The Living

by Isaac Marion

I shake my head. “Just a feeling.”

  Tomsen regards me uneasily for a moment, then parks behind a shuttered bookstore. The moment she cuts the engine, the kids spring out of their fort. They look excited. Even Joan and Alex look excited; their skin shows a faint wash of their natural hues, cool brown and pale pink.

  “You have to stay,” I tell them.

  “But there’s music!” Sprout says.

  “Not safe.”

  Julie kneels down to Sprout. “Let us go check it out, okay? If the music’s any good, we’ll come get you.”

  “You promise?”

  “Promise. We can’t have a kid as cool as you listening to shitty music.”

  Sprout smiles.

  “Stay with them?” I ask, glancing from Tomsen to M. Tomsen nods, but M stiffens.

  “If it’s not safe,” he mumbles, “I should be there.”

  “Marcus,” Julie says, shaking her head. “No you shouldn’t.”

  “But Nora—”

  “Whatever danger she might be in…” She gestures to the bruises on his face and neck. “…you can’t help her right now.”

  He lowers his head.

  “If she’s there, I’ll talk to her. We’ll figure this out.”

  Slowly, M nods. But I’m finding it hard to concentrate on M and Nora’s tension. I feel my own rising up around it, smothering my friends’ plight under my own anxieties. I hear booming voices condemning me for my selfishness. Heat on my face. Smoke in my nose—

  “Let’s go, R,” Julie says, stepping out into this nameless town, and after a moment to pry my fingers off the door frame, I follow her.

  • • •

  There’s something medieval about the town that makes me want to call it a village. The leaf-caked streets resemble dirt paths, and some of the rotten rooftops almost look like thatch. The remains of the sunset cast everything in a dull orange glow while the sickle of the moon hangs in the eastern blackness. I think of Bosch. I feel the gloomy skies of his dour moral universe pressing down on me. Every time we round a corner, I expect a mob of surreal grotesques marching forth to illustrate my sins.

  The music drifts through the cool air from somewhere just beyond the retail district, too far to make out a melody. It clarifies as we get closer, but it’s still a murky muddle even when the source is in sight: a flat, featureless building the size of a gymnasium, all concrete and sheet metal painted matte blue-gray, its entire perimeter lined with blinding floodlights. The only windows are the glass entry doors, behind which I see dense crowds—perhaps a whole village’s worth of people. The building has no signage, but its clean, monolithic presence stands out so sharply from the decaying homes around it that its identity is obvious.

  “R?”

  Julie has stopped and is watching me expectantly, because I’ve fallen an awkward distance behind her. My boots drag like they’re filled with stones. I can make out the chords now. Major, major, minor, major, a familiar emotional recipe.

  “Julie,” I mumble. “Maybe…we shouldn’t.”

  “Shouldn’t what?” She holds out her palms, squinting at me in the dark. “Shouldn’t go in? Nora’s in there, R.”

  “Maybe she…wants to be left alone.”

  “R,” Julie says, taking a step toward me. “She’s just scared. She lost control of herself and she doesn’t know how to come back.” Another step. “I’ve been there. So have you. We have to show her she’s still loved.”

  My dry throat sticks to itself as I swallow. I wish she would smile or touch my arm right now, some gesture to include me in this concept of unconditional acceptance, but she doesn’t. She returns to the task at hand, striding toward the crowds and the lights and the music, and I have no choice. I jog to catch up with her, and we push through the doors into the pandemonium of God’s House.

  • • •

  Pamphlets fly at our faces as we squirm through the gauntlet of eager greeters. They want to know our names, where we’re coming from, is it our first time here; they welcome us over and over without ever specifying what they’re welcoming us to. A church with a tarnished brand, perhaps. A church with a reputation.

