The Living

by Isaac Marion

  “Those damn yellow eyes…” Julie mumbles. “What do they mean, Addis?”

  The matron sidles up to Nora and clears her throat. Julie blinks out of her reverie and stands up.

  “Sorry,” the old woman says, “but we’re settling in for the night and we need to find Addis a bed.”

  “Can’t he just stay with me at the Hostel?” Nora asks. “You can cuff him to my wrist. He won’t hurt anyone.”

  “I’m so sorry, dear,” the matron says with a sympathetic smile. “I’m sure Addis wouldn’t cause any trouble, but we just can’t take the chance of having the Dead loose in the community at night, no matter how close to cured they are. You understand.”

  Nora nods reluctantly. “Yeah.”

  “He’ll be safe at Redemption Hall. Our Dead brothers and sisters are as much a part of God’s plan as we are.”

  “Yeah.” She ruffles Addis’s hair. “I’ll see you in the morning, Adderall. Be good, okay?”

  Addis watches them leave. Julie shoots him a final glance as she closes the door. He smiles again.

  • • •

  Nora and Julie walk in silence. At the bottom of the hill sits the guest housing: a huge, dilapidated manor that Peter and Miriam called the Hostel.

  We’re all tourists on this planet, Peter explained. We should never think of it as home.

  All the other tourists are still at the service, or perhaps at the “after party” to discuss the sermon, so the house is empty. Nora and Julie’s footsteps echo in the unfurnished rooms. The floorboards groan like weary old men. Finally, Nora unties the knot in her throat.

  “Are you here alone?”

  They have stopped at the bottom of the narrow staircase leading to Nora’s room. Julie shakes her head.

  “Where are they?”

  “They’re here.”

  “Is…” She pauses, tenses, forces through another knot. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s okay.”

  Nora nods to herself. “Where’s R?”

  “Here. Somewhere.”

  Nora studies her friend for a moment. “You were crying.”

  “Yeah.”

  Nora sighs and heads up the stairs. “Come on. There’s an open bed.”

  What was once a large master bedroom has been converted into a sort of boarding school barracks. Rows of single beds run along the walls, thin pillows and blue wool blankets. No other furnishings whatsoever. It’s too hot for the blankets so they lie on top of them, staring at the cracks in the ceiling.

  “You sure you don’t want to talk about it?” Julie says.

  “Honestly,” Nora says, still fighting the knot, “I don’t know what I want yet.”

  “All right. I’ll go first then.” Julie folds her hands on her stomach. “R just told me everything.”

  Nora turns her head on the pillow, trying to read Julie’s face, but her eyes are far away.

  “Who he was before. What he did.”

  “And?” Nora says quietly.

  “And it was bad.”

  “Worse than eating your boyfriend?”

  “Somehow…yeah.”

  “Wow.”

  “Because there isn’t any plague to blame for this stuff. It was just him. His choices. His character.”

  They’re silent for a moment. Nora considers asking for specifics but decides she doesn’t need them. “I don’t know, Jules,” she says. “I feel like that doesn’t add up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean…R may be awkward and kind of a whiny bitch…but if there’s one thing he’s got going for him, I’d have to say it’s his character.”

  Julie glances over at her. “You think so?”

  “Have you ever seen anyone try harder to be a good person? Everything’s a moral puzzle with him. He agonizes over every step. It’s fucking annoying, to be honest.”

  Julie looks back at the ceiling. “That’s what I don’t understand. How could he be a monster for so long and then become who he is now? Is it just the magic reset of being Dead? Did he…cheat his way into a new life?”

  “I’m sure that’ll be a big topic in post-plague philosophy,” Nora says. “But I don’t think that’s it. I think there are lots of ways to reset. I mean, how did you do it?”

  “Me?”

  “Seven years ago you were an insufferable emo kid who thought the whole world was built for your torment. You walked around flashing your wrist scars like they were badges of courage.”

  Julie grimaces.

