The Unfinished World (18 page)

Davis, mad in a quiet way; he sat alone on park benches and wept.

Mary needed a false set of teeth but there were none left—they'd all gone to the soldiers. She ate oatmeal and mashed potatoes for years while dreaming of bacon.

Rory's face, blown off in Sardinia. The doctors gave him a new
one. It was called a great miracle. Either it broke all the mirrors or he did.

Sometimes we find a little of what has been lost. Sometimes it is a comfort, sometimes a nightmare. Sometimes it is a mystery, a thing so far removed from now it appears like an alien artifact, singing in the wild of unimaginable kindnesses. These things are written in a language we no longer need, that we no longer believe in. Pages with dog-eared corners, letters dressed with pieces of ribbon and lace, pressed leaves and flowers from earlier walks through woods. Souvenirs of another kind of silence.

Now we spill down through the forest, now we ride into human crowds and there are fevers for us, wild jazz and absinthe dreams, garters and girdles and stockings rolled down. Raucous piano and jitterbugging and casual sex in the park, in the plaza, in the piazza, in the backseat of the Rolls. Everywhere there is fever and passion, everywhere a need to burn, burn, burn out the hurt. We write, we sing, we paint, and still the blackness follows, still the dead are there in every note, every brushstroke. We ride and ride, farther and faster and still, still the ghosts ride with us, keep pace behind us, mock all our efforts to smoke and sweat them out.

Now the inky sky and the stiff-armed sentries and the breathing of sleepers further down the trench. Uneasy, shallow sleep, made restless with wounds real or imagined. Night here has a way of spreading fear like a contagion, making men who hate violence long for the sudden rough burst of it. Something decisive, something solid, something other than this half-life of sickness and waiting. Most of the men are sick
with something: trench foot, dysentery, flu, fever. Fear. Nightmares. A trench full of sick men breathing in hope and dreaming about home. The cleanse before dawn. Before they wake tired and sore, remembering the bombardment starts today. The relentless sound of the artillery guns their only music for the next week. The air they breathe will hum and vibrate with it; the light itself will bend and waver and blacken with the endless shower of shells. Then they'll explode the mines, finally, take out the Boche guns, then rush their lines. After the attack, they're going behind the lines again, what's left of the company, of course. Once the relief comes
.

Delia, married to a steel magnate who made a killing off of the war. But she secretly went to the toilet every night and cried for a boy buried in Flanders.

Danny, the poet, devoid of poetry now. Instead of words he dreams of cave-ins and close fights in a tunnel of earth and water.

All the pictures flung past, the living only half of what's missing. If you look closely, you can just make out the outlines of the dead peering over our shoulders, as we dance, as we sing carols, as we mark the holidays off with ticks on a calendar and births and deaths in Bibles. As we ride, ride, these woods are full of the gloom of the ghostly riders behind us. As we ride, and years wear on, these ghosts never change, never age, always stare glumly at the camera, as green and ungainly as they were at twenty-one. These riders still burn with the fire of the western heavens.

Davy, gassed, drowned on dry land. His nightmare face stuck in his mates' minds for years, green and gasping, eyes rolling and red like a dying bull's.

Jack, pulverized in the heat of the Dardanelles, nothing left to ship home.

Roland, shot for mutiny. By then glad to know how he was going to die, and that it would be clean, and painless, and quick.

Jürgen, fallen from the sky like Icarus. Not in a firefight; his plane developed engine trouble and he went down in front of a clear, bright blue sky and a burning sun.

In the end, nothing left but the trees; twisted things whittled by shrapnel and fire to pointed black stakes. They hold up the sky and fence in the killing fields, make a hideous trinket of barbed wire and wood.

In the end, take the photos of past school classes and strike them through: an
X
, an
X
, an
X
, an
X
.

In the end, the battle-scarred world stands still.

The Process of Human Decay

Fresh

Something is wrong. Your heart, it seems, has become a fish. It leaps, flutters, flops sideways a few times, then stops. You fall down.

Just an hour ago your muscles were loose and limber and you walked down the street to the neighbor's, stood on his stoop and talked about your grandkids, spring training, gas prices. Now your thighs and calves are tightening, rigid, blood pooling under the skin. Your brain cells are losing their structural integrity. Putrefaction has started, and the carbohydrates and lipids have begun to form gases in your intestinal tract. An army of blowflies is already on the way.

Bloat

Your daughter stands nervously behind the cops as they force open your door. This is harder than it looks with you sprawled in the doorway, heavy with decay. The smell bursts from the front hallway and everyone gasps, even your daughter. After only five days it seems impossible she wouldn't recognize you, but you are not you. You
have transmogrified; you are a monster, a shiny human skin sack stuffed with liquefying tissue, leaking from every orifice.

The smell of it all is unbearable and one of the cops mutters something about masks. Your daughter, made brave by grief, puts her T-shirt over her mouth and tries to get closer. It is then that your skin begins to ripple and marble. She runs from the house, and it isn't the first time. You have been a grotesque to her while living, even as you were to her mother before her. Your current state of gracelessness reminds us now that you have not always lived with grace. Though in the last few years you have tried to atone, there is a reason you have lived alone often. There is a reason several wives have wished you would die—and finally you have.

Delayed Decay

You wanted to be cremated; you told your daughter and your son and your sisters and your wretched almost-ex-wife. But somehow, no one has listened. They just want to throw you in a box and bury you as quickly as they can.

Your almost-ex-wife says a few words that aren't true, and your daughter tries but just keeps crying, something her grown children have never seen her do. Their uncle cries, but that's nothing new. He always was a pussy, your son. Your grandkids, though—two boys, good kids—they play baseball for their college teams and they date pretty girls. You think one of them might be a Mormon. You disapprove of God, but you had still hoped to become a better man for their sake. You hoped to show them how to stay men, unlike their uncle. You would be sad to see how little they seem to mind your passing. They look dismayed but mostly distracted, hot and itchy in black wool on a warm spring day. Get it over with, they seem to be saying, and you would probably agree. You were never one for ceremony.
Get it over with, and here comes the lid and the shovel and the earthy hole. Here come the worms.

Dry Remains

Eventually decomposition strips you bare, even in that solid oak you've taken the shape of. You've helped, finally, to enrich something around you, by feeding the soil with your skin and fat and muscle. Now the soil is full of phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and especially nitrogen. Now the soil is supremely satisfied, and you'd be okay with that. You always did like growing things. You always were better with plants than with people.

The Fever Librarian

S
ome days are harder than others for the fever librarian. Some days, the sadness freezes in her veins, and on these still days she is able to file and sort, to restock and research and perform her duties as she always has. But some days, the ice breaks up and the memory ships can navigate through, laden with their dangerous cargo: lust, anger, obsession. On these days her fingers itch to release all the fevers, to bring back all of man's carnal passions and searing pains. To spread illness and abandon throughout the known world.

The fever librarian is keeping it quiet, but an epidemic has begun to infect her heart; it is spreading through her brain and body like wildfire. Her irises are blackening, her hair is darkening to copper, her skin is just starting to betray the red of the fevers burning inside of her.