Rat Badger’s eyes were animated. They roamed their sockets like free-range hens scurrying amongst the hillocks and fens in search of their next organic meal. This was because they were, at the moment, detached from his brain, which had recently been eaten by ants and was having difficulty reasserting itself. When at last it did, it presented its owner with an inverted worldview, much like the reflection in the belly of a spoon that, turn it every which way you might, is always upside down.
Hardwired to the corpuscles of Harold Erasmus Jackson, stitched to the sinews of his self-conception, graven on the roof and walls of the temple of himself, was the ineradicable truth that his ancestors had been slaves. This fact had formed the stuff of which he was made, had justified his behavior, ennobled his hatred, pardoned his failures, excused him his anger; had, in short, provided the scapegoat to which, like the ancient Israelis, he’d strapped his sins—and their consequences—and turned loose in the wilderness to make its own way in the world. The philosophy by which he lived dictated that he was responsible for nothing except the good that came his way. Everything else, everything evil and unwanted, could be traced to the simple, unassailable fact that his ancestors had been slaves.
His recent discovery that, at a remoter distance, they had also been slaveholders, and brutal ones, assaulted the roots of his reason like a surfeit of gluttonous slugs on a rose bush in springtime. The pedestal of his preconceptions turned to dust beneath his feet, as did the philosophy, such as it was, that defined him.
Cummings’ entrance roused him from a host of unpleasant reveries, and he seized the bulbous butler with startled eyes. “Cummings!”
“Sir?” Cummings replied, nothing upon his exterior betraying the disquiet that was his at seeing the master so affected. Previously, the Resident’s response to his nocturnal peregrinations had been unexpectedly thoughtful, and he seemed not overwhelmed by the emotions they engendered. Now, though, it was evident he was greatly disconsolate. Something fundamental to his composition had altered.
Cummings had seen the look before, most recently on the face of the petulant Mongolian princess An Nangh Lei, when she realized that, owing to an irregularity in the generally reliable time/space continuum, she was her own daughter and her father’s great aunt Luci; that she might, in fact, be all of her ancestors, thus paring the family tree (for all its apparent fecundity) down to a single root. She. It was a lonely feeling. To be abandoned by one’s friends in the present is heart-rending. To find one has been abandoned by one’s ancestors is unspeakable, especially to Orientals, for whom the dead are as present as the family goldfish.
Her brain reached its expiry date before she could explore the latter possibility. All that remained of An Nangh Lei, on the morning Cummings last attended her, was the impression of a porcelain doll upon the sheets, outlined in the residue of various pastels and powders with which she emphasized her delicate features.
Cummings returned from this melancholy reverie. “Are you not well, sir?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
Rat was laboring over an analogy. “Have you ever had someone pull your brains out through your nose and stuff ’em up your what-not, Cummings?”
Cummings demurred. “The ancient Egyptians practiced the removal of the brain through the olfactory canal, sir, as part of the embalming ritual. However, I believe that subsequently the organ was deposited in a reliquary constructed for the purpose.” He folded his gloved hands behind his back and began rocking a little on his heels. “In fact, the mummy of Ramses the Great, known to the Hittites as Reamasesa, notable Pharaoh of the 19th Dynasty—”
“Would have known exactly how I feel,” Rat interjected before Cummings could enlarge upon the theme.
Cummings ceased rocking. He detected in the Occupant’s tone a disinclination toward the discussion of matters Egyptian, be they ever so ancient. “Yes, sir,” he said.
Truth be told, Cummings was feeling a little light-headed. He wondered if this might be attributable to the fact that the nearby cave painting of a group of hirsute Neanderthals convening with evil intent upon an unsuspecting mastodon was not fixed on any discernable horizon. A rectilinear individual, he found crooked pictures distressful.
“Things are not what they seem, Cummings.”
“True, sir. Very true.”
“You know that gag about building on shifting sand?”
“I am familiar with the sentiment, sir. A popular literary device.”
“That’s me.”
“Sir?”