  We settle into a dark corner at the back of the auditorium and I see Julie’s eyes searching the crowd, but from here in the back there are no faces, just featureless knobs of skin and hair. The ceiling looms over me, tiny fluorescent lights miles away. The building is huge, yet I feel claustrophobic. The lack of windows, the unadorned walls of corrugated steel. I feel like meat in a shipping crate on my way to be rendered. The congregation is packed neatly into rows of purple office chairs, all eyes on the stage at the front, where attractive young musicians blast pop-rock worship songs through an arena-worthy sound system. It’s moist with emotion. Foolproof chord progressions, fervent male vocals meekly supported by female harmonies. It jerks hard on the heartstrings, commanding me to feel uplifted—a sensation that becomes profoundly dissonant once I pick out the lyrics:

  Lord take it all, consume my whole life, leave nothing behind, no struggles no strife…

  Burn me to ashes, the hour is now, don’t need to know why, don’t need to know how…

  I feel the slow creep of nausea. I glance down at the program in my hand. No name or logo, just blocks of small text that I can’t read in the dim lighting. But I hear murmuring from the wretch in my basement, waking from a long nap. At first I can’t understand what he’s saying, and then I realize he’s not speaking—he’s singing. With a bitter edge in his weary voice, he’s singing along to the church’s self-immolating anthems:

  Burn down my pride, burn all that I’ve built, passions that die, and flowers that wilt…

  Quiet my dreams, Lord silence my voice, I’ve nothing to say that can alter your choice…

  Finally it ends, the church erupts with applause, and the band shuffles offstage. My nausea deepens and I feel the dread of certainty: vomit is coming. It will not be deferred.

  “R?” Julie whispers, looking at the side of my face. “Are you okay?”

  I stare at the stage with bulging eyes, sweating from every pore as the lights come up and the purple curtain parts. Time convulses, the past gives a peristaltic heave, and out comes a man I once knew.

  “No.”

  I don’t mean it as an answer to Julie, but it will suffice.

  Paul Bark is old. His doughy teenage countenance has firmed into rigid angles, crow’s feet and frown lines. His shaved head fails to hide his receding hairline or the scattering of burn scars marring his scalp. He raises his hands to the cheering crowd, either to quiet the applause or accept it. His face is theatrically grim, like he’s here to do battle, a pro wrestler entering the ring.

  I sink low in my chair, not so much hiding from Paul as hiding Paul from me. I should not have come here. I should have smelled this hellmouth’s sulfurous breath all the way from Ohio. I was prepared to face Axiom, to brave that dark corner of my past, but I never expected to stumble into this one.

  “Hello, Ardents,” Paul says into his headset mic, and a chorus of cheerful hoots rises from the congregation. “Are you feeling strong? Are you ready to sweat?”

  More hoots.

  “Good. Because God can bench the universe, and he’s not impressed with your girly pushups.”

  A murmur of chuckles.

  “He’s tired of your excuses. He doesn’t think you’re ‘curvy,’ he thinks you’re a fucking fat-ass, and it’s time to tighten up.”

  A wave of delighted laughter.

  His clothes are a costume of asceticism: leather sandals, distressed jeans, a V-neck T-shirt that looks woven from horse hair. He wears just enough stubble to evoke casual disregard without softening his firm jaw, his permanently jutted chin. More burns on his hands and forearms, too symmetrical to be accidents.

  “So my question for you tonight is this.” His tone is abruptly serious. “Wh
at do you see when you look in the mirror?” He paces the stage, giving the audience a moment to sober up. “Do you see what you want to see? Or do you see what is?”

  Silence.

  “Do you see a ‘good person’ who’s ‘beautiful on the inside’? Or do you see an apathetic slug sinking into the couch while the war rages outside your window? Because I’m sorry to tell you, but that’s what God sees when he looks at you.”

  Somber nods.

  “He sees a broken, hopeless fuck-up who’s inherently incapable of doing anything right. But for reasons we’ll never understand in this life…he loves that broken fuck-up.”

  Paul smiles wryly and the audience mirrors him.

  “Or at least he wants to. But we make it hard, don’t we?” He nods to himself, strolling back and forth across the stage. “We resist his love. We reject it. He offers us a position in his kingdom and we whine about the long hours. We sleep through our shifts and fail all our assignments and then act surprised when God fires us.”

