by Dara Horn
Sara was the younger Ziskind twin by a matter of minutes. But even before she heard this story, Sara had been aware of a silence within her bones, a residual sorrow that flowed quietly in her blood—the legacy of the ten minutes before her life began, when her twin brother left her behind. Those ten minutes also gave her something that few others had: a knowledge, a hard fact that she carried within her like a dark and polished stone, that people who were supposed to have disappeared really hadn’t. She had seen Ben disappear and knew better. Vanished people were a breath away. One only needed to breathe.
It began on the eighth day after her father’s death, her first day leaving the house after the seven days of mourning, during which she and Ben had been taught the ways of the week. Ripped clothes, sitting on little low chairs that the funeral home had given them, covered mirrors, no shoes, sleeping on the floor, the endless stream of people bringing tasteless cookies to the house, the services held with the guests every evening, and worst of all, the mourner’s prayer that they all had to recite every day for the rest of the year, the one that—as their mother had explained to them—said nothing about death at all but instead spoke only of the greatness of God, saying how God was blessed and praised and glorified and exalted and extolled and honored and lifted and lauded, blessed be the holy name. She and Ben missed a whole week of school. In the endless services held in the house, the strange clothes, and the boring board games she played with Ben in his bedroom to avoid the awkward silences in the living room, Sara realized that none of the events of the week had anything to do with her father at all. Even the funeral had simply been a box, and then, after everyone, even she and Ben, had added their requisite shovels’ worth, a box covered with dirt. Whenever Sara was in the room with the guests, she had noticed, the adults in the house avoided mentioning him. It was as if they wanted her to forget him.
But on the eighth day after he died, when Sara returned to the fifth grade, her class took the same field trip that Ben’s class had taken two weeks earlier—a forty-minute school bus ride to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she saw things whose relevance to her life her teacher could not possibly have imagined. Mummies.
Of course, Sara knew about mummies already; all eleven-year-olds do. But while her classmates flocked to the glass cases filled with human-shaped painted caskets, thrilled out of their skulls over the five-thousand-year-old bodies preserved inside, Sara avoided them. A box, she knew from the previous week, was just a box. What intoxicated Sara was something else. Most of the mummy galleries, she noticed, were not actually filled with the mummies themselves, but rather with other things—bowls, plates, cups, necklaces, combs, rings, vases, fabrics, models, pictures, scrolls. And all of it was for dead people.
Dead people had boats to ride in, food to eat, clothes to wear, games to play. Dead people had maps and directions to the underworld, and pictures and models of servants who would travel with them and help them to find the way. Dead people had friends to keep them company and jobs to keep them busy, painted in careful profiles on sandy stone walls. Dead people even had books to read: on one wall of the museum was a long unrolled scroll, called The Book of the Dead.
It wasn’t until Sara had left the museum and had gotten on the bus—emerging from the dark galleries to find that the day had vanished, unnoticed, into a frighteningly early winter evening, the sky already the color of dark blue ink—that a thought struck her, as she sat surrounded by children raving about the extraction of a mummy’s brains through its nose. The previous week, her father had been buried in a box, with nothing. Nothing. Even the box had been unmarked and bare, made of pale unpolished wood. They wouldn’t even put a stone up on his grave until eleven months later, her mother had said, and when they did, all it would say was his name. Her mother had even told Sara, after she asked repeatedly, that he wasn’t even wearing any real clothes inside the box, only a white shroud. How, she thought in a panic as she stared out the bus window at her own reflection, would her father ever survive in the underworld, without a map to take him there, without a job to do there, without a single picture to take with him on his journey?
And so Sara decided to build her father a tomb.
