How Best to Avoid Dying (20 page)

The bus stopped and he carried me again. John carrying a corpse through the streets, but no one asked. He carried me
like the sea had carried me. I floated. He carried me up the stairs, stumbling only once. Inside he laid me on his mat and drew a bath. There was steam and more heat. He made a tea that smelled of spices and put it to my lips. I didn't drink. Tea dribbled down my chin.

Through all of this I did not think. I was doing my best to be dead.

He dried me with a towel and dressed me in a robe.

I still did not open my eyes or speak a word. John read to me.
Charlotte's Web, The Little Prince, Mother Goose
. He used different voices for each character. His women sounded shrill. His villains sounded Roman. He hummed and sang. He combed a century's worth of knots from my hair.

His actions were a comfort and a chastising. Without words he was saying, “You cannot pretend to be dead. That is not your lot.”

One day he filled a bowl with warm water and washed my feet. I could hear him sing.

“God, you are good. Sweet Lord, you are good.”

“God is God,” I said. My first words in months. “Who can say if He's good?”

“You and I are here,” he said, pausing his washing. “That is evidence.”

“Survival isn't evidence.” I looked down at him.

“That is not what I meant,” he said and returned to my feet.

John comes home in the half-light of evening. His eyes are tired. Red snakes in the white. He moves slowly, loosens his tie and stretches his neck. I am sitting against the wall, just as he left me. My legs no longer move. He cannot see how little of me is left. He sits on a stool near me.

“They do not listen, Lazarus,” he says. “Starving children laughing at the food I offer.” His voice has tears in it. “It is not enough to live for them. It is not enough that he died for them. Nothing will open their eyes.”

“John,” my mouth is toothless. “Where are my cigarettes?”

“I smoked them.”

“Where is my food?” I ask.

“No more food for those who won't eat. No more.”

He lies down on his mat. Still determined to pretend he can sleep. He will rise early and pray. He will go back to those who can hurt a man who cannot die. He is tired. Young John. Troubled John. You're going to lose him, Jesus. What will you do if even he leaves you?

“John,” I say, my words sound like mush.

He breathes deeply. He pretends so well sometimes I believe he is asleep. He believes he is asleep. Perhaps he is.

“John?” I say.

He breathes and says nothing.

I lay down against the wall. From here I can see the sky, darker every moment. My eyes are going. Dripping from my head. I cannot see the stars. They could be falling and I'd never know.

“John,” I say. “Perhaps tomorrow he will return.”

He only breathes.

Come, Lord Jesus. For his sake, come soon.

GOODNIGHT

At night, when the wife is asleep, I sneak across the street to the funeral home and whisper through the air conditioning vents. “Hello, dead people,” I say. “They solved all the problems today,” I say. “God gave up the job and we voted Ms. Mayfield, the kindergarten teacher, as the new God. Remember her? Smiled at every drawing you gave her. Read books aloud, holding up each page for everyone to see. She never told when you soiled your pants, just helped you clean up. She said special things happen. She blinked those big brown eyes and promised she loved each of us. She made sure that every kid in class won Show and Tell at least once—even the boy who didn't speak English and kept bringing the same glass paperweight every week. She's God now, and everything is sweet and we have nap-time and cookies and cubbies and learn new things and when we're good we get stars by our name—but real stars now, because she's God. And when we mess up, she takes us aside and talks to us, puts us in Time Out for a few minutes, and we learn our lesson. And remember how she smelled like cotton sheets
right out of the dryer? Now the whole world smells like that. And Ms. Mayfield smiles at us as she floats in all places at once. Life is so very good. But you're dead. Ha. Bad timing. HA!”

Then I sneak home, before the sprinklers come on, crawl into bed and bite my mattress till my gums bleed.

LISH

Lish was going to die. She was only twenty-two and beautiful. She smelled of sandalwood and tea. She couldn't sit through a full movie unless it was a musical or science fiction. She wasn't convinced time existed. She believed bubbles, stars, and poems were all the same thing. Trees said her name,
Lish
. So did sidewalk puddles and passing busses,
Lish
. She had broken her nose in a swimming hole at the age of sixteen and loved the crooked arc that remained. Lish believed that if she wanted to have a baby she need only nod. Lish's body hummed. It was happy to belong to her and she was happy to have it. But that wouldn't last for long, because Lish was going to die.

                    
~Excuse me

                    
~Yes, Lish
.

                    
~Nothing dies. Energy is never destroyed, just changed
.

                    
~Then you won't mind when a painting of the British Fleet defeating the Spanish Armada falls on your head
.

Lish was walking through the park, watching squirrels chase each other around an oak tree with thick, drooping branches. She liked the picture, these grandparents of nature shrugging as the younger members of the world scurried through their limbs.

The way the squirrels hopped and scrambled had Lish thinking about the sperm swimming around her plump eggs. She thought of her high school love, Brinkley. It had been five years since she had seen him, but Brinkley's sperm would still be waiting. Brinkley had been stout and strong, a wrestler. She pictured his sperm having a similar build, shoving their way past Professor Hoggles' snobby, middle-aged sperm (two years ago), or Pev's sperm (last spring) that were so stoned they were probably just finding her fallopian tubes. Of course, Belinda didn't leave any sperm (Halloween night), just pleasant memories and lipstick stains.

