The Brief History of the Dead

  It was late in the day when he saw the two men—boys, really, no older than twenty—holding hands and kissing beneath the awning of a deserted hardware store. One of them was gripping a hank of the other’s hair, and the second was squirming and rocking inside his blue jeans, and when the first one whispered into the second one’s ear, they both began to laugh. He approached them at a rush beneath the awning, where he tried to tell them something about the Bridge of Jesus and the Translation of the Elect. But they struggled against him and would not listen.

  “Fuck off,” one of them said, and the other snapped, “Get your hand off me, you old cocksucker,” and then they batted his sign with their arms and open hands and it lurched back and hit him in the jaw.

  When he opened his eyes, he was lying flat on the pavement, and the boys were gone. He could feel something hard between his gums and his cheek. It was a tooth. When he rolled it over onto his tongue and spat it out, it came out dark red, like the stone of a cherry. On his way home he buried it in the soil of a churchyard, marking it with a crossed pair of bread sticks, so that when he died again and was gathered unto himself he would be made whole. And that was one day.

  ~

  REPENT, FOR THE TIME IS AT HAND, his next day’s sign read, and he inscribed it, YOURS VERY TRULY, followed by his name, which was Coleman Kinzler, Ph.D. He had conferred the Ph.D. upon himself the same day he finished reading his Bible, at the age of thirty-three, for he knew that though he had never actually been to college, he was a doctor now in the eyes of the Lord. At that time, his Bible was the same one he had been given as a boy, a pocket-sized edition with silver edging and fine white paper and a blue leather cover that wrapped around on itself and snapped together in the front. He had carried it everywhere with him until the day he met a woman who had never read it, a Hindu woman in a robe the color of bricks and dark coffee, and he asked her, “If I offer this book to you, will you study it and keep it sacred?” and she promised that she would, so he gave it to her, though it hurt him to let it go.

  But he was convinced that he was doing what the Lord would ask of him. The world was brimming over with Bibles, so many Bibles that they came spilling from the shelf of every drugstore and hotel room in the country, and he knew he could always find a new one for himself. As for the woman, though, he would probably never see her again. It might be her only chance to receive the Word of God.

  He thought about the woman often after that, and also about his Bible, though indeed he never saw either one of them again.

  This was the incident he was remembering as he toted his sign through the district. The sky was overcast with a dimensionless table of gray clouds, and the banners and traffic lights hung slack in the stillness of the air. Two of the Laura birds hopped from beneath a parked car into the path of his feet. They settled between his ankles, where they attempted to make him stumble, but he did not lose his balance, and he did not drop his sign. He yelled at them and whirled his arms around and stomped his heavy shoes until they flew away and landed down the block.

  The newspaperman and his girlfriend were standing by the door of Bristow’s Restaurant, as they did every morning, handing out the latest edition of the Sims Sheet. MORE EVIDENCE FOR BYRD HYPOTHESIS, the headline read, and when the newspaperman gave him a copy, he folded it into quarters and put it inside his jacket pocket. The girlfriend noticed the bandage covering his chin and asked, “Jesus, what happened to you?” She touched her own chin involuntarily.

  “Yes,” he said. “Jesus. I have been bruised in the name of the Lord.” And he told her about his tooth and the breaking of his sign and the boys who had left him on the street to fall, and when he finished, she said, “Oh, you poor man,” and gave him a second copy of the paper, which he folded into quarters and put inside his pocket with the first.

  “The rich shall be made poor, and the poor shall be made rich,” he answered, and he left the newspaperman and his girlfriend outside the restaurant and continued on his walk through the city.

  On H Street, he stopped to talk with a doorman, and when he asked him if he knew the Word of God, a tiny smile creased the doorman’s face. He removed the cross from the neck of his shirt and let it sway back and forth on its thin strand of chain. “God’s blessings,” Coleman wished the doorman, and the doorman offered his own blessing in return, and the small silver cross turned slowly between his fingers, stopped, and began spinning the other way, winking at Coleman as it caught the light from a nearby sign.

