Next of Kin

  “You should have left your coat in my room,” he said, pointing at his jacket on my arm.

  “I don’t mind carrying it.”

  The foyer was busy, at least for this place. A handful of families sat here and there on couches and chairs, chatting with their mothers and grandmothers, old men and women in wheelchairs and walkers, with oxygen tanks, plastic cannulas draped over ears and faces like translucent alien jewelry. Merrill’s face brightened when he saw the foyer, and that recognition was as sad to me, in its way, as the confusion he’d had in his room—not because I didn’t want him to be happy, but because of the speed with which he moved from one emotion to the other. He hated this place, and he wanted to get out, and after one door and one hall and one elevator, he’d forgotten it all. He was here in a place that he recognized, and it didn’t matter that he hated it because that glimmer of recognition overshadowed every other emotion. Here was something he remembered, somewhere he’d been before, and just like that, he was happy. He smiled and waved to someone he’d probably never met, and I walked behind him with the jacket he’d forgotten.

  “Does this place have a restroom?” he asked, and I pointed him toward a door in the wall. He shuffled in, and I sat down to wait. A young man was sitting on the couch across from me, someone I thought I recognized, but I couldn’t be sure. Thin, maybe seventeen years old, with a ragged mop of dark black hair. He was alone, with a dead, emotionless expression, and I remembered Rosie’s concern for others, the way she’d sought me out in the grocery store, and I leaned forward.

  “Here for a grandparent?” I asked.

  He looked at me, his face unreadable. “Kind of.”

  “Kind of a grandfather, or kind of a grandmother?”

  “Friend of a friend.”

  I nodded. “I suppose you could say the same for me.”

  He said nothing and turned back to staring into space. I thought about Rosie again, and the way she’d talked to me, and the buried pain in this boy’s face. I spoke again. “Are you okay?”

  He looked at me with a new expression—not an emotion but a calculation, as if he were trying to figure out who this intrusive stranger was and why said stranger thought it was okay to ask such probing questions out of nowhere. It occurred to me how dangerous my question was, not physically but socially, for the most likely response was almost guaranteed to be an attack: he’d ask what my problem was, or tell me to stop bothering him, or simply get up and leave. I waited, trying to form some kind of defense or explanation, but he simply watched me, saying nothing. After a moment he glanced over my shoulder, nodding at the restroom.

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “Just some guy,” I said, surprised by the question. “I met him about twenty years ago, right before the Alzheimer’s. It’s not really Alzheimer’s, actually, but it’s close enough. He was a good man, and I liked him.”

  “And now you still visit him.”

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  The young man’s eyebrow went up, just slightly—the first hint of emotion he’d displayed. “I’m sure you could do a lot less if you put your mind to it.”

  It was a joke, of sorts, and I chuckled, but more at the joke’s sudden appearance than at its meaning. It made me feel suddenly dark, like a chill wind had blown through the foyer. “You’d be surprised how little of my mind there is,” I said, shaking my head. “Another few years and I’ll end up like Merrill, more than likely, just a . . . hollow man. An organic machine, going through the motions.”

  “So is it worth it?”

  For the second time in our short conversation, his question stopped me cold. I looked at the boy in surprise. “Is what worth it?”

  “Coming here,” he said. “Caring about a man who doesn’t care about you—who couldn’t care about you if he tried. Making connections with people who are only going to disappear.”

  I wondered what had happened to this boy to jade him so thoroughly, but then I shook my head. We were sitting in a rest home, surrounded by the last brittle gasps of a hundred dying lives. If he knew one of them, if he’d watched them fade from a vibrant human being to a distant, shuffling figure—if he’d listened as an old, familiar voice forgot his name—that was all the answer I needed. He was broken, because life had broken him. I recognized this boy, because I recognized that broken expression every time I looked in a mirror.

