The World of the End (23 page)

On their way to the multi-wheel, Ben tried to pry information from the chief Charlatan but the man was impenetrable. At the station, the Charlatan turned to leave. “Hey, where you going?” Ben called after him.

“Get on the multi; get off with everyone else,” the Charlatan said, fading from view. Bewildered, Ben eyed the somber, late-night passengers surrounding him and realized that there was a dark secret at the heart of this journey and that, as opposed to the smile-filled conversations of daytime travel, this particular voyage resembled a random encounter of people all headed together to the gallows pole, the terror plain on each of their faces. When he turned to the man beside him, he saw a face weathered by grief and wondered whether the Charlatan had taken him to the wrong stop. He would see soon enough, he figured. In the meantime, he tried to rein in his enthusiasm in light of the series of disappointments he had suffered since the day of his death and instead focus on the wonder of the past week—each minute of every day he saw his love living and breathing, permanent and undeniable.

She was there beside him during every twist and turn of life, a ubiquitous presence on screen. At times, he found himself so drawn to the events depicted on screen that he responded audibly, surprised to find that the man on tape acted differently. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help smiling for the duration of the six-day marathon, marking mutual milestones in a small spiral notebook, keeping careful records of dates, locations, hours, and occurrences so that in the future he wouldn’t have to search at length whenever he wanted, for example, to watch them make love for the first time. The careful dissecting of his life into chapters, paragraphs, passages, and even trivial sentences, made him feel like a clerk wading through the complex clutter of his existence, shelving each nugget of experience in its proper drawer. The meticulous cataloguing pleased him immensely, especially when he happened on long-forgotten episodes. Had the Charlatans not disturbed him, he would have woken up the following morning, after eight dreamless hours of sleep, and started from exactly where he left off, before fatigue bested curiosity. Then he heard the driver’s voice say, “That’s all folks, we’re here.”

*   *   *

Ben followed the other passengers who got off the vehicle. Like them, he dispelled the darkness with the bright light of day, eager to find out what waited behind the black steel doors that stood at the end of the sandy path. Walking along, he felt as though he had been swept up in a strange tribal ritual. Fits of crying rippled through the mass of people. Ben, remembering family funerals past, recognized something familiar in the walkers—the terrible yoke of loss hunched their backs and weighted their feet. When the black doors yawned open, Ben stopped in his tracks, blinking at the sight of the strangest cemetery imaginable. A bright white hall stretched before him, its floors marble, its ceiling sky. A black lane ran down its middle, separating innumerable rectangular glass caskets containing naked corpses. The crowd strode between the giant fish tanks and, as they reached the caskets of their loved ones, fell to their knees, conversing in hushed tones. The cooing reminded Ben of soft museum chatter. To his right, a twenty-year-old male corpse lay in a fetal position. To his left, an elderly woman lay flat, spread-eagled on her stomach. Up ahead, a child with his thumb in his mouth, his left leg bent so that it formed a triangle with his straight right one. For the better part of an hour, he toured the grid of coffins, entranced by the variety of tranquil sleep positions. Stifling a smile at the sight of a dark-skinned man who had chosen to die in the classic tanning position, hands behind his head, loins marked by the whiteness of imaginary underwear, as though he died a second after leaving the beach, Ben heard a whisper in his ear. “You see the bald man forty-eight rows in front of you?”

He started, looked around, and then stared ahead, remembering the telefinger. “Yes, I see him.”

“Well, then stop flirting with the corpses and go to him,” the voice commanded.

Ben stayed riveted to the man, who bowed before the glass coffin just like all of the rest of the visitors. Only when he was a few steps away did he smile. “Samuel?”

“Speak quietly,” the Mad Hop whispered, motioning him closer.

Ben bowed beside him and looked at the petite, pretty woman entombed before him. Her body was balled up, her hands tucked under her left cheek.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

“My wife, Mildred,” the Mad Hop said, looking at him with glassy eyes.

“I had no idea you were married,” Ben said, examining her delicate face.

“Five years. First time she died was back in 1985. Lung cancer. Second time was eleven years ago. She got drunk and punched in a seven over three. You know what that means?”