  “You actually listed off all the bad shit you’d been through to see how it compared to mine, like it was a fucking contest. Like whoever had the most trauma had the most authority on life.”

  “Please stop before I puke,” Julie mutters.

  “My point is…you used to be the worst. And now you’re my favorite person. Now you’re kind and caring and fucking hilarious, and you take everything seriously except yourself. You love the world, and you fight for it.” She rolls onto her side and looks right at Julie. “And you fight for your friends. When they’re falling apart, you chase them across the country to catch the pieces.”

  Julie keeps her eyes on the ceiling. They are glistening again.

  “So how did you do it?” Nora asks her. “How’d you break all that bad momentum and become who you are now?”

  Julie wipes her eyes and looks up at the ceiling with a faint smile. “I think it was you.”

  Nora frowns. “Me?”

  “I think meeting you was my reset.”

  Nora snorts, but there’s affection in it. “How?”

  “You were solid. Rational. You were immune to my melodrama but still…human. The opposite of my mom without being like my dad.”

  Nora listens in cautious silence.

  “You shook me out of myself. Knocked me off my course.” Julie chuckles. “Maybe literally, when you punched me in the face.”

  Nora can’t help smiling. “Well…you’re welcome.” She swallows another knot and takes a steadying breath. “But we’re…we’re not talking about me, remember?”

  Julie rubs her palms into her damp eyes, trying to smother the itch. “So you think it doesn’t matter who R used to be. Even if he was a fanatic and a warlord. Even if he helped create all the shit we’re fighting.”

  Nora hesitates. It’s getting harder to resist demanding details, but she tries to keep herself on track. “It does matter. Whatever he was, it’s a part of him.” She weighs her words carefully. “But what matters more…is who he is now, right? What he built with those parts?”

  Julie is silent.

  “Maybe that’s why he tries so hard. Because he knows what it’s like on the other side.”

  Julie sits up, cross-legged on the wool blanket, and twists a chunk of her hair into a knotted braid. “So you think I should forgive him.”

  “I don’t know if you should or shouldn’t. But I think I would.”

  Julie takes a deep breath and exhales, releasing the braid to unravel. “So does that mean you forgive Marcus?”

  Nora opens her mouth, then clamps it shut. Her wisdom doesn’t sound as wise when it’s reflected back at her.

  “Does it mean you’re ready to go with us?”

  Distant voices float through the open windows. The tourists are returning. Nora rolls onto her back and studies the topography of the ceiling. Cracks like canyons, water stains like lakes, black forests of mold.

  “Nora,” Julie persists. “Are you ready to go home? So we can do what we need to do?”

  Nora listens to the approaching murmur of laughter and conversation. When the tourists enter the house, it rises through the floorboards like music, and if it had lyrics, they would be about about belonging together, marching together, safe and full of conviction.

  “Are you?” Nora asks quietly.r />
  Julie turns to look out the window. She squints into the muggy night air, a rippling blackness like molten tar. “I don’t know what I’ll feel the next time I look at R. I don’t know what I’ll do when I find my mom.” She takes a shuddering breath and straightens her spine. “And I don’t know know what’ll happen in Post, or if any of us will be alive next week.” She chuckles darkly. “So fuck no, I’m not ready. For any of this. But I know I have to do it.”

  Nora sees conviction in her friend’s face, and it’s a different kind than the fervent intensity of her new Ardent companions. It’s not a graft; it’s old-growth, weathered and real, sprouting from her own experiences with no outside framework to prop it up. The laughter downstairs suddenly sounds thin, like something recorded long ago and replayed too many times.

  “What if I wanted to stay here awhile?” Nora says in spite of the sinking in her stomach. “To take care of Addis.”

  “Nora,” Julie says, twisting around to face her. “We can’t do this without you. I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Nora half-whispers. “Why am I so damn important?”

  “Because you’re my friend—no, fuck blood, you’re my family.”

  Nora blinks. Her throat spasms.