Rat quieted his eyeballs. “You see before you a house built on shifting sand.” Cummings was not required to reply, so he didn’t. “These salty little vignettes prompt me to evaluate myself. I would say reevaluate, but I never did much of that to begin with.”
“That seems to be their purpose, sir. Yes.”
“But this latest installment has gone me one better.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Indeed, Cummings. I’ve had to reconsider my ancestors as well. I mean, I never knew much about ’em, really. Nothing, in fact, beyond a couple of names that used to crop up in Grannie’s conversation. I never paid much attention . . . but I had the impression they were all among the down-trodden and disenfranchised of the world. A herd of doe-eyed, harmless Bambies having played upon them just about every dirty trick the devious white mind could produce toward their torment.”
Cummings inclined the ripened melon. “Most loquacious, sir,” he said approvingly. “You have since revised your opinions?”
Rat studied his cuticles. “By the bushel, Cummings. Among the lower branches on my family tree are a few to whom the white slavers of the 18th and 19th centuries were rank amateurs.”
“I understand your analogy, sir. You presupposed your race was innocent in the matter of slavery. The discovery that it is not undermines certain of your preconceptions.”
“I didn’t know they were preconceptions. I thought they were just facts. Taken with mother’s milk.”
“It has been my experience, sir, that facts can tell different, sometimes even conflicting, stories depending on which way the light strikes them.”
“You have hit the proverbial nail upon the head with a 16-ounce drop-forged hammer, Cummings. But what am I supposed to do with ’em? If I’m not who I thought I was, and my ancestors aren’t who I thought they were, what am I? How am I supposed to remake myself when I’ve got nothing to stand on but . . .”
“Shifting sand, sir?”
Rat nodded. “Shifting sand.”
Cummings tottered upon his pins and his hand went to his brow. Even Rat, whose gaze was mostly inward, noticed. “You okay, Cummings?”
“I confess to a certain ennui, sir. I am certain it will pass. I don’t recall having been ill since I came to the island . . .”
“Well, you look like you’re being sucked the wrong way through a rapidly tapering hole. Sit down.” Rat slapped the edge of his mat on the floor.
Cummings did as he was told, and not a moment too soon, for his legs were beginning to disappear.
Rat, newly sensitive to subtle changes in others, noticed. “Your legs are transparent, Cummings. They haven’t always been that way, have they?”
“No, sir,” said Cummings, making a visual inspection of the phenomenon. “I have always been three-dimensional.”
“This is an unexpected development, then? Not on the program?”
“That I cannot say,” said Cummings, who was rapidly failing in his effort to remain dispassionate. “The program is of another’s creation, and I am not privy to its design. Nevertheless, I may assert with confidence that nothing like this has ever happened before.”
Rat studied the afflicted butler. “I don’t mean to alarm you, but the condition seems to be spreading.” He indicated Cummings’ mid-section with a drift of his eyes before which this, too, was dissolving. “Can’t be a pleasant sensation.”
“Indeed, it is not, sir. I feel as if I am bein
g summoned elsewhere.”
This was not a comforting notion to Rat, but not only because he didn’t wish to be left alone on the island. He was also experiencing empathy. He felt the urge to do something for someone else, and the sensation was peculiar. At the same instant, he was mightily frustrated by his inability to know what steps to take. “What can I do?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know, sir. Does the world seem to be rocking?”
Rat glanced around the cave and caught a glimpse of the reflection of his soul in the little tin lantern. Even in so brief a sketch, it was evident that the creature was worried. Its long fingers wound and unwound nervously and its eyes seemed to be studying the ceiling. It had the look of a creature lost and abandoned, staring into the abyss of an unfriendly fate. It also had boots, an improvement of which Rat, in his consternation, scarcely took note. “Seems stable enough to me,” he said, though more out of hope than conviction.
Cummings swooned. “I feel seasick,” he said.
Rat instinctively grabbed the butler’s hand, which together with his large head and starched collar, now constituted the only solid members of his body. It was the first time the two had touched, and in the precipitate communion Cummings’ condition was instantly transferred to Rat.
“I suddenly feel much better,” said the butler. And well he should, for he was once more his old substantial self. “I can’t think what has happened.”
