After the People Lights Have Gone Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

  And, though Sai imagined there were probably photographs of funerals, he couldn’t think of any obvious repository for such photographs. And he could hardly imagine a grimmer photo album.

  And of course nobody videotaped. People recorded births, sure. But cemeteries are different. Cemeteries are private. Your grief is a wall, your anonymity a given, if you need it. There are no strangers at funerals. Everyone’s a past lover, a childhood friend, a coworker from three jobs back. And everybody’s just there to say goodbye, anyway. There aren’t champagne flutes on circulating trays, there aren’t cookies to abscond with, there’s no shiny pile of gifts to pilfer.

  Still, Sai knew.

  Those three from Mark’s funeral, and then the two from Dava’s, they didn’t belong.

  He could feel it.

  Maybe they had a fetish, maybe they were doing a study, it didn’t matter. What did was that they were stealing. They were sneaking in and taking something.

  Just to be sure, Sai called the groundskeepers at Mark and Dava’s cemeteries and had them check on their graves, to make sure they hadn’t been disturbed.

  Everything was normal, the groundskeepers said. Why?

  Sai thanked them, hung up.

  The next call should be to the police, he knew. To report a crime. To report that three and then two people probably not connected to the deceased had stood in the back of the funeral and observed, yes. Very maliciously. With bad, bad intent.

  He didn’t make that call.

  Instead he called the priest who had officiated Mark’s funeral.

  Just to talk, Sai said. About the future. About his wife.

  “Are you Catholic?” the priest asked back.

  “I just want to talk,” Sai said.

  •

  “What happens to her when she—when it’s time?” Sai said the following morning, Marissa asleep in their bedroom, the baby monitor flashing a line of red dots on the coffee table.

  The priest watched it and considered the question. Or something.

  “Where does she go, I mean?” Sai added. He’d been practicing.

  The priest looked up to Sai.

  With his white hair and black collar and sensible shoes and lanky frame, he was so cliché that Sai had almost grinned when he opened the door.

  The priest for Mark’s funeral had been young, dark-haired.

  Just like at a car lot, Sai figured, at some point in the deliberations they send the manager in, to close the deal.

  “You’re telling me you’ve lived to be thirty-five,” the old priest said, wiping at his lips with his gnarly fingers, “and the basics of Christianity have somehow escaped you?”

  “Thirty-two,” Sai said.

  The priest just stared.

  “You’re still trying to save her, aren’t you?” the priest said. “Are you wanting me to be part of that bargaining, is that it?”

  “The—the last shall be first,” Sai said.

  “And the first shall be last, yes. It doesn’t matter when you believe, in the cradle or on your deathbed, at the recruitment table or in the fox hole. It’s not about how much credit you’ve built up, the world still doesn’t owe you. Blah blah blah.” The priest leaned forward, boring his eyes into Sai. “Pretty shitty system, isn’t it?”

  Sai nodded, afraid not to.

  “Flipside, though?” the priest went on. “It also means that, if your wife’s dying in the other room, then it’s not because you ran over a squirrel when you were seventeen. Or didn’t help some lady across the street last week. Each moment, the world washes its hands of you, starts all over again. Easy as that. Wonderful as that.”

  Sai watched the red line of Marissa’s breathing on the baby monitor.

  “And when you die, when she dies,” the priest went on, palming the monitor away, “then what that leaves you with is regret. That you didn’t do more while she was alive. But, you know what? That’s so the next person you meet, maybe you can do more. Because now life’s got an expiration date, right? And if you work hard enough, if you’re good enough, you can work off all this regret you can see coming. This is how the world becomes a better place.”

  “I just wanted to know—”

  “What happens after she dies, yes,” the priest said. “Maybe what happens, it depends on what you believe. What do you believe?”

  Sai swallowed, squinted his eyes as if studying something on the far wall. “That we bury her,” he finally said.

  “Well, good,” the priest said, standing. “That was easy enough. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got some serious—”

  “That we bury her and that people who aren’t people come to her funeral,” Sai said.

  The priest kept standing, but he wasn’t leaving anymore.

  “Demons, angels,” Sai said. “Ghosts?”

  “Strangers,” the priest said, staring down at Sai.

  “Are they real?” Sai asked, his voice almost cracking.

  The priest turned away. “Are they real?” he repeated, huffing it out like it had been a punchline.

  “They are,” Sai said.

  “We don’t know the world as well as we think we do,” the priest said, and Sai looked up into that weathered face. The one that must have looked across the heads of five hundred funerals, into the eyes of … of what?

  “I don’t want them at my wife’s—when she—”

  “Then don’t have a funeral. Don’t invite them like that.”

  Sai studied this tall white priest.

  “Cremation,” the priest said. “Scatter her ashes. Strangers don’t care about that. Throw a funeral, though—”

  “And they come,” Sai finished.

  “Like flies,” the priest said, lowering his head to take his hat, his eyes never leaving Sai. “And, what’s the thing about flies?”

  “They’re not human?” Sai said.