  He stops in the center of the stage and pivots to face the crowd, straightening his shoulders. “My friends, there is nothing we can do to earn God’s love, but there is plenty we can do to lose it. Anyone who says God’s love is unconditional hasn’t heard of a place called Hell. Because he sure as Hell stops loving you on the day he sends you there.”

  Paul is looking right at me, but he doesn’t see me. His eyes are feverish and distant, like he’s exulting in some infernal vision just above my head. His face has more crags and creases than it should at his age, as if he spent so many years holding it stiff that it’s starting to split open. It clings to his skull like an ill-fitting mask.

  Is this what I should look like? Is this who I really am beneath my mummified skin?

  “We stand on a tiny island of mercy surrounded by damnation, because we are not ‘good people.’ There is no such thing. We offend God with our very nature, every instinct and inclination, every silly dream and self-indulgent whim.” Another wry smile. “We are God’s shit. Just because he made us doesn’t mean we don’t disgust him.”

  The crowd chuckles, and I hunch over in my chair, holding my stomach.

  “R,” Julie whispers, touching my shoulder, but I cringe away from her. I stand up and rush toward the foyer, crouching as low as I can, but something forces me to look back at the stage and Paul’s eyes fall on mine. I see him squinting into the stage lights, an awkward pause in his polished delivery, but I’m gone before my presence can fully register, squeezing through the overflow crowds in the foyer, and everyone is too fixated on Paul to notice me.

  I move along the walls until I find the restrooms. A paper sign says Out of Order but I push through the creaking door, expecting perhaps a clogged toilet or a broken faucet. Instead, I find myself in a dim, damp chamber of cracked tiles and rusty steel urinals, lit by one flickering light above a cigarette-filled sink, the air thick with the stench of sewage. My nausea feels stalled, balancing on the brink of release without quite tipping over. I stumble toward the sink on wobbly legs and brace myself against it. I look into the dirty mirror.

  Whose face is this looking back at me? Which of my many lives does it represent?

  My cheeks are smooth. There are no lines to mark my journey. I have seen things both horrible and beautiful, I have lost hope and found it, learned new lessons and let go of old ones, I have wandered into Hell and fought my way out—but where is the evidence? My face is the blank canvas of youth, preserved through all these years like a mocking dismissal of my experiences. I am a man stitched into the skin of a boy cadaver. A twisted experiment in the laboratory of the plague.

  I feel it coming. The nausea has deepened into pain.

  I stagger into a toilet stall and open the lid. A bowl of dark sludge greets me, an aged septic liquor off-gassing an aroma that’s sublime in its awful complexity. And still the vomit won’t come.

  I shut the lid and sit on it, fighting back tears from the methane and ammonia and grief.

  “R?”

  Her voice echoes in the entryway. Her footsteps are soft as she approaches the sound of my ragged breathing. She doesn’t knock. She opens the stall door, sees me hunched there, sweat dripping from my forehead, and she kneels down on the filthy tiles.

  “What’s wrong, R? Talk to me.”

  Does she even notice the stench? She should be gagging, but her eyes are calm as they search for mine.

  “Tell me,” she says, putting a hand on my knee, and although I don’t know if she means it as such, I take it as permission. No more “slowly.” No more “easing her into it.” I fill my lungs with the putrid air and I breathe out the truth:

  “This is mine.” I wave my hand around, indicating the filthy stall and everything around it. “This is me.”

  She squints. “What?”

  “This church. The Fire Church.”

  “This is the Fire Church?” Her eyes dart; she’s afraid for all the wrong reasons. “R, we need to—”

  “Julie, listen. I built this.”

  She pauses. Her head tilts and her eyes squint. “What are you talking about?”

  “I founded the Fire Church. Me and my friends, when we were kids.” My eyes drop to the floor. “We hated the world. We wanted to burn it down.”

  I can’t look at her while I’m speaking, but I feel her eyes pressing into my forehead like dull blades as my life spills out of me.

  “We tried to avoid killing anyone, but people died. We spread misery, ruined lives. And then my grandfather pulled me out, and I…” My tongue locks up, trying to hold back the flow, but it’s too late to stop now. “I helped him run the Axiom Group. I helped him poison the world. Axiom wasn’t my employer…it was my inheritance.”

