The Living

by Isaac Marion

  He sees goodness. He sees a lot of it.

  He sees enough.

  Addis closes his eyes. He drifts into the dim expanse of the Library, surrounded by our whispering books.

  Will you do it now? he asks us.

  We don’t answer.

  You’ve never been so full, and we’ve never been so thirsty. Will you pour yourself out? Will you do it?

  We don’t answer.

  He opens his eyes. Nora is examining the hole in R’s chest. Julie and Joan and Alex are kneeling by his side, all quietly pleading.

  I said will you do it? Addis shouts into our vastness, sounding much older than seven or even fourteen. Answer me!

  His conviction seizes our vacillating voices. He presses them into a decision.

  We won’t do it, we tell him. You will.

  And then he hears the hum.

  For a moment he thinks it could be the wind. Just innocent air whistling through the windows, playing the dome like an ocarina. R has everyone’s attention except Sprout’s, who remains by her father’s side. The grownups give no sign that they hear anything, but as the noise rises from a hum to a howl, Sprout looks up. She turns her head and catches Addis’s gaze. The fear in her wet eyes confirms it—this is not the wind.

  Addis approaches the door. No one notices, not even Joan and Alex, and this is good. They might want him to stop, and he can’t stop. He feels something filling him, inflating him, like he’s inhaling continuously with no need to breathe out, an exhilarating absence of limit.

  He opens the door and steps out into the hazy sun, the hot wind, the hammering din of war.

  They’re here. One hand, then another, sharp fingers digging into the edge of the roof and dragging skulls and spines behind them. Their hum fills Addis’s mind, louder than the gunfire. He lacks the vocabulary to describe what he’s hearing, but we have all the words ever spoken, and we know this sound even better than he does. We have been enduring it for billions of years as it churns up from the Library’s sub-basement: the dissonant drone of a tone-deaf choir, the raspy chant of a thousand geriatric monks. It’s a sour chord built on an atonal root and it never pauses to retune, it just drones and drones, forever faithful to a pitch established by accident in some dark jungle swamp long before the world had heard music.

  Join, it tells him as the skeletons crawl up the roof. Follow. Eat.

  No, Addis says.

  The hum twists into even harsher discord, tones and overtones grinding against each other. There is nothing else. Only this.

  Addis’s eyes blaze like molten sulfur. How well he knows these creatures. Whether or not any of this crowd ever crossed his path in the airport, he knows them, because they are defined by their sameness. They are the toxic byproduct of unity. Cult, regime, unquestioned custom, party line, canon, convention, taboo. For the past seven years, since the day they killed him, they have been dragging him through the stations of their parodic civilization, assigning him parents and shoving him into homes, drilling him on loathsome skills and meaningless mashups of tradition, and he has followed them because he had no one else.

  Now he does.

  Now he has all of us, and he sees these creatures clearly. They are empty. They are hollow. The wind whistles through them.

  As they creep toward the dome like insects toward meat, eager to eat him and everyone he loves, Addis does something that doesn’t make sense. Instead of running away like all prey should, he steps forward. He advances on the predators.

  They stop.

  Addis stands in a clear circle surrounded by the swarm. He is waist-high to most of the skeletons, and those behind the first row can’t even see him, but skeletons don’t have eyes. They don’t see light bouncing off matter, the detail and nuance of reality. They perceive only broad concepts, vague shapes in the extrasensory fog that surrounds their shriveled brains. They see with notions and assumptions, predictions and preconceptions, so what they see now moving toward them is not a harmless little boy. Like Dobermans cowed by a Dachshund, what they see is the boldness of his challenge.

  The skeletons step back.

  You can’t, they say, a statement without a predicate, a meaningless noise of negation.

  We’re bored of your game, Addis replies. Play it by yourself.

  He feels his hands on the living ladder, the rungs of generations warm in his grip, and he climbs.

  There is no up or down, they tell him in their detuned chorus, only here.

