The Living

by Isaac Marion

  Abram wonders if he’s coming down with a fever. The heat passes through him in waves, and he sees strange things through the windows, veiled and abstracted by the dark tint—eyes blinking in the desert, bottomless potholes lit by deep fires, the silhouettes of giants ambling behind the mountains. But he blinks hard and manages to say, “Yes sir,” and the air cools a little. The sweat dries on his face.

  I

  I am looking at a TV screen, and there’s a man in a suit addressing the viewers, but this is not Axiom’s manic ad campaign. It’s the introduction to tonight’s episode of The Twilight Zone.

  The kids found the ancient VHS tape in one of the drawers. They uncovered the little TV when they built their cushion fort. The fort is now a bed again, and Julie and I sit squeezed in with the kids, watching a distant era’s vision of the uncanny while a less sanitary one seethes all around us.

  I can feel it in flickers. Subtle instances of object impermanence. The wrinkles in the blanket rearrange themselves when I glance away. The pattern of the ceiling stains is slightly different every time I look up. The hole the Boney stabbed into the rear window widens and contracts, as if forgetting exactly what made it. But this is all in my head, purely subjective, and if I tried to prove it—if I took photos or made sketches to record the current states—I suspect they’d stay as they were. It’s the things no one’s watching that start to drift.

  Tonight’s episode is unusually quiet. Almost entirely wordless. I hear the squeak and scrape of Tomsen working on the axle, the occasional grunt from M when she requests his help, the whistling of wind through the window hole. On the TV, a group of Civil War soldiers is preparing to execute a man by hanging. I begin to squirm, wondering if this might be too intense for the kids, but as the condemned man teeters on the edge of the bridge and a noose is tightened around his throat, I feel a tightness in my own throat, and I have an embarrassing realization: my discomfort isn’t for the kids. This hokey bit of 1960s television is too intense for me. It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced fiction of any kind, and maybe the desert’s blurring of boundaries is adding to the sensation, but I am identifying too strongly with the man in the noose.

  I glance over at Julie, but her face reveals nothing. She is as grim and silent as the soldiers on the screen.

  The condemned man falls. My stomach lurches. But the rope breaks and he sinks into the river. He swims to safety, and as it dawns on him that he’s escaped death, a surreal folk tune mumbles on the soundtrack:

  A living man…a living man...I want to be...a living man…

  The man laughs and stares rapturously at everything around him, the chirping birds, the sun through tree branches.

  I see each tree...I read each vein...I hear each bird...upon each leaf…

  He makes his way through the woods to his home. His wife runs out to greet him.

  I want to be…a living man…

  His wife reaches out to embrace him; it’s perfect; it’s too perfect—there’s a gruesome snap. The scene cuts. The man is dangling from the rope, swinging from the bridge, dead.

  “So he didn’t really get away?” Sprout asks Julie. “He just imagined it?”

  “I guess so,” Julie says, her eyebrows slightly raised. “That was…a weird episode.”

  The wind through the hole in the window sounds weirdly human, like a voice singing off key. It’s right between Joan and Alex’s heads, warbling in their ears, and they both twist around and frown intently as if to shush it.

  “What if that happened to us?” Sprout says. “What if we all died a long time ago?”

  Julie might still be stoned enough to answer a question like that, but I don’t stick around to listen. My legs are numb and my neck hurts and I’m remembering what Julie said last night.

  I’m not ready to lose you.

  I climb off the bed and step out into the dry heat of the evening. The fire on the western horizon is spreading. The shadow on the eastern horizon is deepening.

  “Need any help?” I ask Tomsen for the third or fourth time. The left wheel is off and Tomsen has her head deep in the wheel well, looking a bit like a lion tamer. By way of reply, she hums a brief melody.

  “We’re good,” M says, taking a wrench that Tomsen hands him and replacing it with another from the bag. “She’s uh…in the zone.”

  I nod. If they did need my help, I wouldn’t have much to offer anyway. Most boys raised in poverty learn basic repair skills, but when God is coming tomorrow to burn away the world, you don’t think much about making things last. The only talents I learned from my life at the bottom are how to fight, how to kill, and how to convince others to do the same.

  I start to wander down the highway, toward the fire in the west, and Tomsen must see my feet because she calls to me from under the RV: “Careful. Eight minds make a small island. Don’t wade out too far.”

  I don’t bother to decode her metaphor. I’m thinking about the forced smile on Julie’s face when she asked who I’d be when I finished “forming.” She tried to make it look like anticipation, but she couldn’t hide the fear.

  The wind from the west is hot on my face. I walk slowly, each step requiring permission.

  “R,” Julie calls to my back and I turn around. She’s hanging out of the RV doorway, one hand on the frame. “Where are you going?”

  I shrug.

  She hops down and approaches me with a hint of caution. “You okay?”

  I consider offering some explanation—just taking a piss—but I shrug and continue walking. She walks with me.

  We have a couple hours before nightfall, but the rocks and wiry brush are starting to cast long shadows. I try to imagine being alone out here at night, submerged in that viscous blackness… Would the ground even hold me? Would I fall through into some indeterminate abyss?

