The Brief History of the Dead (14 page)

The rope fell slack at the girl’s feet, like a ribbon of seaweed bleached by the sun. She stared up at him without answering.

He called, “Aren’t you even going to ask me
my
name?”

She hesitated for a moment, then said, “I know who you are. You’re the Birdman.”

“No, my name is Mr. Coleman Kinzler.”

“That’s not what we call you. We call you the Birdman of Alcatraz.”

There was a heaviness to the girl’s features that made him wonder if she might be a bit feebleminded. He used his gentlest voice to ask her, “Do you know about Jesus Christ?”

To which she said, “Yep. He died on the cross to save us from our sins.”

“Good girl,” Coleman said. If he had had a toy at hand—a doll, for instance, or a pinwheel—he might have thrown it down to her as a present. But the only items on the balcony were a rusted lawn chair, a spider plant that had gone crisp from neglect, and a stack of signs attached to white wooden pickets, including the one he was planning to carry tomorrow, which read,
JESUS IS THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE.
So instead of a present, and because it was the best he could do, he held the sign up and showed it to the girl, waving it back and forth, until she shrugged and picked up her jump rope and went skipping away down the sidewalk.

And that was three days.

~

The birds were dinosaurs.

He had read about it in a book once—how in the time of the great dying the largest of the dinosaurs had been killed off by disease and starvation, but the smallest had survived, and over the centuries they had changed, and finally they had become the birds. So the birds were dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs were reptiles, and the reptiles, as everybody knew, were demons. It took a diligent eye to see through all the disguises that were in place.

He peeled the bandage from his chin to investigate the scrape he had gotten in the fall. Though the injury was shallow, it had not yet sealed over, and he carefully probed at the edges with his fingers to see whether a crust had formed there, and, if so, whether it had begun to curl away from his skin. Did people heal from the outside in or from the inside out? He wasn’t sure. But he himself did not seem to be healing at all. He cleaned the scrape and replaced the bandage and got his sign from the balcony, and later that day, when he was eating lunch with Joseph, he said to him, “I’m no better today than I was yesterday,” and Joseph said, “Well, I can’t say that I find that very surprising.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know that any of us ever gets any better. I have a hard time believing that people change at all.”

Coleman disagreed. “We are all changed by the hand of the Lord. God gave Saul a new heart, the Bible says. Both Sauls, in fact—King Saul and that Saul who became the Apostle Paul. But I wasn’t talking about my heart. I was talking about my chin.”

“Oh. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised by that either.”

“Why not?”

“If I leave you to yourself, you eat nothing but starches all the time. You don’t get an ounce of protein. Whatever happened to ‘Your body is your temple’ is what I want to know.”

Four birds circled overhead, and Coleman realized that they were watching him again. He hushed Joseph and pointed into the air, and for the rest of the lunch hour, as they finished their hamburgers, he would not let him speak.

It had been only a few weeks since he had asked the Lord to reveal to him the names of the demons, whereupon he had felt a hand directing him into Bristow’s restaurant. He had overheard two men talking about the birds. “So it all comes down to the Laura bird,” the first man had said, and the second man had nodded and answered, “Yes, the Laura bird, that’s what it looks like,” and ever since then Coleman had heard people talking about them everywhere.

The Laura birds. The Laura birds. The Laura birds.

It seemed that nobody could escape from them.

He followed the sidewalk past a vintage clothing store and an empty dance studio and then past the gaping mouth and long distended throat of a subway entrance. When he rounded the corner, the wind threatened to tug his sign away from him. He had to turn it sideways in order to keep his grip on it. The sun was showing on the windshields and silver trim of the cars parked along the street, a pearl-strung line of small white balls with thin spikes of light coming out of them. They were almost too bright to look at. A teenager with a halo of frizzy red hair skateboarded past him and said, “The Truth and the Life. All right, man!” and it took Coleman a moment to remember the message that was printed on his sign. He turned and shouted to the boy’s disappearing figure, “You forgot the Way. Don’t forget the Way,” and the boy raised his hand to Coleman in a salute.

