One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

  Then it hit me.

  Gone. Just like that. My hearing had left me.

  “Sorry,” I said, my voice sounding as if I were underwater. “Sorry,” I said again, and backed out the door, as if that were the only word I knew.

  I ran from the bookstore as fast as I could, not hearing the wind as it whipped past my ears, not even hearing my own breathing. When I reached the church, though, the reverend and his crew were carrying new pews through the front doors, so I waited by the side of the Catholic church across the street, next to a statue of Mary. I ran my fingers down the stone folds of her gown, looking up into her blank eyes as she stared at the baby she held like he was the most special thing in the world, a miracle child. I whispered to her, “Don’t tell him anything. Don’t let him find out anything about this world.”

  When the church people finally left, I slipped inside and sat in one of the new pews to wait for Jamie. He’d come back and then everything would be all right, I told myself. We could take care of each other. We were survivors.

  I believed this even though I couldn’t hear anymore. Not the winter birds nesting in the bell tower, not the mice that shuffled across the floor at night, not the wind that sung in the eaves, not the branches that scratched at the windows, not the endless sirens of the city. I waited in the new pews, and when another day passed without his return, I could feel something happening. My body felt so heavy that I could barely move, and my mind continually returned to thinking of a way out of this place, a way out of everything, the whole goddamn mess of our lives. If I could move a little, if I could find the right kind of door, I could save us both.

  There had to be a door in that church that could open up to a different sort of world, one where death couldn’t reach us. But before I could even begin to look, I remembered my father, how he liked to go on telling Andy and I his philosophies on architecture. “There’s only one rule when it comes to doors,” he said on one of our drives past one of his buildings. “They have to go somewhere.”

  I moved to the altar, dropped to my knees, and thought about what he’d said. What use was it to look for hope where everything was already dead? Even if I found him, even if he found me looking for him, going through a door to dead space wasn’t making a way out of no way. It was making a way into nowhere. And that was a door I’d already taken too many times.

  GIVING UP THE GHOST

  I’M NOT SURE HOW LONG I WAITED AT THE ALTAR. Days passed, the sun rose, the moon glowed, the light in the broken stained glass window square flared, then reflected nothing but darkness. I was tired. Not tired in the way of sleep, but in the way that all I could do was lie on the altar and not move. I had no will, my spark was fading, but I remained conscious even so.

  One day I saw a bird, a cardinal, flitting from branch to rooftop to branch outside the broken windows. It was like this little spot of blood hurrying through the white glare of winter. I liked how it paid the weather no attention and did what it had to in order to survive. I was watching it move through the cold outside when it suddenly winked out of existence. I closed my eyes for a second to rest them, but when I opened them again the tree I’d seen the cardinal in had disappeared too. I blinked and the Catholic church opposite no longer existed. Then the street was gone. Blink. Then the window. Boom, boom, boom. All the lights went out inside me.

  I couldn’t smell or taste or hear or feel or see. I was like a fetus floating in a jar of formaldehyde. I stayed like that for I don’t know how long. Now that there was no light to divide the night—no body to watch decaying in front of me, no bells to be heard ringing the hours, no pains to mark my hunger, no bacon frying to wake up to—now that all of those had gone away, time no longer existed.

  It was just me. Just me without the world to define my borders.

  Then it happened again:

  Pop!

  I flew out of the body.

  And suddenly I could see and hear and smell and touch and taste again. I had sloughed off that shell that didn’t work any longer. There it lay on the church altar, head tilted against a bag of potting soil, dead as dead as dead, its heart useless as the broken heart it kept in its front pocket.

  “Oh no,” Jamie’s voice came from behind me. “Adam. What have you done?”

  I turned around to find him standing under the arch of the front entrance, hands at his sides, barely able to hold his own head up. He’d lost all his color. Even his eyes were black as the coal that littered the bed of the old railroad. He stood before me in the clothes I’d given him, only now the Cleveland Indians face on the left side of the jersey was no longer red, but white as Jamie’s mushroom rotten body. He might have stepped out of an old black and white photo.

  “I think I’ve died,” I said.

  He trudged toward me, his feet thumping on the wooden floorboards, lifting his arms as he came to me, like he did that first night, after I got into his hole with him. “No, no, no,” he said. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. You can’t die, Adam. You have to live.”

  “It just happened,” I said.

  “We can fix it,” he said. He put his arm around my shoulders. “Quick. If you do this now, we can live.” I wanted to tell him he was already dead, but before I could say anything he put his mouth on mine.

  “Can I?” he whispered into me, his breath flowing inside me. “Can I?”

  I felt a tug at my stomach and looked down to find a cord running out of me and into the navel of the body. The cord was shrinking, pulling me back toward the body, but no matter how hard I fought, it was stronger than me. In a moment it pulled me on top of the body, where I looked into my own lifeless, staring eyes. Then it jerked hard and I was inside again, fitting my arms and legs and hands and feet and head into that old coat, wanting to die already because it hurt so much to wear such a heavy thing as flesh.

  “Food,” he said. “Now. You have to.”