  “There’s always more,” the priest said, and let himself out.

  When Marissa asked through the monitor who that had been, Sai didn’t know what to say at first. Or how to say it.

  •

  Two weeks later Marissa checked into the hospital for what the specialists said was the last time. Her lungs, her counts. The disease.

  “I wish she’d been born later,” Sai said to them, his lower lip trembling, his eyes pleading.

  They had no reply.

  In the bathroom, for the third time in his life, Sai got down on his knees and prayed. He tried to pray to God, to any god, but all he kept seeing when he shut his eyes was the white-haired priest ducking out the front door, the brim of his hat lowered against the sun.

  To make the transition—the nurses’ word—easier, they kept Marissa’s IV line swimming with painkillers.

  It meant she was conked out for days at a time.

  Sai lived on vending machine food and coffee from the gift shop on the first floor.

  He wished he smoked, so he could stand out of the wind in the courtyard with the rest of the families, slit his eyes at the grim future, but smoking just made him cough. So what he did was walk the streets at nervous right angles, still making deals with the world. Just offering whatever he could.

  The world answered by delivering him to a cemetery. To an afternoon funeral.

  Sai looked down at his clothes, to see if he was somehow wearing the tie, the overcoat, the black gloves.

  Maybe we’re all strangers, he told himself, using the priest’s word.

  But no.

  The way he could tell was that the real strangers were there already, standing at the back of the group of mourners. Just watching. Whispering to each other.

  Sai thinned his lips, balled his fists.

  There were three of them again, the two men, the one woman. To anybody else, they wouldn’t stand out. Except they were so normal. Except they fit in so well.

  Except, the whole twenty-two minutes Sai watched, they never shifted their weight from foot to foot, or tracked a bird floating above the trees, or turned to a car, honking. An
d there was no thunder this time to give them away, and Sai didn’t know how to fake a backfire in a tailpipe, and he didn’t think he would have anyway, because that would have disturbed the whole funeral, not just the three interlopers.

  What can they be doing? Sai asked.

  Also: what did it matter?

  It wasn’t like them standing there was actually hurting anything. It wasn’t like the person being buried was floating above the casket, counting heads, separating them into groups. Not like the wife or husband or mother or father would have the presence of mind to identify strangers and have them removed.

  The perfect crime, Sai knew. Made all the more perfect in that it’s not a crime at all.

  Still, when the funeral broke up, he followed.

  In his hand was a neatly folded twenty. He was going to tug on the sleeve of one of them and apologize, say he saw it fall from their pocket. The whole time, he was going to be taking mental snapshots of their faces. And probably screaming inside if those faces were blank. If the eyes were solid black. If the mouth opened onto a void.

  Stupid, Sai told himself. It was stupid, all of it. Stupid enough that Sai started to turn around, go back to the hospital.

  The three had stepped into a post office, though.

  Not a diner, not the subway, not a taxi.

  A post office. Like the funeral had just been another errand. One all three had to run. And now all three had to visit their mailboxes, or mail a package.

  Sai shook his head no, no, and lunged ahead all the same, catching the door just before it would have shut.

  Later he would think that that was probably why he was able to see them. That, if the door had closed all the way, they would have just been gone, nobody the wiser.

  As it was, he stepped into the cool blankness of a thousand aluminum mailboxes.

  The strangers were standing beside each other at the front window. He would have thought they were watching people pass on the street, except they were facing slightly away. Like they were looking at something in the glare of the window?

  Sai looked too, and when he came back, the one closest to the door was looking directly at him.

  The woman of the three.

  “What are you doing?” Sai said, his voice harsher than he meant. Either that or he’d only heard his nurturing voice for ten months now.

  The two men turned his way. With their whole faces. All of their praying-mantis attention.

  “Where are you from?” Sai asked.

  Still just the staring.

  A postal customer walked in front of the three and never saw them. Either looking at his clutch of mail or he couldn’t see them.

  “Was it part of the ceremony?” the woman said.

  To show what she meant, the two men moved in around the woman. She held her hand up to the tall one’s chest and guided him out of the way. For the Sai from Mark’s funeral to run past.

  “The noises from the transports,” the tall man said. “Was that intended, or was that happy circumstance?”

  “Happy circumstance,” Sai repeated, realizing it was a not-quite-there translation. “Who are you?” he said.

  “It was unhappy circumstance,” the other man said. “Otherwise it would have happened at other—”

  “Why do you care?” Sai said.

  “That we could look away?” the woman said, incredulous, and when she tried to affect a grin, Sai finally saw the vertical line at the back of her jaw.

  “You’re a puppet,” he said, stepping back, reaching for the wall. Just to be sure it was still there.

  “Puppet,” the third man said, and after processing the word for a moment, the tall man moved his arms and knees as if he were a marionette on strings.

  Sai had his back to the wall now, his fingers spread wide against it.

  “What are you?” he said.

  “Visitors,” the woman said.

  “To … to our funerals? Our post offices?”

  “Post office,” the tall man said, looking around as if seeing it for the first time. “Tiny sleeping chambers.”

