How Best to Avoid Dying

by Owen Egerton

  “Your eyes have changed, Lazarus.”

  “It was the sea.”

  “Nothing has changed with me.”

  I stayed with him in Gaul. He the vocal, the minister; I the quiet, the monk. Both serving. It was good. But after many years we both felt driven to move on. For John it was too much to stay a generation and watch each baby born grow old and die. For me, it was the old hunger. John went looking for life. I sought death.

  “There is a reason you and I do not die,” he told me as we said goodbye. “We are chosen to witness. ‘He will not let his servant know the corruption of the grave.’”

  “My heart is not like your heart, John.”

  “We will find each other again. We always will. Like brothers. You and I are children of the same miracle.”

  By the wall where I sit, John has a box of tiny green bibles that he hands out to neighbors and schoolchildren. He gave me a bible once. A large one with a leather binding. John said that the engraving on the front was my name. I can’t read.

  “Tell me again how he died,” I asked, rubbing the leather along the spine with my thumbs.

  “Confusion, people screaming at him. He spoke kindness even then.”

  “Was there much blood?”

  “Yes,” he said and cringed. “He asked God to forgive them.”

  “Could you see his pain? Tell me about that.”

  “Why do you ask these things? And be careful with your bible. You’re twisting it,” he said.

  “Did you see him after?” I asked. “When the tomb was empty?”

  “Once. From a distance. He was on shore. I was in Peter’s boat.”

  “That’s it?” I felt the spine of that bible thin in my hands. It would snap easily.

  “Others saw him.”

  “Oh, John.”

  The children are still playing below the window. I would throw bibles at them until they run away. They’d return with eggs. This happens nearly every day. But today I am letting go of each speck of skin, each mote of dust. I let go. It is slow. Life holds on and I am still here. I would like John to come home and find only a puddle. What have I not let go? What am I holding?

  After Gaul, John went to the living. Spoke of Christ to crowds. Sowed mercy. Built churches in each town that would let him. People marveled at his patience, his long suffering.

  I went to the dying. Leper colonies, battlefields, hospices. People believed me merciful.

  “He stays with them to the end,” they said of me. “Holds their hands, strokes their hair. A saint.”

  I once helped a child die. I was tending the sick and dying in a plague clinic. Hungry to be close to their death since I was so far from my own. This child, a boy, had a growth in his neck that was closing his throat. A slow strangle. Pain with every moment. Killing him seemed like it would be such a tiny act. I would steal some days, maybe hours, from him, that’s all. I tried believing it was mercy. I put my hand over his nose and mouth. He kicked and watched me. Then he closed his eyes tight and I flicked his forehead with my finger saying, “Open them, open them,” until he did.

  God did not stop me. I had expected he would still my hand. But God stayed away. He would not let me die, but he allowed me to kill. Worse. In the sickness of the act, God had hidden pleasure. It brought me no closer to death. It was more like life.

  I cursed God that day. I went to cities so that He would not find me.

  I saw the Church grow. Heard John’s name, Peter’s name, even my own. Wood churches became stone. Stone churches became cathedrals. I visited these to see images of my sisters in clothes and landscapes they had never seen. There, too, was Jesus. Beaten, bloody, and royal. But I saw no sign of his kingdom. I saw Jews murdered in Prague. Blacks sold in London. Women raped in Istanbul. Rome was called holy. Rome was never holy.

  In Paris a thief with one eye beat me, wanting me dead. He stabbed me and cried when I didn’t bleed. I told him I was sorry. In other cities, at other times, I had whips against my back. Stones tied to my legs. My survival meant nothing.

  I watched cities fill the air with smoke. Buildings stab clouds.

  I made my way to New York and was living under a bridge watching old drunks die of cold. I sat by them, counted their last breaths, watched the mist above their lips. Some reached for my hand. Some pretended I was their father. I was known. They came from all over the city, like the pilgrims had come before. But they had no questions. Just wanted someone near to help with the dying. You see, I believed I desired dying. But dying is an act for the living. I desire death.

  “Like falling asleep,” I told them. “As easy as that.”