  I force my eyes to rise. I let hers pierce them. “I was a monster before the plague. And whoever I am now…that will always be part of me.”

  Her face is utterly blank, eyes wide and empty. And I suddenly realize that I’ve made a mistake. I should never have been so eager to tell her or so certain she’d understand. Time rounded my memories like beach pebbles until they seemed too smooth to hurt anyone, but now that I’m hurling them at Julie, I can feel their jagged edges.

  I run past her to the sink and vomit till it overflows.

  “Now you’ve met me,” I gasp when I’m empty, wiping acrid drool from my lips. “Now you know who I am.”

  “How?” she whispers. Her voice is shaky with compressed emotion. “How could that person become you?”

  I catch her eyes in the mirror. She is blinking back tears.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her, wishing I could offer more than this, my standard response to every question that matters. “I don’t know.”

  Slowly, she backs away. She pushes through the door, and I hear an echoing bang when it closes. I am locked up once again, alone in my cell surrounded by piss and shit, the years scrolling backward to darker and darker prisons.

  WE

  “There it is,” says Team Manager Abbot as the town comes into view, glowing faintly on a steep hill. “Take the next exit.”

  The driver steers the Hummer off the highway and the rest of the convoy follows, a small army of buses, SUVs, and one large RV, all hastily stenciled with the Axiom logo.

  “Stay out of visual,” Abbot tells the driver. “That road there. There’s a spot around the back.”

  They skirt around the hill, headlights off, letting the moon illuminate the narrow road until they plunge into the trees. After a mile in darkness, Abbot gives the go-ahead and the convoy lights up the forest, revealing the sparse remains of a trailer park. Only a few sagging single-wides occupy the lot; most of it is an empty clearing, sickly grass climbing up through the gravel.

  The convoy parks around the perimeter of the lot and leaves the headlights on, making a spotlit stage in the center of their criss-crossing beams. The men cli
mb out to stretch and smoke, and Abram longs to collapse on his bedroll and soak his shriveling brain in sleep, but he can’t. He can’t. He walks to the edge of the park. He unzips his fly and pretends to be relieving himself, but his bladder is empty. He stares into the trees and the spaces between them, darkness within darkness. The camp behind him is eerily quiet. No one builds a fire or plays music or even talks above a murmur. Abram can hear insects chirping. A river gurgling somewhere in that darkness.

  “Something on your mind, Roberts?”

  Abbot moves quietly for such a big man.

  “No sir,” Abram says, zipping up theatrically. “Just taking a piss.”

  Abbot observes the dry gravel in front of Abram but doesn’t remark on it. “What’s your position, Roberts?”

  “Bookkeeping and Guest Supervision, sir.”

  “Not bad for one year in the company.”

  “I’m a climber, sir.”

  Abbot chuckles. “Well, we like that. But what about your family? They still back in Nashville?”

  Abram tries not to tense visibly. It’s not quite natural, this conversation between manager and employee alone on the edge of the camp. He weighs his answer carefully. “They’re in a civilian convoy. They’re meeting me in Post.”

  Abbot nods. “Better hope they show up soon. Between the Manhattan transfers and these recruitment ads we’re running on the Feed, it’s about to get real crowded over there. And it sounds like you wouldn’t appreciate what we’re doing with the overflow.”

  Abram looks at the older man uneasily, but Abbot keeps his eyes on the forest, like he’s waiting for something. Then Abram sees it. Headlights.

  “Are we expecting company, sir?”

  Abbot’s weathered face shows no surprise. His eyes are dull beneath his bushy eyebrows. A tired old man who’s eaten his fill of the world and is ready for the long nap. “Roberts…how did you become a bookkeeper without being informed of our arrangement with the Fire Church?”

  Abram hesitates. “Communications have been a little blurry lately, sir.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Abbot sighs. “Well, nothing much to know here. Just more Orientation bullshit.” He shakes his head, talking more to himself than to Abram. “I figured we’d be putting the experiments on hold till we got settled in Post, but Executive’s all about forward momentum lately. Like it says on the posters, right? ‘Enough is Not Enough.’”