He spent the rest of the afternoon, into the early evening, circling the poorly distinguished boundary line of the district, that meandering belt of fenced-in lots and vacant buildings where the streets began to fade into the empty city. He was looking for people who not yet heard His message. By the time he reached his home, the moon was shining like a Wiffle ball in the highest portion of the evening sky. And that made the fourth day.

~

The rest of the night passed slowly, and in the morning he opened his eyes, and though the sun had risen and the hours had gone by, he could not say whether or not he had slept. He felt as though he remembered dreaming, but as soon as he tried to summon the dream to the front of his mind, it slipped away from him, vanishing into the shadows. The only thing he was certain he remembered was lying as still as he could for hours on end, waiting for that strange feeling of segmentation in his limbs that meant he was finally drifting off to sleep. But as to whether or not he had, at last, slept, he could not be certain.

It was yet another thing that God knew and he did not, though perhaps one day it would be revealed to him.

The Laura birds had landed on his balcony again, and he frightened them away, opening and closing the two glass doors with a sudden loud bang that sent them flying down to the street. Then he put his shoes on and selected his sign and carried it out into the city. There was a little grocery store at the corner of the block, and he stopped there and picked up a bag of peeled baby carrots for the vitamins and a small styrofoam tray of dried sausage fingers for the protein. Joseph was right—his body was, after all, his temple. He put the carrots in one pocket and the sausage fingers in the other, and he found that he could feel the packages on his thighs as he walked, swinging back and forth, their weight almost perfectly balanced. It was a good weight, like the weight of God’s attention, which held all things to the earth and prevented them from vanishing into atoms.

The morning was cool and sunlit and peaceful, and hundreds of people were already out roaming the city streets. He raised his voice as he drifted between them, calling out, “Brothers and sisters! My many friends! Hearken to the Word of God, for His Word is true and His Word is just!” And he held the sign he was carrying high above his head, steadying it with both his hands so that everyone who approached him could see it without obstruction. It read
GOD IS LOVE
in bold black letters, though on the other side he had also written
GOD IS HOPE
, just in case.

Several hours had gone by and the sun was hidden behind the crown of a building when he passed the clockmaker’s shop on the west side of Park Street. He knew it was noon by the chime of the clocks in the window. There were dozens of them, carefully synchronized. He stood there watching their mechanisms turn for a while before he moved on—their second hands sweeping across their faces, their minute hands ticking forward by tiny, almost imperceptible degrees. He left when they touched 12:05. He followed the shadows of the clouds through the gathering place. He stopped to preach to the line of people that had formed outside one of the coffee shops, and when the manager ran out waving his broom at him, he tucked his sign under his arm and fled, and shortly thereafter, he came to the churchyard where he had buried his tooth.

The bread sticks he had joined together in the shape of the cross were missing. Though he examined the ground carefully, he could not find the patch of soil they had marked.

There were birds all around him, though, pecking at the grass, and it took him a moment to realize what they were doing: they were searching for his tooth so that they could swallow it. They had already eaten the bread sticks, concealing the place where the tooth lay buried, and now they had decided to eat the tooth as well, to pry it from consecrated ground and take it into the dark furnaces of their stomachs so that it would never be returned to him.

They had not yet uncovered it, though, and with the guidance of the Lord, they never would.

Coleman found a rake leaning against the wall of the church, and he took it up and left his sign in its place. He shouted, “Get out of here! Go!” as he pursued the birds through the churchyard, swinging the rake from side to side and then across his feet and then down from over his head like a mallet. The tines rang and clattered as they hit the ground. Only once did he actually make contact with one of the birds, clipping its tail so that a little spray of feathers burst into the air and drifted lightly to the grass. The creature squawked and went flapping away, landing on the neck of a lamppost across the street. He kept chasing the others, following them from one hopping point to the next until finally, after much screaming and beating of the grass, the last one flew away. The churchyard was empty. His tooth was safe for now.

