The Ends, page 16
‘And she died up there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nobody ever told me. Not exactly. She died up there. One of her friends came down, though, somebody she worked with. And she was furious at my dad, she went mental at him. I remember watching them fight, she said it was all my dad’s fault. What happened. She couldn’t stop crying, though. She hated it, it was hard for her. Then she died, and they couldn’t tell us how, or why. They danced around it, all these explanations that weren’t explanations. She hated it up there, and then she died.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Rhonda says.
‘She wanted to do good. That’s all she wanted, she wanted to help people. I remember that: she went because she hoped it could help. Like she could save the world or something.’
The train slows more, coming to a stop. A station, but then a dinging, an alarm: the manual ringing of a bell. We look down the carriage, where a woman in her twenties – young enough that I wonder if she was born in this, or if she’s going around again – says to us, ‘There is a wait, six hours or more. The driver will have a meal and a rest, and then we will continue again.’
‘Six hours? So we wait here?’
‘Go, walk. Come back. Your bags will still be here,’ she says, and then she moves to the doors, as everybody does; and she’s out onto the platform, wandering off with others. A café across the way, full of people; more on the street, drinking, waiting. Smiling, and one woman greets this other as if they’re old friends.
‘Should we go?’ Rhonda asks.
‘Probably,’ I say.
We find a shop that’s exchanging currency, and I take some of my dollars to the counter, hand them over to a large man whose moustache covers most of his mouth as if it’s some sort of curtain to his teeth; and when he talks, the hairs slip against his lips. I want to ask him how he can handle it, if it’s not the most uncomfortable thing in the world. The irritation makes me want to scratch at my own skin, to rub my own face.
‘Where did all of this come from?’ he asks.
‘America,’ I say, and he laughs, as if that’s a fantastic joke, the best he’s heard in a long, long time. ‘I don’t need any of it any more.’
‘No,’ he says. He flicks through a notebook in front of him, lists of numbers and names. Looking for something, and he finds one, a dollar sign next to a name. ‘I don’t want this, but I know a woman who will.’ He tears the page out: Sylvia, written at the top, and an address underneath it. ‘You go to her, she will buy it from you.’
‘We’re not from here,’ I say. ‘I don’t know the way.’ So he draws me a little map, smiling the entire time, streets as tubes—
‘Then you stop,’ he says, and he draws a little house. I thank him, and Rhonda takes a little boiled sweet from a bowl at the till, and we leave. We follow the map, turning the paper until it makes some sense; matching his scrappy handwriting to the street names posted up high on the corners of buildings; down a street that’s cobbled, that makes Rhonda gasp, because it’s so quaint and old.
‘How old?’ she asks.
‘Hundreds of years. Thousands, some of this place. These walls.’
‘How is it still here?’ she asks.
‘It just is,’ I say. ‘They wanted to maintain it, so they did.’ I think of fabribuilds they made in the deserts outside Los Angeles, of the new favelas along the border states, of the north-eastern undergrounds, of Telosa and the other imagined cities that they tried to persuade people to move to. I think of how they were emergency solutions to crises, thrown together, or just there, and then these buildings – with their leaning that’s not problematic, not a reason for destruction, just a sign of their weathered age, their need for brickwork patching, for repointing or plasterwork, cracking wooden sills and doorway arches that look to be on the verge of imminent collapse, and have no doubt looked that way for decades now – these buildings that simply stand, that weather the time and the climate. Baking heat, torrential rains, the heat again, the rain again. ‘The people have made them last.’
We find Sylvia’s street, and her house. It is painted in this hue that seems to flit between orange and pink depending on the light, next door to a plain-looking house that seems only to make Sylvia’s shine all the more. I ignore the plain house until Rhonda grabs my arm. ‘Look,’ she says, her voice a little hushed. It’s not just plain: it is concreted, it is sealed shut. The doors and windows closed to the world, no way in, no way out. A face without eyes, a mouth; like some old horror story. And at the base, flowers, cards, notices: all in this muted greyscale, dyed or painted, seemingly to match the palette of the wall itself. As if they are a part of it, melded to it. ‘What happened?’ she asks.