“I can,” said Rat, who was now mostly invisible.
“Oh, sir!” Cummings cried, in his alarm letting go of Rat’s hand.
“Something is intruding on our story, Cummings,” Rat heard himself say. His voice was Gaelic and far away. “I’m feeling Irish, again.”
“My condolences, sir,” said Cummings, but he was already alone, except for the corpse of a dead Irishman upon the bed, its open eyes staring at the ceiling and a curious light that hung there. “It’s always trying to be Irish.”
He stood up, cast doleful, eulogy-laden eyes at the mat so recently vacated by the Resident, and began tidying the cave. One does what one knows how to do when there’s nothing else to be done.
For his part, Rat was dead . . . again . . . but he had company, in the form of . . .
A Hundred and Seventy-Eight Dead Jeremy O’Briens
The sixteenth night
Jeremy O’Brien was dead. His heart had stopped beating. His hands and feet were already cold. People had begun saying nice things about him. There could be no doubt about it.
His eyes were open, staring upward. There were a hundred and seventy-eight glass beads on the converted gas lamp over the bed. All the years he’d slept in that bed, he never noticed. Now it was all he could see. He couldn’t move his eyes or turn his head. He was dead. The periphery of his sight was peopled by shadows that whispered and sighed. He made out a few words here and there. Even Jerome had something nice to say. That showed how serious it was. But it didn’t matter.
A hundred and seventy-eight glass beads. He could see them close up. He didn’t have to blink. His eyes didn’t dry. There were no distractions. No two beads held the room and its occupants in exactly the same perspective. He saw himself reflected there. He should have shaved. A hundred and seventy-eight dead Jeremy O’Briens . . . and every one of them with a three-day growth of beard.
Beyond his reflection, deeper in the bead, Melinda sat in the old horsehair love seat she’d bought in New Hampshire. He’d said at the time it looked like funeral parlor furniture. She was crying softly. Her dress matched the love seat. Jeremy had never noticed things like that when he was alive.
Something about the way she was sitting sparked a memory: a younger Melinda, with redder hair and hope in her eyes. A honey-fresh farm girl sitting straight-backed on her great-grandmother’s portmanteau at the train station outside Killarney, County Cork. She was warming herself in wreathes of steam. It was bitter cold. That’s why the crops failed. Again. That’s why her father had arranged the marriage to young Jeremy O’Brien, America bound. Otherwise he’d never have stood a chance.
He had approached her slowly, thinking how spirit-like she seemed, as if a sudden start would frighten her into mist. As if she’d collapse into a breath or sigh and float away on the morning air. When she raised her eyes, the notion was compounded. They were child-like, deep with questions and confusion, meeting the moment with a desperate resolve. He remembered how his heart beat in his ears, how the blood surged through his youth in response to her beauty.
Tears were in her eyes then, too. The cold, she had said. The fear, he thought. She was just sixteen. At the time he would have said he loved her at first sight. Now, he would have smiled at the thought if he wasn’t dead. He pictured himself that awkward, tongue-tied farm boy, stumbling forward under the weight of his dreams. It hadn’t been love, of course. It had been a biological reaction. But it was a place to start.
Now? What’s left of you, Melinda? He wondered. Was that frightened little girl still hiding there among the ruins? It was a poetic notion—the Gaelic in him—and like most poetic thoughts, it had no substance. Just a lilt of sounds, teasing the ear and beguiling the mind. Melinda wasn’t a ruin. She was a three-dimensional woman who time had fashioned from a bit of fluff. A person of substance. He knew she’d taught herself to love him. In time he became everything she needed. In more time, he became all she wanted. Her tears were magnified by the glass beads.
A sense of waiting seemed to indwell his consciousness. Was he going to heaven? To hell? Part of his mind worked on the problem. Not frantically, but passively, almost out of curiosity. A hundred and seventy-eight companions; wherever he was going, he wasn’t going alone.
He tried to remember a recent sermon. Any sermon. Something religious. He couldn’t remember the words of the catechism. Or the Hail Marys. He remembered the Lord’s Prayer, but by the time he got to the end, he wasn’t thinking in English anymore. He wasn’t thinking in any language, really. Yet he’d never thought so clearly.
