Elania held back that she was one of those students. She had been too shocked that something so personal in her life was living in a stranger’s mind as a pivotal moment in his understanding of Shepherds. That was something she wanted to write down, the ripples of the party out into the world. It wasn’t so that she would remember it, since she was unlikely to ever forget it, but for someone else to experience that oddness. And also the oddness that she and a stranger, linked by this event, had ended up in the same confinement point at the same time.
How were they to leave memories when everything about them was transient? A river of words flowed between them. When their lives ended, those words would still be carried on by others, yet everyone here was dying. There was no paper. No pens or pencils or laptops on which to write their final words. They couldn’t make a monument or create a rock garden when zombies would tear it up at night. Someone had tried to do a rock garden and exactly that had happened. Elania wished that she could write her words upon the river, to carry some simple information around the hill forever. Rachel Elania Douglas, daughter and sister and student, was here. Rest in peace. While eating her breakfast on the second day she was overdue for Zyllevir, she stared hard at the water to form letters.
She did not want to die here. None of them did. But all that was left in their power was how to die. A woman had come in carrying her nine-year-old daughter, her limbs frail and twig-like from cerebral palsy and minus her wheelchair. After one night in the lodge, in which the doors shuddered from pounding and manic hooting went on without cease, the woman twisted her daughter’s head so hard that her neck snapped. Then the weeping woman went to the fence by a watchtower and climbed. Elania hadn’t known either of their names, both in so much terror that they hadn’t spoken except to one another in whispers in their short stay. But she remembered them, for the short time that she had to remember.
If it had been Percy, would she have done the same? It was a repugnant thought. She flinched to feel his warm head braced in her hands with that being her intent. No, she could never have done that. Nor could she say that what the mother did was wrong. That was a horrifying state of mind to be in, another one she wanted to write down. What was wrong, so completely and utterly and totally wrong, was also right in other circumstances. If someone had stormed into the confinement point and arrested that mother for murder, Elania would have testified on her behalf rather than against her. This woman could not be crucified for what was a gruesome kindness in a place beyond hope. She murdered her daughter out of love and protection. She murdered her because the alternative was worse.
The act was both right and wrong, depending on the environment. It was hard to live in a world that embraced such a frightening gray. Had the woman done this outside the confinement point, Elania would have had the loudest voice in condemning her. But here . . . rules were different here. All it took was a chain-link fence to change everything, to shake what Elania had always accepted as inviolable apart. If Percy were delivered behind the fence, it would be best for him if she just . . .
That was the power of the fence. If Percy came here, Elania would tell him that she loved him, and proceed to break his neck out of that love.
They had all come to the confinement point from such different places. They were black and white, rich and poor, old and young, Christian and Jew. Despite those differences, they all said so many of the same things. A woman wanted to hear her husband’s voice one last time; a boy wanted to hear his grandmother’s. Elania wanted to hear her father’s voice, her mother’s and her brothers’. She wanted to hear Aunt Tawnie’s voice. That last one would be the calmest. Aunt Tawnie saw people into death as her life’s work. Everyone goes to death, her aunt would say. Some meet it with open hands, and others with fists. Yet they all go. It’s easier to go the first way.
Elania had started the prayer circle, giving her prayers and inviting others to give theirs. People often called her serene. That was how she appeared to them. That was only the surface. Inside she was screaming and sobbing and numb in turn, and sometimes all at once. Before God she prayed, but in truth she was speechless. She only had the words of prayers, without her own to accompany them. That was strange, and it was also strange to mouth words that had less and less meaning with each recitation.
Her life had not been divided into before and after her infection. She hadn’t grasped that until now. It was the confinement point that divided it into two wholly distinct worlds. Where murdering your child was the right thing to do. Where not killing someone was the wrong thing to do, even if that person had yet to do anything to you. Where she prayed harder than she ever had in her life, but it had none of the meaning it held before.
With the prayer circle, the ten hands reaching out to her became fifty. Even more skirted the edge of the group, either at morning services or at meals, in the lodge at night, and everyone invited them in. Let’s talk. Let’s cry. Let’s pray.
Only a few of the new arrivals introduced themselves with hope. Someone will come! The Army won’t let this go on! Their verb tenses were in the present and future. I’m a doctor. I’m an architect. I’ll get my degree next year. They stared at the fence, expecting it to be bulldozed down any second. Hooray! Let’s go! Exchange phone numbers with their new acquaintances and head home. This had just been a really unpleasant camping experience. Then it sank in over the next days that that wasn’t going to happen. The verb tenses changed. I was a bellhop. I was studying art history. I was applying for jobs.
At least without the Zyllevir pills, Elania no longer had to deal with the guilt. She’d felt like she should give them to someone else. But why? How did she determine who of all these people was the most deserving of some extra weeks of life? One of the children (which one? Sweet Clarissa? Colin? One of the babies?), the woman who had four sons under the age of ten at home or the father of the twins, the older man who was taking care of his bedridden wife until the Shepherds came . . . all of them should receive the pill in her palm, and this pill was all there was.
