WE
NORA AND ADDIS are watching the sunset. Their heads are nearly touching, but their thoughts are far apart. Nora is wishing she could reach outside and clean the train’s windows. Addis is wishing he could live inside the sun. Nora wants a clearer view of the scenery so its beauty might reach her brother. Her brother wants to swim through miles of plasma and curl up in the sun’s unfathomable core, to listen to its secret dreams and ask it all his questions. Why do you keep giving? Why do you pour out your light, showering the universe with warmth and receiving no return from the processes you fuel, not least of which is life?
Why do you want life? Why did you spark us and feed us and raise us to these heights? Is there something we can offer that nothing else can, despite our hideous flaws? What are we here to do?
“It’s pretty, right?” Nora says, always underestimating her brother’s remote stare. “Wish the windows were clearer, but still…look at that.”
A deep green valley spreads out below them as they climb into the mountains. There are no stations or service roads along this ancient track, no capillaries to civilization; it was built before civilization was required, cutting through a primal wilderness that has changed little in the centuries since.
“We should be getting close,” Nora says in a tone somewhere between anticipation and dread. “Just over these mountains.”
The forest is thick, and though humans have swarmed over the planet for two hundred thousand years, voraciously mapping and cataloguing, there are places in this valley that have never known their footprints. There are stones no one has seen. Caves no one has entered. Secrets no one has found.
Nora reads this thought in us and takes it for her own as the train rattles on the decaying tracks. Maybe her brother has discovered such a secret. Or maybe he is one. She watches him watching the scenery until a tunnel swallows the train. The lights are all burnt out so the darkness is total, and it goes on and on. The tunnel must be miles long. She leans her head against the glass and the vibrations begin to lull her. The darkness doesn’t change when she closes her eyes.
Her family is celebrating. Something good has happened. Her father has accomplished something important, in spite of the doubt and discouragement from everyone around him—his friends at the grocery, his withered, shrunken father, and the pale, plump woman by his side. Nora sees the anxiety in her mother’s eyes, the fear that she’ll be left behind as her husband climbs the ladder, since she has no intention of following him up. But for the moment, she hides it well. For the moment, they’re all together, happy and even proud, and Nora’s father is doing something he rarely does: talking about where he came from. That dusty little village in that drought-stricken country that he’s always claimed he doesn’t remember.
He says he wants to mark this day with a ceremony his mother used to perform, and he empties out a bag from the habesha grocery. He pours green coffee beans into a skillet and puts it on the stove. He fills a mug with incense and lights it. As the coffee roasts and the incense burns, the apartment’s atmosphere of musty desperation blooms into a rich perfume. He pestles the coffee with the handle of a screwdriver and brews it in a bong. Nora assumes this is not the traditional method, but it feels right enough. The aroma fills her head and seems to lift her off the floor like the hand of a benevolent giant, raising her from the life she thought she had and carrying her up to a better one.
“Nora,” someone whispers in the grating clarity of the present. “Hey.”
Nora has had this dream before, this home movie of memories, and she knows it’s reached its high point. If it continues to its ending, it will shit all over this sweet moment and she will lose every bit of this warmth. So it’s a bittersweet relief that Miriam is waking her up.
“We’re here, Nora,” Miriam says, gently shaking her shoulder. “We’re home.”
Nora hears freight car doors slamming and trucks driving off amidst a low murmur of wheezes and groans, but she can’t find the context for these sounds. Zombies? Ridiculous. No such thing. She opens her eyes but she doesn’t feel awake. Her brother is by her side and that’s all she cares to know. The world is blurry and dark as Peter and Miriam lead them up a steep hill into a quiet town. Peter is saying something about family and community and something called “God’s House,” but Nora isn’t listening. She still smells frankincense. She still tastes coffee, bitter and syrupy sweet. She sees Addis’s eyes widening as the caffeine hits his brain, sees him running and crashing around the apartment, laughing like a demon cherub.
Peter takes them to a building he calls “Redemption Hall” and says something about keeping the Dead safe while they wait to learn God’s plan, and Nora doesn’t ask what that means, doesn’t care. After a decade of carving her own path, she is relishing the sensation of letting others lead her. Releasing her grip. Being cared for. The less she listens to what they say, the longer this can last.
But then they go and ruin it.
“…so as much as I’d love for Addis to hear tonight’s sermon, it’s best if we keep him here at Redemption Hall as long as you’re with us.”
The world comes rushing back in. “Excuse me?” Nora says.
“It’s just community policy,” Peter assures her. “I’m sure you understand we can’t have our Dead friends wandering loose in the—”
“He’s not Dead,” Nora snaps. “He won’t hurt anyone.”
“I believe that,” Peter says, holding his hands out. “But we have children here, and no matter how close to Living he is…it’s just safer if you leave him here. It’s safer for him.”
Nora grabs her brother’s hand and walks out. No one stops her. She walks down unlit streets past the dark lumps of empty buildings, shuttered storefronts. Is she still in the dream? Is this some new ending her brain wrote, and will it be any happier than the old one? She has often wondered if with enough sheer will, she could pull things out of dreams and into the real world. She tried it with Addis many times over the years. But maybe this time…
She grips his hand tight and starts to jog.
And then she hears a bell. Not a real bell but a recording, its sonorous depth rendered shrill by an overdriven loudspeaker. Then a high male voice singing in Latin:
Deus magnus est…Non est deus praeter Deum…
For a moment, Nora is terrified. Is this an alarm? Will these people finally drop their facade, lock her up, burn her at the stake? But as the loudspeaker falls silent, she hears laughter. Bubbling conversation. People begin to appear in the streets, families and groups of friends, all strolling in the direction of the bell. They give her genial nods as they pass.
She feels foolish. She feels lost. She walks a little further to the edge of the hill, and she stops. All down the slope, the windows of houses are glowing warmly. People filter out at a casual pace, merging into the line that’s ascending the hill like a leisurely pilgrimage. And out beyond the town, shining dimly in the waning moon: the highway. It wanders off toward the coast, pale and twisting like an empty snake skin. Nora recalls her years alone on highways like that. The hunger, the cold, the constant fear. She looks down at her brother, who is watching her patiently. She looks at the groups of cheerful townsfolk on their way to church. She sighs and turns around.
“I’ll stay here with him,” she tells Peter and Miriam, who are waiting in Redemption Hall exactly where she left them.
Peter nods. “That’s fine, if that’s what you want to do…but tonight’s service is starting soon. Are you sure you don’t want to attend?”