No One is Here Except All of Us (8 page)

“I wonder how many terrible things we do to each other every day?” the healer asked. Hersh looked at me, apologizing with every part of his face. Kayla’s eyes were clear, regretless.

“For one,” the chicken farmer said, “people sneak in and steal the eggs.”

“Children leave their toys out for me to trip on,” the baker’s mother said.

“I wish that people would remember my name,” added the man whose name no one could remember, even now.

“No one ever comes to check on me,” whispered an old woman who was no one’s grandmother or mother or friend. “No one knows if I’m even alive.”

The old man with only one eye asked if we could start over yet again and this time do it really, really right. Much better than the first—or second, someone corrected—time. Everyone else agreed that we could not. The butcher thought we could try to grow up more slowly, more carefully, and the baker promised to check on the old woman every Saturday, at least. The children said they would stop stealing the eggs, which they admitted were never eaten, only crushed for the joy of it in their pink hands. Most of us said we were sorry, except the ones who insisted they had done nothing wrong. The rest of us said sorry on their behalf, which made them angry, so we said sorry to them, too. I made my apologies silently.

“You have a beautiful world,” the stranger said. “Have you appreciated it?” Had anyone even gone down the river at night to go swimming? Had anyone closed his eyes and paid attention to the smell of the rain? Did we love everything wonderful around us? Had we kissed the old women on the tops of their warm heads? The children on their sticky cheeks? “We are trying very hard to be good,” Igor said.

“Yes, we really are trying,” the jeweler said.

The stranger asked, “How will we look after the new world? You don’t get to keep things unless you take care of them.”

“Let’s divide the jobs up,” the once wheat cutter, now silver polisher suggested. After some discussion and several small arguments, we decided on a system. The rain ran her fingers down the windows of the barn and the animals got used to our company as we designated committees of appreciation.

The Committee for the Appreciation of the River. The Committee for the Appreciation of the Grass. Committees for the Appreciation of Our Village, the Way We Build Our Houses, the Way We Feed the Dogs, the Way We Care for the Wounded, the Way We Slaughter the Cows. The Committee for Treating All Ailments, which consisted only of the healer. The Committee for the Appreciation of the Barn Which Is Also the House of God. The Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It. The Committee for the Appreciation of Our Stranger, the Recorder. The Committee Against Using the Rain as an Excuse to Be Unkind. And of course, the Committee for Apologies.

We tore up the plans for the temple with the library and the ebony bookshelves and promised to appreciate the barn. The jeweler took the two bowls and the hat out from inside the piano. The hat he wore, floppy and mold-green. The bowls he threw to the ground, where they smashed. Old women covered their eyes.

“What are you
doing
?” they asked.

“These are our stars,” the jeweler told us, smiling along with the piano. “One piece at a time, we build the sky. Everything broken becomes whole again.”

He was thrilled to see the stranger smile at him. The children, especially the banker’s lot, were thrilled that the most dutiful thing they could do was to go home and break things. The grandparents were thrilled to see the children hopping up and down with excitement having something to do with God, although the children did not think of it that way.

When the rain turned to mist and wrapped us in foggy arms, we made tiles. Outside each house, the sound of smashing porcelain plates and bowls rang out. We smashed on rocks, mostly, and on logs, too. We sang as we smashed. We smashed and gathered the pieces. The colors we put into baskets for the sky and the whites we put into baskets for the stars.

Our heavens waited there, broken and unassembled.

THE BOOK OF DOORWAYS

T
he world was cooperative in her remaking. As the rest of the continent’s towns and villages were emptied out, ours grew more and more peaceful. But, unknown to us, the new world also had a helper. A pair of human hands to sweep the dust off our threshold.

As afternoons slunk away, the stranger went for her walk. We knew she walked, but we did not ask her why or where. It never occurred to us that it was anything but a pleasant stroll: fresh air, birdsong. She followed the path to the river, listening to woodpeckers drill their way home. Listening to the rain, our constant friend. Mud and clay, snapped branches and feathers made her path. The feathers put her in mind of mother birds out to gather food for their helpless, bald young, nest bound and hungry. Hawks and eagles, prowling for baby swallows; mother swallows prowling for worms. Who eats first is all that matters. The stranger felt like a hunter, a village full of wide-eyed, hairless babies at her back, as helpless as anything on earth, trusting in a safe world made only for them, for no reason except the story was told that way. But she was not a hunter who brought things back, she was the opposite—her job was to keep the worms out. To catch the prey, but then bury it in the tree roots rather than bring it home in her beak.

The stranger patrolled the edge of our world where river met land, and the tendon that kept our peninsula from becoming an island. It was there, in the now overgrown brushwoods between us and everything else, where the stranger went each evening—the rest of us eating a meal with our families—to keep the gate. She was protecting us, but also herself. The new world had saved her life—the least she could do was protect it.