  “And wherever this nightmare’s taking us, we should go there together.”

  Footsteps pound up the stairs behind an eruption of laughter. Julie gives Nora a final pleading look, then drops onto her pillow and pretends to be asleep. The tourists barely lower their volume. It doesn’t matter. Nora will not sleep tonight. She will lie on top of the blanket, sweating in the dark heat, watching black clouds of choices swirl behind her eyelids.

  I

  In downtown Missoula, across the street from the ice cream parlor, there is a religion store. It sells books of theology, guides for righteous living, and thirty-six different versions of the Bible. There are paintings and plaques bearing scripture, paraphrases of scripture, and modern aphorisms mistaken for scripture. And there are weapons. The sign calls them “disciplinary aids,” but when I see a rack of wooden clubs and rods hanging from leather straps, I find it hard not to think of a castle’s armory. Or its dungeon.

  My father reaches for a long, flat club that resembles a cricket bat. I can’t read the words carved into its surface, but I can tell by their medieval script that they are scripture. My father has never hit me before, but something is different today. His anger usually blazes for a few minutes, then dissipates into the air, but today he found somewhere to channel it. Today he grabbed my hand and dragged me to this store with a purpose in his eyes, and now he studies the club with grim satisfaction, like he’s finally found an answer to some shouting inner voice.

  It is a weapon against sin, he tells me as we leave the store. Against rebellion and ungodly passion. I try to believe this as it strikes me over and over, embossing scripture into my reddening skin. I try to understand what I’ve done wrong so I can repent of it, but it eludes me. It will be years before I can grasp the intangible abstraction of sin, and by then my father will have moved beyond this wooden club. He will not bother to dig it out of the closet when his hands are already clenched. Punishment needs no special ceremony; it surrounds us always like our guilt, eager and pulsing.

  “It feels good, doesn’t it?” Paul Bark says, watching from the corner of the room as I endure the pain I’ve earned. I’m not sure if he’s addressing me or my father. “We all have it in us.”

  Then the pain is gone, and so is my father. He sits slumped in his recliner, black phlegm running down his chin, his final cigarette scorching his fingertips. Year after year his smoke rose up to Heaven. He sacrificed himself on a thousand tiny pyres.

  “We all need something to hate,” Paul says, “and what’s nobler than hating yourself?” We are standing outside the house, watching it burn. “You don’t have to die to be a martyr.”

  He nudges me forward. My skin blisters.

  “I hope you’re not buying this hairshirt bullshit,” my grandfather says, clamping a sharp hand on my shoulder. “Why fight yourself when you can fight for yourself?”

  I follow him along the edge of the stadium roof, open to reveal the teeming masses below, the farms and gardens and apartment towers and the swarms of soldiers patrolling them. I see Ella Desconsado coughing in her bedroom. I see Wally and David and Marie assembling rifle parts. I see the once hopeful Nearly Living, hopeless and nearly dead.

  “No one’s tallying your deeds. No one’s watching. It’s just you and yours, here and gone, so take what you can while you can.”

  I’m sitting in a metal chair in a dark locker room, and he crouches down to leer at me, his rancid breath hissing through gapped teeth. “You know none of this is real, don’t you? The world’s a dream. It’s your dream. And do you feel guilty for what happens in your dreams? When you kill and steal and fuck the forbidden fruit?”

  He runs his leathery fingers along Julie’s arm. She is slumped in the chair next to me, collared and wrapped in cables, her hair covering her face, blood dripping from her mouth.

  “You know the world will disappear without a trace the moment you wake up, so you might as well have your fun with it.” He lifts Julie’s chin. “Like you did with her.”

  I grab his wrist. I wrench his hand away from Julie and it snaps off; a brittle crack and puff of dust. He looks at the dry stump with a bemused smile.

  I hear Paul Bark’s laughter as I struggle to untie Julie. “Do you really think she still loves you? How could you imagine you deserve such grace?”

