Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  “There was light in him,” I said.

  That sounded so flat, so insufficient, spoken aloud, it didn’t even begin to encompass what I meant. What I’d seen. But Jessie didn’t mock me, she didn’t snort and turn her back and resume her directionless plod over the sand. Instead, she smiled.

  “Light,” she said. “And night.” She tilted her head back, savoring the semblance of a pungent lake breeze, exposing her throat like a cat wanting to be petted. Like a captive, awaiting the blade of her assassin’s knife. “They’re both inside him, all of it is inside him, and life and death put together are... this. Eternity. Right here.” She squatted down suddenly on the sand, sliding it through her fingers, watching it stream slowly, inexorably back onto the dune. “This thing that’s dying. Which means, since he is all of that, that he really is dying. He really can’t escape it either.”

  She glanced up at me, and the naked need I saw in her for reassurance, for comfort was almost astonishing; she’d never have let that slip in the living world, never in front of a mere human pulled off that mask for a moment, but here it all came out so easily, here you couldn’t and wouldn’t hide anything. She needed me to tell her she hadn’t just made it all up, that Death’s true face had been more than a dream.

  “But that can’t be true,” I said. “Something that is life, just as much as it’s death—that thing can’t die. It can’t. It’s impossible.”

  “Why?” she demanded. Sharper, contrary, more like her old self. “We’ve all got a little life and death in ourselves, right, don’t we—we’re born, we die, we have a tiny little stake in all of that too? Travel the same road? Everything living dies. Nearly anything living can decide to die. If it’s got the will to decide anything at all. Why couldn’t Death just... decline, like some old dusty, and crumble into nothing? Why is that so impossible?”

  Because he’s everything, I wanted to argue. Because look all around you, and see that becoming nonexistent is so different, so very different than dying. Because it’s one thing for what’s living to choose to die, when really living and dying are just one and the same, but this is everything becoming nothing, everything can’t just up and decide it wants to be nothing—but I was no philosopher, and it wouldn’t sound half as logical said out loud as it did in my own mind. And she was probably right, that I was probably all wrong.

  And because since there were no secrets here, none at all, I somehow knew she could hear me without my even having to say it.

  Death’s true face, that awful blinding darkness and midnight sunrise spilling from behind the remnants of his human masks, swallowing up the moon and sun and all parts of the sky—I mourned the sight of it, the feel of his presence, that all-encompassing everything and suffocating womb. I mourned it like a lost lover. I wanted him back. I wanted it all back. I didn’t have to say that aloud either, to know how deeply she shared in it.

  “Say it,” she said. “Out loud. Just say it.”

  “Why should I?” I asked. The cries of the gulls were growing louder. “Why would he ever care? If he is... dying, how do we know he could even hear it?”

  “Because that’s part of remembering him,” she said. “That’s part of never letting go. So just say it.”

  Because I can’t say it. Because I’m too afraid that if I do, all I’ll hear is laughter, or silence. She didn’t have to say that aloud, for me to know she felt it. All right, then.

  “I love this place,” I said. To the sky, the sand, the birds who weren’t really there. “I love what made it.” My voice caught, cracked. I swallowed, waited until I could control it again. “I want all of it back.”

  The ground shifted beneath us and the sand took the look of soil, damp yet pearlescent and deep black like a field of crushed coal. Flowers, indiscriminate clusters of daisies and roses and lilac and hibiscus and blossoming clumps of roadside weeds—flowers that had nothing to do with each other in life, now thrown together by a higher hand like all those vanishing human ghosts—stuck pale tendrils and fist-thick shoots up from the dark wet ground. They grew up to our knees in seconds, burst out blooming and overpowered me with color, then curled up, withered, rotted too fast for me to take in that little glimpse of pure scarlet, those tantalizing flashes of yellow-pink-white-blue-living breathing green. They went limp like dirty string, the wan brown color of rotten apple. They fell. Then they rose again, over and over, bursts of frothy pink like apple trees in spring.