‘The woman inside there is dead,’ a woman says. She’s standing in the doorway to Sylvia’s house. My age, or thereabouts, and dressed in a way that suggests that only she cares what she thinks.
‘You’re Sylvia?’ I ask, and she nods. ‘I was sent to find you, by a man – he had a moustache,’ and she laughs. Of course she knows him.
‘Hang on, so she’s dead, but why is it—’
‘She cannot be saved. She placed the knife onto herself before the Anomaly came, and she waited and waited. She felt the air change and she knew, that is what people say. The incision here—’ She draws a line up her forearm with her finger, from palm to the soft flesh of the inside elbow, her fingernail pressing down on her own skin so hard that it makes an indent. ‘So deep. We have tried to save her, of course. There is nothing to be placed between the skin and the blade. We have tried knocking her over, one time we tried shooting her, nothing worked.’
‘You shot her?’ Rhonda doesn’t know whether to be shocked or impressed. The smile threatening its way through on her mouth.
‘In her shoulder. To knock her hand away. But the incision has already been made. Her timing was exceptional. She was exact, perfect with it. To the very second. I have never seen anybody more absolutely perfectly on time.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘I remember her. And you know the great irony?’ She smiles. ‘She was always rushing, from her house, because she was late for something or other.’ Sylvia points to the flowers with her foot. A kick that doesn’t connect. ‘We do this for her. A tribute.’
‘Like flowers on a grave.’
‘Not like, this is the very same. This place she dies, the place she inhabits, it is a grave and yet not a grave. Everything in stasis, in flux. So we lay flowers, and sometimes we paint pictures.’
‘You paint pictures?’ I ask.
‘I am an artist, sometimes,’ she says.
‘So am I,’ I reply.
She stares at me, eyes me up and down. As if she’s trying to work out whether I’m any good based entirely on how I comport myself. ‘What did Albert send you to me for?’
‘Dollars,’ I say. ‘I have some I want to sell, and he said you might – you would – be interested.’ She doesn’t really react. Her face somehow static. I wonder if it’s a tactic, a trader’s lack of tells.
‘Where are you from?’ she asks.
‘California,’ I say. ‘Before that, London, before that, Florida.’
‘But recently America.’
‘Yes,’ I tell her, ‘and she,’ Rhonda looks up, ‘is from Nevada.’
‘Is it bad out there? It’s hot, yes?’
‘Very,’ I say. ‘There aren’t many people left.’
‘Another irony: your country’s ancestors left here to find that place, to claim that they discovered it, eh? And now look at you, back here again. Wanting nothing to do with it.’ She looks at my bag. ‘How many dollars have you got?’ I show her. She nods. ‘More than I need, I suspect. I will make you an offer, come in, come in.’
She leads us into her home. I am struck: the walls covered in writing. Not unfocused, but delicate, deliberate. A neat cursive, black Sharpie over the surfaces. She has moved the paintings before writing, the walls with tell-tale rich-paint squares, less sun-damaged. There is a large Start at the top left wall, above the staircase – where the eye is naturally drawn to – and then, from there, her name, a number that I presume to be her age, then words.
‘You cannot read it?’ she asks.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not really.’
But Rhonda can. She translates it slowly, steadily, only tripping over the occasional word, and even then I wonder if it’s the handwriting or placement rather than the knowledge. ‘You were born—’ She looks to me. ‘It says that. You were born, that’s not me changing the words or anything.’
‘Okay,’ I say. And I feel myself smile, at her insistence on the detail.
‘I address it to myself,’ Sylvia says.
‘You were born on a Tuesday, the child of Marta and Julio, in the town of Ronda—’ She stops. ‘That’s my name.’
