Mano looked down at his own body. It was far too big. It was so big, there was hardly any space for the chair to swivel and recline. His size had become freakish, and could not be ignored by even his most loyal customers. His head and shoulders had collapsed inward toward his own center. His body was its own cage. The things he held settled into his body until they became his body. They felt nothing at all like love anymore. He held onto them only because he didn’t quite know how to let them go.
Mano straightened what had become of his legs to rise from his barber’s chair. He walked into the back room. He pushed his nose against the black square. “Are you in there, Pepe? Will you show me your face?”
Pepe showed his face inside of the black square.
Mano wanted to go inside the black square with Pepe, but the black square was just a black square and nothing else. “I can’t come in there with you,” Mano said. He couldn’t hear Pepe say anything back. He couldn’t hear a voice. He couldn’t remember what Pepe’s voice sounded like. And he couldn’t remember Pepe’s smell either. How is it we can lose a sound or a smell so easily once someone is gone, but their face—their face is always right there, floating in front of our own to haunt us, to taunt us back into a realm that doesn’t really even exist, and where we aren’t even welcome if it did.
Mano pushed his nose into the black square against Pepe’s own nose, and breathed in like that so deeply, he almost lost his balance. He wanted to breathe in the whole world, but couldn’t. There was no smell he recognized in that air other than the smell of the living.
Then Mano finally asked what he had meant to ask. “Are you in there, Mano? Will you show me your face?” Mano dug around into the mess of his own body, and found the radio Pepe had given him. He turned it on. He wanted to hear Pepe inside of it, from very deep in the future, maybe playing a polka, but instead some priest’s voice inside of the radio said, “Do you feel his love?”
“No, I don’t,” answered Mano. “I don’t feel it.”
Mano could only feel the weight of the radio asking the question. It was just a radio. It was just a radio. It was just a radio. He threw it at the black square.
The black square cracked perfectly in half. A new horizon right in front of Mano’s eyes split the world inside the black square into a top half and a bottom half. The top half of the black square fell onto Mano’s head. It was heavy. Mano saw a sharp bright white light—a bolt of lightning behind his eyes. He kept his eyes closed to will death into taking him further into the darkness beyond the lightning bolt.
Beulah Minx was suddenly standing above him. She helped him lift the top half of the broken black square off of his head. She stood there, silently, waiting to see if Mano could still talk.
“What do you want?” Mano squinted at her.
“We’re looking for Father Felipe.”
Mano could barely understand Beulah. She spoke with the kind of voice that she, herself, had never before heard. “Who?”
“Father Felipe. Was he getting his haircut?” Beulah tried again.
“I can’t look for anything. I don’t have my glasses,” Mano said. He didn’t know if it was Beulah’s deafness or his sore head that was causing her voice to muddy and echo in his ears. He knew only that Beulah could understand how it must feel to not only not remember a voice, but to have never even known a voice, and to have never even known your own. Mano thought she had asked him something about his father. “What about my father?”
Beulah stood there, perplexed, not answering his question.
“Father?” he said loudly, exaggerating his lips so they could be read. “Fah...thurrr.”
Beulah was staring at his mouth.
Then she tried again. “Far...ther...Far...lee...pay,” she said again, but more carefully this time.
“Who is Father Farlipe?” Mano asked.
Beulah shrugged her shoulders and turned around to walk back out into the crowd on the street. As she left, she looked down at the black poodle that was born from the death hole of her dead husband, The Postman.
“There you are! There you are!” she exclaimed in a voice that to Mano sounded like, “Dear, war! Dear, war!” Beulah picked up the poodle, tucked it under her arm, and walked back out onto Last Street.
Mano felt so alone. Dear, war. Dear, war. In these trenches, we can’t trust even our own eyes upon the loyal.
34.