  There was a sound, up above my head just like the phantom gulls, of a baby crying. It stopped, suddenly, just as the flowers all withered and died, and then as their rotten brown stems went green and straightened toward the sky, it started up again, the wailing rise-fall-rise of any healthy child, newborn child, that sky frightened me so much I dropped once more to my knees in the deep dark soil, gritty yet gleaming like someone had sifted pearls into mud. Inside my head, as it wept, I heard her voice, Amy, Amy! pleading and furious as I raised the shovel over our heads, as I kept bringing and bringing and bringing it down but after the first blow all speech was gone—and then fearless, beyond fear, merely wanting to know. Amy? Amy. Where are you? I know you’re here. But where are you?

  Why should I have been surprised that even after everyone else had gone, everything else was disappearing, she was still with me? Why should that have scared me? She’d be with me all the rest of my life, no matter what happened to me or where I went, and that was my doing, just like Kristin’s baby she killed to spare it a worse death would always be with her. No, I wasn’t surprised. But I was so scared. Because I was so sorry, but that didn’t mean anything—no matter what Lisa’s priests or anybody else said, being heartily sorry changed nothing forever.

  But at least we had flowers. They bloomed and rotted and bloomed again and they weren’t just chimeras, their petals were soft and bruised at the touch and their scents mingled and clashed and went sweetly unpleasant as they decayed, living things here where there was meant to be nothing, and when I looked up at Jessie, I saw she was crying, too. No phantom. I reached up a hand to her and without taking it she sat down heavily beside me, right there on the dirt.

  “What is it?” I asked. But I think I already knew.

  “Goddammit,” she said, and sounded like her old self as she scrubbed furiously at her streaming eyes, rocking back and forth where she sat. “Why couldn’t we have all just died? When does it stop?”

  I laughed. It was a cruel sound but I wasn’t trying to be cruel. “It never stops,” I said. “Ever. At least, it was never supposed to, ever, before we all interfered. Isn’t that the whole point?”

  She wasn’t listening to me. Instead she’d scooped up a handful of the dirt, touching it there and here like probing for bruises on a piece of fruit; I saw dandelion spores mixed in with the blackness, brown seeds and bits of leaf and smears of pollen from the rotting blooming things around us, but they just threw the soil’s blackness into sharper relief, the gritty black whose sheen wasn’t from shards of pearl but something inside itself, in each bit that was a grain of tarry sand. I touched it and felt tiny pinpricks on my fingers, each clump and grain a sharp little rock.

  Jessie looked back up at me, red-eyed, infinitely tired. Then she smiled.

  “’Death ain’t all there is.’ That’s what... that man said to me. That old man I liked. Before he disappeared.” She stirred the mixture in her palm with one slow fingertip. “He said, the old man said, that even Death has parts of himself he can’t understand, just like a human being. Just like us. And that even though he’s carrying something much bigger inside himself—the light in him, and the dark, just like we both saw—it’s like he’s really no different than the rest of us, deep down inside. Or maybe not deep down inside. The other way around. He’s no different than us... on the outside.”

  The gulls were still calling, or a baby still crying, up overhead and that distracted me so I couldn’t get at the kernel of what she meant. The deep-down-insideness of what she meant. I sat down beside her, taking up my own
clod of earth. It was a handful of freshly whetted needles, burrowing into every pad and fold of flesh, but I didn’t care. Seeds mixed with rot. Grains of lake-stone sand, which brought things back to life in ways nobody had ever been able to properly work out, part and parcel with the detritus of death.

