No One is Here Except All of Us (29 page)

THE BOOK OF THE DISTANCE, AWAY, AWAY

E
ven when I had to change trains, and a circle of soldiers surrounded me, and I easily handed over the same worn papers and gave them the answers to all their questions, I was not scared.
Is this where I die?
I thought, saying the names of someone else’s parents and the town where I was not born.
Where will it be? Where is the place where I will die?
And then it happened: one soldier took me by the arm, squeezed my flesh. He shook his head and led me away.

The soldier led me through the station. I noticed everything around me—this place perhaps the last I would see. Pigeons roosted in the high eaves. Their gurgled song was a constant echo. Sausage was for sale, newspapers, sweet cakes in small boxes. Men wore hats and coats, women wore hats and coats. Everyone watched me being taken away. There was something like relief in this scene—the answer to a question as long as my journey to the farmhouse, as long as my journey on the train, as long as my life. Where will the end come? The end will come here.

You, the life inside me, scrambling to put together the cells of guts and toenails and the follicles with which to grow the long shine of hair, could not have seen the soldiers and their boots. Could not see that behind their eyes were so many deaths that there was no sense in memorizing all of them. Just to name the names would have taken them all the nights of their lives.

The soldiers stopped at a stand in the middle of the station. The soldier paid for and received a roll of bread. He put it into a bag and handed it to me. My eyes were questions.
You
, he said.
Bread
. He wrapped his fingers around my wrist. The other words were lost in my shock, but the word
bread
kept landing, clear as a dropped coin. I nodded.
Bread. For you.

The soldier put the package in my hand, led me to my platform, bowed his head and left. I could not find him in the crowd through my window, though I still felt the ring of fingers around my arm and wrist.
I do not die here?
I asked the bread, which revealed its soft white heart.

“I’m going to the New World,”
I told the agent at the dock. He curled his lip and narrowed his eyes.

“America?” he asked.

“Is that its name?” I wondered aloud. “Was the new world always named that?”

“Is it just you?” the agent asked, already writing my name on the ticket. I did not know that I was lying to him when I said yes.

Inside, the tunnels of your ears became more precise. The one single tube began to make itself into an entire network of intestines. Bulbs of arms and legs began to blossom out. No bones yet. No increments of spine. Nothing hard, only soft parts first. Your veins reached out to other veins and opened their mouths to kiss each other.

My cabin was full of Russian women and their children. Hair was combed, clothes were put away in shelves, armpits were splashed with water. Everyone was talking so fast I had a hard time figuring out which words came out of which mouth.

“Maksim is the lowliest of scum,” one young woman said, trying to jam a pin into her blond hair.

“You’re lucky compared to me. My husband doesn’t even remember my name.”

“Mother, I want,” a little boy said.

“What’s that, Vovochka?”

“Find me an American with money and a straight nose and I’ll do all your laundry,” a teenage girl said, laughing.

“Candy. And where’s my water gun?” the little boy whined.

All at once, they noticed me. The room turned silent.

“Hi there, scaredy,” the first girl said to me. “You staying with us? You got your life rafts there?” I saw myself, hugging my bags to my chest. I felt dirty and despicable; pathetic, lonesome, lost. I was no one to nobody, alive without reason to be. I wanted to be invisible, to be air or water, anything but a human body and soul.

I said, “A mistake,” and walked away fast. I felt like I was going crazy, caught in a crawl of biting ants. Down the length of the hallway, each bunk bursting with men or women, kids crashing into each other and laughing hard. “Where are my slippers?” a woman shrieked.

“You expect me to keep track of those disgusting old things?” a man bellowed.

“Superhero!” a little boy screamed, and ran in front of me, his arms out. The air felt sticky at the same time that it was cold. I ran up the metal stairs where the wind, the salty wind, blew my hair. I drank it in. Everything around me was either gray or blue. It was cold outside. I was cold inside. I was tired.

On the bench nearby a man in a black hat was sitting with a radio on his lap. When he saw me, recognition flashed across his face. As if he had been waiting for me to fly through the door. The man’s eyes were filled with sadness. He put his hand out to me. The hand was a beggar, destitute and hungry. “Sit, please. I can’t listen alone,” he said in English. English, I thought. The same language as the radio. That language that brought it all back. He did not ask me who I was—our names, the facts, had nothing to do with this moment. The hum in my body settled, the women and children downstairs in the bowels of the ship hushed up. I sat at his side, my parcels on my lap. Our shoulders touched. The radio filled my ears.