The Vuillemeyers were the father, mother, five sisters, and three brothers of The Humanitarians from Nun’s Hat. The Humanitarians were siblings within the Vuillemeyer family. All twelve Vuillemeyers were of different ages, of course, but they all shared identical shaggy blonde hair, and they were all exactly the same height. When news of The Humanitarians death finally reached Nun’s Hat, The Vuillemeyers were determined to find and recover the bodies of the two adored members of their family. All remaining ten Vuillemeyers traced The Humanitarians’ route along the banks of The Cause. Because they were all the same height, when they walked in a single-file line they looked like a blonde caterpillar.
Pie Time was described to The Vuillemeyers only in letters from The Humanitarians. Their letters never mentioned the first thing about God’s Finger. There was money to be made in assisting those who were left behind to deal with the newly dead, and The Humanitarians were to make as much of it as possible without sharing. In the very last letter received by The Vuillemeyers, The Businessman was described as “the most generous people” they had ever met. The Humanitarians also wrote that they had gotten a well-paying job from The Businessman “simply by walking around town, shopping and holding conversations, while wearing beautiful cages.” None of The Vuillemeyers knew what the cages were for.
Just before The Vuillemeyers arrived in Pie Time, Mitzi Let was crawling on her knees down the center of Last Street in front of the XO Cafe like a cat that had gotten the worse half of a terrible fight, dragging her broken arm behind her along the ground. She was not wearing the cage she found in the sheep’s pen behind the butcher shop.
“They need two more bodies.” Mitzi’s words fell from the gashes of her body, into the dirt of the street. “Two more... bodies...for their pyramid.”
The Banker stood from his favorite table inside the cafe and walked up to the window. “Is that Mitzi Let?” he said into his mug of coffee. “I think I’m seeing things. I think Mitzi is back from the dead.”
“No, no, once you die, you die. That’s one thing I know for sure,” said The Landlord.
“Well, have a look for yourself.” The Banker pointed at the woman on her hands and knees in the middle of Last Street.
“We’ve stopped dying, and now we’re all going to come back,” said The Businessman. “We’ll be able to make something off the coming and the going!”
“Slow down, slow down.”
The Businessman, The Landlord, and The Banker waddled out the front door of the cafe in their custom gold cages, and stood in a line on the sidewalk outside of the cafe.
“Mitzi?! Mitzi, is that you?” shouted The Landlord, from about 30 feet away. “Are you ok?”
“They need two more,” Mitzi yelled.
“My god, that is Mitzi,” said The Landlord to The Businessman. He yelled back to her. “What’s that you say? Two more what?”
“Two more bodies. For the pyramid,” Mitzi answered.
“Why aren’t you still dead?” shouted The Banker.
Mitzi fell down to her elbows and stopped crawling. The crowd that once stood at a distance now collapsed closely upon her in the middle of the street. She looked as though she was in her last minute of life.
“Someone, go get Father Felipe,” said The Chef. “Mitzi’s about to die.”
Inside the crowd, Beulah Minx could read The Chef’s lips. Her need to feel helpful sent her into the nearest business to ask around for Father Felipe. The nearest business was Mano’s barbershop. She returned a few minutes later with no new information and a black poodle under her arm.
“They’re coming ba
ck to life now!” shouted The Businessman, as if to celebrate Mitzi’s return, as she choked for air near their feet.
“Mitzi, tell us about the two bodies,” asked The Landlord, more to the point. “Who needs them?”
“Nun’s Hat,” Mitzi choked.
“What’s the Nun’s Hat?”
“Nun’s Hat saved me from death in the sea. Then I woke up on the pyramid.”
“Mitzi, we need you to speak clearly now.”
Mitzi hung her head, exhausted. “They need two more. For the pyramid.”
“She’s gone mad,” said The Businessman to other people in the crowd. “There’s nothing that can save us from death except our XO Life Cages. We all know that. Poor Mitzi, poor poor Mitzi.”
“What pyramid is she talking about?” asked The Chef.
“Two more bodies for what?” asked The Landlord.