  People used to claim a meteor had landed on the site of Lake Michigan, thousands of years ago, creating in an instant the lake basin that scientists insisted was the slow work of an Ice Age glacier. That traces of the exploded meteor got into the sand and lake stones, infinitesimal particles, and that was what originally made the dead start coming back to life. Stupid myth, stupid story, though less poisonous than the ones that claimed it was the CIA, NASA, Jews, Communists, the Pope, secret nuclear testing, God’s Eleventh Plague, a Potawatomi curse, why not just go all out and claim it was a Venus space probe or something—but somewhere, inside that whole ridiculous story, there was a plain observation of fact long suffocated in a swaddling-cloth of fairy tale. Something forever alive was contained inside something temporary, something mortal—like a carapace of rock, that could be broken, shattered, split open, or could wear away slowly, under the quiet onslaught of water and wind and infinite time.

  “Death contains everything,” I said. I squeezed my fingers shut around the clump of earth, my eyes prickling with the same burning harshness as my hand. I welcomed it. I relished it. “Everything that is, was, ever could have been. Life. Death. Eternity. He is the container of everything.” I was very afraid to say aloud what came next. Fear, of any sort, was beside the point. “But the actual container, itself...”

  “Old wine in new bottles,” Jessie said. Then she laughed. She looked scared too. No hiding anything here. “And bottles, they crack and break.”

  The flowers around us withered and fell and died, and this time they didn’t spring up again.

  Death was alive once, too. That was what he’d said, the boy I had loved and forgotten. That was what he said Death told him. But how could that be true? Living things had always decayed and died, it was their nature, our nature; unless zombies had been some sort of last surviving, diminished remnant of a past human immortality, there had never been a time without Death. There had never been a world without Death...

  ...but maybe Death—and life, and eternity, for Death was everything and all—had never had any sort of contained form at all, and decided it desired one, required one, to walk the earth. Maybe Death, life, eternity, everything and all, were a sort of contagion, an all-encompassing one, just like the plague had been. A virus in need of a host. Viruses, I remembered from biology class an eternity ago, consumed their hosts in the process of replication. Death entered a host, lived inside them for as long as the host—or Death—could stand it, and then...

  “Death,” I said, scarcely able to credit my own words, “really was a human being, once. Or rather, what contains him once was human. He carries everything, eternity, all of it, like Atlas or something, but not on his back, it’s all inside of him, hiding inside, just like we saw—” I was babbling now, giddy beneath the painfully blue sky filled with shrill skittering cries, but I didn’t care, I couldn’t care, it was all spilling out as if somewhere, deep in the parts of me I’d thought hollow and empty, the wellspring of this knowledge had been hiding all along. “Not the same person, necessarily, maybe Death keeps changing hosts or something, maybe it’s like a sickness jumping from person to person—”

  “And now what contains him really is dying,” Jessie said. She was leaning forward where she sat, our foreheads nearly touching: putting our heads together. Were we right? Would it even matter if we were? “Just like I said, just like an old dusty slowing drying up and blowing away—or maybe he’s just sick and tired of carrying around eternity. Maybe hoos pissed him off so much that he’s giving it up. Not giving it up to another person—”

  “But giving it all up.” I shivered. I felt hot with excitement, sick with fear. “Refusing to pass on the burden. The illness. The...”

  What was the word? What was it? I’d learned it when I was little, from the children’s collection of Greek and Roman myths someone now lost from my memory had given me for a birthday, handwritten love scribbled on the flyleaf and a lot of words inside that I had to sound out carefully, put aside my reading to look up and scribble down in turn. Helot. Hoplite. Vestal. Stele. Stoic. Hubris.

  “Apotheosis,” I said.

  The dead flowers were black with rot, drying into deep carbonized grit, softly shedding bits and pieces of themselves until they were indistinguishable parts of the dirt. The sands. The sobbing child-sounds overhead became the cries of gulls once more and we were back on the beach, back where we’d come from, but this time grasses swayed in clumps scattered over the surface, and every inch of sand, every last little wind-made divot and mound, was dotted with soil-dark stones like raisins in a loaf. Too many to collect, too many too count. Jessie and I were standing in beach grass up to our knees, feeling it sway and brush our pant legs like an insistent, half-hearted little caress, and someone else was standing further down on the beach, there on the shoreline that’d once seemed miles away. They were holding something in their arms. They were—

  They were. She was. Overhead, underfoot, all around me, calling my name. Inside my head, my heart, where I’d placed her, in a moment of murderous rage, for as long as ever I might live. Jessie stiffened, drew in her breath, so I knew she saw her, too. We walked toward her in silence, and when Jessie tripped over a rock, cursing under her breath and her footsteps lagging, I didn’t slow down.

