Our dead would wish us to robe you in it, the soldier says.
You count sixteen coffins — one of them minus its patriotic drapery. Who are your dead today? you wonder aloud.
Sixteen trainees in a reconstructed Osprey vertical takeoff/landing aircraft, he says. It crashed a half-mile from camp, the third bird this year. He again offers the scarlet flag.
No, I can’t. I’m partial to the old version, even at its foulest.
The soldier courteously withdraws, to redrape the naked coffin.
Father H— takes your arm and leads you straightaway into the oven.
The Cold Room had ice effigies. The Furnace Room — or this part of its crematory extension — has a cindery floor and dunes of ash. When its doors close behind you, you stand in the gray hemi sphere like snow-globe figures, lit by thin skylights. Black scales etch continents and islands on the walls, and the sooty dunes, when you move, suck at you like whirl pools. The furnace scares you. It seems both an execution chamber and a tomb, full of drifting human fallout.
I thought the ash and bone fragments were collected to give to the families, and that everything else went up the smokestack.
Some ovens work more efficiently than others, the father replies.
You walk deeper into this peculiar space and kneel before an ashen dune. You run your hands into it and let its motes sift through your fingers like desiccated rain. You rub your wrists and arms with it. You pour its grayness over your head in a sort of baptism, a dry baptism befitting your age and orphanhood. You scrub it into your clothes and run your tongue around your mouth to taste its grit.
Father H— breaks a dozen ampoules of red-wine vinegar over the ashes before you and stirs the bitter into the bleak. He shapes a pie from this mixture and urges you to follow suit. You obey. After a while, you’ve made a dozen or so together, but still must make a dozen more for the unfed soldiers in the tunnel. Kneeling, you work side by side to accomplish that task.
Weeks go by before you visit the Melancholarium.
Father H— has told you that it’s a memory room that only two people at a time may enter: an orphaned couple, or the only surviving orphan and a person of his or her choice. No one may enter alone, or in a party of three or more. None of these rules makes much sense, but little about Vinegar Peace ever does, even if it sometimes seems to have a coherent underlying principle of organization that you can’t fathom owing to an innate personal failing.
Meanwhile, you’ve grown used to the noisy Sleep Bay, learned when to visit the crowded jakes, perfected the art of getting servitors to do your bidding, and made enough friends to feel — well, if not connected, at least not entirely estranged from the protocols of what passes for normal life here. You no longer bolt up when bombs go off at Fort Pugnicose (where many of the recruits for the War on Worldwide Wickedness train), or when air-raid sirens wail in the galleries, or when some of the older orphans sidle up to your cot at night and plead, Take me home, take me home. Even the twilight influx of dispossessed oldsters, addle-wits with confusion writ large in their pupils, has ceased to faze you. After all, they’ll adjust… maybe.
Then a dormitron sporting Henry Kissinger glasses and nose gives you a pass to visit the Melancholarium.
The name itself sabotages the place. Just hearing it, who’d want to go there? You, indeed, would rather return to your life-help cottage in Sour Thicket. Vinegar Peace isn’t a concentration camp, but neither is it a Sun City spa. It’s a training facility for people with little time to make use of that training in the Real World, which in your opinion no longer exists.
Choose somebody to go with you, the dormitron says.
You pick Ms. B—, the strap-thin woman who asked you to tell her a breakfast story, and one morning in your second month of residency, the two of you ride a lift to the fifth level and walk together to a tall cylindrical kiosk where a familiar-looking young person, probably female, seats you next to each other at a console and fits you both with pullover goggles.
You walk side by side into the Melancholarium. Now, though, Ms. B— is no longer Ms. B— but your late husband Mick, whose hand you hold as you approach the gurney on which Elise lies in a pair of jeans and a blue chambray shirt open at the collar. Her clothing is so blatantly neither a gown nor a full dress uniform that the simplicity of her look — her sweet girlishness — briefly stops your breath, as hers is stopped. You reach to touch her. Mick seizes your wrist, not to prevent you but instead to guide your fingers to Elise’s arm, which you both clutch for as long as you have now endured in this grand human depository. Or so it oddly seems.
Elise’s red-tinged hair, which the military cut short, now hangs behind her off the gurney. It sparkles like a sequined veil. The expression on her face suggests neither terror nor pain, but serenity; and if you addressed her, saying, Elise, it’s time to get up, come out to the porch to see the sun shining on the spider webs in the grass, you believe with the same soft ferocity that you once believed in God that she will obey — that she’ll open her eyes, sit up, and embrace you briefly before striding out of the Melancholarium into the stolen remainder of her life.
You kiss Elise’s brow. Leaning across her, you give her the hug that she’d give you if only the same green power seethed there. Her body has a knobby hardness that would estrange you from her if you didn’t love her so much. All your pity re-collects and flows from your bent frame into her unyielding one. She has the frail perdurability of Cold Room effigies — but none of their alienness — and so she has finally become yours, although neither you nor anybody else can own her now. When her smoke rises through the crematory flue, it won’t dissipate until your smoke also rises and clasps her last white particles to yours. Then both clouds will drift away together.
You step back. Mick gives you room. You want to freeze this tableau and visit it like a window decorator, keeping its centerpiece — Elise — intact but endlessly rearranging the furniture and flowers. You kiss her brow again, hold her hands, and finger the runnels in her jeans.
You undo the buttons next to her heart to confirm a report that three high-caliber rounds inflicted her nonsustainable injuries. You find and examine them with a clinical tenderness. You must know everything, even the worst, and you rejoice in the tameness of her fatal mutilation.
Joyce, Mick says, the first time anyone has spoken your given name in so long that it jars like a stranger’s. Are you okay?
You embrace, leaning into each other. Of course, it isn’t really Mick holding you upright in the vivid deceit of the Melancholarium, but so what, so what?
You pull back from his image and murmur, Mick, her hands…
What about them?
They’re so cold, colder than I thought possible.
Yes, Mick says, smiling, but if you rub them, they warm up.
On your journey back to the Sleep Bay, you tell Ms. B—, Mick would never have said that. That was you.
Ms. B— says, Well, I’ve never seen such a pretty kid.
You should have seen Brice.
Stop it. I was just being polite. You should’ve seen mine: absolute lovelies fed into the chipper by tin-men with no guts or gadgets.
You don’t reply because you notice a short tunnel to a door with a red neon sign flashing over it: exit and then the same word inside a circle with a slash through it. You think about detouring down this tunnel and even try to pull Ms. B— along with you. She resists.