The Brief History of the Dead (13 page)

She listened to the message a dozen times before she switched the transceiver off.

That poor man, she thought. That poor man and his poor lover.

And then, though she tried her hardest to avoid the thought, Poor me.

Outside, the night was deepening. There were still a few minutes of hazy light in the middle of the day, a sort of false dawn that seemed to seep directly into the atmosphere. The sun no longer appeared on the horizon, though, and the light quickly faded back into itself. Laura walked out into the snow and took a few deep gulps of air.

The sky was all moon and stars now. She found herself wondering if she was the last person alive. It was something she had speculated about before—something everyone who had ever read a science fiction novel had probably speculated about. But in her case, she thought, it just might be true. Maybe the reason she hadn’t been able to reach anyone on the radio, telephone, or computer was because there was no one left to reach. For the first time, it occurred to her that she might truly be completely alone. She couldn’t quite believe it, though.

She had already explored the station pretty exhaustively, but she decided to commence the search again from scratch, ransacking the cabinets and lockers, overturning mattresses and cushions, and peering beneath the heavy furniture with a flashlight. She had to find out exactly what had happened to the emperor penguin party. She had to know what all those X’s meant.

The work was exhausting, but it paid off. Late that night, about to fall asleep from fatigue, she discovered a loose panel behind one of the beds. She popped it out of its mounting to look inside. In the crevice between the wall and the insulation, she found a small, hand-worn book. It was bound in leather. There were black patches along the lower right edge where it had been stained by the oil of someone’s fingers.

She wiped the dust off the cover and opened the book to the first page.
Journal of Robert Joyce,
it read.
First Entry, September 12.

SEVEN.

THE PATRIARCH

T
he wind stopped along with the rains, and the silence kept him awake for most of the night, and in the morning he opened the two doors and chose his sign for the day and shooed the Laura birds off the balcony, watching them drop like styrofoam balls to the benches and the dirty pavement. Their blue-and-gray tails twitched in the yellow light, and though the birds were demons, the light was good, and he took his sign and carried it out into the city. When he came to the gathering place, he shouted, “You, my brothers! You, my sisters! If you listen, you will hear, and if you seek, you will find!” and while most of the people brushed him aside, and some even derided him, crowing out their profanities, there were always a few who stopped to listen.

“Do you really believe that?” they asked him, and “Find what?” they said, and, “What does that sign of yours mean, anyway?”

Today what his sign said was,
IF I WILL THAT HE TARRY TILL I COME, WHAT IS THAT TO THEE?
, and it meant the same thing that all his signs meant: Jesus is returning, so you’d better prepare yourself. “It’s John 21:22,” he tried to explain. “The Lord is speaking to his disciples. Most people think that the verse refers to the Wandering Jew, but if you read it carefully, you’ll see that it doesn’t. The ‘he’ in question is actually the apostle John. Tarry means wait, and wait means live. So the verse means, ‘If
I,
Jesus, will that
he,
the Apostle John, live till I come, what is that to
thee,
my disciples?’ Which is to say Jesus’s disciples, not mine. I’m not Jesus. Do you understand?”

It was a complicated question, and so he would repeat his explanation a second time, and then a third if he still saw a flicker of confusion on their faces, and sometimes a fourth if other people had begun to tarry nearby, and usually he would finish only to find that everybody had drifted away, shepherded from the true sound of his voice by the noise of the birds.

And so he would move once more into the crowds, and start over again, and wait for the people to gather around him.

The people were created in the image of God, and thus they were within the precinct of His grace, even the ones who did not know Him, the ones who withdrew themselves from His presence. It was something he had to remind himself of when they ignored him, or jeered at him, or parroted his voice, or even, as had happened once or twice in the other world, when they arrested him, handcuffed him, and confiscated his sign. Sometimes, when he sensed the spirit of God moving inside him, turning over like a soft bundle of clothing, he would feel so satiated that he would forget to feed himself, and late in the day his legs would buckle underneath him inside the swim of his own hunger. There was a mail carrier, a good man named Joseph, who would offer him a hot dog or a slice of pizza at such times and wait with him until he could stand again without feeling faint. Today, though, he had filled his pockets with bread sticks before he left for the city. He ate them sitting on an iron bench in sight of the obelisk, where he watched the shadows of the birds as they collided with the shadows of the clouds.

It was late in the day when he saw the two men—boys, really, no older than twenty—holding hands and kissing beneath the awning of a deserted hardware store. One of them was gripping a hank of the other’s hair, and the second was squirming and rocking inside his blue jeans, and when the first one whispered into the second one’s ear, they both began to laugh. He approached them at a rush beneath the awning, where he tried to tell them something about the Bridge of Jesus and the Translation of the Elect. But they struggled against him and would not listen.