  Coleman put the placard to his shoulder and continued on. He had forgotten to bring his bread sticks along with him, and though he was hungry, he did not stop to eat. He was thrust out of a home furnishings store by a pair of security guards, and afterward he gathered a small crowd around him when he climbed onto the lip of the fountain in the shopping plaza, and then the crowd scattered and he spent twenty minutes preaching to a woman who seemed to be listening to him with perfect transport until he asked her for her name and she answered in a flurry of Italian. Though the clouds kept rumbling with thunder, it did not rain, or if it did, the rain never reached the ground. There were times when the sky would growl and then his stomach would growl and then the sky would growl again, and he could almost imagine that the two of them were speaking to each other.

  He was nearing his own apartment again when he passed a booth distributing T-shirts that read GOD IS LOVE, stacks and stacks of them, in red and white and black, and as the phrase moved in and out of his vision, it provoked a dialogue. There was one part of him that believed that God truly was love, that the equation was really that simple. But there was another part of him that believed that love was too small a force: too small for God and too small for what people needed of Him.

  The first part said that the love of God was like sunlight and water to us: it strengthened us, filled us out, gave us color. It was only when we rejected that love, when we shut ourselves away from it, that we withered in on ourselves and lost our joy in Creation.

  Foolishness! said the second part. It’s not the love of God that nourishes us, it’s the hope of God. It is hope of any kind. Hope and love are two separate forces, whether you’re talking about God or whether you’re talking about human beings.

  But doesn’t love offer everything that hope does and more? the first part asked.

  Insofar as love generates hope, perhaps, the second part said. But love doesn’t always generate hope. Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much love or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It’s like your sunlight and water—the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it.

  Coleman let the two voices rumble on at each other, thundering back and forth, though which was the thunder of his gut and which was the thunder of his sky, he couldn’t say. It was only when he noticed the other people in the elevator staring at him that he realized he was speaking out loud. He found a package of rice cakes and a jar of peanut butter in the cabinets of his apartment, and he fell upon them with great hunger, and that was the second day.

  ~

  The verse that actually alluded to the Wandering Jew was not John 21:22, of course, but Matthew 16:28, THERE BE SOME OF THEM THAT STAND HERE, WHICH SHALL IN NO WISE TASTE OF DEATH, TILL THEY SEE THE SON OF MAN COMING IN HIS KINGDOM, and that was the verse that he carried on his sign the next day. The Wandering Jew, known variously as Ahasuerus, Carthaphilus, and John Buttadaeus, was the cobbler reported to have taunted Jesus, “Go on quicker,” as he carried His cross through Jerusalem, to which Jesus answered, “I go, but thou shalt tarry till I return,” thus condemning the cobbler to walk the world until the Second Coming. Coleman knew that the story did not appear in the pages of the Bible and that many Christians doubted it, but he himself had always found it persuasive, just as he was persuaded that the snake in the Garden of Eden was actually Satan and that St. Peter was crucified hanging upside down so that he would not die i
n the same manner as Jesus—two stories that also relied on the evidence of tradition rather than the evidence of Scripture, and nobody doubted them.

  The blanket of clouds had drifted to the edge of the sky during the night, but the sun was tiny, and it had lost all its power. It was half the morning before the dew evaporated from the grass. Coleman took up a position on the verge of the road to proclaim the Good Word of God. Nobody on the path stopped to listen, but there was one man who settled on a nearby bench as though he wanted to eavesdrop. Coleman tried to cast his voice in the man’s direction, for he knew that even the most reluctant listener might be swayed by the Truth of the Lord. But then he noticed the man feeding the birds, tossing cheese curls into their beaks from a plastic sack, and he leapt from the verge and crushed the cheese curls beneath his feet and he chased the man away.