  I kept the bodies in a hole cut into the banks of the river. When the hole was nearly full I crawled in among them and imagined I had found Sheol. I lay flat. In the day there was light enough to see the faces. Drawn, rotting, bearded. I spoke to them as if these were my ancestors. Here we are. Here we are. But I did not die. I did not change. At night I laid still and made no noise. When it rained, muddy water dripped from the soil above and the wind groaned.

  John found me there, playing dead. Pulled me by my feet into the air. I tried to crawl back in. But John held my legs. I refused to use my muscles, so he lifted me like a child. Strong arms for a man so thin. He carried me onto a bus. I kept my eyes closed, but could hear the doors open, the engine rumble below us. He hummed a little. Said my name into my ear. The heat of his breath, the heat of others on the bus burned more than the Roman flames.

  The bus stopped and he carried me again. John carrying a corpse through the streets, but no one asked. He carried me like the sea had carried me. I floated. He carried me up the stairs, stumbling only once. Inside he laid me on his mat and drew a bath. There was steam and more heat. He made a tea that smelled of spices and put it to my lips. I didn’t drink. Tea dribbled down my chin.

  Through all of this I did not think. I was doing my best to be dead.

  He dried me with a towel and dressed me in a robe.

  I still did not open my eyes or speak a word. John read to me. Charlotte’s Web, The Little Prince, Mother Goose. He used different voices for each character. His women sounded shrill. His villains sounded Roman. He hummed and sang. He combed a century’s worth of knots from my hair.

  His actions were a comfort and a chastising. Without words he was saying, “You cannot pretend to be dead. That is not your lot.”

  One day he filled a bowl with warm water and washed my feet. I could hear him sing.

  “God, you are good. Sweet Lord, you are good.”

  “God is God,” I said. My first words in months. “Who can say if He’s good?”

  “You and I are here,” he said, pausing his washing. “That is evidence.”

  “Survival isn’t evidence.” I looked down at him.

  “That is not what I meant,” he said and returned to my feet.

  John comes home in the half-light of evening. His eyes are tired. Red snakes in the white. He moves slowly, loosens his tie and stretches his neck. I am sitting against the wall, just as he left me. My legs no longer move. He cannot see how little of me is left. He sits on a stool near me.

  “They do not listen, Lazarus,” he says. “Starving children laughing at the food I offer.” His voice has tears in it. “It is not enough to live for them. It is not enough that he died for them. Nothing will open their eyes.”

  “John,” my mouth is toothless. “Where are my cigarettes?”

  “I smoked them.”

  “Where is my food?” I ask.

  “No more food for those who won’t eat. No more.”

  He lies down on his mat. Still determined to pretend he can sleep. He will rise early and pray. He will go back to those who can hurt a man who cannot die. He is tired. Young John. Troubled John. You’re going to lose him, Jesus. What will you do if even he leaves you?

  “John,” I say, my words sound like mush.

  He breathes deeply. He pretends so well sometimes I believe he is asleep. He believes he is
asleep. Perhaps he is.

  “John?” I say.

  He breathes and says nothing.

  I lay down against the wall. From here I can see the sky, darker every moment. My eyes are going. Dripping from my head. I cannot see the stars. They could be falling and I’d never know.

  “John,” I say. “Perhaps tomorrow he will return.”

  He only breathes.

  Come, Lord Jesus. For his sake, come soon.

  GOODNIGHT

  At night, when the wife is asleep, I sneak across the street to the funeral home and whisper through the air conditioning vents. “Hello, dead people,” I say. “They solved all the problems today,” I say. “God gave up the job and we voted Ms. Mayfield, the kindergarten teacher, as the new God. Remember her? Smiled at every drawing you gave her. Read books aloud, holding up each page for everyone to see. She never told when you soiled your pants, just helped you clean up. She said special things happen. She blinked those big brown eyes and promised she loved each of us. She made sure that every kid in class won Show and Tell at least once—even the boy who didn’t speak English and kept bringing the same glass paperweight every week. She’s God now, and everything is sweet and we have nap-time and cookies and cubbies and learn new things and when we’re good we get stars by our name—but real stars now, because she’s God. And when we mess up, she takes us aside and talks to us, puts us in Time Out for a few minutes, and we learn our lesson. And remember how she smelled like cotton sheets right out of the dryer? Now the whole world smells like that. And Ms. Mayfield smiles at us as she floats in all places at once. Life is so very good. But you’re dead. Ha. Bad timing. HA!”

