Mano trusted his reality more than his dream, but there was Pepe’s back, running back down the well-worn path through the woods toward XO City. Mano could see him so clearly. Pepe’s clothes, Pepe’s hair.
But reality was still inside the cabin. Mimi Minutes was now sitting up on Mano’s gigantic table, blood stains all over the mid-section of her naked body, her bloody panties dangling like a dead soldier from her best big toe. Mimi was crooked—leaning at a 45-degree angle toward the gigantic kitchen sink made from three normal-sized kitchen sinks.
“Who was that?” asked Mimi.
“I don’t know. Maybe Pepe? No, no, it couldn’t have been. It was just some boy. Some boy who looked a lot like Pepe.”
“It wasn’t Pepe.” Mimi tapped an XO from the pack and lit it.
“So you saw? You saw him, too?!”
“I didn’t see nothing, but I watched you watching.” Mimi stood up, and hobbled over to the gigantic refrigerator made out of three refrigerators. It had a door held on by a long bungee cord connected to the metal grid at the back of it. She unhooked the cord and let the door fall open. She grabbed two cold cans of XO. “It was probably a squirrel.”
Mano laughed, but not because anything was funny. “It wasn’t a squirrel. It was a boy.”
Mimi cracked open one of beers, and took a slow drag of her cigarette. “Pepe is deader’n dead. Besides, if he was alive, he’d be older than you. Remember? Mano, look how old you are. Look at you. You’re no boy.”
“What am I?” Mano was daring Mimi to call him a monster.
“I don’t know what you are. But you’re no boy.”
For the first time since he chopped down The Reckoner, Mano felt an urge to leave the woods. He wanted to know something other than his festering life there.
Mimi pulled her panties up high on her hip with her one hand. “You fell asleep halfway through eating me out again.”
“I did?”
“It’s ok though,” Mimi said. “I got it done.”
“I’m sorry, Mimi. I...”
Mimi interrupted Mano. “I don’t need to know nothing else about nothing.” She finished the first can of beer, then cracked the second. “I’m on my period.”
“I can see that,” said Mano. “I have a mop. Don’t worry about it.”
Mimi wasn’t worried about it.
Mano took a few steps outside of the cabin. He intended to walk as fast as he could, so that he’d have enough momentum to not stop, to just keep going further into the woods and closer to the edge, toward The Cure, toward the footbridge near where Pepe died, where his mother had been torn apart by the very woman who was now in his cabin.
Black birds squawked and swooped down in front of him, and circled around his head. Two of them landed on his head and stayed there. They had been waiting for many years to escort Mano back down the hill. But he stopped.
Mano’s body was far too big. He was shaped like a pile of trash, and he hunched so far over that his face was out front, only halfway up his body. Mano’s face was the only part of his body that could be recognized with any clarity. Needless to say, he was not swift, and the chances that he’d be able to catch up with the boy were nil. Defeated, he returned to his gigantic door, which looked more like the size of a missing wall. The door was still open.
“They like you,” Mimi said. She was able to get dressed on her own.
“Who likes me?”
“The birds.” Mimi gestured to the top of Mano’s head with the hand that held her third can of XO.
“Oh, yes. The birds. It’s my own fault,” said Mano.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. It’s just that I asked for them, that’s all. For my 14th birthday. ”
“Well, shit. You really get what you want, don’t you, Mano? These damned things were all over town for years. After you left. They were trying to land on everyone’s fucking heads, squawking, shitting, destroying everybody’s shit.”
“What happened? Are they still...”
“The Businessman put out a call for bird hunters. No one back then knew what birds were, but everyone learned quick. And bird hunters from other places answered the call, too. They settled in, bought up everything, hunted the birds until they were all gone. It was sad really. I liked ’em. The birds. But the funny thing is, all those hunters all thought that they killed them all. You can’t kill them though. That’s the thing. You can kill one or two, sure. But you can’t kill birds. Birds are birds.” Mimi cracked open her fourth beer, and had a new thought about the birds. “Everyone thinks they’re dead, but they just live up here now is all. A lot like you, I guess.”