  He ate lunch with the mail carrier Joseph, who was his friend, and while they were throwing their wrappers away in the garbage can, Joseph said, “You know, when I was a kid I thought that everyone was born with three wishes. I remember using one of mine to wish that I would never have to go to the bathroom again. It didn’t work, of course. I was mad at God for a long time about that.”

  To which Coleman said, “I think you’re confusing God with a genie.”

  He meant it as a statement of fact, but something about it must have struck Joseph as funny, for he would not stop laughing until Coleman had taken up his sign and left.

  The problem was that if the Wandering Jew was real, if he truly existed, the city ought to have been much more heavily populated than it was. Everyone seemed to accept that the people of the city were sustained there by the memories of the living, which was yet another story without scriptural provenance. But there they all were—that much was certain—and Coleman had no reason to doubt the explanation. So why, then, wasn’t the city filled with all the millions of souls the Jew had encountered in the two-some millennia since the crucifixion of Jesus?

  There were three possibilities, as Coleman saw it: either the Jew had died in the virus, in which case the virus had coincided with the Second Coming. Or he was still alive, in which case there must be other pockets of humanity in the city, or even other whole cities out there somewhere. And then there was the final possibility, which was that the Wandering Jew had never existed at all.

  He could not decide which possibility was the most likely, an uncertainty that disturbed him greatly, and for the rest of the day he found his mind returning to the matter as he preached, his voice lapsing into silence while he listened to the wings of the question beating around inside his head. The people of the city flowed around him like water around a stone, and finally he gave up and went home and sat on the edge of his bed, and he watched the shadows as they shifted across the floor of his room, and he listened to a girl who was jumping rope on the street below his window. The girl was chanting a rhyme that went “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black,” and he stepped through the two glass doors onto his balcony and called down to her, “You there, what’s your name?”

  The rope fell slack at the girl’s feet, like a ribbon of seaweed bleached by the sun. She stared up at him without answering.

  He called, “Aren’t you even going to ask me my name?”

  She hesitated for a moment, then said, “I know who you are. You’re the Birdman.”

  “No, my name is Mr. Coleman Kinzler.”

  “That’s not what we call you. We call you the Birdman of Alcatraz.”

  There was a heaviness to the girl’s features that made him wonder if she might be a bit feebleminded. He used his gentlest voice to ask her, “Do you know about Jesus Christ?”

  To which she said, “Yep. He died on the cross to save us from our sins.”

  “Good girl,” Coleman said. If he had had a toy at hand—a doll, for instance, or a pinwheel—he might have thrown it down to her as a present. But the only items on the balcony were a rusted lawn chair, a spider plant that had gone crisp from neglect, and a stack of signs attached to white wooden pickets, including the one he was planning to carry tomorrow, which read, JESUS IS THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE. So instead of a present, and because it was the best he could do, he held the sign up and showed it to the girl, waving it back and forth, until she shrugged and picked up her jump rope and went skipping away down the sidewalk.

  And that was three days.

  ~

  The birds were dinosaurs.

  He had read about it in a book once—how in the time of the great dying the largest of the dinosaurs had been killed off by disease and starvation, but the smallest had survived, and over the centuries they had changed, and finally they had become the birds. So the birds were dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs were reptiles, and the reptiles, as everybody knew, were demons. It took a diligent eye to see through all the disguises that were in place.

  He peeled the bandage from his chin to investigate the scrape he had gotten in the fall. Though the injury was shallow, it had not yet sealed over, and he carefully probed at the edges with his fingers to see whether a crust had formed there, and, if so, whether it had begun to curl away from his skin. Did people heal from the outside in or from the inside out? He wasn’t sure. But he himself did not seem to be healing at all. He cleaned the scrape and replaced the bandage and got his sign from the balcony, and later that day, when he was eating lunch with Joseph, he said to him, “I’m no better today than I was yesterday,” and Joseph said, “Well, I can’t say that I find that very surprising.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know that any of us ever gets any better. I have a hard time believing that people change at all.”