  Then I sneak home, before the sprinklers come on, crawl into bed and bite my mattress till my gums bleed.

  LISH

  Lish was going to die. She was only twenty-two and beautiful. She smelled of sandalwood and tea. She couldn’t sit through a full movie unless it was a musical or science fiction. She wasn’t convinced time existed. She believed bubbles, stars, and poems were all the same thing. Trees said her name, Lish. So did sidewalk puddles and passing busses, Lish. She had broken her nose in a swimming hole at the age of sixteen and loved the crooked arc that remained. Lish believed that if she wanted to have a baby she need only nod. Lish’s body hummed. It was happy to belong to her and she was happy to have it. But that wouldn’t last for long, because Lish was going to die.

  ~Excuse me

  ~Yes, Lish.

  ~Nothing dies. Energy is never destroyed, just changed.

  ~Then you won’t mind when a painting of the British Fleet defeating the Spanish Armada falls on your head.

  Lish was walking through the park, watching squirrels chase each other around an oak tree with thick, drooping branches. She liked the picture, these grandparents of nature shrugging as the younger members of the world scurried through their limbs.

  The way the squirrels hopped and scrambled had Lish thinking about the sperm swimming around her plump eggs. She thought of her high school love, Brinkley. It had been five years since she had seen him, but Brinkley’s sperm would still be waiting. Brinkley had been stout and strong, a wrestler. She pictured his sperm having a similar build, shoving their way past Professor Hoggles’ snobby, middle-aged sperm (two years ago), or Pev’s sperm (last spring) that were so stoned they were probably just finding her fallopian tubes. Of course, Belinda didn’t leave any sperm (Halloween night), just pleasant memories and lipstick stains.

  Sometimes Lish felt sorry for the sperm, waiting and wanting. She was tempted to just nod her head and let them go for the egg. But Lish wanted just one more competitor. His name was Rex H.

  She had never met Rex H, never seen his face except for the faded image on a flyer that had wrapped itself around Lish’s shin a week before:

  REX H, THE FAMED ASIAN HIP-HOP SLAM-POET HAS RHYMED FROM COAST TO COAST, SEA TO SEA, TO NYC TO NC TO MC TO SEE THE YOU IN YOU AND THE ME IN ME. SKIN LIKE HONEY, TONGUE LIKE A HAWK, WHITTLING THE WORLD WHENEVER HE TALK.

  Below the words was a picture of a lanky Asian man with dreadlocks and eyes that reminded Lish of wet Tootsie Rolls.

  Lish thought he looked silly, too serious, and beautiful. He was performing that night at Groundmeet. Lish stepped out of the park and headed in that direction.

  ~Is that where I die?

  ~Yes.

  ~What if I don’t go?

  ~You have to go as much as I have to write you going. If the story says you die and I let you live than I kill the story and you never get to live.

  ~That sounds silly.

  Thanks to intrusive roots, the sidewalk was bumpy and broken. It reminded Lish of her nose. She thought back to her swimming hole incident, back to the moment after the dive and before the pain. The moment in the water. The wet. The blurry green. The bubbles that petered from the corners of her mouth.

  She often thought of bubbles. Air in a moving sojourn, traveling through the water, but always separate. Jiggling to the surface, popping out into the air-world and living as words. As poems. Then floating to the sky to become stars. All stars were once poems. All poems were once bubbles. When Lish spoke a poem she believed she was voicing bubbles and whispering stars.

  “I saw stars,” she told her mother after her swimming hole accident.

  “Yes, oh, yes,” her mother laughed. “With a smack like that, I imagine you did.”

  “No, I saw the stars.”