  He climbs toward that bright ceiling, as distant as the sun, and he feels its warmth on his cold skin. He feels its gravity pulling him upward, easing his ascent, and he silently thanks us. The books around him are more beautiful with every shelf, thick tomes bound in oil paintings with pages of green leaves and yellow flowers and living human skin, books of glass and books of water with words in floating coils, spherical books with nested pages that he doesn’t know how to turn—experiences beyond his understanding. But he doesn’t need to turn every page to share in the wealth we’ve gathered. The words flutter out to meet him and he breathes them in, expanding ever larger, filling himself with the Higher in this endless inhalation.

  There is nothing above us, the skeletons hiss from a thousand miles below. Never has been, never will be.

  Addis inhales the breaths of every life that’s ever lived.

  Addis exhales an answer.

  I

  I am floating down a river.

  I am lying on my back, gazing at the stars. I take quick breaths, keeping my lungs filled; my arms and legs trail limply behind me. It feels good to fill my lungs. I fill them tight and feel a shuddering pleasure, like stretching my limbs after years in a cramped cell. The air is warm and sweet and it saturates my blood. I am buoyant. I can float forever.

  I wonder where my friends are. Will they be waiting for me in the parking lot with their tubes already packed in the car, impatient with my leisurely pace? I must have lost my tube. It must have popped and sank. I must have been on this river all day, back-floating effortlessly as the sun went down and the sky turned pink and then purple and then this inky blue spattered with stars.

  How far might I have drifted in all those hours? Far past my friends, certainly. Well on my way to wherever this river ends.

  But now the river is a road.

  I hover three feet off the pavement, gliding like a parade float through downtown Missoula. The town is empty. The buildings are charred. I hear the echoing taunts of children as I drift past the remains of my school—Rear End! Reject! and of course, Retard!—all the clever names they invented to replace my mother’s puzzling choice, and then silence.

  I drift past my church and I hear my pastor’s operatic shouting, the congregation’s simian hooting, then silence. Past my house. My father’s snarled scriptures. My mother’s secret sobs. Then silence.

  I drift through the doors of a prison.

  Through the training yard, where I learned how to fight. Past my old cell, where I learned how to kill. Past the bones of forgotten prisoners, left to die and come back and die again.

  “Wow, R,” Julie says. “Hard to imagine you in a place like this. You don’t exactly have that ‘hardened convict’ vibe.”

  “Although if I were a judge,” Perry says, “I’d convict you of first-degree cheese for that speech you made out there.”

  They walk on either side of me as I float, like pallbearers. I don’t like that comparison, so I send my mind elsewhere in search of a better scene.

  I am dreaming.

  But if every moment is shared on the shelves of the Library, how real might a dream be? If the thoughts that compose us exist outside us, beyond the sealed vault of our skulls, who’s to say it’s not really Julie—or some loose fragment of her—walking next to me? Who’s to say it’s not really Perry—though he’s long dead—strolling on my left?

  The
prison’s stained ceiling is gone, replaced by a blue sky. We are on the roof of the stadium, and Julie and Perry sit on a red blanket while I float a foot above it. I worry that the wind will blow me away, but Julie keeps a hand on my foot, anchoring me.

  I feel a wet warmth in my chest. I hear a steady dripping beneath my back. Memory creeps in like an unwelcome guest.

  “Did I say it?” I ask, staring at the sky.

  “You said enough,” Julie says.

  “Did they listen?”

  “We’ll find out,” Perry says.

  “Am I dying?”

  They both look at each other.

  “No,” Julie says, and I notice moisture in her eyes. “You’re not dying.”

  “Everyone’s dying,” Perry says. “But especially you.”

  “Shut up, Perry,” Julie says.

  The sky looks different. Deeper, somehow, like a bottomless lake. “Will I come back?” My voice sounds smaller with every question. “Will I start over again?”

  “Maybe you would have”—Perry slaps my thigh—“but those rules are about to change. I think we’re just about done with the whole zombie thing.”

