21st Century Dead

by Christopher Golden

  “Cyril, your reasoning is backward. The children will be much happier without biological imperatives.”

  “So you admit you’re trying to kill them.”

  “I’m trying to awaken them from the slumber of mortality.”

  “I don’t want to awaken them from that slumber,” said Cyril sharply. “If it’s a dream, then let them finish the dream and come out of it in their own time.”

  “When someone you love is living in a nightmare,” said Alice, “you wake them up.”

  “Alice,” said Cyril, “you’re the nightmare.”

  “Your wife is a nightmare? Your children’s mother?”

  “You’re a reanimated dead woman.”

  “Resurrected,” said Alice. “An angel breathed into my mouth.”

  “The angel should have minded its damn business,” said Cyril.

  “You always wanted me dead,” said Alice.

  “I never wanted you dead until after you were dead and you wouldn’t go away.”

  “You’re a bitter failure, Cyril, and yet you cling to this miserable life and insist that the children cling to it, too. It’s a form of child abuse. Of child exploitation.”

  “Go away, Alice. Go enjoy your death somewhere else.”

  “My eternal life, you mean.”

  “Whatever.”

  But in the end, Alice won. First she talked Delia into jumping from a bridge without actually attaching any bungee cords to her feet. Once again Cyril had no chance to grieve, because Alice brought Delia by to tell Roland how great death and resurrection were. Delia was fully grown. A woman, but in a retailored version of her dress that fit her larger, womanly body.

  “The soul is never a child,” said Alice. “What did you expect?”

  “I expected her to take a few more years to grow into this body,” said Cyril.

  “Think of it as skipping ahead a few grades,” said Alice, barely able to conceal her gloating.

  If Cyril had thought resurrected Alice was awful, resurrected Delia was unbearable. His love for his daughter had become, without his realizing it, far stronger and deeper than his lingering affection for his wife. So he could not help but grieve for the young girl cut off in her prime. While the snippy, smart-mouthed woman of the same name, who thought she had a right to dwell in his house and follow him around, mocking him constantly—she was a stranger.

  How can you grieve for people who just won’t go away? How can you grieve for a daughter whose grown-up dead-and-resurrected self ridicules your mourning? “Oh, did Daddy lose his widdow baby?”

  There was nothing to do but say an occasional silent prayer—which they mocked when they noticed him doing it. Only Cyril was never quite sure what he was praying for. Please get rid of all the dead? Please unresurrect them? Would God even hear that prayer?

  Roland died of a sudden attack of influenza a few months later. “You can’t blame me for it, this time,” said Alice.

  “You know you were sneaking him out into the cold weather specifically so he’d catch cold. The dying was a predictable result. You’re a murderer, Alice. You should be in hell.”

  Alice smiled even more benignly. “I forgive you for that.”

  “I’ll never forgive you for taking away my children.”

  “Now you’re unencumbered. I thought that’s what you secretly wished for.”

  “Thanks for telling me my deepest wishes,” said Cyril. “They were so deep I never knew they existed.”

  “Come with us, Father,” said Roland.

  “In due time, I’ll go where I can find what I need,” said Cyril. “You don’t need me.

  Roland was so tall. Cyril’s heart ached to see him. My little boy, he thought. But he could not say it. Roland’s gentle pity on him was harder to bear than Delia’s open scorn.

  They would not go. They talked about it, but sheer inertia kept anyone from changing. Finally it dawned on Cyril. Just because he was the only predead resident of the house did not bind him to it. His life had been stripped away from him; why was he clinging to the house that used to hold it?

  For the shower, the toilet, the bathroom sink; for the refrigerator, the microwave, the kitchen table; for the roof, the bed, place to store his clothes. The burden and blessing of modern life. Unlike the resurrected, if Cyril was going to eat, he had to work; if he was going to work, he had to look presentable. For his health he needed shelter from weather, a safe place to sleep.

  The resurrected people that used to love him did not need this place, but would not leave; he needed the place, but could not bear these people who made it impossible for him to truly grieve the terrible losses he had suffered.

  Job had it all wrong, thought Cyril. Having lost his wife and children, it was better to lose all his other possessions and live in an ashpit, covered in boils. Then, at least, everyone could see and understand what had happened to him. His friends might have been wretched comforters, but at least they understood that he was in need of comfort.

  Just because he had to store his food and clothing there, and return there to wash himself and sleep, did not mean he had to live there, to pass waking hours there, listening to his dead wife explain his inadequacies to him, or his dead daughter agree with her, or his dead son pity him.

  Cyril took to leaving work as soon as he could, and sometimes when he couldn’t, just walking out of the building, knowing he was putting his already somewhat pitiful career in jeopardy. He would walk the streets, delaying the commute home as long as possible. He thought of joining his wife and children in death and resurrection, but he had seen how death stripped them of all desire, and even though his current malaise came from the frustration of his deepest desires, he did not want to part with them. Desire was what defined him, he understood that, and to give them up was to lose himself, as his wife and children were lost.