  From that day on there was seldom a time that Lish did not have a book of astronomy or physics within her reach. She read science textbooks like poetry and grew to believe that Stephen Hawking and William Blake were actually the same person. The facts she read were as full of mystery and beauty as the myths she whispered when she couldn’t fall asleep. She understood the life cycle of a sun, the composition of a comet, the categories of galaxies, and she could still wish on a shooting star.

  She took to lying awake most nights, watching the sky and waiting for a star to die. Would it pop and pow like the fireworks her brother used to set off in rich people’s lawns? Or would it just blink away? Would she feel it go? Feel the universe a light less, even if it happened a million years before she saw it?

  She was still a mile from Groundmeet, when who should step out from a Styln’ Cuts? None other than Rex H.

  “Hi, Rex H,” she said. “I’m walking to watch you.”

  He turned and raised a hand to his new cut. In person he was even more beautiful than his photocopied image. He was clean, sculpted, and somehow childish.

  “Who be you?” he asked, doing sign language for a “B” and a “U” correspondingly.

  “Lish.”

  “Nice.” He smiled, a pristine, white, nearly perfect smile. “And you’re heading to Groundmeet? Well, I do hope to impress as I digress through all I confess. Yes, yes, and yes.” As he spoke, his head swiveled like a slow-motion bobble-head doll.

  Lish bit her lip.

  Rex H cocked his head to one side, a dimple on his left cheek appearing. “Wants ride con me?” He motioned to a black and silver, souped-up, state-of-the-art moped.

  Lish very much wanted to ride con him. She straddled the bike. The leather seat felt smooth and cool against her unveiled kwaggle. Lish owned just one pair of panties, which she wore only on Christmas and the Fourth of July.

  “So sweet. You a poet? You look like a poet.”

  “Yes,” Lish said. “I’m an astronomer.”

  “Nice.” He revved up the cycle. Lish wrapped her arms around Rex H’s waist.

  The journey was delicious—the wind, the noise, the smell of Rex H’s shampooed hair, the bouncing of the seat between her legs. She loved how the cycle cut ahead into time, accelerated a little faster than humans were meant to. She was an outlaw of physics.

  As they rode Rex H explained his poetry. “My rhymes are sublime, amazing the mind. Ideas weave through words like wind through birds, like whey through curds, like corn through turds. Yes, indeed.”

  When they arrived, Rex H ask
ed her if she’d share one of her poems. She smiled, but didn’t answer. He put his hand against the small of her back and they walked in together.

  Quiet boys, she said to the sperm, who were doing agitated summersaults deep within her loins.

  “Butterflies?” Rex H asked.

  “Not really,” she answered.

  Groundmeet was a punk alternative coffee shop with an all vegan menu. No light brighter than a few candles or a dim lamp touched the blood red walls. There were two windows, but both were painted over in black with the words LOOK WITHIN spray-painted on.

  Lish loved the place. She loved the sawdust smell, the red velvet cushions, the ornately framed oil painting of the British Fleet defeating the Spanish Armada that hung from the high ceiling, tethered to the floor by a rope.

  ~Is that it?

  ~Yes, Lish.

  ~I’m not frightened.

  ~No?

  ~Write an O.

  ~O

  ~See the center.

  ~Yes.

  ~That’s eternity.

  ~What about the outside?

  ~That, too.

  ~What about the O itself?

  ~It’s nothing. You just made it. Like a frame floating on the ocean.

  ~You’re still going to die.

  ~Now write an O and then delete it.

  ~Did it.

  ~Is the white still there?

  ~Yes, Lish.

  ~See?

  ~I could burn the page.

  ~You’d make smoke.

  ~I could open all the windows.

  ~Wind.

  ~I could reverse all time until things fell back into the one wrinkle before the beginning and leave everything there.

  ~I wish you would.

  Rex H ordered two soy kolaches, and he and Lish took a seat next to the Noam Chomsky wish fountain. Lish was glad to be sitting by the bust of Noam Chomsky. Whenever she rewrote her childhood, Noam was her father, Frida Kahlo was her mother, and they home schooled her. Stephen Hawking, who was also William Blake, was her frequently visiting uncle.

  Rex H held out a nickel. “Wish?” he said and handed her the coin. She flung the coin, it bounced off of Noam’s forehead and into the water.