Songs of the Dead Read online

  I sit with my mother as she sews, and I think that this is what people have done for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, since the beginning: sit with those they love as they die, and make presents to carry the dying through this transition. Only recently, I think, have we mechanized death, pushed it away, made it the property of strangers and their machines.

  The cat purrs, looks at my mother, looks at me. I hold her, pet her, cry. I have been doing this for hours, my mother has been doing it for days. The cat gets no worse, gets no better.

  And then my mom leaves to take a shower. I hear the water running. The cat looks at me one more time, closes her eyes, and begins to convulse. She coughs, gags, thrashes, and then she is gone. It is clear to me she had been holding on until my mother left the room. She did not want my mother, her best friend, to see her die.

  My mother comes back. She cries. She is done with the quilt. She asks me to bury the cat wrapped in the quilt outside her window. I do. It is raining. As I dig the grave, I find a salamander. I pick him up, look at him, and gently set him down on the soil by a pile of wood. He walks slowly forward, finds a small hole in the ground, and moves back beneath the surface, back to where he lives.

  What makes us think that others, too, do not mourn their losses, that rivers do not mourn their beloved salmon, their beloved sturgeon, indeed their own beloved freedom? How narcissistic—how psychopathic, how evil, how infected with the spirit of a life-hating God—must one be to not recognize the sorrow of all those humans and nonhumans who lose their loved ones, their freedom, their homes, their ways of life, to this culture?

  Allison and I walk in the forest near our home. We are glad to see it. It seems glad to see us. The day is bright and warm. We meander, make our way to the place I used to lie on the ground. I see two trees I haven’t noticed before, two trees growing close together, their branches intertwining. I walk over to one, touch the trunk, and suddenly find myself sitting on the ground.

  Allison asks what’s wrong.

  I can’t speak. I’m panting.

  She looks worried.

  I shake my head, catch my breath, then say, still panting, “You know how I’ve been asking what it’s like to be a forest, and the forest keeps showing me?”

  Understandably, she looks even more worried.

  I smile, say, “No. This is good. When I touched the tree, I felt this immense orgasm run through my body.” I hold out my hand, palm downward. “See. I’m still shaking.”

  “So. . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “Being a forest . . .”

  “Yes, or a river or mountain or desert or ocean . . .”

  “. . . is like . . .”

  “Yes.”

  Her smile no longer tentative, she says, “That reminds me of something I’ve read. . . .”

  “You’ve read?”

  “Yes. Pathetic, isn’t it?”

  We both laugh and laugh, me sitting, her standing holding her sides. She starts to lean against a tree, but hesitates to touch it. This makes us laugh harder.

  Finally I say, “You read. . . .”

  “Oh, yes. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described indigenous humans as living in a ‘blaze of reality.’ Maybe that’s part of what he meant.”

  “I thought you were going to say this makes you understand why so many white settlers ran off to join the Indians.”

  “That, too.”

  She sits. We don’t say anything for a while. Suddenly I notice a small lizard on a rock a few feet away. I nudge Allison, gesture slightly with my head. She sees him, nods. The lizard sits looking at us for the longest time, then he closes one eye. He opens it, closes it again, opens it, and scampers off the rock.

  I look at Allison. She looks at me. We can’t help ourselves: we start laughing again, even harder this time than before. As I roll on the ground, I hear Allison say, her voice squeaky through the laughter, “He was winking at us.”

  twenty five

  power, again

  No miracles are free. Every miracle carries with it a cost, paid to those who perform this miracle. And who is to say that those millions and tens of millions killed by the Nazis and their wars were not human sacrifices to placate and to nourish those who then provided miracles—fog, a detonator that fails to ignite a bomb, a telephone call causing someone to stand outside a room where someone else is setting a fuse, a briefcase pushed too far underneath a thick oak table—in return? And what of the sacrifices made all along to the God of this culture, this jealous God, this God of stasis? Could not the entire world—and her members large and small—said to be the sacrifice being made now?

