The World Ends at Five & Other Stories (3 page)

I looked. Certainly, in the center of the room was a sunken square with four steps leading down on each side. In the center of the square was a cylinder of marble, a sort of pedestal, about three feet high.

I moved forward. The floor was cold on my bare feet and the air was cold on my wet clothes and skin.

“The staff.”

Had I said that? Or had someone else said it?

I stopped and turned to my left. A rack against the wall displayed six staffs, each ornamented differently. Instinctively I chose the one made of blond wood and topped with a brass crescent moon wrapped around a mirror stone.

I had done this before, I felt sure of it.

I hefted the staff and made my way to the pedestal in the center of the atrium. As I climbed up, I noticed that each column around the room featured an angel, about fourteen feet tall, each one holding an open scroll. Each scroll had a word, some word from another language, the same language as on the necklace, the earliest language known to man.

“A gifted person is merely
gifted.
. . until The Order brings them here,” I told myself, as if reciting a lesson learned
in
my
childhood.
“The
Angels
allow
us
to
see
beyond,
move
in
other
dimensions
and
across
many planes of existence.”

“And they have allowed you to traverse the grave,” a cool voice added. I turned to my right and saw
Maewyn
leaning against a column. “Think a moment before you do this thing,
Aerwyth
. If you release them, The Order will fall. We will no longer be abl
e to help the world you love so
much.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. I didn’t like his glib tongue, his voice smooth as a serpent’s hiss and his expression as arrogant as Lucifer’s.

“Beverly!” I shouted at him, the sound ricocheting around the marble room like a bird that finds nowhere to alight. “I
am Beverly and always have been, no matter what you choose to call me!”

The tears were flowing freely now, and I banged the end of the staff on the pedestal where I stood, a child in the grip of a tantrum.

Maewyn
chose another tactic. He approached the well, although he did not descend into it, instead standing on the very edge of it. “You don’t want to do this,” he told me, his silver-blue eyes locked on mine.

I drew back involuntarily. Could that be true? And I
suddenly saw that if I did not do this thing, release these angels from where they’d been imprisoned in marble, I would be
Aerwyth
forever.

He must have read my expression as I
realized this, for he began to shake his head, and if his face could have been any more white than it naturally was, I felt sure it would have been white at that moment. His eyes held no more mocking, no more conceit. He was afraid.

I wanted to sneer, to spit on him, to gloat. But I forced back all these emotions because I knew I could not waste this precious time.

Even as I thought these things, my mouth opened
and began to chant. The words were strange, born of that same early language as was carved on the stone around my neck and the scrolls the angels held. The necklace began
to
glow,
Maewyn’s
too,
his
own
stone
an
evil crimson.
Slowly,
as
if
he
were
struggling against
some force, his hand reached up and pulled the chain free of his throat. He tossed it at my feet. “Take it, then! And all our lives!” he shouted, although I could barely hear him for the roaring in my ears. And yet my eyes remained fixed on him and his on me.

Around us, the marble was disintegrating, bursting into light. I felt the warm rays focused on me, directed at me from every side. I knew now what had given
Steorra
its ethereal glow. The angels shone forth as their casings melted away from them.

I was sure I would soon melt
myself,
so intense was the light around me as the angels came into full form.
I wanted to close my eyes but couldn’t. Their brilliance filled
me,
I was on fire, standing in the center of a white sun. I could no longer see
Maewyn
at all.

If the angels were grateful, they showed no sign of
it. They did not speak, but I felt them go. I did not see it because I could not. I couldn’t see. I was blind.

There was a long moment in which I waited, expecting my eyes to adjust. They didn’t, and slowly I became aware that they wouldn’t.

I blinked rapidly, just to make sure my eyes were actually open. They were. But all I saw was the same bright white heat, even though my body was now cold.

My body! I looked down but could not see it, so I touched experimentally. I still wore the jeans and
tee-shirt
, still surprisingly damp from my fall in the reflecting pool. I reached for my throat. The necklace remained, and I felt the blistering of my skin where it had burned me.