Here, on over an acre of land lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which except perhaps by a convulsive movement or a convulsive sigh from a living skeleton too weak to move. The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated people with nothing to do and no hope of life. There was no privacy, nor did men and women ask it any longer. Women stood and squatted stock naked in the dust trying to wash themselves and to catch the lice on their bodies. Babies have been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live. A mother, driven mad, screamed at the British sentry to give her milk for her child. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.

I was floating above myself. I tried to find my body. My feet were resting on wooden planks hammered down with dowels and beneath those were cabins where people prepared to sleep, dream, stand up to go to the bathroom and have a sip of water because their mouths were dry. Girls were in love with boys. Boys were mean to girls. Children wanted sweets, toys. I felt so lonely it almost seemed unbelievable that I myself was there. That emptiness should not be possible in a living body.

“It’s over,” the man in the black hat said. “Hitler is dead. The camps are being liberated.”

“I don’t know what those things are,” I admitted. He studied me, the clear state of disrepair, of despair.

“You are safe, that’s all you need to know. You survived.”

The man in the black hat opened a newspaper with a picture of a man with a square of a mustache. The headline read:
HITLER AND HIS BRIDE KILL THEMSELVES
. “He married his mistress at midnight and they were dead by afternoon. You can read it.” I put my hand around Solomon’s star in my pocket.
I do not die there?
I asked.
Do I die at sea? Is it a matter of a cleaner, better world?
Though you had no bones yet, you sloshed and rocked inside me. You sent waves out until I had to run and throw up over the side of the ship. The froth swallowed it; I could not even see what I had lost.

The man in the black hat came over and offered me a hand and a handkerchief. “Would you like to sit down?” he asked, his accent flat and songless.

“Do I die here?” I asked him.

“It’s seasickness,” he said. “It’s perfectly normal.”

“Is it a better world now that we are all dead?”

He patted my face with the little white cloth. “No one here is dead. You have made it.”

“I had four parents. I thought it would be enough to last.” I started to cry into the cloth, I cried until the thing was limp and useless. I tore my throat with air. My feet were weak with loss—so were my knees, my earlobes, my fingernails. My hair and dry, stretched skin cried. The tiny bones in my hands cried. The sea of my belly was a storm. You must have felt dizzy, washing back and forth, but your new heart did not stop pumping.
We are alive
, you said,
we are alive, we are alive, we are alive, we are alive.

The man put his hand on my head awkwardly and patted it. “We are going to be all right,” he said. “We are on our way home.”

“Do you know me?” I asked.

“I know you now.” The man in the black hat smiled. “And it’s a pleasure. My name is Edward.”

“Are you one of my people?” I felt as if I knew him, as if he belonged to me and always had. And why wouldn’t he? Here we were in the endlessness and God had not offered a good explanation. I was alive with hands, a mouth—this story was mine to tell. I imagined the villagers running away, leaping into the river, gathered by the loving arms of the water, washed to sea, transformed. I began, “And the people turned into the boards, nails, the passengers. In the ship’s depths they became fires great enough to push this whole floating city across the world. They became the entire, unbreakable ocean.”

Edward was not afraid of me, of where I had come from. Somehow, I seemed to make perfect sense to him. In those clear eyes I saw a place to rest, a small, safe corner. Yes, you are one of my people, I thought. Of course you are. We began to move. The ship rocked on the sea, the sea which counted all the blues as its own, the sea which rolled over itself and sprayed across the bow, landing white and thick on itself.

The motion of the sea felt the same as the motion inside. Everything swam and floated. “Who are you?” I asked my middle.

I looked out and memorized the shoreline, the shape of the way back. I did not have to try hard to memorize the shape of the water because it was so flat, so deep, so endless. Against it the land looked tiny and harmless—a miniature, floating island.

Edward and I spent the whole journey together, yet I hardly remember speaking to each other. We shared food, watched each other’s things when one wanted to stand up and go for a walk. We made a small bed on deck and slept under a cloudy sky. “Good night, new friend,” Edward said each night. I do not know if I slept peacefully or wildly. If I snored or howled. In the morning, Edward handed me tea and we took our place on the bench, where before us the sea was vast and generous—she hid her treasures and her misery; only the tumbled waves were ours to see, only the surface. Ahead of us: This sea, another. The great big ocean. For weeks, our whole world was blue.

THE BOOK OF EXPLANATIONS AND ENDINGS

C
urled up on the salt-sprayed deck, my head on the bag of feathers, I dreamed of the dictator’s wedding.