  I don’t know what made me so certain, what gave me such absolute sureness what would happen next. Maybe it was this place, this soon-gone eternity, that did it. Maybe because I’d somehow known something like this would happen all my life, that I was empty and so I needed someone else to inhabit me and that someone, who I’d forced to live inside me whether she wanted to or not, was standing down there on the beach. Holding the one who lived inside her, and always would. That made it okay. That made it more of a fair fight.

  I walked down the beachfront and the gulls cried overhead, real gulls now or at least they seemed more real, I saw flashes of white when I looked up and not just small escaping shadows. As I came closer, Ms. Acosta didn’t move from where she stood. The lake water rolled in behind her, licking the very backs of her ankles in their sensible awful-looking white sneakers like nurse’s shoes; her hair was full gray just like last winter, a furzy areole that the shore winds made stand almost straight up around her head. She smiled at me, shifting the baby more comfortably against her chest.

  “Shhh,” she said. “She’s sleeping.”

  I looked closer into her cradle-folded arms and saw the minute, unmistakable rise and fall of the baby’s chest, her shoulders as she dreamed an eternal dream. Infant shoulders I could’ve spanned with my one hand, that soft pulsing spot at the top of her head where the dark hair was thinnest, a tonsure. I wanted to touch her as she slept but I was afraid.

  “Where’s her mother?” I said.

  “Dissolved to powder just like the rest of them.”

  Ms. Acosta’s voice was quiet and calm. Big clear eyes stared at me, washed out and faded but still with a soft, quiet luminosity, watercolor streaks against the colorless parchment of her face and hair: just like when she was alive. There wasn’t any blood on her. I’d been afraid there would be. Jessie had come down the sand-slope leading to the shore and stood there now, halfway between me and the safety of the ridge, watching without knowing what to do next. I didn’t either.

  “Dissolved to powder,” I said. “Her mother. So why hasn’t she?”

  Ms. Acosta smiled, a little crook of one corner of her mouth. “Because she and I will always have unfinished business between us,” she said. “Just like you and me. I can’t put her down that easily.”

  No. She certainly couldn’t. I should know. It wasn’t such a bad burden, though, not when it came to meet you halfway.

  “We can’t be the only
ones with unfinished business,” I said. “There must have been billions of them, trillions. So why are we the only ones left?”

  Ms. Acosta laughed, the sneezelike nasal honk we used to make fun of back in school, ten thousand years ago. “Why does one exact leaf fall off one exact tree, onto the roof of one exact passing car? Why does one raindrop splash into one exact gutter? Why does one atom, in one breath of air, find its way into any one set of lungs?” She shifted the baby up towards her shoulder, shook the frowsy hair from her eyes with the old stern, Amy-you’ve-done-it-again look. “Why was your mother—by the way, it was her who gave you that book—in the wrong place at the wrong time, to let the lab first take notice of her? Why did you never die in the plague? Why did your friend over there”—she nodded toward Jessie—”live too, when every part of her wishes she hadn’t? Everything, everywhere, it’s all just so eternally random.”

  Her voice—his voice, its voice—was thin and reedy and every syllable seemed to vanish on the wind, rising up toward the endlessly wheeling gulls who never descended to feed. I put my hand to the back of the baby’s head, felt the same heat and steady pulsations as I had in the lake stone still resting, undisturbed, in my pocket. I willed that sensation to strengthen me. To dispel terror.

  “You’re dying,” I said. “The shell of you, I mean.”

  “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m weary. I’m sick unto myself of all of you. I have had enough.”