Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  My mother did nothing. She just stared down at the frail bellows pumping frantically on the floor. I was on the street before I could think, screaming for a doctor, my dress smeared with red, my lips chalked with terror. A young man dropped the hand of his companion as he ran to me. He searched my body for wounds but I yelled, “Inside, inside,” and tugged at his starched cuff. He stumbled behind me as I led him up the landing and to the kitchen.

  Her breath was a shambling machine now, a pump organ kicked in anger, sounding only foul notes, pathetic flats, not human anymore. The doctor was quick about his work. His finger swept the cavity of her mouth, progressing deep into her throat. It lingered there, then was thrust out as she gagged and vomited a stinking slosh of cake and blood. He sat her up. She heaved her first real breath.

  “Help her to her room,” he said. I moved first but was repulsed as the artist laced his arms beneath her knees and hoisted her, with the doctor, out of the kitchen.

  “Maddy, dear,” she said weakly as she floated from the kitchen. “Your poor dress.”

  The artist never left her side. He beat back her fever with rags wrung in alcohol. He cradled her wilting wrists. He brought broth and flowers and thimbles of cool water, which seemed to be all she could get down. I could hear my mother moving about in some remote corner of the house, away from us, away from the artist’s newly rekindled attention.

  After nine days the sheets barely moved with her breathing. Doctors could do nothing now. The artist asked me to fetch his drawing board and pencils. When I returned with them, he was on the bed with her, his knees curled beneath him, naked, weeping. I backed from the room, then stopped when he began to kiss her. This was not the greedy appetite I had seen so many times before. This was something new. The kisses were tender at first, slight scuffs over her scalding throat. Then his tears caught fire and his movements became impassioned. She moaned beneath him, unnamable. His lips and fingers began to knead her skin and sheet-white breasts. I watched his long brown fingers trace the soft crests of her ribs, the skin stretched taught like something left in the sun. She arched in a daze, her eyes veiled. He reached a bundled fist below the sheets then unfolded himself above her, lengthening like a shadow, and thrust. She moaned. Her brow clouded, then slowly crashed. His tears fell on her shoulders that were too weak to receive him. It was life slowly extracting death, holding up a single silencing finger to that which is made of silence.

  When they were finished, he slipped out of the bed. She slept. Still naked, his eyes never leaving her, he picked up his pad, the shaft of his pencil. She opened her eyes one last time, just long enough for him to trace the gesture. The artist died three days later, on All Hallows’ Eve. He died from the same Spanish flu that would take a hundred million others.

  I tried to mourn them but my mother only scoffed. She told me we had existed, finally, only at the side of their lives. We had been looked at, distractedly loved, holding trays and chairs, never really one of them. But I did not believe this. The house was aggressively empty without them and I could find no comfortable spot, not even among those I had thought brought joy. I refused to scrub properly at the stain on my dress. I needed at least that to know I had been touched. My mother, in many ways a kind of virus herself, was far more practical. She stripped the pillows from their cases and boiled them, then stuffed them full of provisions from the larder, hard circles of cheese and stone-shaped loaves of bread, canned beets, and candied fruit peels. In another pillowcase she stuffed all the wife’s jewelry, a few silver candlesticks, and a few sheets from the artist’s sketchbooks. She knew the families would descend soon and take inventory. With the war as good as lost, they would need every asset they could muster. On our last night in the house, she lit a fire. I watched her as she burned the bedsheets, her profile shadowed hard by the mindless leaping light. I asked where we would go.

  “Berlin,” she said.

  CHAPTER 5

  I knew I would never see Berlin. Already I could feel the pathogen ignite in me, could feel the icy tendrils of the disease lift me up out of my skin. I tried to keep my head clear, fighting hard against the gathering haze. I remember leaving the house. My mother did not bother to lock it. I was trying to follow her down the empty street, but my feet did not touch the pavement. I was carried along on the cold, slippery backs of phantom fish. I stumbled. I could barely split my feet fast enough to stop my vomit of blood from staining my shoes. My mother was angry. A hard jerk under an arm. The world torn loose and spinning as she pulled me harshly back into the artist’s house. On the floor, near a fire. My mother was in a corner, mumbling something. Chanting. She was coughing herself now, spitting distractedly, never breaking rhythm. I saw her lift a small nacreous object to the light. My tooth. She took my tooth and placed it in a small metal bowl. She had a mortar of sorts, a hard little mallet with which she pounded the tooth, crushing it into fine powder. I heard her spit and watched her finger swirl the powder into a hard pearl of pink paste. Her eyes were open but sightless as if the very horizon fled from her stare.

  In my fever, we were in a cave. A frozen cave brittle with blue and pale green ice. I begged for blankets. But she blew on me, a sharp breath that cut like honed flints. Her chanting increased and I saw the flash of a small knife. She held my middle finger in her hand and flicked the tip of my fingernail with the blade. She took the nail chip in her fingers and kneaded it into the paste. Then she plucked a hair from my head and wrapped it around the ball of paste. I watched, delirious, as she pushed the pearl of my hair, fingernail, and ground tooth into what looked like a leathery thistle.

