I clench my teeth. I ball my fists. I squeeze my dreaming eyes shut to gather my will, and in that darkness within darkness, I overhear a conversation.
Can you see it?
He’s hurt bad.
A boy and a girl, speaking in simple pulses of thought.
How bad? Alex asks Joan.
Just a little hole, Joan says. But it’s bleeding a lot.
I don’t want him to die, Alex says.
A pause.
Maybe we can fix it, Joan says.
Like how we fixed the window?
Sure. It’s such a little hole, and if it’s not there he won’t die. It’s silly, isn’t it?
It’s stupid, Alex says. I hate it.
So maybe we can make the hole forget it’s there. Maybe we can decide it’s not. And then he won’t have to die.
I feel a stirring in my faraway body. I hear a rustling of pages and a scratching of pens, old words crossed out, new ones written.
You’re not going to die, my son tells me.
You’re not going to die, my daughter tells me.
I feel the sensation of pulling out earplugs. The world rushes in, real voices now with breath and spittle.
“What was that?” Nora says. “Did he just say something?”
I hear the swish of their clothing. The creak of their knees. I hear Julie’s breath as she leans close to me, distinctly hers even before she shapes it into words. “R?” Her voice is raw and cracked. “Can you hear me?”
I feel two fingers on my throat.
“I don’t get it,” Nora mumbles. “Pulse is still strong. Why is the bleeding…?”
I open my eyes. I expect to see their faces hovering over me, but instead I see the backs of their heads. I see myself, sprawled on the floor in a red puddle. A tall, pale man in a ragged shirt and tie, his sad face in need of a shave.
Look at him. Look at that strange assemblage. How did nature ever arrive at this shape? When did that mass of organs decide to sprout those bony stalks, to stand up and walk, to reach out and grasp? Eyes, ears, nose, mouth. Does the whole wide river of the world pour into me through those seven little holes in my head?
I turn away from my heap of flesh and begin to drift upward. The grotesque plastic dome is gone, replaced by a blue sky of incredible depth and volume, and although my eyes are already open…I open them again.
The sky splits and sweeps aside like a second set of lids, and behind it is another place.
I’m in the Library.
The walls of books curve around me in a column and I’m floating in its center, rising toward that unfathomably distant light. And I am dissolving. Tiny pieces of me fly away from my body and into the shelves around me. Some go up toward the glow, others fall straight down. Empty spaces appear in my hands, my arms; I’ll be gone before I reach the next floor.
We are weary of death.
I hear Perry’s voice in the chorus. Rosso’s too, but it’s not just people who’ve died. Julie is in there. Nora and Marcus, Sprout and Addis and my kids—everyone. Perhaps even my mother and father, their voices faint, their contributions small but still counted. Everything is counted, gathered, and pooled, and the best of it glows above me.
We have outgrown death’s game. Its rigid rules and miserly prizes. We want more.
A tremor shakes the shelves. Books fall out but not down; they hover in place, their pages rustling.
We are vast. We are the mind of the universe, each life a neuron, each love a synapse. But we have been thinking a long time. It is time for us to speak.
Above me, that immense glow pulses like a heart. The shelves shudder from top to bottom. The moldy volumes below stay in place but the ones above leap free, filling the distant brightness like morning fog.
And I see a boy in that brightness.
He is drawing it into himself like he’s filling his lungs for a shout, and though I can’t imagine how he’ll articulate that monumental breath, I want to shout it with him.
We are ready for a new world, says the chorus of everyone, and I hear a new voice among them:
Mine.
And why should this be a shock? Why should tears spring from my eyes at the sound of my voice harmonizing with humanity?
You deserve to be here, my own voice tells me, and for the first time I can remember, there’s love in it.
The Library shakes. The boy shouts. The chorus shouts with him, and I join it.
I open my eyes.
I know these ones are flesh because the lids are heavy; I heave them up like rusty garage doors. I see a brief glimpse of faces looking down at me, then I lurch upright and cough a lungful of blood onto the floor. I stagger to my feet. My vision swirls in and out of focus and black spots swarm around me. There’s a pain in my chest unlike any I’ve ever felt and my shirt is soaked with blood, but I’m no longer dripping, and after a long fit of sloppy coughs, I’m able to put air in my lungs. It feels exquisite. It’s mint tea and honey flooding through my chest. I take a few breaths and savor them, unaware of anything else.
Then I feel a hand on my arm. “R?” Julie whispers.
On my left and right, my kids are beaming. I see joy and a little pride in their grins, like they’ve pulled off a magic trick they’ve been practicing for years. But Julie hasn’t been privy to the backstage dealings in my head. Her wide, wet eyes are full of fear and questions. “Are you…?”
I cup her face in my hands and kiss her. “I’ll live,” I murmur. Then I smile awkwardly as I wipe my blood off her lips.
The laugh that bubbles out of her is a giddy overflow, every emotion at once.
My vision dims again and I stagger. My knees buckle and Julie catches my arm.
“Lie down,” Nora orders. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on here, but you’ve lost too much blood to be conscious, much less walking.”
She says it with all the authority of a hardened combat nurse, but I can’t comply. The air in this plastic prison is thick and sticky, reeking of blood and musty perversions of death. I see the pitchmen’s petrified remains scattered across the floor. I see Abram Kelvin lying in a pool of darkening blood, his daughter crying softly by his side. What happened while I was gone?
I can’t ask now. I can’t breathe in here. I need air drawn fresh from the well of the sky, scented with rain and sun.
I stumble toward the door.
“R, wait,” Julie says, still gripping my arm. “We heard Boneys outside, they’re—”
“They’re done,” I say, not quite knowing what I mean. “Addis answered them.”
Nora’s eyes snap wide at her brother’s name. “Oh shit—Addis!” She whirls left and right, searching the shadows where her brother had been waiting, small and silent, through all the chaos. “Addis!”
“He’s out here,” I tell her as I reach for the door. “He’s getting some air.”
I open the latch. The door flies open. Nora shouts, Julie tries to pull me back, but then they see what I see and they go quiet.
Nora’s little brother is standing just outside the door, surrounded by a dozen skeletons. But the skeletons are still. They are slumped over and limp, like classroom props hanging from their stands. No buzz, no hum. Their fingers twitch faintly and I hear their teeth grinding, but these creatures are broken. Overloaded and burnt out. As if something filled them beyond their capacity and burst their brittle brains.