  “Can you wait?” I plead. “Just until I come back?”

  He tilts his head, disappointed. “Come on, corpse, do you really want to repeat yourself? You’ve learned all you can in this halfway house. Either die or start living.”

  “No moving back,” Julie says with a sad smile. “Move forward.”

  I’m in a forest. The sky is hidden behind a canopy of trees, but the sun glows around the leaves, leaking through in sparkling flashes. My friends stand around me in a circle, their hair and clothes whipping in the wind. Has it already happened? Will I be lowered into the earth now? Will I watch their faces recede from me in that rectangle of daylight, smaller and smaller until the first shovelful covers my face?

  Lawrence Rosso smiles down at me. He is dressed like a priest, but the book in his hands is no particular scripture. It flickers through sizes and shapes, from gilded leather tomes to yellowed pulp paperbacks.

  “Is it good to die?” I ask him desperately. “Is there a better place?”

  His smile turns bittersweet. “There are other places,” he says. “Other forms, other ways. They’re too big for the narrow valve of your brain, and when you experience them you’ll gasp and weep.” He shakes his head ruefully. “But there’s nothing like living. There’s nothing like being in the world. A ripe pear. A soft hand. The sun behind leaves.” He closes his eyes and sighs. “This is your home, R, for as long as you’re here. Never be eager to leave.”

  I clench my teeth. I ball my fists. I squeeze my dreaming eyes shut to gather my will, and in that darkness within darkness, I overhear a conversation.

  Can you see it?

  He’s hurt bad.

  A boy and a girl, speaking in simple pulses of thought.

  How bad? Alex asks Joan.

  Just a little hole, Joan says. But it’s bleeding a lot.

  I don’t want him to die, Alex says.

  A pause.

  Maybe we can fix it, Joan says.

  Like how we fixed the window?

  Sure. It’s such a little hole, and if it’s not there he won’t die. It’s silly, isn’t it?

  It’s stupid, Alex says. I hate it.

  So maybe we can make the hole forget it’s there. Maybe we can decide it’s not. And then he won’t have to die.

  I feel a stirring in my faraway body. I hear a rustling of pages and a scratching of pens, old words crossed out, new ones written.

  You’re not going to die, my son tells me.

  You’re not going to die, my daughter tells me.

  I feel the sensation of pulling out earplugs. The world rushes in, real voices now with breath and spittle.

  “What was that?” Nora says. “Did he just say something?”

  I hear the swish of their clothing. The creak of their knees. I hear Julie’s breath as she leans close to me, distinctly hers even before she shapes it into words. “R?” Her voice is raw and cracked. “Can you hear me?”

  I feel two fingers on my throat.

  “I don’t get it,” Nora mumbles. “Pulse is still strong. Why is the bleeding…?”

  I open my eyes. I expect to see their faces hovering over me, but instead I see the backs of their heads. I see myself, sprawled on the floor in a red puddle. A tall, pale man in a ragged shirt and tie, his sad face in need of a shave.

  Look at him. Look at that strange assemblage. How did nature ever arrive at this shape? When did that mass of organs decide to sprout those bony stalks, to stand up and walk, to reach out and grasp? Eyes, ears, nose, mouth. Does the whole wide river of the world pour into me through those seven little holes in my head?

  I turn away from my heap of flesh and begin to drift upward. The grotesque plastic dome is gone, replaced by a blue sky of incredible depth and volume, and although my eyes are already open…I open them again.

  The sky splits and sweeps aside like a second set of lids, and behind it is another place.

  I’m in the Library.

  The walls of books curve around me in a column and I’m floating in its center, rising toward that unfathomably distant light. And I am dissolving. Tiny pieces of me fly away from my body and into the shelves around me. Some go up toward the glow, others fall straight down. Empty spaces appear in my hands, my arms; I’ll be gone before I reach the next floor.

  We are weary of death.