  “Hair, nail, and tooth,” I heard her whisper. “The sisters that never die.”

  She raised the thistle to her mouth and spat blood on it. She then took the thistle and placed it in my mouth, settling it gently upon my tongue, whispering, her thumb circling my dry lips three times before the flesh knit and sealed the thistle inside me. Had there been a needle and thread? Had I felt tiny stabs through my feverish lips?

  There was a high, incessant whistling in my ears. I wanted to sit up, move closer to the fire that I knew burned in the room, but my body would not respond to thought. It lay there, in the snow, on the floor of the cave, in the cold that became increasingly chill, increasingly real. I pushed my lungs but my scream died behind sealed lips.

  My mother ignored me. Between her fingers she twisted a length of thread, fine and clear as if wrought from glass. This she wove between my paralyzed toes, binding them together in a series of intricate loops and knots. She did the same to my fingers, trussing them together so tightly I could not move one hand free of the other. The thread began to circle my legs, winding up my calves and thighs, pressing my arms to my sides, willing them to mesh, the flesh turning to clay, swallowing the creases between limbs, my body losing all delineation, reverting back to some limbless amoeboid state. I writhed like a worm, sent panicked signals through my spine and nerves, but communication was cut. I was buried in my own flesh, sewn into my own skin like a death shroud. Was this the pinnacle of the illness, the last hideous crest before death? This hateful oneness, all individuality worn away until I was nothing more than a soft bolus awaiting the gullet of a god?

  The last thing I remember seeing was a creature in the corner, a human form, firm on all fours like a wolf, its back arched hard in a feverish curve as torrents of blood flowed from it lips to the blackness of the floor.

  CHAPTER 6

  I awoke in darkness. If you could call it that. I was conscious. But not living. Half-finished. Uncured. You enter a concert hall where a powerful symphony has just played. You see the stage, the seats where the audience and orchestra once sat. You feel a resonance of great sound, but there is no music present. You are this great hall.

  Empty houses that had once known joy must feel this way. Battlefields where the grass now grows.

  I had no heartbeat. No lift and retreat to my chest. It is a vibration you miss only by its absence; blood coursing through its cha
nnels, organs churning out their chemicals and bile, bones on their hinges and intestines squeaking. Blinking. Breathing. All this background noise of living that we mistake for silence. The void was deafening, yet still I was.

  I don’t know how long I lay there drenched in this nothingness. A day. A week. Finally I had a dream of breathing and willed my chest to heave, but the breath was not needed. I could remember. Words. Feelings. Faces. The artist’s wife. Something dimmer in the shape of my mother. The house. The last night. The cave. The thistle. And as soon as my mind fell to this thought, there it was, its rough case pressed against my palate, dry upon my drier tongue. The feeling came gradually, prodded and willed into flowing, but it came. And so I thought of fingers, palm, wrist, and something stirred there with me in the dark. How long did it take to raise my hand to my lips? A month? More? But slowly it came, like lead flowing into the mold of a tin soldier, the memory and the movement coming on at once, flowing into empty recesses and filling with mass, filling with me.

  There were laces there. My mouth had been sewn shut. I pulled hard at the stitches. Did they tear? Or was it the flesh of my lips? I felt no pain. Only the pressure that was relieved in tiny echoing plinks. When the thistle left the purse of my lips, I was filled with a dim but frightening implication. If the thistle was real, then the ritual was real. That meant my death had been real. Or had it? Perhaps this was the dream of death.

  To know, to know for sure, I needed to move, to pierce the darkness and what lay beyond. I remembered wood, the roughness of wood, on floors and crude cabinets, pithy and hollow but oddly strong, and this hardness above me, this stoppage, this was wood. A lid. A box. I willed my heels. They sounded on wood. I was in the box. A coffin. Was that the word? Casket. Buried. In the box, buried deep, in the box with the lid, shut blackly above me.

  There was panic, the memory of panic, but panic without purchase, just the ghost, the flicker of it across my mind, for the box and I were the same. I simply wanted to know what was above the box. The box wouldn’t mind. The box would comply. I willed my wrists to bend, my palms flush to the surface above me, and then I willed Push, push hard, and the stoppage gave, a muffled grating of loose gravel and soil that sifted into the box as I continued to push.

  The dirt filled my eyes but didn’t sting. It only settled there as would a burst of different air, benign, expected. The lid hadn’t been nailed, set upon me as it was in great haste. The grave was not deep, dug as it was in complete exhaustion. Was this my mother’s last effort before she died, when she assumed her charm had failed? And as the lid finally tumbled off my body, my eyes slowly focused on the pitted landscape around me. No headstones. Just quick crude crosses either nailed or lashed at the apex, stuck into the ground, namelessly. Whole crops of crosses over acres of shallow mounds. A harvest of death. I willed myself out of my box and stood. Then I walked. Small pyres of smoldering effects were everywhere. A final effort to slow the disease, they smoked in the wine-colored evening. Horn combs heat-twisted into sea-creature shapes, charred crib slats and blackened saucers, bone-handled buttonhooks still glowing like pokers. Photographs, letters, charred and left to fade from what the flames could not finish.