“Maybe that’s why they like me.”
Mimi put on her shoes with her one hand, and thanked Mano. She hobbled back into the woods toward XO City where she lived alone in an apartment above XO Donuts.
38.
On Wednesday morning, Inez stood on the front porch of The Good House and knocked. The laughing inside the house paused for a moment, and then the door opened. A little boy wearing a cowboy hat stood in the door and pointed his gun at her.
“Do you know who I am, lady?” he asked.
“Is Zuzu here?”
“I’m a cowboy. You can’t come in, lady.”
“Look, I need to find Zuzu,” asserted Inez. “Is she here?”
The cowboy looked confused, as if he didn’t speak the same language.
Inez was unwilling to play his game. “Zuzu. She helps take care...”
“Zuzu is dead, lady. I shot her with my gun.”
“No! That can’t be true. Vera?! Vera!” Inez yelled into the front room above the cowboy’s head. Vera was around the corner in the drawing room where she had been sitting with a table full of other children, and Ernest. They were all drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
Vera walked to the front door in June Good’s old silk robe, and kneeled down to the cowboy’s level. “Igor, what did I tell you about answering the door? And don’t point your gun at people’s faces. Ok? Look at me.” She lifted Igor’s hat on top of his brow. She commanded his eye contact before saying anything else. “Ok?”
The cowboy sheepishly put his gun in his own mouth and nodded in apology.
“Now, go finish your smokes with the other kids.” Vera ushered the cowboy by the shoulders.
“Vera, is Zuzu here?” asked Inez before Vera could stand up.
“No. I’m sorry. She didn’t show up. I figured...”
Inez put her hand over her mouth and her eyes exploded. “Where is she?”
“I’m so sorry, but I don’t know. Did she say where she was going this morning?” asked Inez.
“She wasn’t at home this morning. And she didn’t come home last night either.”
“That’s not like her. When’s the last time...”
“Maybe she’s in here?” Inez pushed her way into the house. “Maybe she’s sleeping? She must be so tired. Maybe she’s sleeping somewhere inside and none of you noticed.”
“Inez, she didn’t come to work this morning.” Vera reached her hand out to touch Inez on the forearm. “Look, can I get you a coffee? Would you like to sit with us? We’re talking about...”
“But Zuzu loves working here. It’s all she talks about. She’d never...” Inez rounded the corner into the drawing room. There was a table full of children. She took a deep breath. “Yes, ok, coffee, yes, thank you.”
When Inez stepped into The Good House, she stepped into a new world. She felt like a frightened little fish in a new ocean. Everything looked strange yet full of love. The furniture in each room all faced the other furniture so that people could sit just to talk. There were three oil paintings on the wall in the drawing room. The one in the middle was a portrait of a woman wearing a funny pink hat. The other two were of men, one of the men was holding trophies, and the other man was cutting a piece of cake. The ceiling above the paintings seemed higher than the house itself, and where the ceilings met the walls it looked like frosting fr
om that piece of cake. The fireplace was crackling, even though it was sunny everywhere in the house and early in the morning.
Vera led Inez into the room where the children were smoking and drinking their coffees. “Nun Other than a Nun’s Hat,” Luis, Ernesto and Leda’s cheekiest and most gregarious triplet, said to Inez, holding up his mug of Nun’s Hat coffee as a greeting when she walked in. Then he took a sip. The mug had a logo of a pyramid of corpses on it. Leda and Ernesto, who were sitting with Luis and a few of the other children, lifted their mugs of coffee and sipped, too.
“Nun’s Hats?” asked Inez.
“Nun Other,” said Luis again.
“We only drink and smoke Nun’s Hat here,” Vera explained. After Pie Time got bought out, we just...”
“I see...” said Inez half-listening. She was on to looking at the framed paintings by children on one of the walls in the drawing room. They were paintings of monsters, rockets, families, and sheep.
Igor, the cowboy who was playing like a tour guide for Inez, his gun now in his holster, pointed at a drawing that was his. It was a painting of a family in cages. “My mother said we all used to live in cages. See, this is my mother,” Igor kept pointing. “This is my older brother, who was a tiny baby...”