Sometimes Lish felt sorry for the sperm, waiting and wanting. She was tempted to just nod her head and let them go for the egg. But Lish wanted just one more competitor. His name was Rex H.

She had never met Rex H, never seen his face except for the faded image on a flyer that had wrapped itself around Lish's shin a week before:

R
EX
H,
THE FAMED
A
SIAN HIP
-
HOP SLAM
-
POET HAS RHYMED FROM COAST TO COAST
,
SEA TO SEA
,
TO
NYC
TO
NC
TO
MC
TO SEE THE YOU IN YOU AND THE ME IN ME
. S
KIN LIKE HONEY
,
TONGUE LIKE A HAWK
,
WHITTLING THE WORLD WHENEVER HE TALK
.

Below the words was a picture of a lanky Asian man with dreadlocks and eyes that reminded Lish of wet Tootsie Rolls.

Lish thought he looked silly, too serious, and beautiful. He was performing that night at Groundmeet. Lish stepped out of the park and headed in that direction.

                    
~Is that where I die?

                    
~Yes
.

                    
~What if I don't go?

                    
~You have to go as much as I have to write you going. If the story says you die and I let you live than I kill the story and you never get to live
.

                    
~That sounds silly
.

Thanks to intrusive roots, the sidewalk was bumpy and broken. It reminded Lish of her nose. She thought back to her swimming hole incident, back to the moment after the dive and before the pain. The moment in the water. The wet. The blurry green. The bubbles that petered from the corners of her mouth.

She often thought of bubbles. Air in a moving sojourn, traveling through the water, but always separate. Jiggling to the surface, popping out into the air-world and living as words. As poems. Then floating to the sky to become stars. All stars were once poems. All poems were once bubbles. When Lish spoke a poem she believed she was voicing bubbles and whispering stars.

“I saw stars,” she told her mother after her swimming hole accident.

“Yes, oh, yes,” her mother laughed. “With a smack like that, I imagine you did.”

“No, I saw
the
stars.”

From that day on there was seldom a time that Lish did not have a book of astronomy or physics within her reach. She
read science textbooks like poetry and grew to believe that Stephen Hawking and William Blake were actually the same person. The facts she read were as full of mystery and beauty as the myths she whispered when she couldn't fall asleep. She understood the life cycle of a sun, the composition of a comet, the categories of galaxies, and she could still wish on a shooting star.

She took to lying awake most nights, watching the sky and waiting for a star to die. Would it pop and pow like the fireworks her brother used to set off in rich people's lawns? Or would it just blink away? Would she feel it go? Feel the universe a light less, even if it happened a million years before she saw it?

She was still a mile from Groundmeet, when who should step out from a Styln' Cuts? None other than Rex H.

“Hi, Rex H,” she said. “I'm walking to watch you.”

He turned and raised a hand to his new cut. In person he was even more beautiful than his photocopied image. He was clean, sculpted, and somehow childish.

“Who be you?” he asked, doing sign language for a “B” and a “U” correspondingly.

“Lish.”

“Nice.” He smiled, a pristine, white, nearly perfect smile. “And you're heading to Groundmeet? Well, I do hope to impress as I digress through all I confess. Yes, yes, and yes.” As he spoke, his head swiveled like a slow-motion bobble-head doll.

Lish bit her lip.

Rex H cocked his head to one side, a dimple on his left cheek appearing. “Wants ride con me?” He motioned to a black and silver, souped-up, state-of-the-art moped.

Lish very much wanted to ride con him. She straddled the bike. The leather seat felt smooth and cool against her unveiled
kwaggle. Lish owned just one pair of panties, which she wore only on Christmas and the Fourth of July.

“So sweet. You a poet? You look like a poet.”

“Yes,” Lish said. “I'm an astronomer.”

“Nice.” He revved up the cycle. Lish wrapped her arms around Rex H's waist.

The journey was delicious—the wind, the noise, the smell of Rex H's shampooed hair, the bouncing of the seat between her legs. She loved how the cycle cut ahead into time, accelerated a little faster than humans were meant to. She was an outlaw of physics.

As they rode Rex H explained his poetry. “My rhymes are sublime, amazing the mind. Ideas weave through words like wind through birds, like whey through curds, like corn through turds. Yes, indeed.”

When they arrived, Rex H asked her if she'd share one of her poems. She smiled, but didn't answer. He put his hand against the small of her back and they walked in together.

Quiet boys, she said to the sperm, who were doing agitated summersaults deep within her loins.

“Butterflies?” Rex H asked.

“Not really,” she answered.

Groundmeet was a punk alternative coffee shop with an all vegan menu. No light brighter than a few candles or a dim lamp touched the blood red walls. There were two windows, but both were painted over in black with the words L
OOK WITHIN
spray-painted on.

Lish loved the place. She loved the sawdust smell, the red velvet cushions, the ornately framed oil painting of the British Fleet defeating the Spanish Armada that hung from the high ceiling, tethered to the floor by a rope.

                    
~Is that it?

                    
~Yes, Lish
.

                    
~I'm not frightened
.

                    
~No?

                    
~Write an O
.

                    
~O

                    
~See the center
.

                    
~Yes
.

                    
~That's eternity
.