A crowd had gathered along the property line, but when he let go of the rake and looked up at them, they dropped their eyes and strode off in a dozen different directions, as if they had been headed somewhere else all along.

He found two sticks and crossed them at the transverse and then knotted them together with a thread from the hem of his jacket, planting them in the ground to mark the spot where he thought his tooth might be. And he leaned the rake against the wall, and he picked up his sign, and all that day he walked the streets delivering the Good Word of Jesus, struggling to make himself heard through the hoarseness of his voice. When he got home that evening, he put the sign away on the balcony and sat on the corner of his bed, emptying his pockets into his hands. He ate all of his sausages and most of his carrots. And that was five days.

~

FOR THOU SHALT BE IN LEAGUE WITH THE STONES OF THE FIELD, AND THE BEASTS OF THE FIELD SHALL BE AT PEACE WITH THEE.
It was the great message of God’s mercy upon the suffering, from the fifth chapter of Job, God’s great book of suffering. Ever since Coleman had died, he had carried the verse on his sign at least once a week as a reminder of God’s grace and His mystery. Of all the books of the Old Testament, Job was the one he found the most puzzling, and also the one he most venerated, and he had often wondered when he was alive if that particular verse, Job 5:23, wasn’t both a promise and a forecast of death. It seemed to suggest that God’s mercy upon the suffering lay precisely in the fact that He allowed them to die. What could it have meant to the Israelites to be “in league with the stones of the field” if not that they would be buried finally among their ancestors?

It meant that they would be at peace upon the earth, not at peace beneath it, one of his voices said.

And the other voice said, But in death God created for His people a new earth.

And the first voice said, Tell me then, oh Wise One—which earth is this?

And the second voice did not answer.

Midway through the afternoon Coleman was addressing a crowd of people from the bench outside a fitness club when he saw the two boys who had knocked his tooth out. They were carrying tennis rackets and gym bags, and one of them snapped a towel at the seat of the other’s pants, then reached around the back of his neck and playfully tucked his shirt tag into his collar, his fingers tickling over his skin. Coleman leapt down from the bench and shouted after them, “God loves you. He loves you and will heal you if you give yourselves over to His care.”

The boys seemed embarrassed. They refused to meet his eye. The first one muttered something into the other’s ear. It looked like “It’s him again,” though it might have been “On the count of three” or even “Whose turn is it this time?”—Coleman had never been very good at reading lips—and then the boys started off at a sort of galloping walk. He tried to keep up with them but lost sight of them in the shopping plaza, and then he banged his shoulder as he was running around the edge of a wooden kiosk, and before he knew it he was sitting flat on the ground, his sign resting dead in his lap.

“Are you all right, Mr. Coleman?”

There was a girl standing over him, no older than twenty, with a wide-open look of sympathy around her eyes. But how, he wondered, did she know his name?

“You wrote it down,” she said. He realized she was reading his sign, to which he had once again attached his signature—Coleman Kinzler, Ph.D.

“Here, let me help you up,” she said, and when he was on his feet she added, “My name’s Sarah.”

“Abraham’s beloved wife.”

She shook her head. “You must be thinking of someone else. I’m not married yet.”

“‘And the Lord visited Sarah as He had said, and the Lord did unto Sarah as He had spoken.’”

Suddenly she seemed to think better of introducing herself. She spent a long quiet moment staring at Coleman. It was as though he were a jack-in-the-box whose lever was winding down, and she was just waiting for the clown to pop out of his skull. Then she said, “Are you sure you’re okay? I’ve got to go meet my mother.”

Briefly he remembered the Bible he had given to the Hindu woman so many years ago. He said, “I miss my Bible.”

“Your Bible is there in your hand.”

She was right—he was indeed carrying a Bible—but it was not the Bible he had been thinking of, the one he had bent his heart toward for so long.

Still he said, “I thank you very much for your kindness,” and she said, “All right then,” her voice climbing an extra notch as she spoke, as though she were asking a question, and he watched her move slowly off across the plaza.