A hand touching mine startled me.
Maewyn
said, “Beverly. Let
me
help you.” His
voice was unbelievably kind,
and
at
first
I
was
suspicious. But
his
touch
was gentle, so I allowed him to take away the staff and then help me off the pedestal.

I stepped down onto grass.

“Yes,”
he
said
when
I
gasped,
“
Steorra
has returned to the heavens.”

Around us came the confused murmur of people I could not see. “Matthew?” I asked in alarm, gripping him more tightly.

I felt him smile. “Yes. We are all what we once were, now.
Who
we once were.”

And I had to laugh. Because I was Beverly, born to middle-class parents who’d died when a train had derailed when I was six. I’d died then, too, in my own way, and The Order had tried to inter me. But somewhere inside me Beverly
had
always
struggled,
until
finally
she’d
laid
Aerwyth
to rest for good.

Raising the Ruins

I remember my mother’s kimono as a washed-out, frayed and tattered thing. Even when I was young and would stand at my mother’s closet, fingering the silky material, I could see the places where the fabric had worn thin and transparent. Once it must have been a colorful, cheerful robe of bright pink, shimmering silver-gray, lavender and white; by the time I saw it for what it was, it was over-worn to one faded non-color. Just like my mother.

She had been beautiful once; anyone could see that.
Small and dainty, with white porcelain for skin.
And her hair was her crowning glory. How I had envied her those long, sleek, straight black tresses that never seemed to fade even as she did. Like a vampire, her hair sucked away the rest of her loveliness and stored it up in its shine.

I sit staring at the television as they debate whether to bring up some of the artifacts. Underwater cameras show the fallen, seaweed-covered temples, their colors faded too after so much time away from the sun. The temples, the kimono, my mother—all relics of a lost world, something better left behind.

She used to talk about the island. She had been in America when it had given its last, rattling breath and been consumed by the ocean. Away at college, dating the man she would marry, the man she would cling to after having lost her whole history to one seismic wave.

Sitting on the sofa, watching the news report on the 25th anniversary of the quake, I remember these things. The kimono. The ivory and ebony sticks she would use to hold up all that hair.
The little shrine at which she lit candles and incense and sometimes placed food.

Dad had hated that shrine. She would only smile serenely at his protests. Although she obediently followed him to synagogue on Saturday mornings, although she upheld every Jewish tradition that my father subscribed to, she would not give up the shrine.

“I guess it’s not hurting anything,” Dad would mutter. But he forbade her to “poison” me with her “voodoo.”

When I was young, I would ask her about her childhood on the island. She would tell me stories of her family, all of them lost to her now. She showed me the paintings and calligraphy she used to do, and I wished then that I could do them. But I had the large, clumsy hands of my father, and his curly hair, and when I stood beside my mother and looked into the vanity mirror, I saw that I would never be as beautiful as she.

I began to despise her. She was beautiful, but she was also weak.
So dainty.
So submissive.
Always living in the past with her shrine and her faded kimono robe. She finally wasted away, and I felt she deserved what she got.

My
thoughts are disturbed by my boyfriend calling to tell me there is an exhibit at the museum
. I tell him I’m not interested, that I have plans with my girlfriends and I’ll catch up with him later in the weekend. Then I hop on the subway and head downtown.

The special exhibit costs more than regular admission and I almost balk. But then I show my old student ID, get the discount, and go in.

The cases are filled with the same sort of paintings my mother used to do.
The white-faced people in long, brightly colored robes holding fans, arranging flowers, drinking tea.
They have bemused, dreamy expressions. They do not know they no longer exist, that their homeland and people have been lost and they are now castaways, floating from museum to
museum ,
pieces of curiosity.

Hadn’t my mother always worn that exact expression?

“It tells the story of a peasant’s daughter that disguises herself as a courtesan and beseeches the emperor for his help against the tyrannical noble that rules her prefect.”

I scowl up at the familiar voice. My boyfriend grins down at me.