  I looked down at my belt, at my keys clipped securely to my lanyard, and I saw myself in Merrill’s room. In Merrill’s life. Who would visit me when I finally lost it all? Who would help me pick up all the pieces of my shattered mind and console me when it snowed and I remembered some distant, unshoveled sidewalk? Who would knock on my door and call himself my friend?

  Rosie had spoken to me in the grocery store. She saw me once, for half a second, and she remembered and she looked for me and she found me again, weeks later, and she offered to help.

  The restroom opened, and Merrill came out, and I knew that I was already gone from his memory. I could walk out the door right in front of him and he wouldn’t even know he’d been left. I looked at the boy, but he was already looking away, staring at the wall. I stood and turned toward Merrill.

  “All set?”

  “Well, look who’s here,” he said brightly, his standard phrase when he reacted to someone who obviously knew him, to hide the fact that he didn’t know them back.

  I held out his coat. “You still want to go for a walk?”

  “I can’t go for a walk. Have you seen the snow outside?”

  “There’s certainly a lot of it.”

  He stared out the front door, deeply concerned about something. “Who do you think shovels all that stuff?”

  “They have a man they pay to do it,” I said, taking him by the elbow. I have touched so few people in my life, almost none of them living. I pulled my hand away with a sudden rush of guilt.

  “Do I live here?” he asked softly.

  “You do. Would you like to go back to your room?”

  “Do you know the way there?”

  “I do.” I gestured toward the elevator, and we started walking.

  It was the least I could do.

  Part Eight

  Rosie’s grief counseling meeting was held in a community center, in a suburb outside of the city. The room was used for all kinds of different activities, I guessed, looking at the posters and the bookshelves and the ill-cleaned tables from a pottery class. There were five people there, sitting on folding chairs in a loose circle in the center of the floor. They all looked up when I peeked in, and Rosie’s eyes lit up when she saw me. My heart swelled in response, but I stayed quiet and moved slowly. I wasn’t here to talk to her, but to stay nearby in case the Gifted came looking for trouble. Were they likely to? Not here, I knew, not this far from everything, but where else could I protect her? It was the least I could do.

  I thought about the boy from the rest home, and I knew I could do more. Was it worth it, making connections with people only to have them disappear? I had to make sure Rosie didn’t disappear.

  “Come in,” said Rosie, beckoning with her hand, and I opened the door wider. She stood and pulled another chair into the circle, and I hesitated a moment longer in the doorway. It would be best if I left now and cut off all of my communication with Rosie. I could protect her just as well from the shadows, waiting outside and following her home, but then she took a step toward me, just a single step, and I couldn’t help myself. I walked into the room. She gestured to the chair, and I sat in it gingerly, as if expecting at any moment for the room to erupt in chaos and terror and death.

  All was still.

  “Welcome to our group,” she said, smiling softly. “My name is Rose. Would you like to introduce yourself?”

  I almost said Billy—it was on the tip of my tongue—but I caught myself. I knew I should leave, but I took a slow breath. “Elijah,” I said. “Elijah Sexton.”

  “Hello, Elijah,” said Rosie. “Thank you for coming today. T
his is a very open group; most of what we do is just talk, and we’ve all gone through some of the same hard experiences, so you’ll find us to be a pretty understanding audience. You told me before that you’d lost someone. Would you like to talk about it?”

  I looked around at the others in the group: a middle-aged woman with a wide, grim face; a tall, skinny man behind a pair of thick black glasses; a pair of older people that looked like a couple. It struck me suddenly that I knew them all—that every one of the people in this grief counseling session were here because of me, because of someone I had been, their father or their sister or their friend. I was overwhelmed by a sense of loss so staggering that I knew I could never hope to overcome it or escape it. I tried to speak, but nothing came, and I shook my head helplessly. “What is there to say?”

  “Whatever you want,” said Rosie. She tilted her head to the side in a sympathetic gesture. “Who did you lose?”

  “My wife,” I said, repeating what I’d told her before.

  “Would you like to tell us about her?”