  Bitterly, Cyril remembered the Bible school of his childhood. Lose your soul to find it? Yes, the dead had certainly done that. Lost soul, self, and all, but whatever they had found, it wasn’t really life. Life was about hunger and need and finding ways to satisfy them. Nature red in tooth and claw, yes, but hadn’t the human race found ways to create islands of peace in the midst of nature? Lives in which terror was so rare that people paid money to go to amusement parks and horror movies in order to remember what terror felt like.

  This life was even more peaceful, even less lonely, wasn’t it? When he walked the streets, he was jostled by thousands and thousands of the resurrected, who crowded every street as they went about their meaningless existence, not even curious, but moving for the sake of moving, or so it seemed to him; pursuing various amusements because they remembered that this was a thing that human beings did, and not because they desired amusement.

  They crowded the streets so that traffic barely moved, yet they provided no boost to the economy. Needing nothing, they bought nothing. They had no money, because they had no desires and therefore nothing to work for. They were the sclerosis of commerce. Get out of my way, thought Cyril, over and over. And then: Do what you want. I’m not going anywhere, either.

  He was living like the dead, he recognized that. His life was as empty as theirs. But underneath his despair and loneliness and ennui, he was seething with resentment. Since God obviously existed after all, since it was hard to imagine how else one might explain the sudden resurrection of all who had ever lived, what did he mean by it? What were they supposed to do with this gift that preserved life eternally while robbing it of any sort of joy or pleasure?

  So, Cyril was ironically receptive when he found the uptown mansion with a sign on the door that said:

  GOD’S ANTEROOM

  Nobody used the word “anteroom” anymore, but the idea rather appealed to him. So he went up the short walk and climbed the stoop and opened the front door and stepped inside.

  It was a good-size foyer, which he assumed had been formed by tearing out a wall and combining the front parlor with the original vestibule. The space was completely fille
d by a small merry-go-round. As far as Cyril could see, no doors or stairs led out of the room except the front door, which he had just come through.

  “Hello?” His voice didn’t echo—the room wasn’t big enough for that. It just fell into the space, flat and dull. He thought of calling again, louder, but instead stepped up onto the carousel.

  It was small. Only two concentric circles of animals to ride, the outer one with seven, the inner one with three, plus a single one-person bench shaped like the Disney version of a throne, molded in smooth, rounded lines of hard plastic pretending to be upholstery.

  Cyril thought of sitting there, since it required no effort. But he thought better of it, and walked around the carousel, touching each animal in turn. Chinese dragon, zebra, tiger, horse, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giant mouse. Porpoise, eagle, bear. All extravagantly detailed and finely hand painted—there was nothing sloppy or faded or seedy, about the thing. In fact, he could truly say that the carousel was a work of art, a small, finely crafted version of a mass entertainment.

  He had never known there was such a thing as a boutique carousel. Who would ever come to ride such a thing? And what would they pay? Part of the pleasure of full-size carousels was the fact that they were so crowded and public. Here in this room, the carousel looked beautiful and sad at the same time. Too small for the real purpose of a carousel—a place where people could display themselves to one another, while enjoying the mild pleasure of moving up and down on a faux beast. Yet, too large for the room, crowded, almost as if this were a place where beautiful things were stored while awaiting a chance for display in a much larger space.

  Cyril sat on the hippopotamus.

  “Would you like me to make it go?” asked a woman’s voice.

  Cyril had thought he was alone. He looked around, startled, a little embarrassed, beginning the movement of getting back off the hippo, yet stopping himself because the voice had not challenged him, but rather offered to serve him.

  Then he saw her through the grillwork of the faux ticket booth in a space that must have been a coat closet when the house was first built. How did she get in or out? The booth had no door.

  Her appearance of youth and health led him to assume she was dead and resurrected.

  “I can’t really afford…” he began.

  “It’s free,” she said.

  “Hard to stay in business at those rates,” said Cyril.

  “It’s not a business,” she said.

  Then what is it? he wanted to ask. But instead he answered, “Then yes, I’d like to ride.”

  Silently the carousel slipped into movement without a lurch; had he not been paying attention, Cyril would not have been able to say when movement began.

  The silence did not last long, for what would a carousel be without music? No calliope, though—what accompanied this carousel sounded like a quartet of instruments. Cello, oboe, horn, and harpsichord, Cyril thought, without any effort to sort out the sounds. Each instrument was so distinctive that it was impossible not to catalog them. They played sedate music in three-four time, as suited a carousel or skating rink, yet the music was also haunting in a modal, folk-songish way.

  Cyril let the carousel carry him around and around. The movement did not have the rapid sweep of a full-size carousel but rather the dizzying tightness of spin of a children’s hand-pushed merry-go-round. He had to close his eyes now and then to keep from becoming light-headed or getting a slight headache from the room, which kept slipping past his vision.

  It did not occur to him to ask her to slow it down, or stop. He simply clung to the pole and let it move him and the hippo up and down.

  Because the music was so gentle, the machinery so silent, the distance from him to the ticket booth so slight even when he was on the far side of the room, Cyril felt it possible—no, obligatory—to say something after a while. “How long does the ride last?” he asked.