The location of the tomb, she determined, would be in the studio: a small room at the back of the house, filled with filing cabinets and drafting tables, where her father had often worked at home. Her mother, too, had worked there. But on the eighth day after Sara’s father died, her mother had gone straight to an art store and purchased a new drafting table for herself, a smaller one, which she had set up in another room. The door to the studio hadn’t been opened since his death. For that reason it was all the more appropriate for Sara’s purposes, since it was unlikely that her mother or brother would wander in. Even Ben, she had decided, shouldn’t be told about it. Secrecy was essential. As she had learned at the museum, one always had to be concerned about people robbing the tomb. As for when to work, Sara decided that early afternoons were best, when she and Ben were supposedly busy doing their homework, and Ben actually was. But Sara had recently discovered that homework, once the only thing that mattered, was simply no longer necessary. When she stopped handing things in, her teacher didn’t even ask her about it. All she did was stop Sara daily on her way out the door, after the other children had left, to tell her that “I know how you feel,” to which Sara would nod, and to ask if “everything was all right at home,” to which Sara would also nod, and to add that she hoped Sara would tell her if there was “anything I can do to help,” to which Sara would nod again and then leave the room, because Sara had figured out that all she ever needed to do at school anymore was nod, particularly when she was asked to agree with something that wasn’t true. So now Sara had both space and time to make the tomb.
The first thing her father needed was transportation to the underworld. Maps would help. These she had to dig out of the glove compartment of the car—which, she discovered, was a small pocket of the world where time had stopped, where the maps were still folded the way no one but her father knew how to fold them, with the road trips they had taken together carefully marked with highlighters and outlined in detail in her father’s capitalized handwriting just off the paper coasts, as if they might any day now pile back into the car and take another trip with him. For the trip itself, Sara helped herself to a few of Ben’s toy cars, which she dug out of his closet one afternoon when he was at a doctor’s appointment. Her father could now choose between a Lamborghini and a Ferrari to take him to the underworld. Other supplies were also essential. Piece by piece, so that no one would notice, she began sneaking into her mother’s bedroom and confiscating her father’s clothes. Not all of them, of course. Just underwear and socks, a few pairs of pants, a heavy armload of shirts, a tie (in case it was fancy there), and a sweater (in case it was cold). Food, too, didn’t need to be overly elaborate—merely “symbolic,” as the museum had suggested. She stole a box of raisins and a bag of almonds from the kitchen and stashed them in the tomb.
But the major feature of the tomb would be the murals, and these required serious preparation. Sara began observing her mother and brother, watching them surreptitiously in the evenings. She sketched them, first in her mind and then later on paper, and eventually right in front of them, telling her mother that it was part of her homework, an art project. (Ben knew better, but he was too busy squirming in his new brace to care.) She was surprised at certain things—how difficult it was, for example, to draw someone’s arm from the front, when it was angled forward, or the problem presented by noses, which in Ben’s face seemed to grow straight out of his eyebrows, but only from certain points of view—and she began to appreciate the murals in the real tombs, where the people were perpetually in profile. But once she started drawing she knew that profiles weren’t good enough, that her father deserved better. Her mother, believing Sara’s claim that this was a school assignment, showed her how to draw things in “perspective” by drawing lines on the page before starting, and Sara
discovered to her satisfaction that some of the problems with noses and arms were slowly resolved. Her father she had to create from memory. But Sara discovered that the range of the mind’s eye—or at least her mind’s eye—was enormous, opening up to an endless landscape of things that she couldn’t even remember having seen in real life. After a few nights of lying in bed with her eyes open and trying to remember what he looked like, she discovered, to her joy, that she could picture her father—not “imagine” him, but actually see him—at all ages, knew what he looked like from every angle even in the years before she knew him, could see the tilt of his head or the position of his arm even at times when he had been out of the house, or with someone else, or alone. She drafted these first in a sketchbook, then with paint on paper, and finally—after moving some furniture out of the way, and raiding her mother’s supplies—in paint that she applied directly to the walls of the room.
