Martin’s mother was waiting with him, dressed in a black sequined dress that might have been matronly if not for the hip-high slit that revealed her aged but shapely leg. She leaned against the coffin like a crooning dame against a piano. As people paused to look in she would touch their hands or faces with her own hand. “Isn’t he beautiful, Jemma?” she asked, when Jemma came near enough to see in. He was not beautiful anymore. The mortician had failed to restore the symmetry of his face ruined in the crash, and in trying to hide the bruising on his face had only succeeded in tarting him up horrifically. His staring eyes were the worst thing, stitched open so he could, as his mother requested, see into eternity. “Kiss him goodbye, darling,” his mother said. “One last time, honey.”
“Don’t do it,” Vivan whispered, but Jemma did. She bent closer and closer, seeking to reconcile this face with the living boy she had loved. He stared past her. Before she kissed his lips she saw how they were parted slightly, and how thick the thread was, twine really, that bound his mouth and kept his jaw from dropping down to his chest. A coldness went into her when she touched her lips to his, and the feeling, a great heaviness, centered in her belly, as if she had eaten a boulder.
“Kiss me, too, darling,” said his mother, reaching for her and blinking through her tarry mascara. Before she could grab her Vivian stepped ahead and absorbed the awful embrace. Her lover’s mother seemed not to notice. She wept ecstatically, and seemed not to hear when Vivian said, “There, there you horrible beast.” Jemma stepped back and watched as the elfin mortician turned a little crank set at one end of the coffin, and the lid slowly closed. She looked back and forth between Martin’s face and the mortician’s ears. Twin eruptions of white hair poured out of them, like little clouds of steam that belied the fixed waxy friendliness of his expression. As the lid fell further down, and the crack grew smaller, she bent at the waist to peer in a final time, not knowing why she did, because it only made the heavy feeling heavier, every second longer she looked at the face. A final bit of light gleamed in his soulless eye. She thought she saw him wink, and then the coffin was closed.
“I shouldn’t have looked,” she said to Vivian.
“I fucking told you,” she said gently, guiding her back to her seat. Jemma had closed her eyes and not opened them yet, and did not open them through the rest of the ceremony. While Father Dover spoke false praise about her lover — wasn’t he patient, wasn’t he peaceful, wasn’t he a gentle boy? — she watched the dead face stare past her, and felt the heaviness in her get weightier, as if the stone she’d eaten was dividing in her, pounds into pounds, and she felt sure she’d never move again.
“Open your eyes,” said John. Jemma had them shut so tight that the muscles at her temples were twitching and she was getting a headache.
“I don’t want to see it,” she said. She held out her hand at him. “I changed my mind. Take me back down.”
“You’ll see it anyway. Listen, it’s starting now.” Above the wind she could hear a faint whooshing noise that sounded precisely like a heart murmur. It grew louder and harsher as she listened. She was bad at murmurs, but found herself quite readily classifying this one — high pitched, rumbling, holosystolic — the hospital had aortic stenosis. The building moved under her feet, and she cried out as she fell, opening her eyes and throwing her hands behind her to break her fall.
“See?” he said. “It’s far more horrible than it looks.” Jemma shaded her eyes with one hand and looked out ahead. The roof had changed since the last time she’d sneaked up here. Previously a wide space of concrete with a few well-tended planters, now it was all grass and gardens — a huge tree was growing on the other side, reaching out of a crowd of bushes and benches and plants. Jemma was standing in the middle of a field of soft grass, surrounded by a little road that ran the circumference of the roof. Beyond the edge there was only blue water, no bodies or birds or bobbing detritus. The hospital was spinning — that was why she’d fallen.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“An adjustment,” he said proudly. “The windows are clearing — I told you they would. Some hallways are lengthening while others contract, just a little. The carpets are growing thicker. The hospital is still preparing, becoming what we need it to be. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”
She rose unsteadily, climbing up the man’s side — he seemed quite sure of his footing. They spun in a brisk arc. Jemma saw the same thing no matter how far the hospital turned her: a calm flat blue that stretched to a line where it changed its shade almost imperceptibly and became the sky. It should not have been beautiful, but she found it to be so. She imagined quite vividly the horrors masked by that insouciant blue surface, and tried so hard to feel a crushing grief, but only the heavy feeling came, filling her up and rooting her to the spot, so she stood firm even as the hospital stopped its rotation and turned the other way, then stopped again and began to move forward, as if it had suddenly become certain of its direction. It gathered speed, so Jemma’s hair flew back above her head and her eyes and nose burned from the cold wind. She looked away from the water and sky to study John’s face. He’d lifted his glasses to look toward the horizon. She thought her face must look like his, blank but not calm. “It’s so blue,” he said.
“Where are we going?” she asked him anxiously, finally registering the very determined way the hospital was moving through the water.
“You know as well as I do,” he said, and shrugged. “She never told me what would happen next.”
8
I should not weep for any of them, nor regret their fate, nor shake one feather in sympathy.
I am not the mourning angel. Neither is my sister, though she weeps freely, with them and for them, and tells them over and over, I will keep you, have no fear. And somewhere there is another angel, who will become my brother when he enrolls himself in this apocalypse, weeping and saying, I will make your crimes known to you, though it is too late for you to repent. And somewhere else another one, weeping even as he plans the thousand ways in which he will kill them. For we must be four — I know this as certainly as I know my part, past and present and future — recorder and preserver and accuser and destroyer. Why four and not one, or eight, or sixteen, or one hundred thousand of us, as many legions as bowed down before Calvin Claflin the night he changed the world, I do not know. I am not as I was, and that kind of knowledge is beyond me now.
I should be happy. Back when I wanted things, this is what I wanted more than anything else — a new beginning. Everything I hated, every thing that heaped on me and oppressed me, is washed away, or buried under a world’s weight of water. So there should be no room in my heart for anything but joyful expectation. But I lost my hope for the new world with my rage for the old. Those emotions were, like they always felt, as big as the earth, as heavy as the earth, married to the earth. They were not portable. I could not take them with me, I have only ever been able to remember them. Yet still I should be happy. Immortality has made me tolerant of tragedy, after all. Another death, and another, and another — they really do add up to nothing. The death that mattered has already happened, and so all these, yes the billy-uns and billy-uns, are afterthought. And maybe, like the wise woman says, in eternity the old world is Troy, and the everyday existence now drowned and lost is in fact the ballad they sing in the streets of Heaven. I wouldn’t know, having barely arrived before I left again. I should say, Let it all stay drowned. It’s not my job to cry for it. Yet I do.