  He picked me up and pulled me off the altar, walked me down the stairs to the back window in the basement, where he helped me onto the crate he’d put there for me the first night we’d come here. “Stop,” I told him when we were in the street, but he held on to my hand and pulled me to the hot dog vendor’s cart around the corner. A trash can stood next to it. Jamie picked out a half-eaten hot dog with ketchup and mustard still on it. He pushed it up to my mouth and nearly pried my lips apart before I took it inside me and started chewing.

  “Jesus Christ,” the hot dog vendor said beside me. “If it’s that bad, kid, why don’t you go to the fucking shelter?”

  I looked at him and blinked.

  “Are you on drugs?”

  I shook my head.

  “What’s the matter with you then?”

  “I’m dying.”

  He didn’t understand for a moment, but then quickly his face dropped out of its mask of disgust and he started putting together a bratwurst. He handed it over with a can of soda and said, “Don’t die, kid. Seriously, get yourself to the shelter. They’ll take care of you. Do you need me to take you?”

  I shook my head but told him thank you between bites of bratwurst and gulps of soda. They felt like nothing going down my throat, just filler, stuffing for the scarecrow of my body. I swallowed and swallowed, though, stepping farther away from the hot dog stand each time I took another bite or drink.

  Finally satisfied, Jamie said, “Don’t ever do that again. You have to take care of yourself, Adam. I need you.”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said, and started to walk away.

  “No?”

  I looked over my shoulder and said it again, shaking my head as I said it. No. It was a word I hadn’t given him. It was a word I’d kept just for me.

  I went back to the church, where the new pews gleamed in front of the altar. The church was still a major mess, especially on the outside, but in a few more months, if the church people kept up their caretaking, I figured it’d be back to how it was before the fire. Maybe a little different, but livable.

  We sat down
on the front pew facing the altar. A large cross had been hung on the back wall. Jesus stretched out on it, his face pressed against his shoulder. We didn’t look at each other. We looked at Jesus. Finally, still not looking at him, I asked him why.

  “You don’t understand, Adam. You’re still alive.”

  I was about to say, “You have a chance if you want it,” like I would have said months ago, back when I found him, to give him hope, to try to help him. But when I looked at him—when I looked at his sunken eyes and the split in his flesh near the temple, when I looked at his skin, pale and shrinking—I realized I’d been fooling myself all this time. I thought of Fuck You Frances telling us we had a lot of unjustified optimism. She was jealous, I’d thought then, but she’d been right. What made us think we could make him live again?

  Hope. Stupid hope.

  “But you found me,” he said. “You found me. And if you and Gracie can see me, that means I’m still alive. Don’t lie, Adam. Not after everything. Not like her. Don’t pretend I’m not here anymore.” I slipped my arm around his shoulders and he pressed his face into my chest. “Oh God,” he said. “Adam, I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m not pretending,” I told him. “I see you, Jamie. I found you. We found each other. But still.”

  “What do you mean?” he said, afraid to look up, afraid of what I was saying.

  “You have to go,” I said. “To the bridge. You have to cross it. Like she did. You can’t stay, Jamie. Not like this.”

  He pressed his face back into my chest and made a sobbing sound. I held on to him, like I held him in the grave, like I held him in my arms when he came to me. He grabbed my arms and shoulders, pinching. He shook his head. “I don’t want to,” he said. “You don’t understand.”

  “I can’t keep you here any longer,” I said. “I can’t give you what you need.”

  “But what about him?” he said. He spoke into the hollow of my throat, still clutching.

  “Who?”

  “The one who did it!”

  “Who is he?”

  “It isn’t fair. He isn’t dead! Why did he do it? Why did he take it from me?”

  “Who is he?”

  Jamie pulled back, wiping at his tearless eyes with the backs of his hands. “I can’t remember. It’s a haze now.”

  “You have to remember.”

  But he only shook his head and looked down at the running shoes I’d given him. “It’s too late,” he said. “I burned that memory. It was the first one to go.”

  We were quiet then, and the sounds of the city grew around us: buses chugging through afternoon traffic, trains whistling as they arrived and departed, sirens blaring their emergencies, the wind sighing through the broken church windows. And as the light faded, the city began to grow quiet.

  Jamie stood up. “Let’s go then,” he said.

  I took his hand, my fingers curling around his. “Are you sure?” I asked. After he’d said it, I didn’t want him to leave. Part of me still wanted to keep him here as long as possible, but that was just as selfish as him taking my words, I realized.

  He nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s the only thing I can do.”

  So I got up and we walked out of the church into the darkening streets of Youngstown, down into the valley where the world was thin, and slipped back into dead space, together.

  As we followed the rusty rails of the tracks that wound through the valley back into the woods, the howls of the wolves crept around us. Down below the tracks, in the maze of trees, men with no skin stumbled around in their own personal darkness. It’s what would happen to him, I realized, if we didn’t get him to the bridge. He’d decay until his skin peeled away and his eyes rolled out of their sockets, and then he’d be trapped here, just like them. He didn’t have anything as strong and binding as Frances had to keep him here. I felt bad all of a sudden for burning her house down, for burning the one thing that housed all her memories. Even if they were bad memories, they were hers, and I’d taken them from her.

