“ — sphincter! — sphincter! — sphincter!” Huh. There was such a thing as a psychic echo.
Carl whipped his head around, and all the other telepaths snickered. He looked suspiciously at Barbara, but she was doing logarithms in her head. “Buttmunch,” he muttered.
Hah. Leadership suck. Nobody was going to shoot at them in the cemetery. Jeez.
Mr. Simmons was talking about some guy who was buried in the cemetery. “Interesting man, Bruce Lee,” he said in a musing tone. “He was an actor and a martial arts expert. Bit of a philosopher, too. Started his own martial arts school….
“There was a TV show called Kung Fu,” he continued. “Supposed to be about the spiritual side of Asian martial arts. But Bruce Lee found that there were no acting parts for a Chinese martial artist and philosopher on a show about Chinese martial arts and philosophy. They gave his part to a hippie white guy.”
“That guy’s buried next to Brandon Lee, that goth actor,” said Minerva. “Wonder if they’re related.”
Mrs. R’s grave was towards the back of the cemetery, near the chainlink fence that separated it from the playground at Volunteer Park. It was dark there even in the middle of the day, and it didn’t have the great view of the mountains that Brandon Lee had. Kind of where you’d expect to find someone who made a teacher’s salary.
There were a lot of people milling about in the cold. All the science classes from Cobain were there, of course, plus some college types who had probably gone to Cobain years before. There were old people she didn’t know, and even older people she was sure she’d never even heard of. Mrs. R’s family, probably.
A plumpish bearded guy in a dark suit sat on a folding chair near the grave, his head in his hands. He was trembling a little bit; he was crying, Barbie realized. She looked around, feeling helpless. She didn’t know guys would cry.
She held her body in a polite position that looked as if she was listening to the service, and set up a double-thick brick wall inside herself. She counted the bricks and got up to two thousand. She looked at the sky, which was astir with dark, bulbous clouds. She glanced around the crowd, and slipped away to its farthest edge. She didn’t want to listen to what people were saying about Mrs. R.
The road she was standing on was old, and had sunk a bit into the earth. There was a high curb containing the hillside, and Barbara sat down on its edge. The speakers’ voices droned on, trying to make sense of stuff that didn’t have to make sense.
At the back of the crowd, Carl stood on a gravestone to get a better view. Other kids followed his lead, of course, and soon there was a whole cluster of them standing there, a meter taller than anyone else.
Barbara cringed. She looked at the tombstones next to her, an odd arrangement of bed-like slabs of polished red granite with cylindrical pillows at their heads. There were two long ones, side by side, and a short one set at a right angle, like camp cots in a small tent.
She read the inscription on the short one’s pillow. Regina Mary Dugan. Born 1896, died 1901. A five-year-old child. The others would be her parents, Barbara thought. She read their pillows, to give the family all its names. Mary Frances Dugan, 1845–1883. T. Constantine Dugan, 1874–1901.
So Mary Frances died 13 years before Regina Mary was born. Her grandmother? Poor little kid. Buried next to some grandmother she’d never even met. With her father, probably. He died the same year, so maybe it was an accident that killed them both. Or a fire, and he tried to rescue her. Where was Regina’s mother? Remarried? Dead somewhere else, no doubt.
All these tombstones, Barbara thought, and though she tried to push it away, a vision came to her — in flashes, like a slide show. Pictures, click-click-click, each one a different gravesite, with different mourners. Each one a ceremony for someone who had died. Thousands of them. Dead now, dead then, dead to come. All those people left behind, weeping, alone. Their time would come, too. Buried with strangers.
She didn’t want to think about it. Box it up, she thought, in one of those cement vaults. Put your feelings aside, keep them in a box where no one can get to them. Even you. Even you can’t get to them — that’s how it works. That’s what Minerva does, and Carl. That’s the secret of high school. Box yourself in, bottle yourself up. Explode at leisure.
She heard shouts from her classmates. Each student had been given a 1.5-liter bottle of Coke. They shook the bottles, and now they were uncapping them in unison. She was missing her chance to show respect. Shaking her bottle of Coke, she ran to join the others.
Brown foam surged from the crowd of students into the open grave. Kids cheered. A few cried. Barbara was one of them.
She tossed a handful of dirt in after the Coke. “Goodbye,” she whispered.
Then it was over.
“Okay, kids, back to the bus,” said Mr. Simmons. “Pick up those bottles before you go.”
Carl shook his head and dropped crosslegged on the grass. He gestured toward row upon row of graves. “Forget it. What’s the point of going to school if you’re gonna die?”
“Hey, Carl’s flipping!” said Minerva, delighted. “Entertain us!”
“Just tell me why I should bother,” said Carl.
“Get a grip or be a slave,” said Minerva.
“Please,” said Carl. “Shove the motivational crap. Entertain us.”
“Okay,” said T’Shawn. He waved his Coke bottle and leaped up a good five feet in the air, scissor-kicking his legs at the same time. When he landed, everyone was staring at him. He started screaming, “Here we are now, entertain us, here we are now, entertain us….”
Carl started leaping too, though Barbara could tell that at first he was astonished to find himself in the air. “Here we are now, entertain us, here we are now, entertain us….”
The whole class found themselves bouncing all over the Lakeview Cemetery, most of them singing, some of them simply yelping in surprise. The other classes, teachers, and funeral attendees stared at first, then began to twitch and bounce a little bit as T’Shawn found the limit of his strength. Slowly he lowered his classmates to earth. He and Carl came down last.
T’Shawn looked at Carl and shrugged. “I don’t know what gets into me, but sometimes I feel like I want to teach the world to sing.”
“Then it’s a good thing this gig wasn’t sponsored by Microsoft — Ex-Lax,” said Minerva.
“Entertain us,” said T’Shawn.
“Nevermind,” said Barbara.
The group headed back to the bus.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Leslie What and I wrote this story about 1997, and tabled it after the Columbine High School murders. It seemed like over-the-top satire when we were writing it, but only a few years later, high-schools had metal-detectors, suicide counselors, and corporate sponsors, and you could actually see Microsoft from Bruce Lee’s grave. Reality has put its grimy pawprints all over our Attitude. This is what happens to science fiction writers.
Green Fire
Isaac
Eileen Gunn, Andy Duncan, Pat Murphy, & Michael Swanwick
September, 1943. Nikola Tesla had been dead since January. George Patton had chased the Nazis out of Sicily and was pursuing them up the spine of Italy. Isaac Asimov, age 23, was learning that he was not a particularly good chemist, and probably never would be.