“I think she’s dead,” said Mary, who nudged Mitzi’s shoulder with her foot.
Mitzi revived for a moment and said, “Pepe?”
“Pepe is dead,” said Mary, trying to help in her own way. “Remember? You were there. Down by The Cure?” Mary pointed toward The Cure. “You were there, Mitzi.”
Mitzi put her hands on the ground and tried to remember. Then she started to cry.
Just then, that blonde caterpillar, The Vuillemeyers, approached the gathering crowd on Last Street. They were tired and weary from their long journey from Nun’s Hat, walking up toward town from the banks of The Cure, past Mano’s barbershop.
“Who are you?” asked The Landlord.
“We’re The Vuillemeyers,” said all of The Vuillemeyers simultaneously.
“Can we help you?” asked the Businessman.
“We’ve come looking for two people,” they said.
“Two people, huh? Where do you come from?” asked The Businessman.
“Oh dear, were they Humanitarians?” asked The Landlord. “And were they beautiful? A man and a woman?”
“Yes, exactly!” exclaimed all of The Vuillemeyers.
Everyone in the crowd looked at each other hoping someone else would be the bearer of the bad news, which was that The Humanitarians were freshly buried in XO Graves.
“Ask them where they’re from,” said Mitzi.
“Where are you from?” The Landlord asked the Vuillemeyers.
“Nun’s Hat,” they all said.
After some silent debating, The Businessman broke the news to The Vuillemeyers. Grief struck hard and swiftly. It reverberated loudly, like static electricity between all ten of them.
35.
The sun was the first of three things to rise. A minute later, the bodies of The Humanitarians from Nun’s Hat were the second and third.
“Good morning,” said Father Felipe solemnly. Then he lowered his head before saying the rest. Father Felipe was presiding over Pie Time’s first ever exhumation in the back of XO Graves. While the priest spoke, The Shoveler and his two sons, Ernesto and Ernest, conspicuously handed out brochures to the congregation which highlighted the differences in amenities between XO Graves and their own graveyard.
“We have gathered this morning to raise back up into the world this beautiful man, and this beautiful woman, whom we did not know well enough in life, to return them to their beautiful family, and to the very special town further down The Cure known as Nun’s Hat, our new sister town, which we will know in life very soon.” As Father Felipe spoke to the congregation, he held the hand of the mother Vuillemeyer, who was standing nearest to him.
“You know, Nun’s Hat’s been there this whole time,” Father Felipe added. He was going off script for a moment to passively scold Pie Time’s blindness.
“It sounds beautiful,” said The Landlord.
Then Father Felipe returned to the script, sticking his arms through the bars of his cage to gesture. “Life, friends, is a boring cage. Your bodies are cages, and your cages are cages. But death! Death is no cage. Death is your freedom from a cage. But you must wear a cage in life, or else, from what would you gain your freedom?”
The crowd released a collective ahh, as if they had just understood the simple solution to a very complicated math problem. Ernesto tucked a brochure for The Shoveler’s graveyard into a woman’s purse. Ernest curtsied to a man who politely declined a brochure, and then he tucked one into the bars of the man’s cage anyway. Most of the people attending the exhumation had a bouquet of flowers purchased from XO Flowers in their fists.
“They died the moment they took off their cages. Forgive them, Lord, for their carelessness, for getting lost in the momentary allure of vulnerability, and forgive Mano Medium, whose misguided lessons on the love of death brought them to you before you were ready, and before they were ready.”
“That’s not how it happened,” interrupted Ernesto.
The Businessman shushed Ernesto. All ten Vuillemeyers simultaneously shifted their weight from all their left legs to all their right legs.
The caged Father Felipe ignored Ernesto’s correction, modeling that gesture of ignorance for everyone else to follow, then picked up the guitar that was resting inside of his cage. “These cages, these cages, these are not these people’s final cages.” He strummed his guitar on each these and the final. “Their final cages belong at home with the Vuillemeyers in Nun’s Hat.”
