Ash Wednesday (56 page)

Except for Merridale. And the people who lived, and had lived, there.

~*~

"Chewing gum is a poor excuse for a cigarette," Eddie Karl said gruffly from his bed in Lansford General.

He twisted his head uncomfortably and looked up, but was unable to see any more of the TV screen than a thin slash of blue-white light. "Don't know why they hadda move us," he complained to his roommate. "Can't even see the damn TV. That color's somethin', I ain't got color at home." He listened to the newscaster for a while, looking out the window over the tops of the nearby buildings to where an early evening moon shone. He was on the seventh floor, too high to see any of the blue forms below.

"The whole world," he said after a while. "The whole fuckin' world. Startin' here and goin' out and around, like somebody wrappin' the world up or puttin' a glove on it or somethin'. Y'know . . ." He leaned back and turned his head toward his roommate. Their beds were head to head in a line from the door to the far wall. The rest of the room was hidden. ". . . if I wasn't a religious man I think I'd become one after this. Now I don't go to church, but nobody said that don't make you religious. But if I was a goddam atheist or an aganostic, I'd change my mind fiddle-fuckin' fast. You just tell me how else you can explain this? And on Ash Wednesday too? There's some connection there, betcherass. Don'tcha think?"

Eddie was answered by only a low grunt.

“Sorry. I keep forgettin' that dumb jaw of yours." He listened to a bit more of the news.

"Panic," he said at length. "Don't know why everybody's so shitless scared. Didn't back home and I don't know now. I tell ya, I never done nothin' to no one that I'd be afraid to see 'em dead, y'know? Guess maybe a lot of people are scared to see people they done wrong to or somethin'. Well, if that makes 'em stop doin' wrong to other folks, then I say whoopee and welcome. Now you take your countries — they ain't gonna be so hot to blow each other up, because who the hell wants to live in a place where folks you blew up are all lookin' at you? Huh?"

There was another grunt that Eddie took as agreement.

"Damn right. Now that ain't to say people aren't still gonna kill each other. They still will. People did that in Merridale f'crissakes. But I bet they won't do it as often, and like with these countries, not as many at a time. Yessir."

Eddie paused, removed his gum, and dropped it into his water glass. "Hey, we old guys go on, and you can't tell me to shut up, so if I'm borin' you, just blink your eyes or somethin' . . . no, hell, that's no good
 
— I gotta break my neck just to see your eyes. Well, I'll shut up for a minute."

Actually, it was a few seconds short of a minute.

"I just thought of somethin'. You ever see that thing on old tombstones, that Momento mori? That's Latin. You know what it means?"

The roommate gave a negative grunt.

"It means something like, 'Remember you gotta die.' And that's what this whole thing is like, like one great big reminder that we're all gonna go sooner or later, so we better be damn good to each other while we're here."

Eddie Karl thought about that for a while, then laughed. "Hell, we always knew that! That's nothin' new, is it?

"We always knew that anyway . . . You don't got any smokes, do you? Aw hell, I asked you that already . . ."

~*~

Days, weeks passed, and the dogs stopped barking. The tears dried, and those who had fled came home. They returned to Merridale, to thousands of towns and cities over the world, eventually finding their own dead more comforting than those they had not known.

Governments did not topple, kingdoms did not fall. No angels appeared with flaming swords, as the thousands of new prophets predicted. No antichrist arose from the waiting mass of humanity. Siva, Brahma, and Vishnu, though looked for, did not appear. Mohammed remained silent, as did all the gods and avatars, as silent as the hazy dead who shared the earth with awestruck, expectant mankind.

Between the living and the dead lay an uneasy truce that grew easier with the passing of time, a pale blue light that had to darken before it could begin to illuminate.

There was no epiphany, no apocalypse.

But in Africa, a young mother, about to strike her son for accidentally breaking a jar, looked into the peaceful face of her ancient grandmother and stayed her hand, admonishing the boy with a word, impressing it with an embrace.

In the Sinai, an Israeli colonel, craggy and stiff with war, looked over a plain hard-won years before, lost, and won again, and found that there were things more important than land.

And in a tenement in Brooklyn, a machine operator on his way home passed the now familiar forms on the street finally without fear, and for the first time in his life stopped on the corner and spent a dollar for a flower to give the woman with whom he lived.

For the worker, the colonel, the mother, for all who now understood, the blue light blazed with the brilliance of suns.