  If there was a sense of sadness it was a remote feeling. I looked on all this with more fascination than horror. Horror requires a kind of consent from the victim, and I was past all that now.

  I knew I was still in Vienna, for I could smell the brackish signature of the Danube. I could see barges moored along the canal. I knew I was no longer in the thirteenth district. I was later to learn I had been stumbling around in the wilds of the Kaisermühlen in the twenty-second district of the Donaustadt. This would account for all the available burial space. But at the time I could have been wandering the surface of the moon.

  A greasy light spilled onto the wet cobbles of the quay. The air was rank with a tarry heather that flaked off pitch torches lit against the airborne pathogens. The light came from a riverside beer hall, once robust in its patronage but now filled with the old and infirm who had escaped induction or disease. Fat old men with imperial side-whiskers and beer-blistered eyes focused only on the shallow dregs of their steins. They were seamen, barge captains, and stevedores, idle now that all the empire’s supplies were spent at the front. I looked like what I was, a child newly puked from the grave. My entrance, as they say, raised the roof.

  “Crippled Christ, look what the cat dragged in.”

  “Step into the light, darling. Let’s have a look at you.”

  “God in heaven what a stink.”

  “Steady there, Hans, that brat is dripping with plague.”

  At the mention of plague, I could feel a cold recoil from all those present. Then one of them stood.

  “Can’t have that,” said the one that must have been Hans. “Not while we can still lift a stein to our lips.”

  My life, if one could call it that, would have been so much different if they’d simply asked me to leave.

  I didn’t feel the first blow, nor the second or third that ramped into a steady hail of angry fists. I was aware only of a kind of adamant concussion, a velocity of outrage, as if I were safe in the confines of some metal cage let loose over a rocky incline, tumbling, rocking, jolting, but vaguely aware of the intent of the impact, not the impact itself.

  I felt myself leave the ground, my body arching in space as I cleared the far edge of the bar and landed on the slimy plank floor. I held no breath that could leave my body.

  There was more rough jostling as boot heels slammed into the orbits of my eyes and the bridges of my cheekbones, but where bones should have cracked and splintered, mine gave, pliant as marsh reeds. The mob redoubled their efforts, terrified at the sickness they thought I harbored, frustrated at my resiliency, but I was above them now, swerving in the unconcerned trajectory of a common housefly as it avoids the dull swat of human hands.

  Their fury finally reached its climax and I felt myself lifted up again. They ran me through the door, each holding a limb in a grip that could shatter kindling, slamming the crown of my head into the jamb, but again I felt only a ripple of concussion through the jellied chambers of my spine, a wind that thrilled in passing. I was falling through space again, in the soothing openness of water-cooled air, tumbling in a languid free fall that almost delighted.

  There was a soft implosion, the cymbal hiss of a parting surface that enveloped me in some slower substance. I saw the surface of the Danube seal over me, the white froth of bubbles from my impact squirmed past my open eyes in furious schools. The darkness swallowed me slowly.

  I don’t know how long I brined in that silent green water. I recall the sleeping darkness, the almost audible whisper of the currents that gently buffeted my body like a lover rousing me to love. The sacks of my lungs had filled with water and weighted me to the bottom. There was no flesh to decay, no methane that could siphon into my tissues and buoy me to the surface. I drifted. Freshwater snails curled into the conch of my ears and little fish frolicked in the hollow of my open mouth. If we knew how serene death really is, how merciful the dark gesture that helps us shed the sea chests of ourselves, would we still fear it?

  I was roused by the sound of dripping water. I could feel pressure in the pit of each arm, an unsecured weightlessness. Voices conferred, whispering as if afraid to wake me. I felt two fingers press my jugular, a rustle of cropped hair as the convexity of a head was held to my chest. I was being lowered when sight bled into my open eyes and I saw I was in the hands of a giant.

  He had a sallow face the color of candlewax and sunken at the cheeks. The lids of his eyes seemed swollen and unbearably heavy but could not hide the bright blue irises that stared dully back at me. He had black hair, shorn nearly to the skull, running in wide patches on either side of his head. But the top of his head was flat, hairless, a calcified rusty color with patches of florid green patina. The lip of this plate, for I realized it was a metal plate, was flanged at the crest of his head and dipped past his hairlin
e, beaten somehow to mimic the curve of his forehead. A crown of four mismatched bolts had been drilled through the lip, into the living bone, securing it there. Even in my present seemingly impervious state, I marveled at the radiant pain he must have endured, the huge, blind fumbling will to live that could leave him content to be so diminished and yet still breathing and blinking and feeling. I didn’t know who was the greater wonder, he or me. There was something familiar about him, despite his modified appearance. I felt a little peal of pleasure as one might feel in the remembered floor plan of a childhood home despite it being demolished. He was the plowboy. The one forced into my mother’s lap in the troop car. The one who demurred. The one who could resist her. I must have smiled, for his colorless lips spread into a thin grin that revealed the broken pickets of his teeth. But there was warmth there, a dull thud of recognition. Many candles had been extinguished behind his eyes but this one still burned.

  “Put her down, Mutter,” a voice whispered. “She’ll be all right now.”