  “R,” Julie says, “can I talk about Perry for a minute?”

  My wandering thoughts screech to a halt. Of all the subjects I thought might come up tonight, that wasn’t one of them.

  “Not about…you and him,” she adds quickly. “About me and him.”

  I’m confused and more than a little apprehensive, but I shrug. “Okay…”

  She watches the cracked pavement scroll past her feet for a moment. “It was hard, dating him. Really hard.” Her hands are stuffed in her pockets and her bare arms are pressed against her sides. She looks cold, and I wonder if the furnace blast from the west is only in my head. “He’d been through a lot and he…had a lot of baggage. No more than me, but two messes don’t cancel each other out, you know? They just make a bigger mess.”

  I glance back at the RV. It has shrunk to the size of a van, but I’m not seeing any holes in reality yet. I keep walking.

  “Even when it was good, even when we were really in love, we fought all the time. He found so many things to get angry about, so many triggers and insecurities, and he brought mine out, too…” She shakes her head. “It was hell. Like one of those Bosch paintings, just a big, smashed-together mess of demons.” She weaves her fingers into a twisted knot to illustrate this, and the half-healed stump of her ring finger lends authentic horror to the image. She’s giving an accurate summary of what I’ve seen in Perry’s memories…but where could she be going with it?

  “So when I met you…” Her face loosens and lightens and she takes in a deep breath. “You were like a wide open field. A Monet. No baggage, no history, no collection of neuroses, you were just this…presence. I could sit and talk to you for hours and unpack everything I’d been holding in, and you were just there, solid and simple. Once I was sure you weren’t going to eat me, anyway.” She tries to crack a smile but it falters into a grimace. “I liked that you were blank. I didn’t have to think about who you were or what you wanted, your ideas or your qualities. All that mattered was how you made me feel, and you made me feel safe. You loved me, you were there for me, and
that was it.”

  My pace has been slowing as she talks, my brows lowering, and now she stops and grabs my shoulder with one hand, staring me in the eyes. “I’m telling you that as a confession, okay? It was a fucked up way to look at a person—like you weren’t a person. Like you were comfortable furniture. But that’s what I thought I needed then.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I need a person. And…now that’s what you are.”

  I hadn’t realized I was clenching for a blow until I feel myself relaxing.

  “I want to meet you,” she says, looking up at me with round eyes that are starting to glisten. “I do. But I’m scared you’ll be a stranger.”

  I stand still for a moment. I’m scared too, but the relief of this sudden openness is softening the fear, neutralizing the acid in my stomach like a wash of cold milk. “How can I make it easier? How should I…introduce myself?”

  She looks at the ground for a moment, then back up to me. “Slowly.” She takes my hands and holds them in front of her. “Ease me into it.”

  She releases my hands and steps off the road. We stroll into the desert, our boots kicking up puffs of dust from the baked earth.

  “Ask me something,” I suggest.

  She thinks for a few paces. “I want to ask what your name was…”

  “Not that.”

  “…but I’m not going to,” she continues, “because it’d be weird to just suddenly know that, after all this time. It’d be confusing. And kind of…sad?”

  I nod, relieved that she understands. “My name is R.”

  “Okay. So…” She eyes me up and down as we walk. “How old are you, R?”

  I consider this. Scanning my fragmented past, I’m not even sure I know the answer. And does she mean how long have I existed, or how long have I lived? Do I count the seven or eight years I spent in the coma of the plague? Am I the actual age of my body, or is it my mind that defines me?

  I clear my throat. “How about…yes or no questions.”

  She laughs. “Okay, sure. Make it fun. Are you…under twenty-five?”

  “No.”

  “Over thirty-five?”

  I pause to do some blurry math. “Probably not.”

  “Okay. I can live with that range.” She hesitates. “Married?”

  “No.”

  She nods. “Girlfriend?”

  “You mean…ever?”

  “When you died. Did you have someone? Did you leave someone behind?”

  I hesitate, then shake my head. “No.”

  She releases a breath. “Okay. That would’ve been tough.”

  She doesn’t need to hear about Rosa today. She doesn’t need to hear that one of Axiom’s glorified prostitutes was the closest I ever got to “having someone,” or that I watched her die in a forest while she cursed me with her last breath. No, that wouldn’t be “easing her into it.” That wouldn’t be “making it fun.”

  Julie punts a dirt clod and it spins off into the desert. “Okay, let’s just get this one out of the way so I don’t have to keep wondering…are you a virg—”

  “No.”

  She looks at me with raised eyebrows. “Wow. Didn’t have to think about that one. Are you, like…very not a virgin?”

  I grit my teeth in a cringing grin. “Yes?”

  Her brows rise further. “How many?”

  “Yes or no questions.”

  “More than fifty?”

  “I don’t remember the number.”

  “But more than fifty.”

  “Well…probably.”

  “Wow.” She nods, jutting her lower lip. “You’re full of surprises, Mr. Zombie.”

  I wince at this understatement. If something as benign as my sex life shocks her, what will the rest of my history do? Maybe we should stop. Maybe it’s too soon, too fast, she said “slowly” and I sense us gaining speed, maybe we should—

  “Did you work for Axiom?”