“Eternal sleep,” the righter sighed. “So this is where they bring all the permanently dead?”

“There’s no way back from here,” the Mad Hop intoned miserably.

“I’m so sorry.”

The Mad Hop stroked the top of the transparent coffin. “She was my Marian.”

Ben turned away from the coffin. “You also killed yourself a year after your wife died?”

“I told you to keep your voice down,” the Mad Hop said. “People come here to mourn. And regarding your question: yes, and no. Yes, in that my suicide took a year; no, in that had I not chosen alcohol as the cure for my pain, it’s likely that my liver would’ve held up for a few more years, not that I have any regrets.” He looked at Ben out of the corner of his eye and added coldly, “As opposed to you, I reckon.”

“Come again?”

“Surely you regret your actions,” he said, his voice getting colder with each word. “After all, you didn’t commit suicide in order to give up on Marian, did you?”

“What?”

“Look around, Ben. Look at the people who frequent this place. Desperate people, broken people, people who come to grieve for their loved ones. People who would give anything to switch places with you!”

“What are you getting at, Samuel?”

“Is that not clear? I called you here to show you how lucky you are. You haven’t yet found Marian, but at least you know she’s not here, which means there’s still hope.”

“That’s why you drummed up this whole charade with the Charlatans?” Ben asked, abandoning the code of hushed speech.

The Mad Hop clapped a hand over his mouth and barked, “Shut up, buggerhole, and listen to someone who knows a little more than you do. Last time we met, you said you were going to look up your father and report back to me. It’s been a week and I haven’t heard a word. I left you twenty-three messages on the telefinger, but you couldn’t be bothered to return my calls. Not a single one. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but upon return from your father’s or mother’s house or wherever the hell you were, you gave in to despair and, rather than contacting all other family members, you did what any weak creature might: You waltzed over to the Vie-deo machine and took out the tapes of your life.”

“You have no right to trick me like this,” Ben said, shaking with rage. “What right did you have to send them to me?”

“You came to me to help find your wife! That gives me every right in the world to act as I see fit! I warned you before not to go near those tapes. They suck you in, distort your reality. Every day of viewing makes you a bit more certain that you won’t see her again. You trap yourself in the gilded cage of memory and forget what’s truly important! And what do you make of that, Ben? Exactly what I said at the beginning. You’ve rendered your suicide pointless! If all you were after is moping, why leave the previous world?”

“Save the sermon; give me back those tapes,” Ben insisted.

“No more tapes!” the Mad Hop said, like a parent at the boiling point. “They’re off-limits until you’re told otherwise.”

“You can’t do that.”

The Mad Hop caught his eye and whispered venomously, “That’s it, Ben, it’s a done deal. You’ll get the tapes back when you find Marian, and not a second sooner.”

“Or perhaps,” Ben said, his face shining, “I’ll simply join you and take them from your apartment.”

The Mad Hop shook his head. “You’re welcome anytime you like, but you won’t find the tapes there.” He brought his lips close to Ben’s ears. “The Charlatans have taken good care of them. They’re far from reach. Ben, save yourself the trouble and concentrate on your wife. You’ve got a far better chance of finding her than them.”

Ben held his head in despair. “You don’t get it, Samuel, it’s not like you’re making it out to be. Those tapes keep me going. They encourage me to look for her, to believe that I’ll still find her. Without them I have nothing. Before I took them out, I felt like someone was pulling a rug out from under my feet. My dad lives with a strange woman, my mom doesn’t care, the entire world order seems to have been turned on its head. All of a sudden, everything’s possible. All of a sudden, the truth has been washed away, leaving nothing behind, as though it were only worth something in the previous world. When I watch the tapes, Samuel, I get stronger. They give me fortitude. I refuse to believe that here, in this world, our love has lost its meaning. I’ve got no choice. Reality keeps barging in on me, laughing in my face, and I don’t have a revolver to silence it with. Everything’s messed up. And the worst part is that no one’s seen her. No, actually, the worst part is, even if I find her, there’s no guarantee that everything will work out.”