  I hear Perry’s voice in the chorus. Rosso’s too, but it’s not just people who’ve died. Julie is in there. Nora and Marcus, Sprout and Addis and my kids—everyone. Perhaps even my mother and father, their voices faint, their contributions small but still counted. Everything is counted, gathered, and pooled, and the best of it glows above me.

  We have outgrown death’s game. Its rigid rules and miserly prizes. We want more.

  A tremor shakes the shelves. Books fall out but not down; they hover in place, their pages rustling.

  We are vast. We are the mind of the universe, each life a neuron, each love a synapse. But we have been thinking a long time. It is time for us to speak.

  Above me, that immense glow pulses like a heart. The shelves shudder from top to bottom. The moldy volumes below stay in place but the ones above leap free, filling the distant brightness like morning fog.

  And I see a boy in that brightness.

  He is drawing it into himself like he’s filling his lungs for a shout, and though I can’t imagine how he’ll articulate that monumental breath, I want to shout it with him.

  We are ready for a new world, says the chorus of everyone, and I hear a new voice among them:

  Mine.

  And why should this be a shock? Why should tears spring from my eyes at the sound of my voice harmonizing with humanity?

  You deserve to be here, my own voice tells me, and for the first time I can remember, there’s love in it.

  The Library shakes. The boy shouts. The chorus shouts with him, and I join it.

  • • •

  I open my eyes.

  I know these ones are flesh because the lids are heavy; I heave them up like rusty garage doors. I see a brief glimpse of faces looking down at me, then I lurch upright and cough a lungful of blood onto the floor. I stagger to my feet. My vision swirls in and out of focus and black spots swarm around me. There’s a pain in my chest unlike any I’ve ever felt and my shirt is soaked with blood, but I’m no longer dripping, and after a long fit of sloppy coughs, I’m able to put air in my lungs. It feels exquisite. It’s mint tea and honey flooding through my chest. I take a few breaths and savor them, unaware of anything else.

  Then I feel a hand on my arm. “R?” Julie whispers.

  On my left and right, my kids are beaming. I see joy and a little pride in their grins, l
ike they’ve pulled off a magic trick they’ve been practicing for years. But Julie hasn’t been privy to the backstage dealings in my head. Her wide, wet eyes are full of fear and questions. “Are you…?”

  I cup her face in my hands and kiss her. “I’ll live,” I murmur. Then I smile awkwardly as I wipe my blood off her lips.

  The laugh that bubbles out of her is a giddy overflow, every emotion at once.

  My vision dims again and I stagger. My knees buckle and Julie catches my arm.

  “Lie down,” Nora orders. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on here, but you’ve lost too much blood to be conscious, much less walking.”

  She says it with all the authority of a hardened combat nurse, but I can’t comply. The air in this plastic prison is thick and sticky, reeking of blood and musty perversions of death. I see the pitchmen’s petrified remains scattered across the floor. I see Abram Kelvin lying in a pool of darkening blood, his daughter crying softly by his side. What happened while I was gone?

  I can’t ask now. I can’t breathe in here. I need air drawn fresh from the well of the sky, scented with rain and sun.

  I stumble toward the door.

  “R, wait,” Julie says, still gripping my arm. “We heard Boneys outside, they’re—”

  “They’re done,” I say, not quite knowing what I mean. “Addis answered them.”

  Nora’s eyes snap wide at her brother’s name. “Oh shit—Addis!” She whirls left and right, searching the shadows where her brother had been waiting, small and silent, through all the chaos. “Addis!”

  “He’s out here,” I tell her as I reach for the door. “He’s getting some air.”

  I open the latch. The door flies open. Nora shouts, Julie tries to pull me back, but then they see what I see and they go quiet.

  Nora’s little brother is standing just outside the door, surrounded by a dozen skeletons. But the skeletons are still. They are slumped over and limp, like classroom props hanging from their stands. No buzz, no hum. Their fingers twitch faintly and I hear their teeth grinding, but these creatures are broken. Overloaded and burnt out. As if something filled them beyond their capacity and burst their brittle brains.