  Jack Shoemaker reaches one gloved hand into cage A43, picks up the mouse, drops it into a plastic bag. He clamps the opening of the bag to the nozzle of a CO2 canister, then turns on the gas. The bag inflates, and he turns it off. The mouse from A43 gasps, scrabbles at the smooth plastic, and begins to convulse. Jack writes the mouse’s number on the bag, opens the lab’s refrigerator, puts the bag inside, shuts the door. He walks to cage B17, reaches in, puts the mouse in a bag, walks to the canister, and so on. Tomorrow one of the graduate students can run the tests on the dead mice.

  Through all of this it never occurs to Jack to ask the questions he asks so often of the women he kills: Where do you go when you die? What do you think and feel and see as you die?

  Allison and I try to settle back into our lives in Spokane. But this is hard to do when we know what is coming, when we know we need to act. There are moments like in the forest, with the trees and the lizard, but for the most part we go through our days as though we are wearing clothes that are too small, living in rooms too tiny to maneuver. For about a week we don’t do anything about Nika’s killer. Then Allison asks what’s next.

  “I thought you’d have some ideas.”

  “I only knew it had to be done.”

  I nod.

  She continues, “Committing is the hard part anyway. Everything else is technical.”

  I say, “I guess the first thing is to go back to where I saw Nika, and see if I learn anything new. We can also go to the river.”

  “Where you saw him. . . .”

  “Yes, there.”

  We go to where the apple trees are growing over the small stream. The leaves are starting to turn. We sit. Allison reads. I try to will the land to show memories to me. Nothing. I try to will myself to be open to receiving those memories. Still nothing. I lie down, close my eyes, begin to drift. I dream of rabbits and coyotes and I dream of dreaming. I dream that when I dream, the dreams do not come to me but that I go to them. I dream that when coyotes dream, the dreams do not come to them but that they go to the dreams. I dream the same for rabbits, salamanders, trees, rivers, rocks. I dream that dreams are living beings who eat us to stay alive and whom we eat, too. I dream that dreams keep us alive. I dream that without dreams we die, and we die faster even than we die without other foods, without fruits and meats and roots and shoots and leaves. I dream that we are here to dream, and that dreams are here to come into us. All of us. I dream that dreams hitchhike into us, and that we hitchhike into them. I dream that otherwise sleeping makes no sense. Rabbits need to rest, but to sleep is to be vulnerable. I dream that we are here to be vulnerable, that we are here to sleep and to dream.

  I dream that we have forgotten how to dream, and that we have forgotten how to live, and that we have forgotten how to die. I dream that if we do not remember how to dream, we will never remember how to live, nor will we remember how to die.

  Nika is dead. She is dreaming. She is dreaming that willows grow out of her hair. She is dreaming of rivers full of salmon and she is dreaming her ribs are made of pine trees. She is dreaming of wild roses on her breasts, on her hips. She is dreaming she is making love—something she never before got to do. She is dreaming she is making love with Osip and he is making love with her and he is running his hands through willow leaves and he is holding tight to the trunks of pine trees, and she misses him
and her mother and her father and her brother, and she wishes she were home, but it is a long way home, and she will go to visit, but this is where she is now, with willows growing from her hair and pine trees in her ribs.

  Nika is dreaming.

  We go to the river. Again I do not fall through time. Again the land does not open up to me, or at least it does not in ways I understand.

  So we go to Latah Creek, sit on the bank. I lie down. I drift. I dream that I sit up, that I see salmon running thick. I see bears and foxes and birds eating the fish. I see insects eating the fish. I see pine trees eating the fish. I see willows eating the fish.

  And then I see a woman. I see Nika. She has willows growing from her hair, she has pine trees in her ribs. She has wild roses on her breasts and on her hips. I dream she is making love and I turn away to not pry, and when I turn back she is gone, and so are the salmon and bears and foxes and birds and insects.

