by Patrick Ness
If even then.
But eat. Taste. Try.
These are the fruits of your sins.
Are they bitter? Are they sweet? Are they bittersweet?
Taste your regret. Taste your guilt. Taste your longing.
And forget.
Forget when you were tactless or cruel. Forget when you were selfish or ungenerous or mean. Forget when you raged or you criticised or you belittled.
Forget when you gave in to your momentary longing that time in Swindon, because you were so attentive to your wife after, so much more caring, so much more loving, that you convinced yourself it hadn’t been a sin at all, that it had been a good thing.
Then forget the sin of self-deception.
Forget when you shoplifted the Mars bar from the off-licence. Forget when you found the wallet in the carpark and returned it to its owner claiming the money was already gone when you picked it up. Forget all the joy and happy hours you stole from your favoured younger sister out of jealousy and self-hate.
Forget the jealousy.
And please, please forget the self-hate.
Eat, even though the taste is harsh. Eat and forget. For sin is only another word for the harm you’ve done to yourselves.
And you’ve done so much harm.
You have taken the unfathomable gift of life, given to you by a universe you cannot even begin to interpret, and you have used it as occasion to worry, to suffer. You have found ways to squander even unbounded riches and plenty. You have brought untold war and death on each other. Every system of government you have ever devised has–
But no.
No.
Now is not the time for judgement.
Not yet.
Nor are we those who will pass it.
You will do that to yourselves.
And you will not count it a blessing.
But first you must finish dying. As much as we might wish to cut your burdens from you, we cannot. You must do that yourselves.
Who were you? What do you hold on to?
Love?
Yes, love. Always love. How you went on about it. And you were right to do so. As an emollient, as a pleasure, as a meaning in an existential universe, love takes some beating.
But it’s the thing that attaches your previous lives to you the most. Love is the stickiest glue, and it will trap you here, which is a situation you would not like.
Fortunately, we have made it easier for you. The food you ate, your sins, they were poisoned. Poisoned with forgetfulness.
… do not complain. We do not listen to complaints. These swords, this armour, these teeth, they are not the accoutrements of ones who are amenable to complaint.
You must forget, you must. It is the only way.
You are forgetting now. Can you not feel the burden of your lives falling away? All the unnecessary attachments, all the loves that broke your heart, all the passions that seemed so important for those few fleeting moments …
What do you mean, no?
Do not be stubborn. We shall not abide stubbornness.
You, you there, yes, you. You are forgetting. You are forgetting the girl who let her slightly crooked teeth get in the way of seeing herself as beautiful until you did it first. Feel her fade, let her go, her with the laugh that caused restaurants to fall silent, her with the shoe size she always lied about, her who you loved so deeply there were actual physical changes to your heartrate, your blood pressure, when she walked into the room. She who mourns you now, you must let her go.
Yes, you must.
And you, hiding in the middle of the others, hoping it would escape our attention that you ate nothing for fear of this exact thing happening, you must forget the boy with the lopsided smile who never sneezed once but always eight or nine times in quick succession and who you taught how to drive and whose forearms were always such a source of daydreamed pleasure.
Cast him off. Set him adrift. Be free of him.
And you there, with the thoughts of your twin sons. And you, sir, still suffering with unrequited love for your postman. All of you, with your lovers and partners and friends and sisters and children and pets.
Quite a lot of pets, actually.
But you must let them go. If you do not, the rest of this journey will be harder than you can bear. You will go astray. You will be lost.
We will give you a moment to say goodbye to all that you loved.
Are you ready? Have you set down your memories? Have you said a final goodbye to your loves and your losses and your sins?
If so, then we shall proceed.
If not, we shall proceed regardless, though we cannot be responsible for what might happen to you.
For now we come to the most dangerous part of the journey. A part which has seeped into your own beliefs about death. A part a good portion of you are expecting. And frankly, the portion of you that aren’t expecting this are the ones who should be expecting it the most.
We have come to the fire.
The same fire that sets our swords ablaze. The fire that scours the slate with white ash. The fire that burns away the rust you’ve let accumulate on your soul. For you have been mistaken all your lives.
Fire does not destroy. Fire changes.
Are you ready to be changed?
We are sorry you are frightened, but you have no choice. You must continue. You ate more than your fair share just now and we did not have enough to feed the ever-hungrier dead who follow you. If you stay behind, you will be consumed.