Her first painting was of her father in his usual position, sitting at a drafting table, drawing on a large piece of paper covered with rows of numbers. She wanted to make sure he would have a job in the underworld. But the other paintings were more fun. In paintings that filled the studio walls as high as she could reach, she re-created every room in their house, with her father taking his proper place in each. In the living room, he sat on the piano bench next to her, one hand on the keyboard and the other on her shoulder as she tried to follow his lead. In the kitchen, her father and Ben played checkers together, laughing, their painted mouths open. And in her parents’ bedroom, she painted him into bed next to her mother, their eyes closed and his arms wrapped around her mother’s body like a warm cocoon, as she had once seen them in their sleep.
The paintings wound their way around the room, and Sara was pleased with her work. But she still thought her father ought to have a Book of the Dead. She began to look around the house for an appropriate one, but few of the books on the shelves seemed suitable, and those that did—a Bible, a yearbook, a photo album—might well be missed. It would be best to make one from scratch.
There was a story that Sara remembered her father reading to her, not once but many times, called “The Dead Town,” and she decided that it might be a good thing for her father to read in the underworld. She had liked it so much that she knew the main parts of it by heart. She took a few pieces of paper, cut them into strips, taped them together into a scroll, and began to copy out the story as best her eleven-year-old brain remembered it, sometimes embellishing it with new details, like an ancient scribe. It was only a shadow of the original story, but it was the best she could do.
* * *
Once upon a time I was traveling around the country, and I saw a man walking by the side of the road, dragging his feet step by step in the sand. He looked like he could hardly walk. I thought I should be nice to him and give him a ride, so I did. We started talking, and soon I asked him, “Where are you from?”
He answered, “From the dead town!”
“Where’s that?” I asked him. “I never heard of it.”
The man laughed at me and said, “Just because you never heard of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Not every place in the world is on the map. Believe me, it exists. It’s a regular place, with houses, stores, schools, and everything. Just like any other town.”
“So why do you call it the dead town?” I asked.
“Because it IS a dead town!” he said. “It’s a town that from the very beginning was hanging by a hair, and then the hair broke and it just hung in the air, with nothing holding it up. And while it was hanging there in the air, it became a dead town. If you want, I can tell you why.”
“Tell me,” I said.
The man started to tell his story.
“In the beginning, the town hung by a hair, because it was built in a place where it was against the law to build a town. That’s why it’s not on the maps. People started moving in, and so they built houses, and a school, and a cemetery, until the government found out about it. Then everything in the town had to be sold. But when they tried to sell the cemetery, the dead people got very upset, and started coming up out of their graves.”
That was what the man told me. Then he asked me, “Do you believe that?”
I wasn’t sure. It was hard to believe that dead people could come back to life. So I told him, “I believe that people’s souls live forever. But their bodies? No way! Once you die, your body is in the grave, and that’s it.”
“But what happens to your soul?” the man asked. “You say the soul lives forever. Okay. If the person was good, the soul is rewarded in the world to come, and if the person was bad, then the soul is punished. But why are there rewards and punishments at all? I’ll tell you why. Because as long as a person lives, he has choices. He can do good things, if he wants, or bad things, if he wants. But what happens to a person who never does anything good or bad, who never makes any kind of choice? A person who isn’t really a person, whose life isn’t really a life? What happens to that person’s soul?”
“I don’t know. What happens?” I asked.
“Nothing!” he said. “It just keeps living in its own imaginary world, like it did before. No one in our town has ever really died, because no one in our town has ever really lived! No one ever made any choices, no one ever did anything good or bad. No one ever did anything at all! A lot of towns are like ours, actually. When people in our town die and come back, they don’t remember anything, and no one remembers them, because there is nothing to remember. They just crawl out of their graves, go home, put on their pajamas, and go back to sleep!”
“But don’t the living people think that’s a little weird?” I asked.
He laughed at me and said, “The living people? They don’t notice! They’re busy with their own stupid fights and problems. Why should they notice? The people are the same, alive or dead! After a while, the dead people took over the whole town. It was easy, since they don’t need any food or air. And they never have any worries, because what makes a person worry? Knowing things, making choices! They don’t know anything, and they never choose anything, so they never have any questions, never any doubts, never anything to make them sad.”
I looked at the man next to me, and I asked him, “And what about you?”