Somebody moved in the depth of the beads. Jerome. A hundred and seventy-eight best friends weeping over a hundred and seventy-eight dead Jeremy O’Briens. Poor Jerome. Life had broken him at an early age. He’d descended from a wishful cynic to a bitter alcoholic. He was Irish. His drunkenness had left a residue of venom in his spirit. His tongue was tipped with it. He was selfish. Could be cruel. But Jeremy had loved him like a brother because there was still the laughing, barefoot boy, the one who spread his youth like sunshine across a gray and sunless Ireland. Sometimes Jeremy had searched his best friend’s reddened eyes for some trace of that ancient companion. Sometimes he caught a glimpse, or imagined so.
Jerome had never cried. He was crying now, gripping his cloth hat tightly in both hands and pressing it to his eyes. The hat had always been too big for his head, but it fit his eyes perfectly. His huge frame shuddered and heaved silently, speaking volumes of sorrow. Jeremy knew that Jerome wept for himself, but the weeping would do him good.
Jeremy found himself thinking of things in a way he never had before. It wasn’t like thought at all. It was comprehension. Knowing. Every minute he was dead, life became a little clearer. He could see it in the beads, through his dead eyes. Death was going to take a lot of practice. But he felt in no hurry. Eternity would be long enough.
A hundred and seventy-eight Jeromes soaked acres of craggy cheeks with tears. Jeremy hoped there would be enough tissue to go ’round.
The doctor looked tired. It had been a long night for everyone, and he had other patients to attend. He would stay until the first flood of tears had stopped, of course. He couldn’t dismiss the feeling that he was responsible for them, somehow. It was always that way. He took another sip of water and tentatively patted Melinda on the shoulder. He never knew when a grieving relation would turn on him at the deathbed, like a wounded animal, and vent their anguish on him. Sometimes a touch would do it. He withdrew his hand from Melinda’s shoulder, sighed deeply, and quietly began to collect his things.
It
suddenly occurred to Jeremy that the undertaker would be next. What do undertakers do? A hundred and seventy-eight undertakers doing whatever it is to a hundred and seventy-eight dead Jeremy O’Briens. Maybe he’d get a shave after all. Maybe he’d dress him up and make a nice display, the way they had Colleen Doonan last week. Everybody said she seemed to be sleeping. Some said she’d never looked half as good in life. It was the peace, you see.
Everyone would file past. He had an image of them dropping flowers on him, for some reason.
Then they would close the lid. It would be dark and comfortable. The casket would sway gently as they carried him to the graveyard. He’d stipulated St. Patrick’s in the will. He’d left money for the plot in with the papers he’d tucked in an old sock beneath his underwear. Melinda knew.
Then he would hear the sounds of their voices one last time. Then the shoveling of dirt, its heavy thud and spray on the lid and around the sides. It would get quieter and quieter. Perfectly still. Perfectly dark.
The thought would have terrified him once. Not now. Something had happened to him. He was in transition, getting ready to leave Jeremy O’Brien behind. It wouldn’t be long. He understood that. There was no panic. No impatience. He would have liked to sing something. Something very windswept and Irish. No songs came to mind, but he felt one would come along presently, one to which all his favorite tunes were nothing more than the gurgle in a newborn’s throat.
There was a good deal of commotion in the beads. The undertaker had arrived. The doctor was leaving. Friends and relatives drifted in at intervals. Some talked too loudly. Some walked too softly. Everyone was equally uncomfortable. So was Jeremy, oddly enough. He felt deeply naked. He was glad that people only glanced at him long enough to assure themselves he was, indeed, dead.
Death was a much bigger place than he’d imagined. The beads were so crowded. How did people breathe? No wonder they had such odd notions about things.
Melinda had given birth to four Americans in that bed, and Jeremy had never understood them. They were in the beads now. Four times a hundred and seventy-eight. Seven hundred and twelve children. He’d given Solomon a run for his money. No wonder Melinda looked tired.
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