The Unfinished World (17 page)

He'll do it for free, Cassie's mother says, holding out her arms to her ugly little girl. Cassie's heart explodes like trumpets, like fireworks and streamers. She's going to be beautiful. It suddenly seems okay that she'll die, now. It suddenly seems like a natural price to pay. She will be a flower, yes, a moonbeam, yes, shining briefly but bright—a silvery, shimmery memory forever.

Oh, child, says her aunt. I wish you wouldn't. Everyone loves you now. What do you need prettiness for?

Cassie says nothing. She knows she can't possibly explain. How the love people give you when you're ugly just isn't the same.

Oh, hush, says Cassie's mother. She holds Cassie to her, while
her daughter cries without knowing she's crying. Her face is even uglier with the redness and the squinty eyes and tear tracks. Cassie's mother tries not to look. She was the Caton County Corn Festival Queen once, and she's still the prettiest cashier at the Safeway. Prettier than most of the other girls twenty years younger. Oh, Babydoll, won't it be nice, she murmurs into her daughter's mousy hair. Won't it be nice.

The doctor is young and good-looking, with long slender hands that will work magic on Cassie. The doctor has heard from another doctor that Cassie is going to die, and nobody exactly disabuses him of that notion. Everyone in Cassie's family believes at least a little in her Sight.

The doctor says it will take six months, and does she have that long? Cassie thinks about it, and it feels right to her. So she says yes, and the family echoes her. Yes.

Then he rolls up his metaphorical sleeves, and Cassie rolls up hers, and they get to work. He breaks her nose, puts in a chin implant, performs eyelid lifts, pins back her ears, plumps her lips up with injections, liposuctions her thighs, and gives her breast implants. It is all very painful, but Cassie has a mantra, though she doesn't know that word. I will be a moonflower, she says, over and over, when the pain gets so bad she feels she might black out. I will be a moonflower. I will.

Five
. Cassie is a little in love with her doctor. This is one of her blind spots. He tells her that he will throw her a party when the bandages come off, just like Cinderella. She tries to tell him Cinderella was always pretty, but he cuts her off and smiles wider. You'll be the belle of the ball, he says.

No one has ever checked the doctor's credentials. He just
showed up on Cassie's doorstep, and the family has attributed it to Providence. If anyone had checked, they would have noticed he was no longer allowed to practice medicine. If anyone had checked, they might have seen some scary things.

Six
. Cassie has always disliked mirrors. Tonight, though, she is almost dizzy at the thought of what they might reveal. Tonight, the bandages come off. And Cassie gets a haircut and highlights and her teeth whitened and even a pedicure and a manicure, and the doctor pays for it all. Tonight is the night Cassie will be reborn, briefly, before she dies. A phoenix in reverse.

Cassie puts on the dress first. It's a new silver lace froth, long and grown up, and the heels are pale pearl. She is leaving the mirror for last. She is terrified of still being ugly. The doctor's nice blue eyes widen in appreciation. You look like a beautiful fairy princess, he says. Cassie snorts—she's not a fool—but then she realizes, she might. She might be that lovely now. The thought makes her tingle and light up from head to toe, like fireflies are dancing all over her skin.

The doctor puts his hands on her bare shoulders and gently spins her around, until she's facing the full-length mirror. And then Cassie forgets all about dying, forgets about her fears and her family and everything but the floating girl before her in the glass. That's me, she whispers, and the doctor laughs. You're my very finest creation, he says. My Galatea.

He leads Cassie into the backyard, tells her the guests will be arriving soon. Will you dance with me first? he asks, and though she's never danced before, she knows she can. She's not afraid. Not even when the doctor puts his arm around her waist, and her breath catches. She ignores the strange warmth in her blood and concentrates
on stepping in the right places. She's so beautiful, she realizes, is it any wonder he would want to dance with her?

And as they dance he starts to sing to her, softly, Oh, you must have been a beautiful baby, you must have been a wonderful child . . .

Cassie smiles to think of her own history rewritten. She looks down, shy in her new skin now, and sees her pearl shoes sink into a green patch of grass, edged by pink and purple flowers. Big flowers. Her vision goes black for a moment, then as her sight ebbs back in waves she looks up, really looks, right into the doctor's nice blue eyes. They have gone soft, unfocused, pupils wide, and she sees her new pretty face reflected in the empty blackness.

