The Living

by Isaac Marion

  I am no longer falling. I am standing on a balcony at the base of a towering shelf. The balcony runs out of sight in both directions, lit in dim orange patches by unseen lights. Beyond the railing: a dark gulf, then another wall of books. I look up. Another balcony, and another above that, and on and on until they disappear into the golden glow of some impossibly lofty skylight. The level where I stand is utilitarian: metal shelves, tile floors, the dull municipal efficiency of a small-town branch, but the architecture grows more beautiful with each floor until its ornate intricacies become a blur in the hazy heights. The desire I feel to explore those shelves is an exquisite agony—but there is no way up.

  Not for you, the voices say. Not yet.

  Who are they? Which members of my ever-expanding inner ensemble are these? There was a time when I heard the murmurings of the minds I’d eaten, a room full of weary souls reminiscing on the past. I hear these now, but they have joined a much larger chorus.

  “When?” I ask them. The sound hits the silence like a boulder in a still pool; cascades of reverberation rush through the space.

  Not alone. You’ll need help to climb. But to fall…? A note of sarcasm emerges from the chorus, an individual overtone that’s strangely familiar. You do that pretty well on your own.

  A ladder appears at my feet, leading down to whatever’s below.

  I peer over the balcony and feel the worms wriggle in my belly, my chest, my groin, spreading numbness that’s almost welcome. Below is like above, but reversed. Level after level, an endless succession of shelves and balconies, growing cruder and uglier until they vanish from view in the shadows.

  Go, the voices say, and I feel a nudge at my back. You need to see it.

  “See what?”

  That familiar overtone again, wryly amused, but warm. You’ll see.

  I climb onto the ladder. It’s white and smooth, with organic contours—the ladder is made of bones. Not the dry, brittle remains I’m used to but supple and warm to the touch. The ladder is alive.

  I descend.

  It’s exactly like Julie’s dream. I can feel the books around me; I can read them without touching them; they jitter and dance in their shelves, pages fluttering open and spewing their words into my mind. But this is not the rich perfume Julie enjoyed. She was ascending toward those luminous heights; I am sinking to the basement. My perfume is dust and dried blood, wet fur and fear sweat.

  “What am I looking for?” I ask the voices.

  The plain metal balconies become crude plywood carpentry, then raw timber tied with rope, then stone ledges, then nothing. I pass level after level of inaccessible books, abandoned and forgotten but still here, moldering in the depths.

  Nothing in particular, the voice replies.

  I catch familiar faces in the swamp of words. Disjointed excerpts of lives I’ve known, but only the darkest passages down here, morbid cuttings tucked in amongst medieval prison records and lists of smallpox deaths.

  I see a girl who looks like Tomsen watching her father shudder and cough, dying from some treatable disease while her screams for help disappear into radio static. I see M shoving a smaller kid’s face into the pavement and holding back tears while his brothers cheer. I see him pointing a gun at a family while his girlfriend takes their food. I see him sinking his teeth into a boy. I see Nora watching him sink his teeth into a boy. I see Nora wandering alone, freezing and starving. I see her holding a knife to her wrists every night, asking why not and scrambling for an answer. I see Julie’s wrists, the blood and then the bandages. I see her staring dead-eyed at her mother’s mock funeral, her father dropping the empty dress into the grave. I see her writing a list on a painter’s canvas of everyone she’s killed, mostly just descriptions since she rarely got their names—fat man with tattoo, bald man with scars, cute boy with knife—and I see her covering it over with blue and black paint.

  I see her meeting me.

  I see her watching her friends butchered all around her. I see her father’s gun pointed at her head, his eyes glassy and cold before a demon peels him apart.

  I see the man she’d decided to trust revealing that he’s a demon too.

  “Whatever it is you’re trying to show me,” I whisper into the gloom, “I don’t want to see it.”

  I try to halt my descent but my numb legs continue on reflex, as if they never needed my input. I am a half-dissolved torso falling like a leaf.