So she took it. And lived to see another day, eat more bad food, pray to a God who never responded and hear the shots from the watchtower guards when others in despair climbed the fence. Lived to sleep badly another night with the screams and animal chatter from outside, and to check over each new arrival and gauge how threatening they were. Under thirteen of either sex and they were not threatening. She could take them down. Over eighty of either sex wasn’t threatening either. Most of the women got a free pass at first glance purely due to their sex, and then she remembered Ruthie and the snarly-haired bitch. Women could be just as sick as men.
The men she judged on a case-by-case basis. It was a reflex, though little of a sexual nature had happened since the battle for the lodge. New people took their place in the dominant culture, and in this one, forcing sexual contact won you nothing but a one-way ticket out into the night. Some of the abused people were more destroyed by what had happened in the lodge than they were by their Sombra C. Elania added at one prayer circle that their bodies were sacred, every male and female body on the hill. No one had the right to touch it, to make it the price of safety. A teenaged boy burst into tears at that. He’d been abused by his uncle when he was seven and then here, and he hadn’t ever heard anyone call his body sacred. He’d never conceived of himself that way, nor told anyone about what his uncle did until now. Several women were crying, too. Abused here, in their homes, at their work, one in the military. Elania felt awful for their tears. Her words had been more powerful than she grasped, and what had happened to them was more horrible than she could comprehend. Every story they told made her sick. Without that blade, without Micah wielding it, without all of those people backing her up, Elania would have had a story of her own.
It was hard to feel sacred behind the fence.
That was the day Casper came to the confinement point. She didn’t know what she was doing with the prayer circle but he did, and he taught her how to build it. Prayers were best when th
ey came with connections. The next day she did the Jewish prayers and he led the Christian. Then he gave a sermon about letting go. They were all doing this, him included. He was letting go of the hope that he’d meet the right woman, settle down and have children. He’d finally figured out how to lead his life, and now his life was ending. It hurt that he would never hold his child. What were they letting go?
The air filled with whispers. I got a wife. I’m taking care of my mom. She’s sick. All I have is my job teaching, but I love it. My grandpa needs me. He’s got dementia. Oh God, Molly is only ten months old! Stevie just turned five! Who’s feeding my cats? My dog? Who is going to take care of them?
For Elania, it was Pewter. She wasn’t going there, or to any college. It felt like being on the Titanic as it upended in the ocean, sending people falling helplessly into space. That was Elania, stretching out for something to hang onto, anything or anyone, and her hands closing on emptiness. She had had a vision for her life, college and work, a guy along the way, a child in the far-off future . . . and it was gone. How did she say goodbye to that? How did anyone? But whether she said it or not, it was being said for her.
So she just wanted to sit with her family. This she could not do either. Those goodbyes were being said for them as well. To her brothers yelling pirate chanteys around the toilet; the way her mother never daubed her lipstick since she liked it bright and cheerful; her father learning how to build a fire with instructions off the Internet . . . Goodbye to the bell ringing for class and Elania at the ready with a pen in hand to take notes. To the spray of hot water in the shower on her shoulders; to waiting in a drive-thru at Tic-Tac-Taco; to the knowledge that killing someone was wrong.
Goodbye to the future, who she was becoming, who her brothers were becoming. It reminded her of the time Cormac had said Elania was his favorite person in the world. She’d hugged him and said thank you, although he wasn’t often her favorite. Percy was sweet and goofy and Conor was thoughtful and serious and Cormac was belligerent and impulsive . . . but she couldn’t let him know that. He would have been crushed. What he was feeling for her was to be treasured, and more important than the bouts of irritation she felt with him. One day he’d grow up, likely mature into a brother she truly enjoyed, and she had to let go of that hope, too. She was sitting shivah for herself.
All of these things and thousands more she was losing. After that prayer circle, one after another of her losses wandered into her mind. Each was a blow. She wasn’t going to school in the fall. She couldn’t go to the pantry and nose around for hidden treats. She’d never receive flowers from a guy. That hurt more than she’d expected. Guys were always on hold for college. She had still hoped for it to happen, that her mind would be racing with homework and clubs and office hours, and the surprise of a bouquet would stop her dead in her tracks. That was very old-fashioned, a girl wanting flowers from a guy, yet she loved the idea.
Not screaming across campus that he’d like to fuck her in the ass. Not shouting that he had something to put in her mouth. Her guy had a backpack over his shoulder or a book tucked under his arm. He also had a mind set to homework and clubs and office hours, and in all of that hustle and bustle of college life, he’d still noticed her. Gotten her flowers and wanted to ask her out, get to know her. She had lost this little fantasy that she visited now and then, and it raked her heart.
It burst out of her to Casper that afternoon. An hour later, he gave her flowers picked from around the hill and said he didn’t mean it in a creepy way. She trusted that from the anxiety in his face that she was going to misread him. The flowers had come only from kindness. If he were twenty years younger, he said, and hadn’t been such a total fool as he was at eighteen, Elania would have caught his eye. But he was twenty years older, so he was going to be her big brother here. She could tell him anything, and she did. He held the pain with her.