  “As long as you want,” she said.

  “That could be forever,” he said.

  “If you like,” she said.

  He chuckled. “Do you get overtime?”

  “No,” she said. “Just time.”

  “Too bad,” he said. Then he remembered that she was dead, and neither payment nor time would mean very much to her.

  “Do you read?” he asked. “Or do you have a DVD player in there?”

  “What?” she asked.

  “To pass the time. Between patrons. While the customers are riding. It can’t be thrilling to watch me go around and around.”

  “It actually is,” she said. “Just a little.”

  Liar, thought Cyril. Nothing was thrilling to the dead.

  “You’re not dead yet,” she said.

  “No,” he answered, wanting to add, What gave me away? but keeping his silence. He knew what gave him away. He had asked questions. He was curious. He had bothered to ride at all. He had closed his eyes to forestall nausea. So many signs of life.

  “So you can’t ride forever.”

  “I suppose not,” said Cyril. “Eventually I have to sleep.”

  “And eat,” she said. “And urinate.”

  “Doesn’t look like you have a restroom, either,” said Cyril.

  “We do,” she said.

  “Where?” He looked for a door.

  “It has an outside entrance.”

  “Don’t the homeless trash the place?” he asked.

  “I don’t mind cleaning it up,” she said.

  “So you do it all? Run the carousel, clean the restrooms?”

  “That’s all there is,” she said. “It isn’t hard.”

  “It isn’t interesting, either.”

  “Interesting enough,” she said. “I don’t get bored.”

  Of course not. You have to have something else you want to be doing before you really feel bored.

  “Where are you from?” asked Cyril, because talking was better than not talking. He wanted to ask her to stop the carousel, because he really was getting just a little sick now, but if he stopped, she might insist that he go. And if he got off, yet was allowed to stay, where would he stand while he talked to her?

  “I died here as a little girl. My mother gave birth to me on the voyage.”

  “Immigrants,” said Cyril.

  “Isn’t everyone?” she answered.

  “So you never grew up.”

  “I’m up,” she said, “but you’re right, without growing into it. I was very sick, my mother wiping my brow, crying. And then I was full-grown, and had this strange language at my lips, and there were all these buildings and people and nothing to do.”

  “So you found a job.”

  “I came through the door and found the ticket booth standing open. I knew it was called a ticket booth as soon as I saw it, though I never saw a ticket booth before in my life. I could read the signs, too, and the letters, though they weren’t in the language I learned as a baby. I turned on the carousel and it went around and I like to watch it, so I stayed.”

  “So nobody hired you.”

  “Nobody’s told me to go,” she said. “The machinery isn’t complicated. I can make it go backward, too, but nobody likes that, so I don’t even offer anymore.”

  “Can you make it go slower?”

  “That’s the slowest setting,” she said. “It can go at two faster speeds. Do you want to see?”

  “No,” he said quickly, though for a moment he wanted to say yes, just to find out what it would feel like.

  “No one likes that, either, though people still ask. The living ones throw up sometimes, at the faster speeds.”

  “Sometimes the resurrected come to ride?”

  “Sometimes they come with the living ones. A dead mother and her living children. That sort of thing.”

  “How do you like it?” he asked.

  “Well enough,” she said, “or I wouldn’t stay.”

  He realized she must have thought he meant how she liked her job, or watching the carousel.

  “I meant, ho
w do you like resurrection?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have a choice, so I don’t think about it.”

  “When you were dying, what did you want?”

  “I wanted my mother not to cry. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to feel better.”

  “Do you feel better now?” asked Cyril.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose so. My mother isn’t crying anymore. I found her after I resurrected. She didn’t know me, but I knew her. She was just as I remember her, only not so sad. She and I didn’t talk long. There wasn’t much to say. She said that she wept for me until her husband made her stop so he could bury me. She wouldn’t move away, because she would have to leave my grave behind, so they lived their whole lives nearby, and raised eleven other children and sent them out into the world, but she never forgot me.”

  The story made Cyril want to weep for his own dead children, even though they were alive again, after a fashion. “She must have been glad to see you,” he said.

  “She didn’t know me. It was her baby that she wanted to see.”

  “I know,” said Cyril. “My wife got my children to die and they came back like you. Grown-up. I miss the children that I lost.” And then he did cry, just a couple of sobs, before he got control of himself.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been able to cry till now. Because they’re still there.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m glad to see you cry.”

  He didn’t even ask why. He knew: her mother, being resurrected, had not cried. The woman needed to see a living person cry for a dead child.

  Needed. How could she need anything?

  “What’s your name?” asked Cyril.

  “Dorcas,” she said.

  “Not a common name anymore,” said Cyril.

  “It’s from the Bible. I never studied the Bible when I was alive. I was too young to read. But I came back knowing how to read. And the whole Bible is in my memory. So is everything. It’s all there, every book. I can either remember them as if I had already read them, or I can close my eyes and read them again, or I can close my eyes and see the whole story play out in front of my eyes. And yet I never do. It’s enough just to know what’s in all the books.”