But you will not stay behind. We carry swords for a reason.
For example, you there! Where do you think you’re going?
… Yes, that is now one fewer of you who will continue this journey. Do not ask what happens when you are felled by our swords. You do not wish to know.
Now. Onwards.
Do not be afraid of the fire. If you have left behind all that you were, you have nothing to fear. If you are an empty soul, ready for the kiln, you will feel nothing but the purest pleasure, a sensation like a warm bath. Except on fire.
You will pass through and re-emerge a lighter being. You will be relieved of the last of your connection to time. You will know a cleanliness like you have never experienced, not on your soiled earth, not with your soiled lives …
Again, apologies, we are not here to judge.
But consider the word ‘clean’ for a moment.
Do you know it? There are at least three obsessive compulsives among you who claim to know it, but none of you have even the slightest idea.
Even when you washed your bodies, even when you soaked them in luxurious baths that could have watered the crops of an entire drought-stricken village, even then you were left crawling with colonies of uncountable bacteria. Under your fingernails, living in your gut, roosting in their thousands on your very eyelashes.
And those of you who would clean your minds. With logic and reason. With piety and good works. How much more numerous were the bacteria that infested your nooks and crannies. What prejudices did you hide? What diseases of personality did you hope no one would ever discover about you, lest they bring them to light?
You strove for cleanliness while standing in mud. You dared to reach for the divine while–
… One moment.
… One moment.
Yes, yes, all right. Fine. Fine, I said. We said.
… Yes, I’m going to tell them, would you just–
Yes, okay, whatever, you were also capable of great works of art and literature, of love and compassion and kindness, of generosity and bravery, of curiosity and reason and faith and joy and tenderness and exaltation and commitment and mercy and flirtation and pity and justice and humour and beauty and gentleness and care and, and, and, and … punctuality. And dressing well. And returning change when you were given too much. And not killing anyone (except you, sir, we have our eye on you). And being nice to cows. And paying your TV Licence. And watching BBC4. And separating out your recyclables. And slowly walking ten kilometres to
raise £130.45 for lupus.
Yes, yes, you were capable of wonders. Yes, all right!
Happy?
You will still burn.
This way, please. Over here. Come along. If you have read your guidebooks and followed all instructions, you have nothing to fear.
Calm yourselves. The fire is already beneath your feet. It already rises up what you persist in thinking of as your skin. You should feel the ease start to take you–
What do you mean, it hurts?
How can it? If you did everything we asked of you.
You have no bodies to be injured, no nerves to alert yourselves to pain. How can you be–?
Unless.
Unless, of course.
You were unable to leave yourselves behind, weren’t you? You were unable to set aside your loves and your transgressions. You still cling to the memories and grievings of your former lives. You stubbornly look death itself in the face and say, ‘No, this I will not give up, this I will not let go.’
You do, yes, you do. We hear you.
You there. You bow your head in false humility while clinging on to the day you watched your daughter graduate from Cambridge with a first in Economics. Four months before she was drowned in a river. You will not let it go, the happiness. You hoped to meet her here, and you will not let her go.
And you. With the wife you loved for forty-one years who died and left you on your own for another intolerable eleven, you refuse to relinquish the smell of lavender with which she used to dab her pillow. Even when all other memories faded during your long, slow, interminable death, you clung to that, an oasis in a desert, and you are damned if you are going to let it go now, now when you may have a chance to see her again. Well, sir, you are correct. You are damned.
And you, the little boy lost to neglect, who does not know how to set aside his hope that this is a better place, that this is where Mummy and Daddy came on those long hours they left you alone, the hope that you must find them here soon if only we could all get to where we are going, if only the terrible, terrible men with the burning swords and the claws and the great black wings unfurled with the sufferings of millions – because, oh, yes, the young among you can see us in their minds all too well, they have not yet learned to ignore the reality of their imaginings – and they think if only these great, giant men with their gnashing teeth and stitched-over eyes would show us the way out, the way through–
But that is impossible!
You have refused your duty! You have refused your instruction!
You will not forget yourselves!
The flames engulf you and burn you away! You have provided them all the fuel they could wish for! They are the flames of the still-hungry dead and they consume you!
You burn! You feed the fire!
Until there is nothing left of you!
