These Lifeless Things

I think sometimes of all the things I have not told V.

About my boys, for one. I am terrified he will recognize their names and he will turn out to have attended their school or something. About M., yes; but not his death. Not even my last name, nor he his; no one does now, as K. knows. As if our families, gone, can carry those names only; as if we the living must get by with something else, as if only in death are the names truly safe. I only half-disbelieve it. They can take everything including all the blood from a body and all the spirit too, all the memories, intelligence, all the heat, all the veins, all the hair and nails; we’ve all seen it; who’s to say They cannot take a name?

Anyway, to admit it would be to also admit that I took Mariusz’ name when we married. So I am no better than Them. That I took it out of love would make no difference. They don’t know what love is anyway.

I hate that my leg is still sore. No infection yet. Just the tired, angry ache of ripped muscle and whatever godawful things live on the feet of those little monsters, healing. If I were twenty years younger, if I were V.’s age, I would be walking this off already.

No one speaks of the missing children while we search, while we interrogate, while we mark the buildings. No one speaks: but we think about it all the time.

If I asked K. about it, I wonder what he would say. But he is still too new to trust with this fragile thing that we do not, ourselves, know what to do with. He is not really a part of this neighbourhood. I’ll ask V. about him later. Maybe even P., who senses (I think) that I am not really at ease around her, but (I am quite, quite sure) does not know why.

It grieves me to see it in her eyes, she is so hungry for love and connection, and so angry about that need within herself that she kills it every day, she stamps down on its corpse, it is buried in a cast-iron coffin at her personal crossroads. I would give her all that love so easily, if not for this one juvenile, awful thing. I hate myself for it. She can never know. Yes, I’ll talk to her too. I could give her this one thing. I give so little now.

September 15

We search; we still have to eat. Have to feed the grief, or else what will it eat in its hunger? We are breaking new ground now, for what we would have probably once referred to as patriotism gardens or victory gardens but now we do not even call them gardens, we just call them food; we are breaking new ground for food, a fall planting. At the outskirts of the old park near the cemetery, where several huge trees were torn down on Invasion Day, the ground has been reclaimed by weeds and concrete bits; but it’s a good location, I’ve been scouting it for a while.

We heaped up a guard tower, and put V. on it while A. and P. and K. and I did the digging for most of the day. Things flitted in the treetops, though not for long; every now and then something would shoot out, and there would be a brief cry, and a flurry of feathers. Soft, soft grey or iridescent violet, like clouds.

The pigeons all left, P. said, looking up, alertly, and baring her kittenish teeth at the trees. Then they were coming back.

Were, I said.

I hate these trees, she said.

Me too. We couldn’t go any deeper into the park; we’d be torn apart. Things live there during the day, and walk freely in the tentacled shadows of the ancient trunks, just as the statues walk in the night.

We’ll probably be all right here in the open, I said.

The soil was black and safe, and familiar, and curiously uncontaminated. K. said, We have some of the best soil in the world, you know. Make a dead stick bloom.

I hope so. There are fewer of us to be fed, but there will be more if we get the children out. Where are they, where have they been taken? Is it shameful of me to feel proud for putting seedlings in rows? I should be storming the Bastille of Monsters, dammit.

Think of them in there.

I can’t think of anything but! How am I supposed to stay alive, thinking like that?

They say: You put on your own oxygen mask first, and then you tend to others. But remember when we were flying for that choir competition and the plane dropped and I snatched at the mask and put it over I.’s face, and M. just looked at me, from behind his own… you’re meant to put on your own mask first. You can’t help others unless you help yourself.

But have I gotten too used to helping myself? I don’t know. I hate my mind sometimes; I wish I could turn it off, as in the old days.

One worrying thing. When V. and P. switched spots on the guard tower, she lasted all of an hour before standing, calling out, garbled words, no language any of us knew. We all spun, expecting to see sentinels approaching, slithering over the fresh black soil, emerging from the trees. We were ready to fight. But no, it was just the girl, her head thrown to the sky, this unbelievable stream of noise from her mouth, trying to speak Their language, the one we hear in dreams. V. seemed glued to the spot in sheer terror. K. panicked. A. sighed, and hefted his shovel.

You stay away from her! I shouted, and scrabbled up the heap of stones we’d built to the flat spot on top, and grabbed the girl’s leather jacket, pulling her nearly on top of me; for a second we teetered, startled, in the sunlight, gasping for air. But she stopped the noise as soon as I touched her, and I knew it was one of those… moments, just a moment, we all get them. Mostly while we sleep, when we can’t hurt ourselves. Sometimes, admittedly, during the day.

She was shamefaced afterwards, quiet. She dug and picked rocks without complaint, her eyes and nose swollen and red, as if she was about to cry, but would not permit herself to do so. Something, perhaps her abruptly cut-off call, attracted small ugly sentries from the neighbourhood that harried us whenever we lowered our heads, and were driven off with the chunks of rubble that we dug from the dark dirt.

Don’t be upset, I told her as we walked back. Nothing happened.

I kept hearing things, she muttered. Singing. From the sky. I followed it… but that was months ago. I thought it stopped.

It’s all right, I said.

And then she did cry, clenching her jaw against it, angry at herself. She swiped at her face with her dirty hands and left rich black smears. I ignored it, she said. I didn’t… I didn’t listen to the…

I said, Listen. Whatever secret knowledge They brought with Them, it is not for us, not really. They will say that it is because They will say anything to have Their way with this world. How do you think They get agents? But you didn’t fall for it.

No, she said. I didn’t.

I can’t believe, looking back, how fast I climbed up that rock tower, nearly splitting my stitches. To shut her up, I told myself. Because the noises people make can attract all sorts of things. It’s a sign, it’s like a spell; it tells Them that something worked. I did it because I wanted to live.

You can live with anything. You can live as anything. It always comes to an end, and then afterwards, you can say: I did what I had to, and I lived to tell the story. I bear witness, even though to do so I had to do some terrible things.

Leg mostly healed. Will it slow me down, later?

Where are the fireworks we were promised?