“Who is this little boy?” Inez asked Igor. She pointed to the painting just next to his painting of his family in cages.
“That’s Zuzu.”
Inez snapped back into recognition of why she was in this house in the first place. “Zuzu! Are you here?” She walked into the kitchen, which was large and bright and smelled like pancakes, then through a door beyond the kitchen. There was a staircase there, and she walked up it.
Vera Good spent her time equally with all of the children in her care. They would sit with her, one at a time, usually on the porch, and she would tell them about June Good, about the caged days, and about when their city was once a town called Pie Time. The children loved to ask her questions about June, about good beer and cigarettes, and about love and death.
Leda and Ernesto spent their time watching the youngest children. They talked to them about their families, about love and death, and they made paintings.
Ernest watched the older children. He read books about love and death with them, and together they worked on mathematics. He taught the children about animals, and the children helped take care of all of his cats, of which there were eight.
Ernesto and Ernest’s step-mother, Hera Horn, spent most of her time upstairs singing opera to the old and the very sick. The old and the very sick were most often the same people. Hera liked to feed them, bathe them, read to them, and sing to them. Her favorite old and very sick person was Irene Mire, who was perhaps older than anyone had ever been before. Irene was held together by dust.
Every morning, the first thing Irene would tell Hera was, “I’m ready to die now.”
The Shoveler, despite having not dug a grave in over 16 years, still had a face seared with soil and a shiny layer of sweat. He spent his days outside mostly, teaching the children about dirt, flowers, trees, fire, and insects. The children learned with their hands. They sat in a circle, often in the sunlight in the woods, and they talked about what love was, and what death was. All of the older children felt as though they knew something of love, but none of them knew anything of death. The Shoveler knew something about it. In the same way that he would describe what happens to a body once love happens to it, he would describe what happens to a body once death happens to it. He would talk about how it would stiffen, swell, and rot, and how the insects would feed on it. “Life comes from where death goes,” he’d say, with the same cadence that Mano used to use while teaching The Death Lessons years ago.
The Shoveler no longer had anything to shovel because no one at all had died in XO City since the exact day that Mano disappeared.
In the earliest days after Mano’s disappearance, the people had so many reasons to celebrate. No one was dying, and the fear of God’s Finger, that unusual, imminent, and cruel death that had terrorized the people of Pie Time, dissipated into nothing like Sisi’s black cloud. Naturally, The Businessman became Pie Time’s heroes. They had cured God’s Finger. Pie Time built three golden life-sized statues of The Businessman out of the same iron-like material that they used to make XO Life Cages.
XO’s success was considered a feat of science and humanitarianism for the rest of the valley to behold. Many more people settled in Pie Time where jobs were plentiful, and where the problem of death had been solved. Soon all of Pie Time’s houses and businesses were owned by XO. Pie Time’s newest settlers, naturally, mistakenly called the town XO. Eventually, it became easier for everyone to just call the town XO, and Pie Time was officially renamed XO City.
Mano and Sisi’s old house was now the XO History Museum, which housed a permanent God’s Finger exhibit in what was once Sisi’s bathroom. In that old bathroom, the history of God’s Finger was on display in the form of Pie Time newspaper clippings, photographs, and interviews, which were given primarily by The Businessman. According to the God’s Finger exhibit in the XO History Museum, there were two reasons why God’s Finger was no longer plaguing XO City.
The first was the introduction of the XO Life Pill. Once it became clear that there was no longer any market for new life cages, the life pill was introduced. Its only ingredient was refined sugar, but the exhibit doesn’t mention this. Many people who were still leery of the possibility of death, but were willing enough to take the risk to free themselves of the discomforts of living in an iron cage, trusted in the life pill. Obviously, this argument didn’t account for all the people who were not taking the pill and who wanted death badly.
