The Unfinished World Read online

  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.

  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

  Some 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.

  From the Eternal Library’s Official Employee Handbook: The brain of the Fever Librarian should be made mostly of melancholy. The Fever Librarian should wear black bile in the veins. The Fever Librarian should be an unmarried woman with a soft, drowned heart, and a choleric disposition. She should be pale and thin, with a look that hints at Perpetual Anguish of the Soul. She should resemble someone’s grandmother, someone we have known for ages in the abstract. Dependable. Invisible.

  From the Eternal Library’s Official Employee Handbook: One would do better to forget the Fever Librarian’s name as soon as one has learned it. She would do better to forget her own.

  The opposite of melancholy is fierce, bright delirium. It has a name: fever, also known as pyrexia, comes from the Greek pyr, meaning fire.

  The fever librarian has read all the scholarship, has attended the debates and listened to the shouted discussion on the radio programs. Some scholars are furious at the fevers being catalogued and contained. These scholars say the fevers are a good, or at least a necessary evil, humanity’s way of fighting illness and tedium. We once prayed they did not last long, and endured the irrationality they engendered, and we breathed a long slow breath of relief when they had gone. And now humanity, these scholars claim, is scarcely human at all. We move like molasses, they say, in this mire of supreme rationality. We are barely beings, so calculating and calm are we.

  The scholars on the other side argue, of course, that man lives in a golden age of enlightenment. Now, they say, we have the mental reserves and energy to study and dream up great improvements for the human race. Now, they say, we have rid the body of wasteful passions and useless energies expended, hours stolen from every day to relieve our unspeakable animal urges. We are more human than ever, these scholars say; we have finally risen above our shameful pasts, more than angels, we, with each new experiment.

  The fever librarian comes from a time of incredible yearning. Plucked from the past, deprived of memory, she still retains certain physical imprints of that time. Her body remembers dancing, and driving, and craning the neck to take in great tall buildings going up at greater speeds. Her body remembers fear, too, and pain, and the way her limbs had of leaving her control for the refuge of a neck or a chest or another pair of lips—unthinkable, the idea of violating the space of another human body, but as her veins thaw and her skin warms, these memories begin to surface as she moves, as she walks and rises and sits and stands and even as she breathes.

  When the Eternal Librarians chose her, they sealed all things past in a great ice heart, frozen inside her for all of time. This is always the way the Librarians are created, and contained. This is the way the world’s memory is kept safe. But the Eternal Librarians did not understand the far-reaching effects of the fevers. They did not understand what such heat could do to an ice heart.

  And so the fever librarian sleeps a great deal now, for only in sleep can she find relief from all the human passions caged in her four chambers. And so the fever librarian spends a great deal of time studying herself in mirrors, fearful of giving anything away. She is trying very hard to be invisible, tepid and faint as an early morning shadow. But she watches with awe and fear as the hair reddens, the skin reddens, as the eyes betray the rising temperature of the body underneath them. She watches and she worries she will soon be found out. She worries she will soon be overtaken.

  Pliny the Elder estimated the number of human illnesses at three hundred, but of course assented that no one really knew the full range. He believed fever an illness, like most learned men of his time, and suggested, among other remedies, wine for shoring up good health and preventing disease. His favorite brew contained spikenard, cardamom, cinnamon, saffron, and ginger. The truth, he said, comes out in wine.

  There is no wine in the Eternal Library. Wine warms unforgivably; truths breed euphoria and inevitably, passion. The preferred drink now is a weak tea brewed faintly with calming herbs like lavender and chamomile, cooled and drunk at room temperature. From the Eternal Library’s Official Employee Handbook: The Librarian’s preferred draft should be the heady nectar of a day’s careful research. External foods and beverages are necessary only to sustain the inner studies, and should never be enjoyed or sought out during working hours. Such seeking could prove dangerous to the Librarian and indeed, to the efficient functioning of the Library itself.

  There are only working hours for the fever librarian. These triple-lined, carefully cooled cabinets are full of all the fevers man and god could dream up: alchemy, Cat-Scratch Fever, Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, goldfish swallowing, Dr. Spock, Trench Fever. Acid wash, chariot racing, ant farms, holy wars, hula hoops, Humidifier Fever, monkeys on television. Jumping beans,
Beatniks, ballooning, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, the Orient, witch mania, cockfighting, Maternal Fever, table-rapping, drag racing, Pac Man, Parrot Fever, Metal Fume Fever, dance marathons, self-flagellation, African Hemorrhage Fever, the Crusades, Typhoid Fever, quiz shows, Lassa Fever, Rubix Cube, phone booth stuffing, toga parties, Scarlet Fever, Septic Fever, Swamp Fever, water beds, zoot suits, trading cards, competitive sports, Autumn Fever, spring fever, beach movies, chivalry, secret orders, grail quests. Little Lord Fauntleroy. Dream fever. Sexual fever.

  Love.

  The Egyptians recognized that local inflammation was responsible for fever. They observed that the pulse would accelerate under its influence.

  Throughout history, it was assumed that fever gave either divine or devilish powers to the possessor, or rather, the possessed. In some cases, the fevered person was observed in acts of prophecy; the fevered person related fantastic visions that had come to them in this heightened state. In other cases, the fevered person was seized by demons and flung about the room, or made to spout unintelligible gibberish, or commit violence upon themselves or others. In some cases, the fevered person was given to fits of sexual passion and mania, and opinion differed in these cases as to whether demonic or angelic possession was at work in the human flesh.

  The Mesopotamians believed that only evil spirits brought fever, and that only under the priests’ cool influence could it be exorcised from the body. There were no exceptions, for the side of good could never be the side of the flame.