Death on Behalf
by Natalia Liron
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
So that’s how it was! Now I believed she was twenty-five. This was a completely different person: an adult woman, tired and sad, who had to make a difficult decision.
“So forgive me, Michael Davis but, regardless whether you like it or not, I will be coming here. Unless you move to another room or... go home or—”
“Or die,” I finished the sentence for her mercilessly.
“Or die,” she agreed calmly.
She turned around and walked towards the door.
“Anne.” I didn’t want her to leave on such a sad note. “I’m sorry. I just want you to understand, and please, don’t be—”
“I understand.” She nodded, having become a young girl again. “And I’m not mad.”
The next day’s shift belonged to Dasha, whom I interrogated endlessly about everything to do with Anne. It turned out that John Watts had left his pregnant girlfriend, Anne’s mother, after which he gave them some money but otherwise never took part in his daughter’s life. His parents passed away, his older brother died in a car accident, and he never cultivated a family of his own, so Anne Green was his only blood relative. And yes, she taught at the Municipal Environmental College, and her mom lived in California.
The elderly couple who visited him once turned out to be his neighbors, to whom he’d once given his last will and testament.
And now Anne was visiting him almost every day, as well as spending some time at his house, trying to understand what he would have wanted: to die or to stay on life support, which he could afford for the next several lives.
I was amazed at her thorough approach to this matter. Her appearance gave the impression of a lighthearted and laughter-filled young lady, but it had become evident that this was only one facet of her personality.
* * *
She didn’t come for two days, and I was only a little surprised to find myself missing her fast, jerky movements, rosemary scent, and bottomless eyes.
And I hated myself for it.
“You know, I was thinking,” she said without any sort of greeting, rushing into the room, “that we need to exchange mobile numbers, because otherwise this just—”
“Won’t do,” I finished her sentence, smiling.
“Exactly,” Anne said without missing a beat.
We exchanged numbers and began to exchange calls. It was easy to talk to her. We chatted about anything and everything and couldn’t get enough of each other. Our “good morning” and “sweet dreams” texts bound us to each other with woolen thread.
* * *
Sometimes she would come in the afternoon, sometimes in the early morning, sometimes even closer to nighttime, taking full advantage of the flexible visiting hours for patients on palliative care, and Mr. Watts was absolutely terminal.
She would sit down on my bed and tell me about her day, about her students. She taught a subject with a formidable name: Technospheric Safety of Oil Installations. Who would have thought?
I felt alive again. And it was painful, because now I desperately wanted to keep living.
“Do you have to die?” she asked me somewhat casually one day, sitting down on the edge of my bed.
“Anne...” What a strange question. “To be honest, I really don’t want to, especially not now.”
“I don’t want you to die either.” She touched my hand. “May I?”
“Um... sure.” I felt her cool fingers, and my heart started beating rapidly.
“Could you scoot over a bit?” Hot embers sparkled in her gray eyes.
She moved my hand to the side and lay down next to me.
I closed my eyes. My heart pounded against my ribs, and my head filled with a stupefying ringing.
She took my hand again and intertwined our fingers.
“If you could not die... if you could.” She gently turned my head to her.
Our eyes met.
“If you could, Michael Davis.” Her face was so close, her eyes, like melted pearls.
“Anne, I, I...” It seemed to me that this was not possible, that this was all a dream and now...
She touched my lips with hers, and my body jerked as if from a burn, and it was indeed a burn.
“Anne... h-h-hold on.” I gasped for air.
“Are you okay?” she asked, alarmed.
“Yes, but—”
She did not listen any further, gently hugged my face with her hands, once again touching my lips with hers. There was so much bitter tenderness in her kiss, so much burning thirst. She was kissing me right in the heart, reaching the bottom of my soul, even though it seemed to me that everything there had died a long time ago, way before I had come to terms with my own death.
And I was consumed by heat: unbearable, unfathomable heat, the kind that freezes your insides and melts your body, and death and life themselves retreat and, in their place, arrives something unique, something I could not conceive of: honey and silver, quivering flame, pouring out of the fingers, trickling under the skin, while minutes are crushed under the pounding of a heartbeat, one heartbeat for two people.