“You’re going backwards,” he tells me. “You have to start on the other side and work your way around to this one.”

“Why are you here?” I ask him.

“Because I knew you would be.”

I snort. I’m mostly angry because I can’t deny it.

“I can read it to you, if you like,” he offers.

“Since when did you learn?” I demand, even as I follow him over to the first case.

“My parents taught me.”

His entire family had been traveling abroad when the island submitted to the roaring waves. They settled in America as refugees but held tight to their culture. Of course they would have taught him the language. They probably had a shrine at their house, too. I wondered what his mother’s kimono must look like. I had never met his family.

We go around the cases and he reads me the story. Pretty soon I notice we have a small gathering of people around us, listening.

It is a typical folktale of the kind my mother used to tell me as a child. She had only had a few native books with her at school, so the childhood stories had to be called forth from her memory, like an oral history of her people. It occurs to me to wonder that she never wrote them down. Perhaps she never saw a reason to, considering few people could read her native script, and she probably never would have thought to Anglicize the tales. She had tried to teach me her indigenous language, of course, but I’d had little patience for it. I had only learned enough Hebrew to get by in synagogue; languages weren’t my bag.

At the end of the story, the people around us clap for my boyfriend. I feel irritated by his timid smile and drag him into the next room.

The large cases here hold a series of the island’s Old World costumes. Headdresses, jewelry, flashing weapons studded with gems, and of course, a kimono.

I walk over to it and stare. This one has bold cobalt, shy sky,
inky
ebony. It is vibrant and alive and almost menacing. I find myself glad to know it is contained in glass.

My boyfriend joins me. “My mother’s is nicer.”

I don’t answer.

“She makes them, you know. They’re as authentic as you can get, considering.”

I think of my mother, wearing hers day after day, unwilling to let go of her past. What would it have meant to her to have a new one? I doubt she would have worn it. It would never have been authentic enough.

“It’s important to keep some of our culture.” He says it as though I am part of that culture.

I shake my head at him. “It’s important to move on.”

I leave him in the museum, standing next to the caged kimono like a living piece of the exhibit.

I return to my apartment, funded in part by my father. He wanted to be sure I lived in a Jewish neighborhood. I have all sorts of Jewish neighbors that I never speak to, and I live right down the street from a synagogue I don’t attend. But at least I can get challah for Friday nights. Not out of any sense of obligation, of course, but because I like challah.

It isn’t until I find myself surrounded by that set of traditions, that Jewish
community, that
I begin to wonder. What made this culture more valid than my mother’s? The fact that it still had a homeland, a ground zero? Just like jungles subsuming abandoned ruins, cultures that lose their roots eventually fade and are overgrown by the cultures nearby. Adapted. In my mother’s case, Americanized. She had struggled against it, had tried to keep the pure essence of her people’s past, their beliefs and history. But any person living away from their home culture must learn to grow new roots in the fresh soil or else they will wither.
As my mother had done.

That night on the news, I learn that extensive paperwork is involved in raising the ruins of my mother’s homeland from its oceanic grave. There are questions about who “owns” that space, that place in the water that once was a country. Are permissions needed?
seems
to be the question. I snort.
Permission from whom?
All the dead that lie below?
Maybe someone should’ve asked them sooner.

On the television, a group of Americanized culture-mongers are divided. Some want the artifacts left undisturbed. Others are rallying for them to be pulled up, cleaned off, and put on tour. “We must remember!” says one man. “We must show the world so it will not forget!” I think of my boyfriend and wonder about his family. It makes me curious to meet them. So I call up my boyfriend on the pretext of apologizing for leaving him at the museum and inveigle an invite.

We’ve only been dating a few months, and although he’d invited me before to have dinner with his family, I’d always declined. I thought it was too early. But tonight I’m feeling nosy; I want to see what they’re like, where he came from, why he is the way he is.