“Fuck off,” one of them said, and the other snapped, “Get your hand off me, you old cocksucker,” and then they batted his sign with their arms and open hands and it lurched back and hit him in the jaw.

When he opened his eyes, he was lying flat on the pavement, and the boys were gone. He could feel something hard between his gums and his cheek. It was a tooth. When he rolled it over onto his tongue and spat it out, it came out dark red, like the stone of a cherry. On his way home he buried it in the soil of a churchyard, marking it with a crossed pair of bread sticks, so that when he died again and was gathered unto himself he would be made whole. And that was one day.

~

REPENT, FOR THE TIME IS AT HAND
, his next day’s sign read, and he inscribed it,
YOURS VERY TRULY
, followed by his name, which was Coleman Kinzler, Ph.D. He had conferred the Ph.D. upon himself the same day he finished reading his Bible, at the age of thirty-three, for he knew that though he had never actually been to college, he was a doctor now in the eyes of the Lord. At that time, his Bible was the same one he had been given as a boy, a pocket-sized edition with silver edging and fine white paper and a blue leather cover that wrapped around on itself and snapped together in the front. He had carried it everywhere with him until the day he met a woman who had never read it, a Hindu woman in a robe the color of bricks and dark coffee, and he asked her, “If I offer this book to you, will you study it and keep it sacred?” and she promised that she would, so he gave it to her, though it hurt him to let it go.

But he was convinced that he was doing what the Lord would ask of him. The world was brimming over with Bibles, so many Bibles that they came spilling from the shelf of every drugstore and hotel room in the country, and he knew he could always find a new one for himself. As for the woman, though, he would probably never see her again. It might be her only chance to receive the Word of God.

He thought about the woman often after that, and also about his Bible, though indeed he never saw either one of them again.

This was the incident he was remembering as he toted his sign through the district. The sky was overcast with a dimensionless table of gray clouds, and the banners and traffic lights hung slack in the stillness of the air. Two of the Laura birds hopped from beneath a parked car into the path of his feet. They settled between his ankles, where they attempted to make him stumble, but he did not lose his balance, and he did not drop his sign. He yelled at them and whirled his arms around and stomped his heavy shoes until they flew away and landed down the block.

The newspaperman and his girlfriend were standing by the door of Bristow’s Restaurant, as they did every morning, handing out the latest edition of the
Sims Sheet
.
MORE EVIDENCE FOR BYRD HYPOTHESIS
, the headline read, and when the newspaperman gave him a copy, he folded it into quarters and put it inside his jacket pocket. The girlfriend noticed the bandage covering his chin and asked, “Jesus, what happened to you?” She touched her own chin involuntarily.

“Yes,” he said. “Jesus. I have been bruised in the name of the Lord.” And he told her about his tooth and the breaking of his sign and the boys who had left him on the street to fall, and when he finished, she said, “Oh, you poor man,” and gave him a second copy of the paper, which he folded into quarters and put inside his pocket with the first.

“The rich shall be made poor, and the poor shall be made rich,” he answered, and he left the newspaperman and his girlfriend outside the restaurant and continued on his walk through the city.

On H Street, he stopped to talk with a doorman, and when he asked him if he knew the Word of God, a tiny smile creased the doorman’s face. He removed the cross from the neck of his shirt and let it sway back and forth on its thin strand of chain. “God’s blessings,” Coleman wished the doorman, and the doorman offered his own blessing in return, and the small silver cross turned slowly between his fingers, stopped, and began spinning the other way, winking at Coleman as it caught the light from a nearby sign.

Coleman put the placard to his shoulder and continued on. He had forgotten to bring his bread sticks along with him, and though he was hungry, he did not stop to eat. He was thrust out of a home furnishings store by a pair of security guards, and afterward he gathered a small crowd around him when he climbed onto the lip of the fountain in the shopping plaza, and then the crowd scattered and he spent twenty minutes preaching to a woman who seemed to be listening to him with perfect transport until he asked her for her name and she answered in a flurry of Italian. Though the clouds kept rumbling with thunder, it did not rain, or if it did, the rain never reached the ground. There were times when the sky would growl and then his stomach would growl and then the sky would growl again, and he could almost imagine that the two of them were speaking to each other.

He was nearing his own apartment again when he passed a booth distributing T-shirts that read
GOD IS LOVE
, stacks and stacks of them, in red and white and black, and as the phrase moved in and out of his vision, it provoked a dialogue. There was one part of him that believed that God truly
was
love, that the equation was really that simple. But there was another part of him that believed that love was too small a force: too small for God and too small for what people needed of Him.

