli immediately nodded vigorously. He smiled at her and disappeared into the hall, as if to say, “Follow me.”

  Before going after him, Kieli looked down from the window one more time. Harvey sat crouched on the steps outside the entrance, staring absently into the distant sky and puffing his cigarette. After making sure he was there, Kieli left the window.

  By the time she went into the hall, the old man had already gone past the balcony and was standing on the opposite side of the hall, waiting in front of the door at the far end. Taking the utmost care not to make the floor creak, she ran after him, and the old man went inside the room, stood aside, and beckoned to Kieli.

  This room felt more lived-in than the hospital rooms she had been looking at; it was packed with a disarray of furniture and seemed smaller. Unlike beds in the patients’ rooms, with their tight white sheets, this bed was properly made up with a well-used brown blanket. It probably belonged to the old man himself.

  A rusty picture frame decorated the end table beside the bed. Kieli hesitated a bit but then walked forward and gently picked it up. She felt the weight of the metallic frame in her hand.

  The picture inside the frame showed three men: a middle-aged man and a young man with similar eyes who appeared to be father and son, and a youth with copper hair. She didn’t know how many decades ago the faded photo had been taken, but in any case, it was old, and a Harvey completely unchanged from the one Kieli knew stood inside it.

  She showed it to the radio that hung from its cord, near her stomach. “The bastard really doesn’t age,” it muttered in exasperation. She thought Harvey wouldn’t appreciate someone being exasperated about him.

  Kieli felt a bit differently about it. The background in the photo looked a lot like the scene at the carnival they had visited the day before. She didn’t know if it was the same town or another venue, but either way, they were in the middle of a festival, and Harvey was smiling innocently as he and the other young man had their arms around each other’s shoulders, like best friends or brothers joking together.

  She thought, So Harvey can smile like this. The Harvey Kieli knew was generally eighty percent expressionless and twenty percent either annoyed or bored. At the very most, she had seen him smile only wryly or faintly. When he smiled like this, he looked surprisingly childlike and seemed pretty warm.

  After holding the frame tenderly and gazing down at the picture for a time, Kieli turned to look at the old man standing behind her.

  “Is this you?” she asked, pointing at the middle-aged man who stood in the back, smiling gently as if watching over the two young men. The old man laughed and shook his head.

  “That’s my father. The one in front is me when I was younger,” he said, pointing to the young man next to Harvey.

  “Dad used to be a military doctor. He opened this clinic when the War ende
d and cared for people who were injured in the War. He was a hopeless philanthropist — he didn’t just look after the injured but also worked with a charitable group that buried the heaps of corpses that were left behind on all of the ancient battlefields in Easterbury. He picked him up on his way back.” He smirked as if to say, “literally picked him up.” “He had been buried under a mountain of dead soldiers. At the time, I was very young, so when my dad told me to be friends with that half-dead corpse that he practically dug out of a grave, it was quite the shock.”

  The old man spoke in a mild voice that was easy to listen to, then narrowed his eyes, buried in wrinkles, as if in fond memory.

  Oh, so that boy really was this old man. As she looked from the old man to the picture in her hand and back again, a warm feeling filled Kieli. That youth’s face looked as if a big hole had opened up in his heart, but thanks to the boy and his father, he learned to smile like this.

  “That was the last photograph. He left a little after it was taken.” The old man’s remark brought Kieli back to reality. Now that he mentioned it, Harvey said he had traveled all over the planet, so he couldn’t have lived in this house forever.

  She looked up from the picture and turned a questioning gaze to the old man. He closed his eyes and didn’t answer immediately.

  “If he was here long enough for that little boy to get as old as he is in this picture, he was already here plenty too long. It would be weird for the people around him not to get suspicious. The Church has a crazy reward out for the Undying; if you reported an Undying to the Church soldiers, you’d get enough money to buy a ship.”

  Kieli glanced down at the radio, then silently returned her gaze to the old man. He nodded, his eyes still closed.

  “Dad died not long after that picture was taken. The direct cause was an old war wound that had gotten worse, but apparently he had been suffering a lot since Mom had gone before her time. After the funeral, he disappeared. And he never came back.”

  “Not even once?”

  “Actually, we had been fighting,” the old man said, laughing with a hint of self-contempt. Kieli stared at his face, a little surprised. Here he seemed like such a kind, gentle man, much like his father in the picture. It must have been Harvey’s fault. Kieli started imagining a scene that, to Harvey, would be a baseless and false accusation.

  “So you’re saying that you may have owed my dad, but you don’t owe me anything, and now that Dad’s gone, there’s no reason for you to stay, is that it?” This different voice suddenly interjected behind the old man.

  She looked past the old man in surprise, and saw a tall shadow leaning against the door frame. For the first time, she noticed that her surroundings had gone completely dark, the faint bluish light from outside dimly illuminating the room’s miscellaneous furniture.

  “He yelled, and hit me as hard as he could. That sweet little old man was pretty hotheaded when he was young. Well, I appreciated that he had the guts to hit an Undying, so I didn’t hit him back,” Harvey said casually in the gloom. He raised one side of his mouth in a smirk, showing not an iota of the innocence of the smile in the picture.

  Kieli threw him a supsicious glare, wondering where he’d picked up his current personality, and Harvey, ducking his head to let the glare pass, pointed toward the hall and downward.

  “Kieli, do you mind if we stay here tonight? It’s a little dusty, but I found a room on the first floor that I think you could sleep in.”