He picks me up the following evening. After a whole day of waiting, the idea now seems like a bad one, but I can’t think of a polite way to back out, especially since I was the one who had asked, pretending to be all interested. Well, I guess I hadn’t been pretending at the time. I
had
been interested. But the spark of fascination has worn off after 24 hours, and I’m
prepared to be bored
, if not downright irritated.

They live in one of those neighborhoods. You know, the cultural kind, where people of all one type gather en masse. I’m all set to be condescending about it until I remember that I live in a Jewish neighborhood myself, and is that so different.

The house we arrive at is old but decidedly Western in design.
Steps, a wooden porch, a door.
We even enter into a regular living room, complete with sofa and television. But when I glance at the bookcase, I notice a good number of books that are not in English. They’re real books too, the paper kind, not electronic like most of mine at home.

My boyfriend’s parents call him a strange name, but other than that they speak in accented but very good English. They’re dressed in American clothes, too. I suppose it’s because I’m there that they bother. I see his mother shooting little glances at me and remember that I look a lot like my father. Which means I don’t look like what they expected their son to bring home.

In the corner of the kitchen, behind the dining table, is a shrine like my mother’s. Involuntarily, I move towards it.

“You practice Shinto?” my boyfriend’s mother asks. I look over at her, and I imagine my face must be hard because my boyfriend looks startled by it, but his mother only continues to smile kindly.

“I’m Jewish,” I say somewhat harshly. Then hesitate. Because that isn’t exactly true, after all. “I mean, I grew up Jewish. But my mom had one of these.”

My boyfriend’s mother nods encouragingly, but I have nothing more to say.

We head for the table. My boyfriend’s teenage younger brother and pre-teen sister appear from somewhere and quietly take their seats. The brother ignores me while the sister stares. My boyfriend introduces
me and them,
but the names have so many odd sounds that I promptly muddle them and decide to save myself embarrassment by not addressing the siblings for the rest of the evening.

“Tonight I cooked a traditional dinner,” my boyfriend’s mother announces. She produces bowls of soup, followed by larger bowls of steaming rice and fish and vegetables. I remember my mother cooking similar meals, serving up rice and meats and a myriad of sauces.

And then my boyfriend’s mother sets down napkins and chopsticks and I freeze.

From the time I was a child, my mother tried desperately to teach me the art of eating with chopsticks. But the same big, clumsy hands that wouldn’t allow me to do calligraphy or play a musical instrument also kept me from being able to handle the wooden utensils. Eventually my mother had given up, setting the table with two sets of silverware and one pair of chopsticks.

And now I face the chopsticks yet again.

I suppose my expression cannot be disguised because my boyfriend’s mother says suddenly, “You would like a fork?”

I feel my mouth open to respond,
then
close again without anything coming out of it. It’s the old fish-out-of-water routine, complete with guppy mouth action. “I never learned,” I finally manage to say, and my own defensiveness rings in my ears.

“Easy enough,” my boyfriend’s father says jovially, and I start because I’d forgotten he was even there. Except for his brief introduction, it’s the first thing he’s said all evening. “Like this,” he announces, holding up the chopsticks. But they’re in his left hand and I’m right-handed.

I glance around the table, and they’re all holding up their chopsticks to show me. Cornered, I pick up my set and begin to fumble. My boyfriend puts his down and adjusts mine in my hand. I immediately manage to misadjust them.
The brother stops to help me.
I quirk the sticks awkwardly and drop one. The mother and sister come to my aid. After a moment, I realize they’re laughing at me. Until I discover I’m laughing too.

For some reason the idea that I’m enjoying myself makes me uneasy.

At some point I am able to pick up a piece of fish. The vegetables prove more difficult. The rice turns out to be impossible, so I leave most of it uneaten. Thank god there’s a spoon for the soup.

After the chopstick escapade, the dinner becomes eerily silent. Meals with my parents had also been quiet, but it’s been so long since I’ve eaten with a family that I find the situation discomfiting. At least when I eat with my friends, or with just my boyfriend, we
talk
. Here I feel left out, like maybe they
would
talk if I weren’t there.