Sylvia smiles. She seems very happy with that. ‘Ah! It’s fate, then! Fate, that we should meet! Rhonda, do you know of Ronda?’ She moves to a cabinet, to a book of photographs, and opens it to a page of a bridge, a creek, rocks. Sundrenched, so bright that the glare almost seems to shine off the paper. ‘This is me, when I was a child. A teenager, probably your age, I think?’
‘Maybe,’ Rhonda says. ‘It looks nice.’
‘It is,’ Sylvia replies. ‘It’s beautiful. The people there, they are so friendly.’
‘The bridge is in the town?’
Sylvia describes it: a bridge that runs right through the heart of the place, as tall as ten trees. People abseil down the sides of it, they stand there and stare at the canyon, and they’re glad to be there, grateful for the view, for the place itself. ‘A place of true beauty.’
‘I want to go,’ Rhonda says. ‘I feel like I should go. We have the same name, how often does that happen?’ Sylvia smiles, but it’s sad, curious. Not the smile she had before. She puts the photographs away, takes out another box, opens that. A pile of plastic notes suddenly in her hand, and she flicks through them with the trained fingers of somebody who has handled a lot of banknotes in their life. She folds a bundle over.
‘This is what your dollars are worth to me,’ she says. There’s no haggling, and I’m grateful for that: I would not even know where to begin. ‘Nobody wants to go to America, nobody wants American money. You are lucky you found me.’
‘Do you have a bathroom?’ Rhonda asks, and Sylvia shows her to it; then we stand, the two of us, in her room of writing.
‘I am dying,’ she says, apropos of nothing but the silence and the words surrounding us. ‘I am going to America because I want to see it now. I will write up here that I went, and then I will wake up here, and it will be as if I went, nearly the same. I send to myself letters from places, postcards to myself, and photographs. This money will pay the postage, because I will die there.’
‘When do you go?’ I ask.
‘My next life. I am dying, very soon I am dying.’ She leans close to me, as if we are together in this, two old friends, I will understand her words. ‘Do you know, I always die the same way, the same day. The sickness for me has no compunction, is that the word? I cannot sway it. It is far enough along that when I die, it is no surprise. Always the forty-third night I am alive. This section—’ She points to a part of her wall. Neat words, but written over multiple times, for emphasis or clarity. ‘This is the moment where I die. Sometimes, you know, it is the same hour. These …’ notches, marks, like pencil dashes ‘… are the hours counted down. To see if it is exact, and to learn that it is.’
‘What is it?’ I ask, but I know, I already know.
She smiles. ‘I think it is the same as you,’ she says.
‘I think so too,’ I say.
‘And how long do you have?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘How can you not know? Is it not the same each time?’
I lie to her. I don’t want to tell somebody who only lives weeks that I have done thirty years. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it varies, I don’t know why.’
‘My word,’ she says. ‘To have the chaos of not knowing, that’s a gift in its way, I think?’ I don’t correct her. That the chaos is, in its own way, a curse. Whoever would have thought that life was something to rally against? It isn’t life, I want to say; it’s waiting. And when coming back, to endure again; when I think, sometimes, that if it could be over, then I would find peace, maybe. Perhaps. ‘I have found a peace, a comfort in the knowledge of what is to come,’ she says. I wonder if I paused, perhaps a little too long. ‘There is something substantial about forty-three days, when you know that is your allotted window of time. A lot can be achieved in forty-three days.’
‘I can’t imagine,’ I say. I have sat in my house, afraid to go out, waiting to die. I cannot count the days. I do not own a calendar that could accurately tell me. I have no real idea. Years, yes, probably. Months? Days?
What have I achieved? What have I lost?
The sound of the cistern; then Rhonda comes downstairs. ‘Your house is lovely,’ she says. Sylvia smiles.
‘I always spend my forty-third day cleaning,’ she says. ‘There is always a lot of blood, and I want that the house is as nice as it can be.’ She looks at a clock. ‘You came on the train?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘You have an hour until it will leave again, maybe. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. You should go to the café, get some food. It is a long journey from here. Where are you terminating?’