Behind her was the cupped palm of our spit of land; in front the flat, pale arm and the body—enormous and complete—beyond. No mountains marked an edge in this direction, no horizon except the spilling away of the earth itself. A birch forest was a troop of tall spirits in the distance. Fields were watered by our river, siphoned off as veins. Where the road used to lead from our village out, now thorns, blackberries, weeds and young oaks stopped up the hole. They were a thick seal, as resolute as every other resident. But hard as they might have tried to block the way, the stranger knew a path through to the other side. Her arms were scratched by brambles trying to talk her out of leaving. Cuts stung and bled—shining drops, the precious treasure of the body, dug up.

The stranger sat on the other side on a stump. She waited. Nothing had burst into flame when she had crossed over. No bolt of lightning, no chasm. She wiped her cuts with the hem of her dress. The sky was still blue above her, but it was rusted like a forgotten tool all around the edges. Stars popped through. Another day wilted away in front of her eyes. Up the road, a shadow, a figure, like a hole in the landscape. As it came closer, it earned a nose and a beard. Eyes reflecting the last of the day’s light. It turned into a man, and in his hand, a bag.

“Madam,” the man said, close enough to have a scent, bitter as stepped-on milkweed, “good evening to you.”

“Good evening,” the stranger said.

“Beautiful out,” said the man, panting, tired from his journey. He sat on the ground next to the stranger’s stump, looped his arms around his knees. The man and the stranger looked out, and the earth provided facts to be conversed over. The stranger noted the temperature, which was cool but comfortable, and the man commented that it always seemed to be raining when he came. “Mmm,” the stranger sighed, “wet here.”

“Helpful for growing,” the man told her. She nodded. The sky turned purple, which was a beautiful thing just then, and the stranger memorized the color. “You don’t get flooding?” The stranger shook her head. She did not mention the high water that had carried her here. “I suppose it drains to the river.” The man looked at the stranger and asked her, “Is anyone else here? Are you all alone?”

“In a way,” she half lied. She did not want to admit to an outsider that a whole healthy village existed there. “Anything for me?” the stranger asked, knowing he would not have come if the answer was no. The man opened two brass buckles on his leather bag and held up several pieces of paper to the dying light. He squinted at each one, shuffling them to the back of the pile until he found what he was looking for, and handed the letter to the stranger.

“That’s all.”

MORDECAI GLASSMAN
, the envelope demanded. Take me to Mordecai Glassman.

“Thank you,” the stranger said, shaking the man’s hand. He did not look like he wanted to stand up. The walk, the dark, the cold settling in. “I can’t invite you to stay. I’m sorry. I have to send you home.”

They batted politeness back and forth while the thorns were waiting for the stranger, vengeful.

The stranger made
pools each time her feet sank into the riverbank. She rolled the letter into a tube, looked through. A particular grouping of stars. A shadowy willow grove on the other side of the river. She smelled the letter, but detected nothing of the forbidden place it tried to import. No cinnamon or myrrh. No churned butter, pine smoke, mutton stew. The stranger heard the long-lost wind chimes of a child’s voice tink through her head:
Why is this night different from all other nights?
The stranger did not have to think long before she had the answer—because tonight, under the whole world’s sky, she was not going to allow the rain and mud to destroy the letter unread, buried in the flower patch behind the barn with many others. Tonight, the stranger was going to read the message, carried by the man in his bag, from another planet.

It had not been a decision she had weighed. The stranger did not deliberate. From the first day of the world, when she had sneaked off to patrol the borders, and every day after, whether mail came or mail did not, the stranger understood that she would peek behind the curtain once. Because she was human? Because she was flawed? Because she was strong enough to know something about the truth? None of these. Because, she thought, one of the letters was going to matter. She would need to know the contents to keep order in the new world. Which one, she hoped, was going to be clear when she held it.

On a wet, rotting log, with the help of the trustworthy moon, the stranger split the seal.

Dear Mordecai,

I have not heard from you for a long time. We are worried about you. Why don’t you come to stay with us until you get on your feet? We could send you some money for passage. People say Antonescu is as bad as Hitler. The Americans think we will win the war, but I don’t know. I wish you would not wait to find out. Esther sends her love. The boys are doing well in school. We bought a new icebox. Please, brother, come to where it is safe. Please answer, no matter what. I’m going crazy not knowing if you’re all right.