What are you doing to me, Anne Green? What will you do if I don’t stop you?
But she stopped on her own and moved slightly away from me. “H-h-how are you doing?” she asked, exhaling.
“F-f-fine,” I replied, not quite convinced that it was really so. “Everything’s alright.”
And then I understood that everything was not alright. That everything was so bad, it couldn’t get any worse.
She was lying next to me and time was flowing through us, measuring out our unequal lives.
“If I could die instead of you,” she said quietly.
“Nonsense,” I muttered.
I should have told her to go to hell the moment I met her, but she came into my life so easily. Came and stayed.
“You, of course, will think that I’m crazy, but, you know, I sometimes die for other people” — she was lying beside me and gently touching my fingers — “in other lives, in another time. In this life, I live full time, and I always come back here.”
She was definitely crazy. She was talking nonsense. I lay there and smiled.
“If I could die for you.” That strange phrase again.
And something inside me twitched and responded to it. “How is that possible?” I turned to her.
“I have no idea what kinds of glitches there are in the universe,” Anne said half-jokingly. “How do I explain it to you? There are people who can’t or shouldn’t go through death, their souls are too fragile, they won’t withstand the moment of non-existence, which is the essence of death. And then I become that person and die in their place.”
“Fun stuff,” I said, although I wasn’t having fun at all; I was rocked by a sticky fear, a sudden wave of terror. “And where do they go, th-th-the ones for whom death is so disagreeable?”
“I don’t know, most likely they go on living, bypassing this experience,” she said it as if it were common sense. “I know you don’t believe me, it’s okay. You can think of it as a silly fantasy.”
“And what do you get out of this?” I asked, but I already knew the answer, which I said at the same time as she: “Time?”
“So you already know?” She looked at me with genuine amazement.
“I just guessed.” But it wasn’t a guess.
A bitter cold was crawling inside me like a predatory snake, fear burned me alive, leaving no trace of anything that I had just felt, neither echo, nor shadow.
In an instant, I knew everything, and understood that I had gained this knowledge too soon.
Why had I met her? This meeting wasn’t supposed to happen. Why? Too soon.
She would recognize me. I could not let that happen. Not now.
“What’s wrong?” She sat up.”You’re trembling, are you okay?”
“Go away.” I was shivering violently.
She stood up, her big gray eyes staring at me with fear: “Michael?”
“Go... away.” I could barely get the words out, my body filled up with a grave heaviness, with steel grit, became disobedient and alien to me.
“Mike, what’s wrong? Mike?!” She pressed the nurse call button: “Michael, hang on! Martha, Ma-a-a-rtha! Dr. Hendricks! Anybody...” her voice resounded through the hospital lobby. And through the ever-growing ringing in my ears, I heard hurried footsteps.
Cold spread through my body, restricting my movements, slowing down my breathing; time froze along with my heart, which was pounding with a shallow, convulsive pulse.
There was simply no other choice.
My brain grasped some short, sharp words from the general buzz: “Chest compression.”
“Mike!”
“Can you hear me? Michael? What happened?”
“I don’t know, we were kissing, and then—”
“Two, three... again... How much time has passed?”
“Nothing happened; he was just lying there.”
“Ambu bag.”
“Mike!”
“Keep pumping.”
“Epi.”
“One milligram.”
“Atropine.”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Keep pumping.”
“Mike!”
“Stand back!”
“More epi. Two.”
“Time?”
“Heart beat?”
“No.”
“More.”
“I love you! Love you!”
“More atropine.”
“Asystole.”
“Time?”
But there was no time; it curled into a black clot of nothingness, which fell into my hands. With my last breath, I kissed the edge of that reality in which a strange girl, who knew how to die for others, could survive my death.
And for the first time, in this posthumous moment, I felt an abyss of pain, the pain of loss.
* * *
I opened my eyes. What was this? A clock ticked menacingly above my ear. I was lying on my own hand.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” The driver had turned around and was looking me over. “Hey, man, you okay?”