  I fumble with the cables. My fingers are slick with her blood. Her eyes slide open and watch me through the gaps in her hair, but I can’t read what’s behind them.

  Paul Bark says: “Haven’t you learned we deserve nothing?”

  I spin around, gritting my teeth, and Paul smirks at me from the shadows. “What now, Brother Atvist? Have you got a new sermon for us?”

  I open my mouth—but there is no air in my lungs. My roar of defiance leaks out in a groan.

  I wake up.

  I am curled into a ball, trembling with rage. I fill my lungs till they hurt and I scream into my knees, throat straining, veins bulging. It’s the loudest sound I’ve made in at least two lifetimes.

  I uncoil and scramble to my feet. I’m in a small, dark chamber with rusted metal walls; the air smells of dried blood and decay, and I think I must not be awake after all. Another nightmare. My twisted little brain, half-rotted and hateful. Is this what Julie experiences every night? An endless procession of horrors and accusers? And worse yet, is that why I love her? Because we share the same sickness?

  My hand touches the cold steel, and reality seeps in. I’m not in Hell. I’m in a train. An empty freight car—it must have been hauling meat. A white bar of daylight glows through the half-open door.

  Last night returns in red-orange flickers: wandering through the empty streets of this half-abandoned town, breaking shop windows, kicking down doors, searching for a violence strong enough to squeeze the poison from my veins. I don’t remember how it ended. How I found my way to this metal box and somehow managed to sleep. I only know I couldn’t sleep in the RV, alone in a bed I’ve shared with Julie, waiting for her to slip in next to me and feeling my guts twist tighter with every hour she didn’t.

  I stumble out of the train into a dim gray oven. Cast-iron clouds diffuse the heat, baking me from all directions while the humidity threatens to drown me. Where am I? What country is this? What planet?

  I walk for a few minutes before realizing I actually don’t know where I am. The train must have moved in the night. The same wooded hill looms up ahead, but there is no station platform and no sign of the Fire Church’s quaint little compound. A gravel road leads from the tracks to the hill, so I follow it.

  Soon I’m surrounded by trees, but I hear noise up ahead: the rumble of big engines and occasional shouted command
s. As the woods open into a clearing I feel an instinct to proceed with stealth, but I’m too angry to obey it. My stomach is burning, I have swallowed caustic chemicals, and if anyone stops me I will puke fire in their faces and stand tall for the consequences.

  I stroll into the clearing like I belong there—and maybe I do. No one takes note of my presence. A few dozen young men mill around the field of dried mud, loading fuel cans and what looks like bundles of riot gear into the backs of trucks. The trucks are hitched to freight trailers, but these are not the standard highway haulers. The trucks are armored bricks on solid-rubber wheels, the kind once used to move cash between banks. The trailers themselves look reinforced as well, though they’re riddled with outward dents like they’ve been carrying loose boulders.

  I think of a circus backlot. The trampled field of crew trucks, generators chugging inside sooty white trailers, gnarled carnies sucking cigarettes by the outhouses, a grimy reality behind all the whimsical lights and color. But where is the bigtop in this image? Is it God’s House at the top of the hill? Or is it the strange structure at the center of these trucks? I see nothing familiar in its outline; it’s not the usual repurposing of an old-world building for new-world needs, schools into barracks, stadiums into fortresses. Whatever it is, it appears to be built from scratch for a purpose I can’t imagine: a squat mass of thick steel sheets, the kind used to cover holes for road work, welded together to form…a box. A windowless, featureless box the size of a department store.

  And what is that sound inside this box? What subtle undertone do I hear beneath the engine noise and shouting?

  “Hi!”

  I whirl around to find the young man from the train grinning at me. He sticks out his hand.

  “We met earlier. I’m Lindh.”

  I look at his hand until he lowers it.

  “Listen,” he says, “I feel convicted about the way I treated you yesterday. I was rude.”

  I shrug.

  “I could sense you were closed off, so I think I withdrew some of my hospitality, but today you seem a little more…open?”