The Unfinished World (11 page)

Then there was the time the two teams came upon one another in the Como Bluffs and threw shouts, then insults, then stones, until their ears and fingers bled. Until they were covered in bruises and little red stars.

We gave the same damn species thirty-some names. You published seventy-six academic papers in one year. I acquired so many fossils I'll never have time to look at them all, to open the crates and unpack the bones. They called it wasteful, useless. We called it love. We called it the rush to greet our long-lost dead
.

She finally left Marsh, the only way she knew. She was losing her insides by then, scarlet flowers in all her white handkerchiefs, so she went out West, where he had always promised her they'd go. Only she went alone, and she never came back. He learned of her death from a telegram, sent from a sanitarium in Arizona.

He heard that Cope's wife and daughter had left him, also. One of the side effects, evidently, of their mutual hunger for bones. He tried one more trick: to take Cope's fossils, to commandeer them for the government. It was the end of the end for Cope. For both of them,
really. Cope turned over his catalogue of Marsh's misdeeds. The headline:
SCIENTISTS WAGE BITTER WARFARE
. Congress investigated and eventually saw an opportunity to eliminate the department of paleontology at the Geological Survey, along with Marsh's position as its head. Woe and wickedness, said one of Marsh's assistants, and he cried as they packed up the lab. Then he went to work for Cope, until Cope ran out of money, too.

That ass in Congress shouting about birds with teeth, birds with teeth, are we taxpayers funding such a foolish blasphemy? And the other jackals taking up the cry. It has me in a black and dangerous mood, the brandy not enough to keep the devil from my tongue tonight
.

He eats the last of his egg, finishes his coffee, and reads the rest of the obituary. Small pleasures now, small hurts, too. He dabs at his beard with a napkin, feels his breath come shorter these days.

My own grave will be ready for me soon
.

I have heard about your nightmares, he almost wrote to Cope, years ago, but he tore the paper out of the notebook and balled it up till the ink was smeared through.
Nightmares where the bones of the dead assemble themselves, where they dance and gambol and knock their joints together in his ears, eternal ringing sounds and terrifying laughter. Nightmares where the creatures we discovered hover over Cope's camp bed and keep watch like vultures.

I have heard about your dreams, he tried then, and put his head down, suddenly old, suddenly tired down to his own weary bones.

Sometimes I long to go West again, to watch the prairie grass ripple and the wind blow history clean. Like we could take it all back, this whole sordid business of living, and just fall into dust. As I suppose, one day, we will
.

For These Humans Who Cannot Fly

The annals of the German waiting mortuaries are a “damned” chapter of history; few people outside Germany know anything about these extraordinary establishments. Even German writers on the subject concentrate on architectural and social aspects and avoid the central questions: Why were these bizarre hospitals for the dead built? Why were they maintained for a period of more than a hundred years? Did they ever serve any purpose?

—FROM
BURIED ALIVE: THE TERRIFYING HISTORY OF OUR MOST PRIMAL FEAR
, BY JAN BONDESON

E
very death is a love story. It's the goodbye part, but the love is still there, wide as the world.

When my wife died, I began to understand this. I began to build the death houses. The name is misleading, since these houses hold not only death but futures, possibilities, hopes that the end isn't the end. These are perhaps tall tales, but they stack up better than dead bodies and they burn longer than kindling. I sell these tales
for the living, and for the dying, and I have done this since my wife flew away.

The story about my wife is a short and sad one, not so new or so tall. My wife was lovely, with a smile like the moon dipped in stars. When we first married, she would fit herself into the crook of my arm as we slept; she would write me love letters three times a day and slip them into pockets, under cushions, behind the backs of mirrors and along the linings of drawers. She loved animals even more than she loved me, and we always had a cat or two in the house along with the dogs, mice, chickens, hedgehogs, goats, and sometimes even pigs. We never had birds because my wife couldn't stand to see them caged.

She sang on the stage, but soon grew to fancy herself an actual songbird. She would chirp and whistle instead of speaking and flap her arms as though they were wings. She started digging worms out of the soft earth in the early mornings, crushing them with her moon-smile and leaving pink fleshy bits in her teeth. She would hop to the window on light feet and watch the birds in the trees, weeping because she couldn't join them in flight. She banished the cats from the house after one brought in a robin with its neck broken and dropped it on her pillow.

I have reached a milestone today. I have built exactly one hundred death houses, all over Europe and the United States. In those houses I've placed exactly five hundred Temporary Resting Containers, built to house the newly dead until they reawaken. Five in each house to start with. (The clients are free to build more, but I provide only five.) Five hundred love stories, begun at their ends. I do think of myself as a romantic. I think of myself as a false idol, or sometimes, a
saint. Women often embrace me, and many offer me expensive gifts and sometimes more than that. Men shake my hand and choke up, clearing their throats. When I leave a village or a city with its very own death house, I can see it collectively sigh and relax, as if a great weight had been lifted from its massive shoulders. I can see the people's relief rising like smoke, the residue of tamped-down fear.

I usually choose a restful spot for the death house, or
Leichenhaus
. It should rise gracefully in an arc, casting a long shadow on cobblestones and hearts. But I try to keep things playful, too. In many villages, I find that placing it at the end of a long road and a short curve mimic the element of surprise when death arrives.