The first part said that the love of God was like sunlight and water to us: it strengthened us, filled us out, gave us color. It was only when we rejected that love, when we shut ourselves away from it, that we withered in on ourselves and lost our joy in Creation.

Foolishness! said the second part. It’s not the
love
of God that nourishes us, it’s the
hope
of God. It is hope of any kind. Hope and love are two separate forces, whether you’re talking about God or whether you’re talking about human beings.

But doesn’t love offer everything that hope does and more? the first part asked.

Insofar as love generates hope, perhaps, the second part said. But love doesn’t always generate hope. Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much love or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It’s like your sunlight and water—the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it.

Coleman let the two voices rumble on at each other, thundering back and forth, though which was the thunder of his gut and which was the thunder of his sky, he couldn’t say. It was only when he noticed the other people in the elevator staring at him that he realized he was speaking out loud. He found a package of rice cakes and a jar of peanut butter in the cabinets of his apartment, and he fell upon them with great hunger, and that was the second day.

~

The verse that actually alluded to the Wandering Jew was not John 21:22, of course, but Matthew 16:28,
THERE BE SOME OF THEM THAT STAND HERE, WHICH SHALL IN NO WISE TASTE OF DEATH, TILL THEY SEE THE SON OF MAN COMING IN HIS KINGDOM
, and that was the verse that he carried on his sign the next day. The Wandering Jew, known variously as Ahasuerus, Carthaphilus, and John Buttadaeus, was the cobbler reported to have taunted Jesus, “Go on quicker,” as he carried His cross through Jerusalem, to which Jesus answered, “I go, but thou shalt tarry till I return,” thus condemning the cobbler to walk the world until the Second Coming. Coleman knew that the story did not appear in the pages of the Bible and that many Christians doubted it, but he himself had always found it persuasive, just as he was persuaded that the snake in the Garden of Eden was actually Satan and that St. Peter was crucified hanging upside down so that he would not die in the same manner as Jesus—two stories that also relied on the evidence of tradition rather than the evidence of Scripture, and nobody doubted them.

The blanket of clouds had drifted to the edge of the sky during the night, but the sun was tiny, and it had lost all its power. It was half the morning before the dew evaporated from the grass. Coleman took up a position on the verge of the road to proclaim the Good Word of God. Nobody on the path stopped to listen, but there was one man who settled on a nearby bench as though he wanted to eavesdrop. Coleman tried to cast his voice in the man’s direction, for he knew that even the most reluctant listener might be swayed by the Truth of the Lord. But then he noticed the man feeding the birds, tossing cheese curls into their beaks from a plastic sack, and he leapt from the verge and crushed the cheese curls beneath his feet and he chased the man away.

He ate lunch with the mail carrier Joseph, who was his friend, and while they were throwing their wrappers away in the garbage can, Joseph said, “You know, when I was a kid I thought that everyone was born with three wishes. I remember using one of mine to wish that I would never have to go to the bathroom again. It didn’t work, of course. I was mad at God for a long time about that.”

To which Coleman said, “I think you’re confusing God with a genie.”

He meant it as a statement of fact, but something about it must have struck Joseph as funny, for he would not stop laughing until Coleman had taken up his sign and left.

The problem was that if the Wandering Jew was real, if he truly existed, the city ought to have been much more heavily populated than it was. Everyone seemed to accept that the people of the city were sustained there by the memories of the living, which was yet another story without scriptural provenance. But there they all were—that much was certain—and Coleman had no reason to doubt the explanation. So why, then, wasn’t the city filled with all the millions of souls the Jew had encountered in the two-some millennia since the crucifixion of Jesus?

There were three possibilities, as Coleman saw it: either the Jew had died in the virus, in which case the virus had coincided with the Second Coming. Or he was still alive, in which case there must be other pockets of humanity in the city, or even other whole cities out there somewhere. And then there was the final possibility, which was that the Wandering Jew had never existed at all.

He could not decide which possibility was the most likely, an uncertainty that disturbed him greatly, and for the rest of the day he found his mind returning to the matter as he preached, his voice lapsing into silence while he listened to the wings of the question beating around inside his head. The people of the city flowed around him like water around a stone, and finally he gave up and went home and sat on the edge of his bed, and he watched the shadows as they shifted across the floor of his room, and he listened to a girl who was jumping rope on the street below his window. The girl was chanting a rhyme that went “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black,” and he stepped through the two glass doors onto his balcony and called down to her, “You there, what’s your name?”