  Again I dream. Again I see Nika. I speak to her, ask her how she is. I reach out my hand. “Nika,” I say. “Nika.”

  She reaches out her hand, too, touches finger to finger. I feel a charge run through my body like an electric current. I jump, and when I look again she is gone.

  Nika is dreaming that she sees a man who sees her, too. His lips move but she cannot hear his voice. He reaches out his hand, and suddenly she hears him say her name. He says it twice. Or maybe he says it eight or twelve or twenty times. She reaches out her hand, too, and when their fingers touch she feels a flood of memories rush into and out of her, memories of human contact, of hands touching her, of her family, of Osip, and then of others, of all the men, of Jack. It’s too much. She pulls back, gathers herself, and when she gains the strength to look again he is gone.

  My mother asks me why we came back. She says, “I don’t mind making a quilt for your bed, but I don’t want to make a quilt to bury you in.”

  I tell her we came to fight back. I stop, then say, “But I’m scared.”

  “I am, too.”

  Silence.

  Finally she says, “Just because you saw the future doesn’t mean you saw the only one.”

  “I want to believe that.”

  “Obviously you do, or you wouldn’t have come back.”

  She’s right. Or at least I want her to be right.

  She continues, “This isn’t like the cat, where there was nothing to be done, and so we just held on to every moment for as long as we could.”

  Silence.

  She says, “This is a terrible thing, to be living in the shadow of a murderer.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you are going to change the future. You are.”

  “Yes.” I wish I were as certain as she sounds.

  “So the sooner you do it,” she says, “the sooner we can all get back to living.”

  Allison and I go to East Sprague. The way Nika was dressed makes me think she might have been a prostitute, and we have seen women walking there wearing hot pants and halter tops. We don’t know what else to do.

  We park. Allison gets out. I stay in the car. Not only is Allison somewhat less introverted than I, we also decided there would be less confusion if a woman approached rather than a man. She’s going to pass out pieces of paper with our names and phone number and a request to call if they have information about someone named Nika. She’s not going to say anything about Nika being missing, since for all we know she might not yet have been attacked. We also decided that if anyone asks why we want to know we’ll just say we’re concerned.

  I see Allison talking to one woman, then two together, then another alone. After she returns to the car she says the women were friendly and took the slips of paper, but none responded to the name.

  She goes back out. I remain in the car. I watch a man pull his car to the side of the road, watch a woman lean into the passenger seat window. After a few moments the woman gets in.

  Allison is now a few blocks away. I start the car, follow behind, park again. If it weren’t for the memory I saw at the river I probably wouldn’t worry if I lost sight of her. I may not even have come down with her. She is perfectly capable of taking care of herself.

  This whole process doesn’t take long—this stretch of East Sprague is short, the density of prostitutes is low, and neither of us knows where else to go—so when she’s finished we head on home.

  Kristine doesn’t feel good about the slip of paper the woman handed her. She doesn’t know what the woman—she said her name was Allison—wants, so she didn’t let on she knew Nika. Oh, she’d nodded and smiled and looked at the paper, which she’d folded up neatly and put in the tight front pocket of her pants, and then she’d promised to call if she heard anything, but she wasn’t going to act.

  Maybe the woman really wanted to do something good for Nika, but then again she’d seen Allison’s man—Derrick, the note said his name was—hanging back in a car waiting. Maybe he’d sent Allison to get Nika for a threesome. Fucking coward. He could have just come forward himself. And why Nika? Why not me? I’m not good enough? Well, fuck you. Or maybe they were cops, in which case she wanted nothing to do with them. Or maybe Nika made a break for it—Kristine hadn’t seen her for months now—and these two fucking sleazeballs were with Viktor. Yeah, that’s it, she thinks. They’re probably with Viktor. She’s not going to tell those two a goddamn thing.