Her word is so on the nose I nearly laugh, I nearly burst with laughing. ‘As far north as we can get. We want to go to London.’
‘London? What is in London?’
‘My ex-wife,’ I say. ‘Or, my wife. She’s still my wife, I think, we didn’t divorce.’
‘Why are you looking for her?’ she asks.
‘Because I am,’ I say. ‘She left, and I don’t know to where, and so I’m looking for her.’
‘Does she want you to find her?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘Maybe you should think about that, uh? You tell your father to not look for somebody if they don’t want to be found.’
I wait for Rhonda to correct her, but she doesn’t. She stares at Sylvia, and she shrugs. ‘It’s his life,’ she says.
‘As it is hers.’
‘He just wants to know why she left.’
‘Maybe because he is chasing her, maybe that is why?’ Sylvia is suddenly serious, but then the seriousness breaks; and she smiles, laughs. We are all friends here. ‘Your lives are your own,’ she says, ‘who am I to judge?’
We are leaving, then; and on the back of her front door I see a square, carved with pen. Crude, this, not like the penmanship of the other writing. This is scratched in: notches, for every day she’s had. Counting down. All exactly the same. The latest box with forty-two of those delicate scratches, on a quick count. I notice a spray bottle of bleach; a rag. She is preparing. And I think, as she waves us off, as she bids us farewell, that I should probably start to prepare as well.
We eat little custard pastries, and sandwiches with cured ham and the richest butter, and we watch the other people as they wait for the train – faces we recognize, and nod at, we are all on this journey together. Rhonda listens to Spanish, floating in the air, and she occasionally looks at me, tells me quietly what she’s heard. This couple is headed for France, she says; or, this man’s got a dead mother to visit, she’s just come back again and wants to see him; or, he’s a musician, he’s got a concert, he’s really nervous. Life pushing through death, in little ways.
Then the train driver returns. He doesn’t have a uniform, but some of the others waiting recognize him, shout hello, start to follow him up to the train. We all reboard, back in the seats we had before.
I think it is only moments before Rhonda is asleep. Minutes later until I follow her.
I dream of my house, in California. Of the walls, open and yet closed; of the elements outside, but in the dream, there’s rain that I never really saw in truth: thunderously heavy yet silent, pooling outside the doors, around the walls, rising higher and higher; and the house rocks on its foundations, lifting at the corners like pages, threatening to take me and the walls away from there entirely.
21
Checkpoints are quiet; they are rarely policed, and when they are, it’s people making sure that nothing illegal is being smuggled. A man on one train, as we travelled up through the northern areas of Spain, into France’s Provence region, told us a story about gun smugglers, how they were especially vigilant here. Smelting factories to turn old weapons into reusable metal, and to keep them away. He said, ‘The hope among the French and Germans is that they will have no more weapons. That this is a reset, in its way! Imagine that, starting again?’ He told us about his life – we didn’t ask, as others didn’t ask us; but he spoke, just as we did, because that was how the time was passed it seemed, like some Canterbury Tales of the post-apocalyptic train journey – and how he hadn’t died, how he hadn’t even really been touched by the Anomaly, by the virus, by the collapse of everywhere else. He said, ‘You’re born in a village, you live in a village, you die in a village. Some people have died, and they come back. That is normal now, just as they died before and did not come back, that was the normal then.’ Rhonda was fascinated by him: her experience running so short, and he had lived through it all. I did not say, Well, so have I; his experience was, to her, something individual to him.
‘What do you think will happen when the Anomaly leaves?’ she asked him. And he laughed, as if the concept was so strange, so alien.
‘We do not know it will leave,’ he said.
‘We don’t know that it won’t,’ she replied.
‘If it leaves, and death resumes, as it did before? Then we will find that as normal, suddenly. Suddenly, that will be all we know, and we’ll come to forget this time. Remember when we couldn’t die for good? Remember?’ He laughs at that, then. ‘Children,’ he says, ‘what it would be to have the hope of the children.’