The Mad Hop laid a hand over his heart and donned an expression of woe. “That was truly moving. ‘Reality keeps barging in on me, laughing in my face, and I don’t have a revolver to silence it with.’ Did you just come up with that on the spot or is that from one of your epilogues?”

Ben stared at him, shaking his head. “So now you’re ridiculing my pain?”

“Not your pain. The source of your pain!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, it doesn’t pain you that you haven’t found Marian; it pains you that you
still
haven’t found her. You’re an epilogist and so it only follows that you’d like to see a well-defined ending to your story. After all, you’re incapable of handling the fact that your story may have an open-ended finish. That you don’t find your wife, but that you keep on with your death, knowing that perhaps one day … That ending is far more tragic than the terrible ending that says you shall never find her, since that option, of course, doesn’t exist here in our eternal world. The infinite nature of the story drives you out of your mind, so you throw your hands up in the air and succumb to the tapes, where there’s a clear beginning, middle, and end. You’ll agree with me that you committed suicide after Marian died with the understanding that in the best-case scenario, you’d find her, and in the worst case, you’d find that death concludes all stories? You didn’t take into account a Marian-less after-death. You didn’t think such a scenario existed. And then, once you’d managed to locate a few family members and learned that they, too, had no information of use, you gave in, turned your full attention to the tapes of life, which proved that you’re willing to forgo everything just to secure an ending, pathetic though it may be, to your story. Ben, think of her, just her. She doesn’t even know you’re here. Think of her reaction when one day, out of the blue, she sees you. She’s probably already begun getting used to the idea that you’ll never be together again. As far as she’s concerned, the story is truly over … and then you show up, rocking her world, proving her wrong—the ultimate ending, no?”

Ben smiled through the tears, silently applauding the Mad Hop’s speech even as he dared to question him. “What if by the time I meet her we discover it’s too late? That she…”

“Forget it!” the Mad Hop said, his face weary. “It’s never too late for you.” He then looked back at the woman entombed in the casket and whispered, “Millicent, my love, only for us is it truly too late.” He pressed his lips to the glass, kissed it longingly, and rose.

Ben stayed put, his blue eyes boring into the dead woman.

“You alright?” the investigator asked.

“I thought her name was Mildred,” Ben said.

The Mad Hop shrugged. “Millicent was my pet name for her.”

Ben looked at him, then back at the corpse and said, “You don’t know this woman at all, do you?”

The Mad Hop scratched a phantom itch and smiled. “I haven’t the faintest idea who she is.”

“Then why did you…?”

He winked. “There was a point to be made, mate, was there not?”

Ben got up and followed him through the hall in silence, the two of them walking together toward the stop, into the awakening dawn.

The Mad Hop cleared his throat. “I lied about her, yeah, but not the rest. My liver condition really was…”

“Why’d you choose her?”

“Did you get a look at the other corpses around there? If you’re going to lie and say you were married, might as well say you were married to a good-looking woman.”

Ben laughed, full throated. “And to think that you’re a walking, talking truth machine. Samuel, you’re a menace to society.”

The Mad Hop smiled proudly. “But I got what I wanted, did I not?”

“What do you mean?”

“Tomorrow morning you’ll go try and find some other family members, right?”

“Do I have a choice?”

*   *   *

Ben boarded the multi-wheel toward 2001. At the apartment, the missing tapes were too much to bear. He paced the rooms, trying to decide which family member to look for first, bearing in mind distant uncles that he hadn’t seen in ages, who would probably be of no use.

At last he smiled at the portrait on the wall, smacked his head, and said, “You see what an idiot I’ve become since you left? Hours I’ve been wracking my brain over who to go see and the answer’s sitting right here. I mean, if there are two people in the whole world who definitely didn’t part, it’s Rosanna and Moses. No way! Right, Marian?”

The woman in the portrait didn’t change her expression, but Ben was willing to swear he saw a playful glint in her eye, the same glint she’d shown each time she met the most outrageous member of the Mendelssohn clan, Rosanna Horazio Malvina Solpero Mendelssohn, aka “Grandma Rosie.”