  Kristine wakes up scared. Not scared like when she’s woken up with a strange man or men on top of her, or scared like waking up from those dreams where she’s running from someone who’s going to hurt her and finding safety only to see the faces of her rescuers turn into the faces of those who chase her. Not scared like the time she woke up to see her dealer—to whom she’d owed a shitload of money—sitting staring at her, calmly tossing a small knife from his left hand to his right and back to his left. And not even scared like she wakes up scared every day. This was something new. All night, images of something hitting her in the head kept forcing themselves into her. And images of something pushing into her chest. She’d felt everything about the blows except for the blows themselves. The terror, the impulse to block with no time to make a move, the anticipatory tightening of the muscles. Again and again she’d felt all that, in looped dreams that lasted only seconds but that dragged on all night. And then she’d been awakened by a voice so clear she’d jerked upright and looked around, been surprised to see no one. The voice had said, “Stay.”

  Fully awake now, she dismisses the voice and especially the message. Staying here is a nice notion, but of course impossible if she wants to avoid another visit from her dealer, who’d promised that next time he wouldn’t let her off with a warning.

  The thought barely occurs to her—as it sometimes does— to quit the heroin, but she rejects that immediately—as she always does—as absurd, impractical, and undesirable. Almost unthinkable. The knife, she thinks would be less painful than being clean. And quicker.

  She looks around at the weeds dying from the change of season, at the chain link fences, the discarded refrigerators and gutted stoves, the broken glass and crushed cans, and thinks she doesn’t want to stay here anyway. She doesn’t want to stay anywhere. Nor does she want to go anywhere, mainly because no matter where she would go, she would have to bring herself along. And that’s too much weight to carry.

  She’d thought, a very long time ago, that by running away from home she’d be able to leave behind everything that happened there and start all over. But she’d learned almost immediately that there was no such thing as a fresh start. The wounds came with her. The memories came with her. The self-destructive impulses came with her. And she had known from the beginning, even consciously, that no matter how clean her rationalizations, too many of her impulses, actions, motivations were self-destructive. The nightmares came with her. The lack of impulse control. The hatred—earned hatred—of men. The hatred of herself.

  Even more than scared now, Kristine is tired. She’s tired of running away only to find herself still at the same place.
She’s tired of being tired. She’s tired of being.

  She cooks up some heroin, thinks very seriously about taking way too much, ending it right now. She holds the knife against the tacky chunk and pictures the knife slicing through, pictures heating it all up, pictures injecting herself again and again, pictures how that would feel to take that one last glorious gasp before going away to feel no more pain, to enter no more nightmares, to see and feel no more flashbacks. How good that would be.

  But she can’t do it. Coward, she thinks. Fucking coward. She thinks that has always been her problem, that she was a coward from the beginning. She didn’t fight off her brother or her uncle. She’s never fought off any of the men who’ve taken her. It’s as both her brother and her uncle—and so many others—said to her more times than she could ever count, “You won’t do anything about it because you’re a fucking coward, and a slut besides. You wanted it more than I did. I was doing you a fucking favor by even looking at you.”

  As always, Kristine puts in only enough heroin to take off the edge. She’s disappointed in herself, as she is every time she goes through this, every time she considers ending it but cannot because she’s a fucking coward.

  She gets up, puts on the same pants as yesterday, rummages through her garbage bag to find her fuchsia blouse, and puts that on. She starts walking toward East Sprague.

  “Fuck it,” she says. “Fuck it all.”

  Jack is collecting. He’s in his truck. He’s thinking about his childhood.

  He remembers his parents telling him when he was very young that happiness comes not from being but from striving. You’ll never find happiness, they’d said again and again, by gaining some goal or by being in any specific way or place or circumstance, but rather by setting a goal and seeking to attain it. Once it’s attained you need to set another. Again and again Jack has found that to be true in so many areas of his life. Certainly in his professional life. His position yields no happiness. Nor do his publications. Happiness is always around the corner, in that next promotion, that next publication, that next bit of knowledge gained through his experiments. And it’s just as true in his personal life. Courtship brought him far more happiness than marriage, dreaming of buying a home far more than living in it.