And you are–
Utterly–
Hopelessly–
ETERNALLY–
Lost.
…
…
But not.
Are you still with us?
Most of you are. Most but not all. The mother found her drowned daughter. The husband found his wife. The matador found his bull. If you listen, you may hear them weeping together.
They’ll all come along. In time.
When they’re ready to put down the swords they’ve just picked up.
Someone has to protect the rest of you from the hungry dead.
And who better than the dead who’ve been sated?
But now, come, those who remain, you’re nearly there.
You’ve died. And died again.
Congratulations. And welcome.
What did you hold on to?
You were willing to let some things slip away, voluntarily, through forgetting, through the fire itself, but you also defied us. You defied both the darkness and the flames. You defied our swords and our threats.
You defied judgement itself to hold on to your most precious thing.
Which is, of course, the thing that makes you who you are.
What did you hold on to beyond the last moment? What was it that death could not even take from you?
But you do not have to tell us. It is written on your souls.
And will always be.
You will take it with you from this place. You will not be able to read it yourselves – for we can never look at our own souls, lest the magnitude kill us – but it is there, forever.
And it will dictate your next shape.
So we hope it was love. Even we, with our swords, the dead who stayed, we hope it was love.
We hope it was not sorrow, but if it was, you will have this chance again, when we hope a better word may be written.
You are what you remember. You are what you hold on to.
And it is time to take that thing, and go.
The door awaits.
What’s beyond it? you ask.
Another life? Another world? Another kind of place altogether?
Even we do not know and will not find out until we are ready to enter it ourselves. We only know that most of you will return here. Again and again, writing your most important words on your souls until they are at last full and ready.
Hold them tightly.
The time is here.
The time is now.
Do not be frightened.
You’ve come through fire, we would not harm you now.
Take that which even death could not make you relinquish.
Take what is best of yourselves.
Hold it close.
And be.
Reborn.
Notes and Acknowledgements
Two of the stories in this collection were previously published: ‘Sydney Is a City of Jaywalkers’ in Genre magazine (US), and ‘The Way All Trends Do’ in Ambit (UK). My thanks to the editors of both.
‘Jesus’ Elbows and Other Christian Urban Myths’ contains one urban myth told to me in an email as absolute truth by its sender, whom I’ll let remain anonymous (though believers that true are notoriously hard to embarrass). Another is plucked and adapted from the swirling worldwide urban myth ether. The others are invented. I decline to say which.
The epigraph is from the song ‘Zebra’, from the album 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields; lyrics written by Stephin Merrit. Copyright © 1999 Stephin Merrit, published by Gay and Loud (ASCAP). Reprinted with permission.
Thanks to: Michelle Kass; Resham Naqvi; Philip Gwyn Jones, Jon Butler, Karen Duffy, Sarah Savitt, and all the other fine folk at Flamingo; T. C. Boyle; Patrick Neate; Nicola Barker (for the Sillitoe!); Jonathan Ruffle for a timely printer lifebuoy; John Mullins, Andrew Thiele, and Phil Rodak. Special thanks to Patrick Gale for his unfailing generosity, and to Patrick again and Aidan Hicks for their hospitality.
And my love to Marc Nowell.
About the Author
PATRICK NESS is the author of seven novels and a short-story collection. His five novels for teenagers have won the Carnegie Medal twice, the Costa Children’s Fiction Prize, and have been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Prize and the Arthur C Clarke Award. His first adult novel, The Crash of Hennington, and short-story collection, Topics About Which I Know Nothing, are being proudly reissued by Fourth Estate. Patrick’s works have been translated into 25 languages and have sold over a million copies worldwide. Born in America, he lives in London.
By the same author
More Than This
The Crane Wife
A Monster Calls
Monsters of Men
The Ask and the Answer
The Knife of Never Letting Go
The Crash of Hennington
Copyright
Fourth Estate
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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2014
Copyright © Patrick Ness 2004
P
atrick Ness asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Version: 2014-01-10
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1 In the interests of full disclosure, the author wishes to state that he was groomgrabbed at the age of nine. He was taken to the Glendale Galleria, outfitted in Ralph Lauren, and deposited back home with a chocolate-chip cookie and a copy of World magazine. Although he remembers the experience as ‘delightful,’ he wishes to express his intentions to remain objective on the matter.