  There were so many, both young and old; sometimes I died first, and sometimes they died and left me alone. I stared at the floor, careful not to look at her, and tried to think of something to say.

  I remembered another woman, barely more than a girl, a lifetime ago on the slopes of a great mountain. We lived in a hut of mud and thatch, watching a small flock of sheep on a field of short, stiff grass and twisted trees. She laughed freely, and she worked hard, and she died in childbirth, and I couldn’t remember if I was her husband or if I was her. Maybe I was both, and her parents, and her child. I took so many back then.

  Rosie and the others simply watched me, silent and supportive, giving me time to think before I spoke.

  I opened my mouth, trying to think of a story they wouldn’t recognize, a story Rosie wouldn’t immediately see herself staring back from, but they were all the same: someone left, and someone else was left behind. The world was a broken puzzle, the pieces dumped out in a pile on the floor, close without ever being connected.

  “Is it worth it?” I asked suddenly. I couldn’t get that boy’s words out of my mind. “We spend our whole lives making connections with people who are inevitably, every time and without fail, going to leave us. Unless we leave them first, which might actually be worse. We’re building a foundation that cannot last, with materials that will never hold, and time goes on and mountains crumble and everybody dies, everyone and everything that ever was, and I . . . I am so old.” I felt it then like I’d never felt it before, the sheer weight of my endless, ageless life, as deep and as black as a bottomless pit. It was age that ruined the Gifted—not time, for time was fleeting, but age itself. The relentless buildup of days and nights and days, of waking and doing and being and sleeping, over and over, forever. “Even my memories fade,” I said softly, looking down at the keys on my lanyard, but Rosie stopped me with a single sentence.

  “Do you feel that lasting—that staying, that remaining—are the only things that give something meaning?”

  We’d thought that once, in the beginning. We wanted immortality, and we were willing to give up anything to get it. I don’t remember what I’d given up, but I knew it was a part of me so deep, so central to myself, that I had never been the same person since. None of us had. We had reached for a gift, but we’d reached too far and we had withered instead, like dead vines shriveling in a glaring summer sun.

  “Give meaning to what?” I asked, feeling bitter and empty. “If I give you meaning and you die, what good has it done?”

  “You can’t give me meaning,” she said simply. “It’s not yours to give; I have to do that on my own. Elijah, what has meaning for you?”

  I looked at Rosie, remembering the day we were married, and the long nights we’d spent sick or worried or joyful in each other’s arms. “People,” I said.

  “And what happened when those people were gone?”

  I stared at her, so close I could almost touch her, and my voice came out in a strained whisper. “It is so much worse than simply being gone.”

  Rosie nodded, silent a moment, before speaking softly. “A life can be important because it affects other things, and it can have purpose because of what it accomplishes, or what it intends to accomplish, and those are active words. They have movement and life behind them, and when somebody dies, that life goes away, and it feels sometimes like the purpose and importance goes with them.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Meaning is different. A life has meaning when it means something to someone else, and it can never do that on its own. It means something to me. To you. When that life is gone, it hurts us and it changes us and it feels sometimes like we’re tearing apart, but no matter where that life goes, or if it even goes anywhere at all, the things that it meant are still there because it meant them to you. And as long as you hold that inside of you, it’s not just meant, in the past tense, but meaning, in the present. Right now. You asked if making connections was worth it, and I promise you: it’s the only worthwhile thing in the world.”

  Part Nine

  I don’t know what I was expecting from the meeting. A reunion, perhaps, though I knew it wouldn’t happen. In years, maybe, when her loss had subsided . . . But no. Even if she was ready, I wouldn’t be the same anymore. I might even have forgotten her.

  I forgot my way home and drove around in the middle of the night, thinking.

  When I went to work again, the three Gifted were there, Gidri and Ihsan and the silent man. Ted was unconscious in the corner, his face bloody, and I ignored Gidri’s cheerful greeting as I walked to Ted’s body and leaned down to check his pulse and breathing. He was alive, but I couldn’t imagine that the Gifted intended to leave him that way for long. I straightened and turned to face them.