They both kept their hands out in prayer circle and afterwards in every minute they were behind the fence. Soon Elania had a hundred hands reaching back. Even if the prayers meant nothing to her, they did to others. It had been her name on the lips of a Jewish girl that a guard had shot at random. Elania knelt on the path and held her hands as she died, daring the guard to shoot her, too. Casper stood guard over them both. This was ministry far more than prayers.
It was foolish to ask why God allowed these things to happen, or to pray for Him to fix them. If He hadn’t stopped the atrocities of the Holocaust, why would this confinement point be any different? But God wasn’t a superhero in tights and a cape that flew around the world making things better. She knew better than that. So what exactly was God besides principles, and why was she praying to Him? What exactly was she praying for?
Please don’t let me die on this side of the fence.
It was going to happen. The Zyllevir was gone. After breakfast, she climbed to the top of the stairs and waited in the full sunlight for the others to come to the circle. Oh, she did not want to be doing this today! Most of the people were a variation of Christian anyway, not Jewish, so she was really just talking to herself. Casper could do it and people loved how he spoke after prayers. Yesterday he had led an exercise of congregants imagining the most cherished person in their life standing behind them, bearing some of the pain and being a soothing presence. People imagined their parents and grandparents, spouses and best friends and adult children, teachers and siblings. One woman didn’t have anyone, so she imagined a guardian angel with his hands on her shoulders. When prayer circle had ended, Casper asked Elania to give the next sermon. She hadn’t come up with anything over the day or night, or this morning. She just wanted to go into the lodge and curl up on a sofa, bury her face in a pillow and wonder why this was happening to her. She had tried to lead a good life, and the hill was a punishment for a crime she hadn’t committed.
But God didn’t give explanations. She could not find Him this way, demanding He come down and explain Himself. Maybe in the next world, she would gain a greater understanding of God and what He was, a fight for truth, a recognition of commonality, or as memory. The last of those three was intriguing. She had experienced through common childhood cruelties what it was to feel left out, the girl who wasn’t as liked, the odd one out when her race and religion marginalized her. She had brought some of those feelings to Cormac’s declaration of love. He wouldn’t remember Elania as someone who favored his brothers; she hadn’t passed on that pain. The ability to remember incidents from years before and apply them to different circumstances . . . to keep someone from hurting as she had been hurt, perhaps that was as much of God as she would conceive in her life.
These were thoughts she had to have now, before the virus rendered her incapable. If God was memory, then she had a responsibility to what people remembered of her. It was irrelevant how long they would be around to remember. That wasn’t the point. In the short amount of time she had left, she could lighten burdens or add to them. She was going to pray in this circle rather than hide in the lodge, lifting her voice to God with words He would not or could not hear, or did hear. People needed this from her, just as she had needed Casper to listen about the college boy she’d never meet.
Perhaps she wasn’t praying to God, which implied a conversation that they could not have in this world. She was praying for God, and also for the others around her. There was a distinction there that she was still fighting to grasp.
People had come to the confinement point and forced the captives into sexual servitude. The memories they had chosen to give were hideous, and Elania who had been untouched still was scarred by wounds she’d never received. Their abusers had taken food away; struck and cursed and heckled and assaulted. They had left behind them memories of fear and added burdens in a place that was dark enough.
The sun was so warm upon her face, the sky so brilliant a blue. All that Elania controlled now were the memories she left in others. It was the only power given her. And dear God, she wanted the power to break down these fences and go home! To pun
ish the Shepherds and go off to college! For justice! At the very least, she wanted the power to talk to her family and leave a message on the hill that she had been here. This was not allotted her, so how did she want to be remembered?
Hopefully, she was going to be remembered as a voice in prayer circle; the hands that ripped off the plastic for fingers too stiff to do so; the young woman who brought down a king of the hill. It wasn’t in her control what pieces of her would be remembered by others. It was her responsibility to make sure that those memories, if any, were good ones. She had brought no harm, left no scars upon the innocent, she had alleviated burdens when she could, and come to her end with acceptance.
And as she had to give memories that were good to others, so did she bear good memories of her own. To be stripped of those would leave her truly alone, and right now she could see her parents and brothers in her mind’s eye, feel the ice cream going down her throat as she laughed at a table in the Cool Spoon with Micah and Zaley. She had made a mistake by staying in Mr. Dayze’s class, but it was a gift that she had the ability to remember it, and to learn from it. This was the holy in memory, where without it she would be the lowest order of animal.
It struck her what to say in her sermon. Today she wanted to imagine someone in her life to which she could speak of what little she’d learned of the world. Cormac walked into her mind as the others came up the steps to the grass. What would she say to him? He was the one who needed the most, and had the least ability to hear. She didn’t want to tell him to be good or to do the right things. That didn’t mean anything. Those words weren’t personal to him. The right things depended on what side of the fence he was on. Nor did she want to tell him to love everyone. Elania didn’t feel love for the Shepherds, nor did she feel that she had to. She was furious with them. It was okay for Cormac to be furious with people in his life, to rage against a system that had caught him up in its grip. If enough people were furious and demanded change, then change came. Change didn’t come from blind acceptance of the status quo.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 94