  “I don’t want to see it!” I scream up toward the skylight, just a tiny white spot now, but no one answers.

  I see a boy who looks like my father touching the blood on his lip. My grandfather sneering down at him, shaking his head in disgust. My great-grandfather doing the same to a boy who looks like my grandfather. Wads of dusty parchment, sheafs of papyrus, clay tablets. They hum and shake, angry and insistent, vomiting their words into my mind: Learn the way of things. Do as was done.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and grip my head in my hands. I can feel the worms hammering at the gates of my brain.

  Are you seeing it, corpse?

  My eyes snap open. The overtone has become the fundamental; the chorus has receded to a supportive hum for the unadorned voice of a single young man.

  I choke on his name. “Perry?”

  A feeling of warm water pools in my chest—a ghost is smiling. It’s good to be known, R.

  My feet refuse to stop. I sink lower. To my surprise, there’s a bottom; I see it in that vague orange glow, a floor hidden beneath drifts of dust and scattered pages, but I don’t stop there. The ladder continues through a hatch in the floor, down into the basement.

  You’re so much like I was, Perry says to me. So concerned with with your worth and your purpose, your very right to exist. Do you really think your bumbling human errors—no matter how colorful—disqualify you from life? Or even happiness? Look around you!

  The basement is a cavern, a dank stone shaft like an immense well, the air cold and fetid, thick with mold and methane and unknown Precambrian scents blowing up from the darkness below. Its walls are honeycombed with holes and the holes are filled with language: pre-lingual symbolism in bent sticks and notched bones, forcing stories into my head with even greater violence than the books above.

  An ape hunches over its meal, eyes darting left and right, angry and afraid. It pisses on a nearby rock, just to be sure, then returns to the food at its feet: the juicy face meat of a rival troop’s young. A thousand insects crawl in the ape’s fur, unaware that the ape is an ape or that it’s alive or that they are, unaware of anything beyond the chemicals that tell them when to bite, when to suck, when to excrete eggs and die.

  Life is a long ladder, Perry says. We climbed from deep pits. The lowest thought of the basest human is a staggering achievement.

  I sink deeper and even the dim lights fade. The darkness is complete, frozen and airless, but the stories continue, reduced to almost nothing: microbial etchings of binary narratives, hungry/fed, living/dead.

  But there’s more than this, Perry tells me. There are Higher shelves.

  My feet finally allow me to stop. I hover in the smothering blackness and I look up. The skylight is a dim speck, a distant star.

  “They’re so far away.”

  My voice sounds muffled, like I’ve been buried. It trembles with a purity of sadness that I’ve never felt before, the simple core of loneliness inside every elaborate grief.

  Some of you is up there, R. Some of me, too. We’ve lived most of our lives in the Lower, but we have a few scenes in those lovely books. Everyone does.

  The worms surround my brain, gnawing at its walls. My body is gone; my face and skull are gone; I am a wrinkled gray planet adrift in space.

  It’s easier to fall than to climb, and yet against all logic, life keeps rising. The line wavers, but the trajectory is upward.

  I can feel the worms’ outrage at being detained. Thei
r tails thrash as they strain toward my center.

  So what’s your choice, R? Where will you shelve the last book of your life? Down here in the pit with the primordial slimes?

  I close my eyes. I grit my teeth.

  Or up there in the light?

  Somewhere inside me, far deeper than my lungs and larynx, a scream rises. It rips up from miles beneath my basement, a sound so fierce it scares the brute out of its pit, it sends the wretch running, it roars up the staircase and down the hall and bursts out of my mouth, and the worms fall still.

  I clench that invisible muscle hard enough to tear it, and the worms slide backward. Squealing with indignation, they peel away from my brain, squeezing down through my jaws and jugular and finally, back into the bite itself. I compress them into a dark, tumorous mass beneath the Dead man’s toothmarks, and I hold them there.

  Perry smiles again, and his warmth spreads through me. My limbs tingle and return. My hands twitch and ball into fists.