  “Funerals,” the third man said, not wanting to lose this line of inquiry, it seemed. “Do you think—do you think that they will grow, if you plant them deeply enough?”

  “It’s almost too much to believe,” the woman added.

  “That you don’t know their names,” the third man said.

  “That you leave them there,” the tall man said.

  “That it really and truly does happen here like that,” the woman said. “The legends are true.”

  “About what?” Sai said, a postal employee sliding past, between him and the three, adjusting his gait slightly to avoid stepping on a wide black shoe but never quite registering the man standing in that shoe.

  “You just discard them,” the woman said. “As if you’re done with them. As if they have already served their reason.”

  Sai was breathing hard now. And not screaming.

  “Their reason?” he said. “Their purpose, you mean?”

  The three looked among themselves, as if for confirmation. And then back to Sai.

  “Everywhere else you travel,” the woman said. “After the first calamity—”

  “What you call final death,” the third man slipped in.

  “Final?” Sai said. “How many calamaties are there?”

  “Eight,” the third man said, in a tone evidently reserved for children.

  Sai studied him.

  “After the first,” the woman went on, “everywhere else you can travel, everywhere except this place, the loved one will have whispered their secret name to their most trusted.”

  “We don’t—” Sai started.

  “But only right at the end, when the calamity precipitates,” the third man said. “Otherwise, they might say it beforehand, in anger, or in their sleep—”

  “Or even say it after the calamity, at the least proper time,” the tall man added, his voice hushed.

  “Whole worlds have been ravished,” the woman said.

  “Ravaged,” the third man corrected.

  “Ravaged,” the woman repeated, agreeing.

  “From saying a name at the wrong time?”

  “They rise then, but not as their former selves,” the tall man said. “As—as animate husks.”

  Sai looked up and up to him.

  Was he taller than he had been before?

  “But what if—what if you say it at the right time?” Sai heard himself say.

  “Then the cycle continues unabated,” the woman said. “As intended.”

  “You’re saying,” Sai started, then started again: “You’re saying that if you say someone’s secret name after they’re dead, then that person—”

  “Continues,” the tall man said.

  “Otherwise it all becomes madness,” the third man said. “Otherwise there is no reason to—” but the woman touched her palm to his chest, shushing him.

  “Apologies and forgiveness,” she said to Sai. “He doesn’t mean to offer description of your world.”

  “He does,” Sai said.

  “You just throw them away,” the tall man said, amazed. “Nowhere else does this happen. We had to see for ourselves that the legends were—”

  “We bury them.”

  “You don’t have to,” the woman said, and smiled her remote-controlled version of a smile.

  It made Sai look away, to the deadspace their forms were leaving in the glare of the front window.

  When he looked back to them, they were gone.

  •

  At the hospital, instead of waking Marissa for her secret name, Sai held her hand. For eight days.

  On the ninth, she squeezed his index finger once and died.

  The nurses let him have twenty minutes alone with her. He kept the side of his head to her sternum the whole time, his eyes closed.

  At the funeral four days later, there were no interlopers. No strangers.

  Walking away after everyone was gone, thoug
h, there was something.

  A white cardboard box for mailing packages. The free kind from the post office.

  There was no address on it. The flap wasn’t even closed. It still had the strip of paper on it, protecting the glue.

  Inside, a phonebook.

  Sai held it, looked all around, and left it flapping on the curb by his car, along with the white box.

  He hadn’t really followed anybody, he told himself.

  It was wishful thinking. He’d needed the universe to be large enough to accommodate the remote possibility of Marissa surviving, and so had invented alien tourists who knew, and could divulge, the secrets of the universe.

  It was wishful thinking.

  Feed anybody days of vending machine cookies and complimentary coffee, let them breathe the second-hand antibiotics of a hospital, then load them with enough worry for the rest of their life and usher them out into the city.

  Of course Sai had seen meaning in every interaction. Even to the point of walking through a haze of his own making, fabricating those interactions.

  It was all a way of putting off the inevitable, wasn’t it?

  It was all a way of not dealing with what he was going to have to deal with.

  That the interlopers had conveniently disappeared after Marissa’s death only confirmed that they’d been coping devices all along. Defense mechanisms. A way to avoid, to stall.

  Still, for four nights in a row, Sai didn’t go to Group. He did answer his phone, though, and assured each worried caller that he wasn’t going to pull a Dava, no. That Marissa had made him promise, “she’s still saving my life,” at which point his voice would crack and he could escape again.

  He just needed some time alone, he told himself. To cope. To find new tasks, new moments.

  Most days he ended up at the curb by Marissa’s cemetery.

  Twice he staked out the post office, but that’s all it was. That’s all it had ever been.

  When people die, they’re dead, right?

  What other option could there even be?

  The world didn’t work on magic, on fantasy.

  And of course, at the cemetery, he wasn’t alone.

  There was a woman, a completely human woman, who visited a headstone some four times a day. She would collapse, lie there for minutes, then gather herself, leave only to come back three hours later.