Every family had one.
So, when my sister came back from the dead, we accepted her. When she came downstairs for breakfast, we acted as if everything was normal. She smelled really bad—you know how human bodies can stink when they begin to decay after two days in room temperature. The interior walls of the house seemed to tremble in disgust, offended by my sister’s suffocating sweet-sickly stench. We observed from the corner of our eyes how she sloppily buttered her toast and crammed it inside her mouth. How was she going to digest it?
“You don’t have to pretend to be reading, Beth,” I told her. “It’s been two days. The worms are supposed to come out of your eyes pretty soon. I don’t think you can still see. I mean, tell me, can you still see?”
“I have to,” she said. “I’m going to be dead forever. It’s not like I’m going to live again. I might as well try to find ways to jumpstart my eyes. I might regain my sight if I do that. Blind dead is the worst kind of dead.”
“But that’s the only legitimate kind of dead there is. This, you, right now, it’s—” I trailed off and for a minute or two we chewed on our respective thoughts.
“You won’t be an undead dead forever,” I added. “The world is going to end soon.”
“Let me know if you are ready for the formaldehyde treatment.”
It was father who said this to Beth. It was father who was schooled in the inevitable reality of irreversible entropy in classical thermodynamics. He did not look up from his morning paper, did not waver for one second from his absolute lack of empathy. He never had it in him to care about anything except for matters directly related to his personal welfare. That and boxing. He loved boxing. Beth didn’t answer him right away. I looked out the window.
Outerbridge was particularly quiet this morning. Many parts of the world had been quieted down, too. There’s the forest near Chernobyl, for example, where fallen leaves won’t rot until forty years have passed. Had Beth been in Chernobyl, she might have a better chance at delaying the eventual corruption of her body. There’s also the town called Kalachi in Kazakhstan where people suddenly fall asleep and wake up after six days, none of them remembering anything. I sometimes wonder what the people of Kalachi dream of when they sleep for six days straight.
Meanwhile in Outerbridge, the choir from The Church of Henry was strangely silent. Exactly four months ago, not long before Beth died, the government announced that the world was going to end on a such and such date. We did not pay much attention to it. We did not even pay attention to how the morning sun began to develop a strange yellowish sheen. When the early light struck opaque surfaces, it did so by producing oily specks. Like the light was somehow liquefying and spattering its droplets. An announcer from the local radio station mentioned something about the early stages of redshifting, something about fluctuations in the quantum level that affected frequencies of light. We did not pay much attention to that, either. Because even if we did, we could do nothing about the impending cataclysm. Happy endings are just curses told evasively.
So we went on with our lives, what little remained of them. Then one day, Beth died and came back to life. Her dead body was wheeled out of the emergency room. Nine hours later, around the time when mother was making arrangements with the mortuary downtown and while father was insisting on cremation, Beth regained consciousness. Thing was, she did not have a pulse. Her skin still sported a deathly pallor. A physician, schooled in the science of human vital signs, pronounced her to be clinically dead and then sent her home to her family. He recommended prompt formaldehyde treatment for sanitary reasons. He also said that nearly every family had one like my sister, so we shouldn’t take it personally.
“Besides, the world is going to end soon,” the physician, who was schooled in the science of human vital signs, said. Then he winked at my sister, who did not or could not wink back.
“Turn down the thermostat in your room as low as it can go and stay there,” mother told Beth after father left the room, rattling the paper in his hands. “I’ll call home services for your formaldehyde treatment this afternoon.”
Beth did not nod in agreement. She did not say anything, either. Maybe she thought she didn’t have to. Or there’s the possibility that she had lost her hearing. Sometimes, the undead are completely misunderstood. They can’t help it if the living have to keep on living; have to keep expecting something from them. That’s the one true quality that defines life—the compulsion to draw something: an essence, a lesson, anything—from others.
Beth continued the way she was because there was nothing any of us could do, the same way we couldn’t force back the water leaking out of a cracked vase. Even if we managed to put the vase back together by gluing its cracks, the water, some of it anyway, would already be irretrievably lost. And Beth, to be sure, was cracked. And some of what Beth contained inside her had already dribbled and been absorbed by the area rug, seeped into the floorboards beneath, leached into the baseboard’s tiny cracks. Some of Beth had already evaporated into the atmosphere. And so Beth—what was left of Beth—stayed inside her room most of the time. There was no need to eat or drink. There was no need to sleep. There was no need to need anything. As expected, isolation would draw her in, because pure isolation, having no notion of emotional pain, would seek out those that belonged to its fold.
After her formaldehyde treatment, she helped me clear her room of unnecessary objects. The undead don’t have any use for a bed, for example. Or a chair, a desk lamp, a mirror. So, we emptied her room. Of course, I did all the heavy lifting to avoid accidents that might injure her. People like Beth won’t ever heal.
She kept on looking out of the tinted glass windows of her empty room, observing with a clinical detachment, which could be mistaken for curiosity, the children playing on the street. The children who rolled the glittery red things, the children who thought they could still live forever, the children who did not know that it could someday happen to them.
The children could not see Beth by the window.
Beth could not see the children.