  Good, Perry says, and the chorus surges in around him, absorbing his voice into its vast and complex harmony. Now you know what to do.

  In a shallow grave deep in the forest, I open my eyes. I dig my fingers into the mud. I climb out.

  I

  The church is empty. The speakers hiss, waiting to amplify whoever steps to the mic.

  The houses are empty. The doors are open, so I search each one. They looked vacant before—no decorations, no furniture, blankets on the floor for beds—but now even their squatters have moved on.

  The RV is empty. My kids are gone. But this is a relief. Better they be locked up in a van on their way to Post than somewhere on the streets of this town.

  Because the streets are not empty. The streets are full of corpses steaming in the morning sun. I step gingerly between them, fighting my way through a squawking murder of crows as I scan the withered faces, desperately hoping not to recognize any.

  Only morbid curiosity brings me to the circus in the woods. Deep tire tracks mark the escape routes of the armored trucks and their trailers. And of course, the metal building is empty. The daylight leaking through its entry is the only illumination for its windowless interior, but there is nothing to see. It’s an empty box. The only hints of what it held are the scratches on the walls, the broken teeth and chips of bone, the strange, pointy footprints in the bare earth floor.

  No one will ever bury this town’s corpses. No one will ever inhabit its sorrowful homes. Future generations will steer wide of this nameless place, whispering of ghosts and curses.

  I suddenly remember that I’m carrying something. It was dented and corroded but the Atvist code still opened it. The musty documents inside are unreadable, but they never said anything to begin with. The case’s true contents are hidden under its false bottom. A gift for some unlucky Cascadian enclave, a box of death for the first one to resist.

  I feel an urge to use it now. To “surrender” this town and blast its rot from the earth. But there is only one good deed this weapon can do, and only one place to do it.

  “Julie!”

  My hoarse voice echoes down the streets of the town square. I suck in a deep lungful and shred my throat on her name.

  “Julie!”

  Another personal volume record, but my only answer is the angry crows.

  She is not here. No one is.

  I walk to the highway and head toward the coast, leaving the birds to their grim festivities.

  • • •

  The bite in my neck throbs. My grip remains fierce, holding the worms in place, but no matter how hard I squeeze I can’t crush them. They writhe in my blood, bellowing demands like powerful old men unaccustomed to refusal.

  How long can I hold them? I am a single guard transporting a bus full of prisoners, and it’s only a matter of time before they overpower me. I need backup.

  Perry? I whisper into my mind. Can you help me?

  I know it’s a foolish request, but I’m desperate.

  Can you show me where she is?

  I imagine him pretending not to hear, as if to save us both the embarrassment. Wherever and whatever Perry is, he is not my personal assistant. He did not emerge from that cosmic chorus to be my GPS.

  This journey is mine.

  • • •

  The trees that surround the highway grow taller as I move west, until the sky is just a narrow inverted river winding above my head. The sun coaxes languid ghosts of steam out of the wet earth. It strikes my neck and warms the bite; the worms shrink to the corners of their cage.

  I walk just short of a run and soon I’m breathing hard. Each inhalation brings a rich bouquet: pine and cedar oils, grass like green tea, and the more complex scents of more complex living things. The sweat and dander of wolves and deer, rats and wildcats, dusty birds and the subtle bitterness of the insects they eat. All the creatures carrying on behind our stage, absent from our dramas, too pure for our plagues.

  Lost in hermetic contemplations, it doesn’t strike me as odd that my once useless nose has gained bloodhound sensitivity. My body and mind have taken many forms throughout my many lives. I am a walking canvas for reality’s new rules.

  And somewhere beneath all that piney, musky redolence, I smell Julie.

  Not the generic scent of biological life, that cheap and consumable commodity—the scent of her, distinct among a billion others.

  I leap off the highway and scramble up the embankment and crash into the forest. I make a token effort to shield my face from the trees but their claws rake me mercilessly. Go back, they tell me. You’re a fool. There is nothing for you here.