“Huh?” I was lying in the backseat of a car.
“Don’t even think of throwing up in here. Are you high or something? You don’t smell like booze.” We were stopped in traffic.
“No, no, I’m fine.” I was regaining my bearings. Such a strange life and such a strange death. Too fast, too—. Anne! I remembered her and clenched my fists: “What year is it?”
“Definitely high.” The driver swore. “Get out.”
“Ugh, idiot.” I got out of the car without wasting any more words, took an umbrella out of my briefcase. My cell phone buzzed: my mother was calling.
“Yeah?” I’m on the way, I’m stuck in traffic, I mean, I’m on the way to the metro, I’ll try to hurry up.”
I hung up. The display lit up with the time and date: August 27, 2015.
Today was my brother’s funeral. And back there, it was fall and the year 2012. And New York.
* * *
I was shaking. It was always like this, whenever I returned. Sometimes it took a few hours, sometimes a few days, to get my bearings, re-enter my life again, remember faces and events, get used to myself.
But today there could be no such indulgences.
The rain poured down in sheets. I walked over the bridge towards the metro. Under me. the Neva glimmered darkly, cold and indifferent, like the breath of creation.
I remembered everyone for whom I had ever died. I knew that their deaths added time to my own life. I had no idea what I did to deserve such a fate. And only once did I meet someone like myself.
It was an old lady, Tamara, who worked as a janitor at my university. She looked about seventy years old but, as it later turned out, she was one hundred forty-seven. She was the one who explained what was what to me in brief; the rest, I figured out myself.
We met up a few times, I remember she once told me, “Listen, if things get really bad, come and see me.” I hadn’t taken her up on it yet, but I knew her address by heart.
* * *
Who are you Anne Green? And why did I have to die so soon after meeting you? I’ve never met anyone like me in other lives and in other people’s deaths. Never.
I walked through the rain and through my memories, my clothes gradually soaking through, my shoes squishing. But she kissed me, the real me. That was precisely why it had been so bright and hot, so tender and painful.
D-d-d-damn it... I clenched my fists. Cursed girl!
I rode the subway and thought about my strange life full of deaths that were not my own. It didn’t occur that often anymore, maybe four or five times a year.
Time. I needed time. I will forget her.
I exhaled and exited at the Novocherkasskaya station.
* * *
The next few hours dragged by like a long viscous downpour, I called the crematory and the funeral home, gave my mother a sedative, accepted condolences from the gathered relatives and friends.
The cremation was scheduled for three in the afternoon.
A couple of years ago, over a bottle of dark Guinness, Alex and I happened to have a conversation about death; back then, he said, laughing, that he didn’t want his tattooed body to be eaten by worms, explaining that fire is cleaner and more pragmatic.
So it will be, my little brother, so it will be.
In the main hall of the crematorium, everyone spoke in hushed voices, huddled together according to the degree of kinship and acquaintanceship. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that a lone figure had detached from the cluster of friends and headed towards me.
“Yes, I’m...” I turned around and stopped cold.
“Could you please, tell me” — she looked me in the eyes — “how long... Are you okay?”
“Me?” I couldn’t believe it.
“You’ve turned pale.” She looked at me with those same big gray eyes.
This couldn’t be happening. Just could not be happening. I pinched my wrist; it didn’t help. I stood there looking at her, powerless to utter a single word.
“I just wanted to know how long the ceremony was going to last,” she said, flustered.
“I-I’m sorry,” I stuttered. “I’m Mikhail, the brother,” and held out my hand to her.
“Anna,” she nodded briefly. “A friend. Sasha and I went to university together. But it was a long time ago.”
“The ceremony is about two hours long, then there will be a reception at the restaurant.” I tried to pull myself together.
“Will you... be offended, if I don’t go to the restaurant?” she asked strangely.
Offended? Was I five years old?
“N-no,” I barely suppressed a bout of laughter, knowing that it would have been a nervous laughter, but what she had said was so ridiculous.
Yes, she was the same as she had been back there.
Why was she here?
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Natalia Liron