And she doesn't
See
it but she sees it just the same: her mother weeping prettily beside a casket with pink and beige insides, her aunt's head bent in sad disapproval. Her cousins shifting, uneasy at the funeral, uncomfortable and bored in stiff black suits and ties. Her class, politely shuffling by at the wake, puzzled by what they suppose are the wonders of mortuary makeup. She looks better dead, an unkind classmate will whisper, and Cassie's father will clench his fists and plant his huge, useless bulk on the front pew because what else, whatever else can he do?

But now she twists away, she tries to run, shedding one shoe; but the doctor catches her hard by the wrist and throws her to the ground. Please don't hurt me, she says, but she knows he will hurt her, hurt her so badly she will never get up again. She's been resigned to her death, but now that she knows how she'll die it seems wrong, it seems bad and unfair and a cheat. And so she cries for the beautiful little girl she had living inside of her all along, like a wood spirit trapped in a tree.

Seven
. Cassie can no longer See, and she sobs and sobs as the man kneels stiffly down beside her to whisper the rest of his song in her pinned-back ear. You must have been a beautiful
bay-ay-bee
, he sings softly, his fingers long and slender and working fast. She opens. She closes. She is a single flower, born and then gone under the silver strands of moonlight.

The Fires of Western Heaven

S
andbags rim the mouth of the trench, swarmed by tangles of barbed wire. The sentries lie here and there with their periscopes, improving their loopholes, bolstered by the approach of dawn. You climb the fire steps and look through the early morning mists, silvering the white and chalky soil. The dreams of the dead seem to swim through the shadows of No Man's Land, just past what you can see. There is almost nothing to mark the horizon: farms, churches, landmarks—even the ruins have been ruined, pounded into oblivion by the constant shelling. One small cottage is all that remains of the broken village past the field, just bits of plaster and a wall.

Sometimes the blackness descends, months and years later, and we find ourselves back there again. We are floating above the earth, or no, we
are
the earth, we are grass and trees, we are England and Germany, we are the Italian Alps and the Turkish Dardanelles, we are boys and girls, parents and grandparents, sorrow and anger and joy and bitter, bitter hearts. It is a very strange way to see, through the
all
of it, and it feels heavy as a blanket made of iron. We are riding in a dense, dark wood. We ride with the dead and with the living. We ride hard the hounds and show no mercy to the fox.

We ride hard to forget, but the dead ride with us.

Edmund, drowned in the mud at Passchendaele. Stuck and sinking for twenty minutes, while his helpless lieutenant watched him go.

Lettie, dead of the Spanish flu, carried by a cargo of sailors to her port town. Her small sisters followed, one by one by one.

All the Giordano boys, fallen in France, and not one proper grave between them.

Blair, gassed at the first Ypres, kept his life but lost his sight and lungs and laugh. Lost the color in his hair and face.

Mrs. Winthrop's old husband, the Major, sunk off the coast of Africa.

Katarina, finished with food after she lost Paul. She wouldn't eat, she wouldn't eat, and eventually she grew so thin she wore wool in high summer. And then she wore nothing at all, and the land claimed her little white bones.

Soon the night patrols will come back, the sentries will stand down, and the men will start exchanging insults and songs with the soldiers across the bombed-out No Man's Land. In broken French and broken German and a little broken English, they'll swap opinions on the local estaminet—the beer is swill, the eggs rotten, the chips just edible—and on which French women to bed and which to avoid. There'll be a few jokes about that, too, and calls for names, names, please, because after
all the VD will land an infantryman in the hospital just as well as a piece of shrapnel
.

After the Stand-To, then inspection, then rum with breakfast on this chilly morning. The men will gather at the largest shell hole to wash and shave, cheerfully saying good morning to their dead German soldier as they file past. They inherited Fritz, as they call him, when they arrived a few days ago, and they've been watching him turn colors ever since. White then yellow then red then blue, and now he's got a greenish cast. There are bets on when the black will set in, though they all hope they're back behind the lines before then. The panic and boom of the Salient will sound in the distance soon, too. The rat hunting will begin in earnest, rodent corpses strung like grotesque necklaces over the trench throats. The whole jagged mess of war and life will make a sharp wound against the brightness once more
.

Tom, the happy warrior, shot in the neck while leading a charge. It took him four days to die. He called out for his mother but the veil came first.

When Valentina's brother died in the Alps, she shipped out as a nurse to France and her father died of grief a month later.

When the Carthaginians made sacrifice, they played loud music near the fires so no one could hear the little children screaming. Said Georges to everyone when he returned from Siberia.