There were no balloons. No ribbons. There were no flags for miles along the road and no procession of shining cars. The dictator wore his green suit, of course and as always. His bride wore a green dress and green shoes and a green hat. Did she call up and order this from a shop in the city where she was born? Did she tell them it was for her wedding? Did she put her right arm up even though the person on the other end of the phone would never have known if she did?

At the moment of their nuptials, our earth was heavy over them. Many feet of ground between the wedding and any daylight. Ants and ant holes. Worms and wormholes. Gophers, rabbits, snakes, spiders and the green backs of beetles. Rainwater did its best to make it down inside their cave and drown them there.

In the cave, the dictator had had a floor installed. There were pastel-colored telephones and beds for sleeping with fresh goose feathers to fill them. The tapestry from his former living room was hung now over the wall, moist with groundwater. Ants made their way along its silken strands.

“You have been true to me all this time,” he said to his bride. “This, finally, is your reward.”

“I have followed along behind.”

“Exactly right.”

On all sides, deep and shallow, the dictator and his bride heard the four-leggeds hunkered down, feeding their bald babies, licking the blood off.

There were two other men in the room, officials. One was the witness and one was the officiant. The dictator had not known either of them long. They had been called upon only recently, as the land got smaller and the only breathable air was underground.

“Everything is going great,” the men lied. “We are sure of it. How could it go any other way?”

The dictator combed his fingers through his mustache. His companion looked down at the brought-down wood floor. She did not say to him that this was no wedding: her mother was not there with a hat on. Her sister had no new dress. Her father would not give her a new silver knife with which to divide the vegetables along their spines.

“We are supposed to be getting married,” she said. “I have been following along.”

“The lady is right,” he said. “Tell us what to do.”

“Stand near each other. Stand so you’re touching,” the official told them.

They moved shoulder to shoulder but the dictator took a step away when his head came up shorter than her head.

“Friends,” the official began, “we are gathered here today to witness the union of this man and this woman in the eyes of all that is pure.”

The walls crumbled slightly under the feet of living things inside them. Powder fell in soft piles. The hundreds of feet came closer.

“The earth is cleaner now than it was. The world is new and better. We move ahead cleansed,” the officiant continued.

Centipedes, millipedes and carpenter ants devoured the sandy ground. Their legs needled and pinned the path.

“Do you take this woman to be your wedded wife until the day that you die?”

“I will do that.”

“And do you take this man?”

“I will.”

“For the rest of your life?”

“For the rest.”

The walls simmered with the bodies of the living things.

“I now pronounce you man and wife,” the official said. “Kiss.”

The dictator leaned down and scratched his new wife’s cheek with his lips. “Is that what you wanted?” he asked. “Are you satisfied?”

“Do you love me?”

“You’re a pure woman.”

Champagne was enjoyed out of crystal flutes. The bubbles stung the faces of the celebrants when they sipped. By the time the toasts had been toasted, the floor was dotted with insects. The four humans stomped as many dead as they could but the supply was quickly renewed by the bountiful, plentiful earth.

The new wife lay naked all night long, waiting. Her skin was cold. He did not press against her. He did not spank her in the midst. He did not kiss her with his open and dripping mouth. He did not collapse and whisper a few words into her ear. He slept right through the night, though the creatures made the turn from floor to bedposts and found the two large bodies under the covers. The dictator’s wife was walked upon by tiny feet, pricked by them on her pale skin, but she did not scream because she did not want to disturb her fair, sleeping husband.

And in the morning, when the officials came back with the news that the enemy was closing in, that the space of their territory had become very slight, the dictator handed his wife a terrible, beautiful pill and took one for himself. “Thank you very much,” he said to the official. “We will be in our room.”

“Cheers,” the wife said, ever hopeful, while she tapped his pill with her own.

“Bite, then swallow,” he told her.

But after the stuff spilled out over their tongues, and before it worked to end their lives, the dictator took a gun out of his belt and put it to his head, giving his new wife the opportunity to watch him die. She fell over him and watched his blood roll down into a river in which the bugs swam. In the time it took her to die, the river had reached the wall and begun to soak into it, the wall was reddened and rich. What was alive inside rejoiced.

The officials wrapped the two bodies in a cloth, carried them through the tunnels and out into the spinning world where spring tulips lost one waxy petal at a time. The dictator and his new bride were tossed into a hole, where they became inseparable, indistinguishable in death—bones were bones, insides were slippery and rich—and the tiniest of creatures began to eat.