  Of course Kieli had no objections, so she nodded in assent. It was a shame not to stay at the inn they had already reserved in front of the station, but the only things she had were the shoulder bag she always carried with her and the radio (the radio technically belonged to Harvey, but somewhere along the way it had become the preferred style for Kieli to wear it around her neck).

  “Then let’s go. There’s no electricity here, so we won’t be able to see anything soon,” Harvey urged her, disappearing from the doorway. Kieli glanced up at the old man next to her. He smiled bitterly and, nodding, stood up and left the room.

  The last to leave, Kieli could see the backs of Harvey and the old man as they walked down the hall ahead of her, side by side. They argued about something as they went. The old man was half a head shorter than Harvey, but he was a match for him in attitude. “That was because you suddenly said you were leaving without giving any decent explanation. And Dad had just died; anybody would make that mistake.”

  “You shouldn’t have needed an explanation to figure it out.”

  “Don’t you get defiant on me! You’ve always been one extreme or the other — either you don’t say enough or you say way too much. You need to learn a little consideration for who you’re talking to.”

  “Augh, don’t lecture me. I wasn’t asking, damn it.”

  Walking behind them and staring at their backs, Kieli desperately tried to contain her laughter. “What, are they little kids…?” the radio muttered in exasperation, but the Corporal had no right to talk about age or foul language, which made it even funnier, and Kieli giggled in the back of her throat.

  The two of them are like best friends and brothers, just like the two joking around in the picture. I’m really glad they were able to talk again, she thought.

  The next morning, when Kieli opened her eyes she was lying on a sofa with broken springs in the waiting room, wrapped in her coat and a dusty old blanket.

  The clinic had completely fallen to ruin. Yellow sand and dust had settled below the crisp, clear, cold morning air, and the once clean, white paint on the walls had faded to yellow and peeled off in places, showing the concrete wall underneath.

  Kieli spent a while walking through the deserted house, looking for Harvey, the floor creaking with every step she made. When she went up to the second floor, the plants that decorated the balcony had withered to nothing, and only the cracked pots remained under the nebulous morning light.

  She stopped in front of the old man’s room. There was no bedding on his mattress, and most of the furniture had been either broken or carried off, leaving the room empty. She walked to the end table and carefully picked up the photo frame that had been left facedown on top of it.

  The photograph inside the rusted metallic frame had turned a milky white, and she could no longer make out anything except that there were three people in it.

  “I’m sorry about dragging you along yesterday,” a quiet voice addressed her from behind, and Kieli looked up from the photo. Harvey leaned in the door frame, just as he had done the night before. “Oh, no…” Kieli answered, shaking her head. Harvey smiled just a little more softly than usual.

  “I’m going to visit his grave. Wanna come?”

  There was an abandoned Church school in a corner of the upper level of the vertical inner wall that made the old city so complex, and the open lot next to it had become a public cemetery for the poor. The concrete walls that surrounded it were half-crumbled, and a cold but gentle morning breeze blew between the rows of stone grave markers.

  In the farthest corner of the cemetery lay a simple tombstone belonging to the old man Kieli had met last night. It was covered in a layer of red dust that had come in from the wilderness, and it appeared that it had been there for at least a few years. Thinking about it, those memories in which the old man was a boy were right after the War ended, and that was almost eighty years ago.

  Immediately next to his grave marker stood another that was a little older. Engraved on it was a modest epitaph, fitting of such a plain marker. “Here lies Tadius, beloved father of Harvey, Tadai, and many potted plants.”

  There was no inscription on the old man’s grave; perhaps he had no family or close friends to care for him. There was another tombstone beside the father’s grave. It was much more weathered than the other two, but she could just barely make out the words carved in it — “Here lies Harvey, most beloved son of Tadius, and Tadai’s older brother.”

  Openmouthed, Kieli couldn’t help staring at the letters on th
e tombstone.

  “There was an elder son in that family,” Harvey informed her in a smooth tone. “Apparently he died in battle six months before the war ended.”

  At a loss for words, Kieli looked up at Harvey, standing beside her. Harvey’s profile wore no expression as he looked down at the grave, and he stood completely motionless for a while as he sometimes did, his eyes fixed downward. After waiting quietly for a while as Kieli hesitated to speak to him, he finally blinked once and turned his usual indifferent gaze toward her.

  “I’m going to stay here a little longer. Would you go eat breakfast or something with the Corporal to kill time?”

  “Can’t I wait here…?”

  “No. Sorry, b…” Harvey started to say, then broke off as if the words were stuck in his throat. He showed a vague smile and averted his eyes. “But I want to be alone for a little while.…”

  Kieli stood still for a time, looking at his face. She felt the inside of her throat tighten. She bit her lip and swallowed. “Kieli, let’s go,” the radio’s voice pressed her on, and she took two or three steps backward.

  “…Then I’ll be off,” she somehow managed to choke out, then turned on her heels and fled.

  At the cemetery exit, she looked back and saw Harvey crouched on his knees in front of the grave. She faced forward again and ran at full speed, not looking back again. As she ran the inner wall’s steps in one bound, the radio and her bag thudded against her.

  An awkward, three-wheeled taxi with its cylindrical fuel tank on top drove sluggishly into the plaza in front of the station. It passed in front of the bench Kieli and the Corporal sat on, the fat muffler in the back spitting out black smoke that showed a severe lack of fuel efficiency, and Kieli, who was trying to take her first bite of breakfast, couldn’t help choking.