“I’m half dead,” he answered. Then he jumped back onto the road and disappeared into the woods.
* * *
Sara copied over the words in ink, and the book of the dead was complete. But the one in the museum had had little illustrations in it, she realized, and now she had written on the whole scroll without leaving room for anything else. So she taped on another strip of paper to the end and made little drawings of the three remaining things that she knew her father would need, but that she was too afraid to search for in her mother’s bedroom: his two crutches, and his leg.
SARA HAD LEARNED about her father’s leg years earlier, when she was six years old, on a night when she couldn’t sleep. She had tried her best to close her eyes, following every single suggestion she had ever heard for falling asleep: counting sheep, counting goats, just plain counting, pretending she was on a raft floating in the ocean, pretending she was flying, but somehow none of it worked. Soon she gave up and wandered down the hall to her parents’ room, where she saw that the light was on beneath the closed door. Without speaking, she leaned against the door and gently edged it open.
It was a hot summer night, and her parents were lying on the bed. Her mother was wearing the shirt she had been wearing during the day, but no pants, just white underwear, her bare legs stretched over the sheets. Her father, hairy and wearing nothing but a pair of white briefs, was lying on his side, facing her mother, his fingers rising in ripples underneath her mother’s shirt, his eyes closed, and his lips moving along the edge of her mother’s ear, like he was tasting it. Her mother’s eyes were also closed, and she was laughing—a strange laugh, a smile filled with short airy breaths. What was so funny? Sara watched as her mother wrapped an arm around her father’s wa
ist. Her mother sat up a little with her eyes still closed, still laughing that funny airy laugh, and began running her fingers along the waistband of her father’s underwear, sliding two of her fingers underneath it. Then she opened her eyes, and her laugh stopped. “Sara,” she said, her voice dark.
Sara stood in the doorway, her white nightgown trailing on the floor. She opened her mouth to speak, but then her father turned his head and looked at her. He started to smile, and then suddenly laughed out loud. What was so funny? Her mother wiggled her fingers out of her father’s underwear, the waistband snapping against her father’s hip as she let out a tight burst of breath. Sara stood in silence, her mouth still open. Her hand was sticky, pressed against the door. She felt like she had been eating candy, the gummy fruity kind that made you feel sticky afterward, outside and in.
“It’s okay, Sara, come on in,” her father suddenly said, his tone unusually bright. He dislodged himself from his perch against her mother’s body, kissing her mother’s eyebrow as he moved. Her mother frowned.
“I—I can’t sleep,” she said as her father rolled himself over on his back. And then she held her breath.
She had seen the prosthesis before, since discovering it the previous year—he had rolled up his pant leg to show it to her one day when, sitting on his lap, she had slipped onto his hard plastic shin. She had never been terribly curious about it. She had thought it was something all fathers had, like rough cheeks and wrists ringed with fur. But recently she had noticed other men, fathers even, who seemed to have two regular legs, like her mother. There were people on television, of course, but you couldn’t really count them because they were all imaginary anyway. What confused her in particular was the man who lived across the street. Mr. Eriksen often stood outside in the summertime with his kneecaps shining in the sunlight, wearing shorts as he watered his plants. His legs were both exactly the same color, she noticed. One time she had crossed the street to get a closer look, and she had seen that not only were his legs the same color, but both had fur on them. That day he was watering his plants barefoot, and she could see, as he stood on the deck on the side of his house, that both of his feet even had toes. (Her father’s hard leg, as she thought of it, was smooth, with no fur, more pink than his other leg, and it didn’t seem to have any toes; it went straight into a sock and shoe.) She had tried to sneak up a little closer, walking out onto his lawn and pretending that she was looking for a lost toy. Then her mother had called her back to the house, urgently, and she had wondered if there was something dangerous about men with two legs. But what she had never seen before was what she was seeing right now, in her parents’ bed, as her father rolled over onto his back: her father’s right leg in its natural state—a narrow thigh, a twisted red and purple knot in the place of the knee, and then nothing.