  I swat their branches aside. I kick through thorny vines that wrap around my ankles. Julie’s scent grows stronger, a tendril of rich perfume guiding me through the woods.

  Get out of our world, the trees snarl. You don’t belong here.

  They’re right, of course, but I don’t belong anywhere. So I guess that means I belong everywhere.

  I burst through a knotted mass of brush and stumble forward into daylight.

  A meadow.

  Tiny daisies dot the lush field. That uncharted river gurgles in the trees. Julie and her mother sit in a circle of flattened grass, like they planned a picnic and forgot everything but each other. They haven’t noticed me. I stay where I am, absorbing the painterly beauty of the scene, its classicism marred only by the black blood on Julie’s tank top. She sits cross-legged next to her mother, speaking softly while Audrey rocks back and forth, hugging her knees to her chest, draped in a baggy white overcoat. Both of them are filthy and ragged, but the sun glows in their matted hair.

  Julie sees me. Her eyes are raw, drained of tears, and her reaction is muted. She stands up. She takes a step toward me. She looks at the bite in my neck, then the cuts on my hands, ears, face, the warm dew of blood seeping out of me.

  She whispers, “Are you alive?”

  I nod.

  “Say it.”

  “I’m alive.”

  She blinks a few times, lets out a shuddering breath that might be relief or something beyond it, but no smile, no embrace.

  She sits down next to her mother. “Mom,” she says. “Do you remember R?”

  Audrey nods. Her skin is pale but no longer gray, closer to porcelain than concrete. Her eyes are leaden when shadowed but there’s a glint of blue when the sun hits them. “I remember R,” she says, straining only a little to find the syllables. “He loves you. You love him.”

  A wall of tension appears between Julie and me, but it feels trivial in this sacred meadow. It collapses. Without meeting my eyes, Julie pats the grass. I step into the circle and sit.

  Something is happening in her mother. Beyond the physical signs, there’s an electricity in her aura. Her fingers twitch. Her eyes scan from side to side. I think of Nora’s patient, Mrs. A, lying on a table in a pool of her own b
lood, reviving herself and killing herself with each hard-won breath. I remember the ferocity in that woman’s eyes as she fought to exhume her soul just in time to send it on. I wonder if Julie is ready.

  “I remember…” Audrey continues, squinting at the ground, “…someone who loved me. Who I loved.” She looks up. “Where’s…John?”

  Julie’s lips tremble. “He’s gone, Mom. Dad’s gone.”

  Audrey lowers her eyes again and watches an ant navigate a blade of grass. She shakes her head. “Not gone. I hear him.”

  “What?” Julie says, her voice cracking.

  Audrey’s face is tense like she’s listening to an infinitesimal sound, the breath of an ant or the hum of the planets. “Parts of him,” she says. “Scattered through…the books.”

  Julie is not as drained as I thought. Her eyes well up with some hidden reserve of tears.

  “I’m…reading,” Audrey says. “Books about him. And you. All the years after I…” Her eyes rise to meet her daughter’s and she has tears of her own. “Julie…” Her voice spasms. “I’m so sorry.”

  Julie finally breaks. She buries her head in her mother’s lap and sobs.

  “I couldn’t hold on,” Audrey whispers. “Not even for you.” Her words come almost smoothly now. What a force she must have been in life, that it all comes back so quickly. “So many reasons to fight…but I couldn’t see them.”

  Julie pulls back to look at her, a spike of anger jabbing into her grief. “So you did do it on purpose?” She makes no attempt to stop the quaver in her voice. “You weren’t just stupid? You really walked out there to die?”

  “Julie…” Audrey reaches out to touch her hair but Julie pulls away, sitting up straight, her face reddening.

  “How?” she demands. “How could you do it? You ruined Dad! I couldn’t hold him together. I couldn’t hold myself together!” She thrusts out her palms, exposing the scars that criss-cross her arms and wrists, none quite deep enough to be a true invitation to death but each one a conversation with it. Shallow cuts to distract from a deep one.