With that, The Shoveler and his sons stepped aside, and the rest of the crowd lifted The Humanitarians on top of their heads. They formed a line. They looked like ants carrying two bread crumbs.
All ten grief-stricken Vuillemeyers led the way.
It was the first time the people of Pie Time had ever ventured down The Cure. The path never strayed from the banks of the river, following its side at every bend like a shy child to a parent’s leg. The noise of the rushing water comforted the weary travelers along the way. They walked slightly downhill mostly, and trampled on dead grass. The exodus was, for the most part, a mass exodus. The path in front of the people was grass, and the path behind them was worn down into dirt. They were making the path visible behind them. Some people saw apple trees for the first time, and some of them saw beavers for the first time, building a dam.
Father Felipe spoke from the very front of the line. He was a knowledgeable guide for their tour. “That is a beaver, folks. See how it makes a home, just like you? It wants what we all want.” He spoke loudly with a kind of eagerness that fueled their walking. “Open your eyes! See the world around you. It is full of mystery. You need not be blind to it.” The people were like a train, and Father Felipe was their engine.
Mary Minutes got out of line to pick three apples from a tree despite The Baker’s clear conditions regarding staying in line. She gave one apple to her sister, Mimi, and she gave another one to Mitzi Let, who was lagging behind and looked as though she needed food. Lana Rile explained the difference between the sun and the moon to her daughter, Fran. The Landlord ran out of XO Cigarettes, and forgot to bring another pack, but The Foreman gave him an extra pack from his shirt pocket. Beulah Minx had a rock in her shoe, and the new Postman waited for her while she took the time to sit down on the path to remove it. Then he helped her back up to her feet.
The Cure was meant for the dead, and in a way, this path alongside it was no different. Though, instead of placing a corpse on a raft made of sticks, logs, and brush, saying goodbyes, setting it aflame, and launching it downriver from a sad little dock, the people of Pie Time took upon themselves the difficult task of carrying the bodies of strangers, the exhumed Humanitarians, alongside the river. For the first time, the people of Pie Time were seeing the world that their dead had seen, and in doing so, they were making it a path for the living.
The Humanitarians’ bodies were transported in two strong burlap sacks donated by the XO Factory. They were sacks that had once carried tobacco from the tobacco fields to Pie Time. They each had a giant XO stenciled with black paint on the side. Each of the men in the group took turns carrying the bodies above them. As their shoulders became tired, they
’d let the weight of the Humanitarians’ bodies rest on the tops of their life cages. They could easily keep the bodies balanced there. They’d puff on an XO Cigarette while they walked with the body resting on the top of their cage. Father Felipe lectured them when he saw the bodies resting on the cages. To him, it was disrespectful to the dead to not hold their full weight in your arms. True respect for the dead should be painful. Pain is a gift. “Hold them high! Hold them as high as you’d want to be carried,” he shouted from the front of the line. The men’s backs stiffened. Their shoulders became rocky cliffs.
Almost all of the men in town were in that line, except for Mano and Mothers, who were both instead nearly dead on the floors of their own businesses. Pie Time had been left alone to the very few.
“Pepe?”
“I’m not Pepe.”
Even though Mano could not conjure the sound of Pepe’s voice, it was clear that the voice of the person now entering his barbershop was not Pepe’s. The voice belonged to a woman. Mano had been awoken at some point in the middle of the night by it. The room was dark. The parallelogram of sunlight that lit Mano’s lap in the barbershop earlier that day, or perhaps the day before, was now a parallelogram of blue moonlight. For a moment, Mano wondered whether or not his barbershop had electric lights at all. It had been a long time since he had been inside of it during the night.
Mano could see the blurry shapes of someone’s ankles in the moonlight, the back of her calves, and her shoes. She was standing on the top half of the black square. Mano tried to get up into a sitting position on the floor, but the weight of all the things on his body was too great.
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