  Coleman disagreed. “We are all changed by the hand of the Lord. God gave Saul a new heart, the Bible says. Both Sauls, in fact—King Saul and that Saul who became the Apostle Paul. But I wasn’t talking about my heart. I was talking about my chin.”

  “Oh. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised by that either.”

  “Why not?”

  “If I leave you to yourself, you eat nothing but starches all the time. You don’t get an ounce of protein. Whatever happened to ‘Your body is your temple’ is what I want to know.”

  Four birds circled overhead, and Coleman realized that they were watching him again. He hushed Joseph and pointed into the air, and for the rest of the lunch hour, as they finished their hamburgers, he would not let him speak.

  It had been only a few weeks since he had asked the Lord to reveal to him the names of the demons, whereupon he had felt a hand directing him into Bristow’s restaurant. He had overheard two men talking about the birds. “So it all comes down to the Laura bird,” the first man had said, and the second man had nodded and answered, “Yes, the Laura bird, that’s what it looks like,” and ever since then Coleman had heard people talking about them everywhere.

  The Laura birds. The Laura birds. The Laura birds.

  It seemed that nobody could escape from them.

  He followed the sidewalk past a vintage clothing store and an empty dance studio and then past the gaping mouth and long distended throat of a subway entrance. When he rounded the corner, the wind threatened to tug his sign away from him. He had to turn it sideways in order to keep his grip on it. The sun was showing on the windshields and silver trim of the cars parked along the street, a pearl-strung line of small white balls with thin spikes of light coming out of them. They were almost too bright to look at. A teenager with a halo of frizzy red hair skateboarded past him and said, “The Truth and the Life. All right, man!” and it took Coleman a moment to remember the message that was printed on his sign. He turned and shouted to the boy’s disappearing figure, “You forgot the Way. Don’t forget the Way,” and the boy raised his hand to Coleman in a salute.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon, into the early evening, circling the poorly distinguished boundary line of the district, that meandering belt of fenced-in lots and vacant buildings where the streets began to fade into the empty cit
y. He was looking for people who not yet heard His message. By the time he reached his home, the moon was shining like a Wiffle ball in the highest portion of the evening sky. And that made the fourth day.

  ~

  The rest of the night passed slowly, and in the morning he opened his eyes, and though the sun had risen and the hours had gone by, he could not say whether or not he had slept. He felt as though he remembered dreaming, but as soon as he tried to summon the dream to the front of his mind, it slipped away from him, vanishing into the shadows. The only thing he was certain he remembered was lying as still as he could for hours on end, waiting for that strange feeling of segmentation in his limbs that meant he was finally drifting off to sleep. But as to whether or not he had, at last, slept, he could not be certain.

  It was yet another thing that God knew and he did not, though perhaps one day it would be revealed to him.

  The Laura birds had landed on his balcony again, and he frightened them away, opening and closing the two glass doors with a sudden loud bang that sent them flying down to the street. Then he put his shoes on and selected his sign and carried it out into the city. There was a little grocery store at the corner of the block, and he stopped there and picked up a bag of peeled baby carrots for the vitamins and a small styrofoam tray of dried sausage fingers for the protein. Joseph was right—his body was, after all, his temple. He put the carrots in one pocket and the sausage fingers in the other, and he found that he could feel the packages on his thighs as he walked, swinging back and forth, their weight almost perfectly balanced. It was a good weight, like the weight of God’s attention, which held all things to the earth and prevented them from vanishing into atoms.

  The morning was cool and sunlit and peaceful, and hundreds of people were already out roaming the city streets. He raised his voice as he drifted between them, calling out, “Brothers and sisters! My many friends! Hearken to the Word of God, for His Word is true and His Word is just!” And he held the sign he was carrying high above his head, steadying it with both his hands so that everyone who approached him could see it without obstruction. It read GOD IS LOVE in bold black letters, though on the other side he had also written GOD IS HOPE, just in case.