  We came to the bend in the tracks where one set of rails continued toward town, back to my mother and father, and the other curved into the mist where the covered bridge crossed over Sugar Creek. Shadows still lingered near the entrance: a woman wearing an Amish dress and bonnet, an old man wearing a flannel shirt and overalls, a young man in a business suit, carrying his briefcase, still looking at his watch, a little boy or girl in a snowsuit, fur-lined hood pulled down, looking around, crying for its mother.

  As we got closer, Jamie’s hand tightened around mine. I could feel him shaking. “What do you think is on the other side?” he whispered.

  “Home,” I said. “Whatever that is. The place we came from.”

  We sat down on the rails for a while, watching the others mill, their eyes wide and frightened like spooked cattle. There was no way to help them understand time was important. It was eternal twilight here, darkening or lightening only a few degrees every now and then.

  We rested our elbows on our knees, our heads on the palms of our hands, but didn’t speak. There wasn’t much left to say, really. The little kid kept crying for its mother, the guy in the business suit kept looking at his watch. Dude, I thought. Whatever time it was when you got here is all you’re going to get. But you can’t reason with the dead that easily.

  Jamie was silent as he watched the others. The kid in the snowsuit kept getting louder, though, squinting hard as he shouted, “Mommy!” over and over. I thought of my mom back home in her wheelchair. I wondered if she’d given up looking for me, if she’d given up on me completely.

  Jamie stood up then, dusting off the back of the jeans I’d given him, straightening his jersey. He held out his hand. I took it and he pulled me up, saying, “I guess this is what goodbye means.”

  At the mouth of the bridge, I held him again. He shuddered like I’d shuddered the first night he came to me, so I held him tighter until he no longer shook. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s all right. I’ll see you again. It’s not goodbye forever.” My voice shook, so I’m not sure if I was convincing, or even if I’d convinced myself, but it was all we had to go on, this idea that everything would be all right in the end, that when he crossed the bridge he’d be going someplace wonderful, or at least where he needed to be going. Who knows? I didn’t cross that bridge. I took him there to see him off and promise I’d see him again one day. I whispered it in his ear. “I love you. I’ll see you soon. You know how time flies here.”

  He chuckled and rubbed his face on my shoulder. “I love you too,” he said. “Tell Gracie that for me too, okay?”

  I nodded and let go of him, and he moved toward the mouth of the bridge. At the last minute he took hold of the little kid’s hand. “Come on,” he said. “It’s this way.” The kid stopped screaming and stared up at Jamie like maybe he’d start running, but in the end he nodded and wiped his face with the back of his hand, ready to go where Jamie was going.

  At the threshold Jamie looked over his shoulder, and as he entered, as he and the little kid disappeared into that dark mouth, I shouted, “Don’t worry! I’ll find you again! Don’t worry, Jamie!” I lifted one pale, white hand and waved. Then the mist and the dark surrounded him, and he was gone.

  After Jamie disappeared, I went back through dead space to the valley, back to the church on Elm Street where I slipped through the basement window and climbed the stairs to the bell tower and sat down, gathering my knees to my chest. I didn’t know what to do but feel bad and sad and angry. I kicked the remaining shutters out of the tower windows. I screamed. Like the wolves of dead space, it was a kind of howling. My scream rose over the city, joining my mother’s and Gracie’s, joining the voices of everyone else who had screamed out their horror. My scream hung over the rooftops, a black cloud spreading.

  Out of that cloud several crows came flying. They darted through the air until they landed on the street below to look up with their beady black eyes and consider me. I counted seven. Seven for a secret that w
ould never be told.

  It wasn’t fair. I wanted to know who had done it to him. I wanted to balance the equation. I imagined my father jumping out of his recliner, making his hands into a gun. Bam! Bam! Bam! He would have killed that motherfucker if it had been his boy.

  But there was no motherfucker to be found. Whoever had done it would go on, just like everyone.

  I fell asleep on the floor of the tower, shaking. By morning I could barely speak. My throat was raw. Sweat covered me. I couldn’t pick myself up. I shivered. I looked around for something to keep me warm, but there was nothing. And right then I realized something.

  I was cold. I hurt. I could feel things. I could feel me again.

  I blacked out then, and when I woke who knows how long later, the reverend’s daughter’s face floated above me. “Be quiet,” she whispered. “Or they’ll hear you.”

  So I closed my eyes.

  Later, when I woke again, it was night and a blanket had been wrapped around me, tucked tight beneath my weight. A jug of water and a brown plastic bottle of pills were beside my out-flung hand. I looked at the label. It was a prescription for Tia Taylor, the reverend’s daughter. Take two every six hours. I opened the bottle and drank some down with water, then fell asleep again.

  In the morning she came back, and when she saw my eyelids flicker, she said, “You sure are sick, but not like when I found you.” She smiled. Her teeth were big and white, her skin soft and sweet looking. Her face hanging above mine made me think of sunflowers. Sunflowers just reminded me of Gracie, though, and I felt my eyes begin to well, but I held it all in.

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “Oh Jesus, did I say something?”

  I shook my head. “It’s nothing,” I managed to whisper.