  “Is this your new plan?” I asked. “I won’t join your army, so you kill my friend?”

  “He’s still alive,” said the tall man.

  “For now,” said Gidri. “You know how the rest of this proposal goes, so I’ll just sit and wait while you propose it to yourself.” He sat on the edge of the desk, watching me with a dark, laughing gleam in his eye. Ihsan stood beside him, the scar on his face more prominent now than it was before, and in the corner the third man, sharp-faced and ominous, lurked like a shadow.

  “Am I really that important to you?” I asked.

  “You’re our brother, Meshara.”

  “You’ve never cared about that before.”

  “How would you know?” asks Gidri, and the wicked grin that spread across his too-handsome face was all the more maddening, because I knew he was right: maybe they did care about me, and stood up for me, and I just couldn’t remember it because I couldn’t remember anything. I touched the keys on my lanyard and found myself reciting the litany of maintenance checks for the hearses. Did I still remember it all? Was I missing any steps? Ted would be able to help, but if I didn’t tread carefully Ted would never do anything again.

  “We want you on our side, because you’re one of us,” said Gidri. “You belong with us—with the whole Cursed family.”

  “Cursed?” I said, looking up in surprise. “I thought your side called us Gifted.”

  “I know a curse when I see one,” said Gidri. “We wanted long life, assuming that it would be a good life by default, and we’ve had millennia to learn the truth of that mistake. But unless you’re ready to roll over and die, what difference does it make? Even monsters can defend themselves.”

  I looked at Ted, unconscious and bloody. “From the big, scary humans.”

  “They’re closer to winning than you think,” said Gidri. “If we found you, they might have, too, and they could be watching us right now. Or someone else, maybe? Someone who’s slowly inserted themselves into your life, gaining your trust, learning your secrets, waiting for the moment to strike.”

  I thought about Rosie, but there was no way she was hunting us. I knew her too well—better, literally, than I knew myself. She and Merrill and Jacob were
the only people I knew. And Ted. Was that Ted?

  I looked in the corner, and it was Jacob. Ted got a new job two years ago. Or was it longer?

  I needed a new mind, and soon.

  “You look confused,” said Gidri.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Your memory’s failing,” he continued. “You need a new one. As a token of good faith, allow us to provide one.”

  “Who?” I asked, but the tall man was already moving. I tried to step in front of Jacob, but he was too strong, and he pushed me out of the way like a doll and snapped Jacob’s neck with his hands. “No!” I shouted, finding my voice at last, but it was too late.

  “I’ll need the skin when you’re done,” said the tall man, rubbing his scarred face, and his skin moved unnaturally across the bones beneath it, like a mask. I sank down at Jacob’s side, feeling again for his pulse and breathing, but he was gone. I tried to remember how well I knew him, but I couldn’t bring the thoughts to mind. Was he a stranger, or my best friend?

  I felt the paranoia creeping in, triggered by the murder but rooted so much deeper. Every shadow was an enemy; every corner an ambush. When you can’t remember what lurks beyond your peripheral vision, the world becomes a twisted, threatening madhouse.

  I closed my eyes, rage fighting with despair. “You’ve lost now,” I said, shaking my head at their callousness. “Jacob was my only friend, and you said if I joined you he could live. Now you have nothing to offer me.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” said Gidri, and the sharp-faced man slipped silently into the hall. Gidri smiled, showing his teeth, and my heart sagged, for there were only two other people they could hold me with. “You were gone an awfully long time,” said Gidri.

  “Please, no.”

  And then there she was.

  The sharp-faced man dragged Rosie into the office, bound and gagged to keep her silent in whatever back room they’d hidden her. She was half awake and stumbling, her coat torn, her clothes disheveled, her scalp bleeding in ragged patches where someone had yanked or dragged her by the hair. I stepped toward her, but the tall man held me back, his hands strong as iron.