The second was Father Felipe. He was credited for the eradication of God’s Finger because of his legendary pilgrimage to the pyramid of dead bodies in Nun’s Hat. He was given credit not only for discovering Nun’s Hat, but for feeding its pyramid with the final bodies it needed. Because this pyramid was complete, God no longer needed any other bodies to flow downstream to the monument. And it was Father Felipe’s ever expanding and financially successful church, The XO House of Love Everlasting, or better known as The Hole, which continued his legacy, and kept sinners free from their final punishment.
To a few others, the absence of death became XO City’s newest plague. No one could die even if they wanted to. Eradicating God’s Finger, to some, meant eradicating God. To those people, God no longer paid any mind to the people of XO City. One at a time, the bravest people in the city left their cages. They tasted freedom. When it became clear that no one who had left their cage was being struck by the finger of God, more and more people started leaving their cages. And when it became clear that no one was dying from anything at all, those bravest of people began risking their lives for the thrill of it. People in love did back flips off the roof of the newly constructed XO Factory into each other’s arms. Some people swam in the strong, cold, and rocky currents of The Cure. Even those who were very old and in pain, their skeletons turning into dust inside of them, couldn’t die. Some people, like Mothers, who were tired, sore, and sad, tried to drink themselves to death. They tried to drown their sad brains in a nectar of painlessness, but could only drink themselves into a living oblivion.
“Zuzu! Where are you? Zuzu! Baby, I’m sorry.” Inez was upstairs, looking inside the closets of each of the five thoughtfully furnished bedrooms and five tastefully wallpapered bathrooms that made up the upstairs of The Good House for Children and the Very Sick and Old. She opened up each closet door and pulled back each bathroom curtain. “You can visit The Butcher down at XO Meats all you want. Ok? You can do whatever you want. You’re a woman now. I can see that. You’re a woman now, Bebé!”
Vera walked up the stairs behind Inez, just to be sure she would be alright. “Inez, come back downstairs. Your coffee is ready.”
Inez ignored her and kept searching. When she reached the last bathroom, the door was unlocked, and the shower was loud and steaming. The wal
lpaper had a pattern of summer fruits and vegetables, and the red and white checkered shower curtains were drawn. Inez thought Zuzu was taking a shower and couldn’t hear her calling her name. So, Inez pulled back the curtains fast with a strength born from panic. As she did, at the top of her lungs she repeated the phrase that had been looping in her mind, “You’re a woman now!”
Hera, who was three times the size of Zuzu, and clearly a woman now in every way, continued to move the suds around between the folds of her hairy armpits and long yellowish squash-like breasts while holding Inez’s gaze. Hera made up a song on the spot. It was her best talent. “I am a woman now, it’s true. I am a woman, like me and you.”
Inez screamed and ran at a full sprint, in a straight line, out of the bathroom.
“Inez, please...”
Inez passed in front of Vera like she was on fire, from the bathroom into the bedroom across the hallway, then jumped with both feet onto a chaise lounge, which launched her body through the open window.
Outside, in the back yard, just off of the back porch where the younger children were watching from lounge chairs, The Shoveler was teaching the older children about death, about how the dead used to be buried in Pie Time. “This is how it was done,” he said. The children shoveled the last scoops of soil into a pile next to the fresh plot. “Then we just put the dead body in,” The Shoveler continued, “and we filled it back up.”
“But where do we get a dead body from?” asked one of the children.
“We just have to wait. It’s never up to us.”
Just then, Inez’s body fell from the sky above them, landed hard on the edge of the fresh grave and bounced awkwardly into it.
The children began scooping the dirt onto Inez’s wet face and into her crying mouth. The children cheered.
39.
Enid stood alone in her strawberry field like a scarecrow. She wasn’t moving at all, but inside of her own mind, she was moving very slowly. Inside of her own mind, she was picking a strawberry from its stem. A strawberry has its seeds on the outside, like a coat, she thought. Or like eyes. Her dress was white with little strawberries on it. The sun was going down, orange and pink, just above a few new high-rises, and over the woods to the west, on the other side of The Cure. In her mind, she dropped the strawberry into the basket. In her mind, she picked another strawberry from its stem.
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