Yours truly, Isaac

Her first thought was: Wrong letter. She stuffed it back into the envelope and pressed the flap, but it did not seal. She realized that she had expected the letter to be for her. That Mordecai Glassman was only the name on the front, but inside she would find clear instructions for her personal care of the village. Straight from the mouth of God. The stranger did not know who Mordecai was. Of course she knew him, because she knew everyone in the village, knew everything they hoped for and worried about and every prayer they had uttered. But she did not know their names. She addressed them by the jobs they did.

The stranger could suddenly feel this brother, this Isaac, come out from inside a curtain’s great folds and stand on what felt now like a darkened stage. How big our creation had seemed before, how entire, only one small opening to keep shut, one river to dredge for trespassing objects—a watch that reappears mangled on the sand, the leg of a faraway, unknowable chair. Now it was a wooden platform, a puppet theater, with every seat empty. Isaac was real, somewhere. He thought about his brother, the potential children with their running noses and flattened hair. The door our village had built, opened and walked through only existed for us—to the rest of the world the only likely explanation for our silence was that we were dead. Not re-created, not wrapped in the whisps of clouds summoned from the sky just for us, but shot, drowned, worm-eaten, dismembered. Extinguished, just as we thought they had been. Mordecai, whoever he was—baker, butcher, jeweler—may not have been one of a hundred-and-some small gods, stirring the pot of the world. He may have been nothing bigger than a faraway someone’s brother, the whole of their love for each other passed back and forth on thin sheets of paper. A man, two men, fifty men. Their bodies breaking down, bending a little closer to the beckoning ground with each swoop of the sun.

“Is that true?” the stranger asked a God who was official on the books but had never bothered to assure her he was listening. “Are we nothing but heel skin and blisters? Traveling a straight line to the end of our lives?” She flipped a black rock with a belt of white quartz in her hand. Tossed it one palm to the other. God was mute. What if that’s the flaw? she wondered. He’s up there on his glorious perch, eagle-eyed and all-knowing, unable to communicate but for his doughy fists shaken at the air, while we knock into the furniture, throw rocks through the windows, punch each other in the stomach, leave our new babies untended on the edge of the ravine.

Rather than feel pity for this helpless, voiceless God, the stranger hated him just then. If he could not solve his problem, how were the stupid, mush-brained ants on the ground supposed to solve theirs? As she grimaced and sighed, the stranger was folding the letter from faraway Isaac. She made one pointed end, and then another; she made a flat bottom, a space inside for a tiny person to sit. A boat. “Pray we will,” she said. “Because you never know. But still.” She put her fingertips in the hull of the small craft. “This might be utterly stupid,” the stranger said to her shut-lipped God, “and maybe that’s our specialty, us humans, but I made a promise to these people. We made a promise, we made a world, together. I am going to serve them. If it’s an angel they want me to be, I’ll look as winged as I can.”

The Germans are everywhere
, the child’s chiming voice sang.
Americans say we will win the war, but I don’t know. Come to where it’s safe.

“What would we do? Pack up everything in the world and start walking?” the stranger asked the darkness. “Mordecai’s brother surely will not house us all, wherever he lives.” The sky was feverish with stars by now. “We are in the middle of a project. We are trying to do the right thing. What if the safest place we can be is on our river-wrapped island?” She sharpened all the boat’s creases. “Have your wars,” she said. “We’ll stay here and be peaceful.” To bury this letter like the unread others would have felt like an attempt to deny it, like a counterargument. The letter did not feel dangerous to the stranger. It was just a misplacement, a stray. Sometimes a fish gets stranded on the riverbank, but with luck, someone is there to toss it back into its right place.

The stranger knelt by the water and placed Isaac and Mordecai’s boat on the fluttering surface. The boat nodded at her,
Yes yes yes
, then shook its head,
Never mind
. “Conviction. That’s the hardest part,” the stranger agreed with the boat. But in a minute, the vessel found its steadiness, and it used the light of the risen moon to stay traceable as it sailed straight out of the known world. Just like that, slipping through the gauze, and ceasing to exist. If there ever was an Isaac, he had brought his hat to his heart and bowed for the empty seats; he had exited stage left and fallen into the darkness.

The barn by lamplight that night was the same as the barn by lamplight every other night. The letter had changed nothing. The idea that it ever could have seemed stupid to the stranger. It was as meaningless as our village’s bones will be, unearthed a million years after we finally fall to rest. The stranger still planned to keep guard, to bury the mail, to throw intrepid debris back into the river, but she was glad to let the curtain fall back over the stage, to believe that ours was the only world, despite any evidence to the contrary. In that little paper ship, the stranger had sent all the questions we might have asked away. In its wake: quiet, for a thousand days.

Truth belongs to the place where it lives, like a plant, she thought. That the mountains are spiny with beech trees does not make the valley’s foot-soft grasses jealous. That one world is at war does nothing to interrupt the patient churning of peaceful years someplace far away.