  I have a flash of panic, but there’s a surprising lack of accusation in her tone.

  “I mean you obviously did. That’s no secret. So did Abram and Marcus, so did a lot of people. Who cares?” She’s not looking at me as she says all this, but now she glances sideways, grimacing with dread. “But you weren’t…one of those ‘pitchmen’ were you?”

  “No.” An easy one. There were no such creatures in my day. Although was the creature I was any less loathsome?

  “Okay,” she says, “I’m starting to get a picture here. Hotshot young Axiom employee, living large, fucking all the bitches…but secretly guilty and tormented, right?”

  I nod.

  “Yeah,” she agrees. “If you weren’t tormented, then you really are a stranger to me.”

  “Very tormented.”

  I glance behind us. The RV has shrunk to the size of a small car, and the sun is about to slip behind the mountains. Now would be a good time to turn back, before we drift any further into the encroaching shadows. I open my mouth to suggest this, but Julie is still digging.

  “You also know how to fight,” she muses, almost to herself. “You’re weirdly lethal for such a skinny dude. You must have been a soldier or something, right?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Have you killed a lot of people? Is that what you didn’t want to remember?”

  I don’t answer. I don’t like this path. I didn’t expect her to get so far so fast.

  “It’s okay, R, these days everyone’s killed a few people. I killed three before I turned thirteen. How many was it? More than ten?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than twenty?”

  “Yes.”

  She pauses. Her steps are slowing a little. “We’re talking about your first life, right? Not the people you ate when you were Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than…a hundred?”

  I feel the skeleton of a small mammal crunch beneath my boot. I stop walking and look Julie in the eyes. “Directly? With my own hands? One person.”

  She seems smaller somehow as she looks up at me. “Just one?”

  “Just one. Directly.”

  The followup question is obvious, but the dark heat in my eyes steers her away from it. She swallows. She looks queasy. “What about…before Axiom?” Her face brightens as she seizes on this idea. “Yeah, enough about the fucking Axiom Group, what did you do before they got to you?”

  A laugh bubbles in my throat like vomit and I swallow it back down. She thinks she’s changing the subject to a lighter one, to simpler times and better days, but she has no idea where she’s heading. Each nested doll is uglier than the last.

  “Did you have a job?” she asks. “Like…farming or something?”

  “No.”

  “Were you an artist?”

  The question dislodges a few memories of me toying with a camera, snapping shots of mundane objects, macro lens closeups of dirt and skin, but this was during the leisure hours of my Axiom princehood, to distract myself from the horrors of my workday. It had nothing to do with these innocent early years that Julie is hoping to hear that I had.

  “No.” My voice is gravelly and hard. It sounds like a verdict. “Not an artist.”

  She’s looking queasy again. Her voice is faint. “Well what did you do, R? How’d you spend your days?”

  I feel the bitter laugh rising in me again. Julie is remarkably flexible; her heart can stretch to accommodate many jagged shapes, but how much can it fit? What would it take to exceed her capacity? To break her fierce grip on compassion?

  She reads my eyes and seems to wilt a little. “Maybe that’s enough for now,” she mumbles.

  I nod.

  “We should get back. They’re probably almost ready.”

  She turns and starts walking. The wind sounds like a voice again. Not singing bu
t whispering. I notice that I’m not following her.

  “Are you coming?” she says over her shoulder, but she doesn’t stop to wait for me.

  “In a minute.”

  She doesn’t argue. I watch her dwindle. Then I turn and walk further out.

  I hear the rhythms of syllables in the wind, the contours of phonemes, but it’s like a voice on a radio buried in static, just audible enough to make me wonder. I cock my ear, straining to make it out. Does the wind always speak? Is it always out here whispering to itself and whoever might happen to hear? What secrets would I learn if I could decipher it?

  It’s blowing from the east now. A cold wind, and strangely stale, like a draft from some deep cellar. But it’s still speaking, and I’m starting to pick out words.

  I tried to get away. I tried to hide you from the corruption.

  It sounds like my father in his later years, his voice raw and wheezing through the tumors.

  But you let the world seduce you. You gave in to your wicked heart, and now you’re going to burn. I’m sorry I failed you.

  Why does the wind have my father’s voice? And what are these sharp bits of debris it’s blowing around me like tiny teeth?

  Are you coming for me, kid? Are you coming to see what we built together?

  The timbre has shifted. It’s raspy now instead of wheezy, older and more brittle.

  You can’t sell your stock in this company. It’s locked in your blood, in your past, in a lifetime of choices.

  I catch some of the debris in my hand. It’s not sand or bits of brush. It’s bone. Splintered fragments bouncing off my clothes and scratching my cheeks.

  It’s inside you. It’s you.

  A whirlwind is forming in front of me. It writhes and shimmies on the dry earth, filling with dust and leaves and ancient remains. It’s drifting northeast, away from the road, and it undulates like a beckoning finger, not seductive but commanding. A master to a slave.

  Come, it says, and I obey.

  Behind me, I hear a horn. It blasts insistently like a call to battle, but it’s miles away, someone else’s concern. I follow the whirlwind out into the night.