I have been sent to this dry and windy town to interrogate the dead. As part of one of the processing teams, I reported to a station set up in the canyon where, by the time I arrived, people had already been reviving for six months, falling upwards out of a hole in the ground that was said to have been long ago dug by a burrowing hog-nosed skunk. As a respawn point, this one had been identified somewhat later than others, because of its distance from human settlement—the canyon is inhabited only by clusters of abandoned factories and trickling streams of foul-smelling water winding through gray reeds—combined with the limited topside time of the revived. Footprints in the sand suggested that there had been more than a few rounds of revivals, the souls in question left to trot aimlessly around the scorched landscape before the agency showed up and started taking notes.
I have shifts four days a week, and in my downtime, I find myself with little to do in this quiet, hidden place. My neighbors are uninterested in me; our dogs sniff each other and move on along the narrow, sloping sidewalks. The town, positioned as it is on the edges of the canyon, is mostly in the process of sliding downwards, too slowly to be perceptible. Nonetheless, there are signs: the steep angles of the streets, the height of the bridges, cracks in the brick. The sun, relentless, stings and beats and moves slick across the stone facade of the building across from my balcony. I heat eggs on a hot plate and watch.
Before I volunteered, there was a meeting with the others. We met beneath a slimy-leafed magnolia in a park across from a Walgreens, two miles over from the supermarket produce aisle where we’d first become acquainted. A number of us were considering joining the agency, our reasons differing only minutely. There were really only two schools of thought: those of us who wanted to screen the revivals for our loved ones, so that we might communicate some final and essential message, and those of us who wanted to lay in wait for Dan. Use his limited time topside to discuss some things: ask questions, or exact revenge. Jessie, of course, would like to ask him the question that has continued to plague him: why his younger sister, and not Jessie himself? Was it chance, or did Dan make choices about who to claim as his victims—about who got the headshot, and who the extremities, and who the less-vital organs? We contemplated what questions might be asked and then we moved on to our more usual subjects: our aches and pains, our persistent anxieties, our families or our lack thereof. Afterwards, Savion and I walked together across the vast parking lot, and decided we would volunteer. “But I don’t think I want to ask Dan anything,” he told me. “I don’t want to ever hear his stupid fucking voice again.” A month later they sent him to the respawn point outside Yellowknife and I came here.
So this is what I do now: ask the revived for whatever identifying information they can remember, and for any messages they’d like to pass on. I lure them from the dry grass around the skunk hole and guide them easily into a queue—they are eager, it seems, to be directed into an order, a system. We sit in folding chairs under a tent and feel the sun hot on our heads through the creaking canvas. It’s interesting the disparities between them; what some remember, what others don’t. I was on a horse, says one. The night parted around me like curtains. Another says: my name was Brianna Ko, I lived at 362 Arden Ave, Kernersville, CT 06018. From another: I was supposed to tell Ellie to pick up a package from FedEx.
They don’t often know themselves. They are naked, removed from time and its trinkets. When they speak, I understand them; the complications of language have somehow been removed from the equation, Babel disassembled. I record their stories as faithfully as I can. Whatever facts of them have been carried over, sifted back across some boundary, warped by the distance. I nod attentively at their strange and looping narratives, their half-lived lives. Feel protective of these frayed bits and pieces. A duty to the past: the importance of a record, of a score counted. I want them to know there are tallies being made, testimonies filed. On our side of the veil, maybe they will feel understood, for a moment. They will think that at least we are all doing our best in such unprecedented times.
When our time zones cooperate, I talk to Savion on the phone. I am, as he is, on the lookout for his mother, however dire our chances might be of encountering her. He has often shown me photos, since my brief encounter with her in the produce aisle is something I find difficult to reconstruct in images. When I go back there in my mind, my other senses must compensate: produce the smell of overripe fruit and copper, the pop and ring in my ears. Savion beside me, in his mother’s arms. The heat of him and the coolness of her. In memories, none of this coalesces into the realm of the visual; it is as though I experienced all these sensations with my eyes closed. Perhaps I did. But I suspect this is not the case, and that instead there was once a visible component that has since been lost to me. Stowed away or erased. Troubling is the thought that there are vistas from that day that I suppose only I saw, or that I am the only one left alive to have seen from a specific angle, in a specific second. And if I cannot produce these images, then they are lost. Lost to history, and to those of us who were there. And so much of what we do for each other is based on returning to these memories: endless retellings, re-examinations, hypotheticals and minute divergences. In meetings and one-on-one, we ask: do you think, if we had all run for the door, we might have all lived? Should we have gone for the freezer when the first shot rang out?
“Is it bad that I fully don’t like Ray?” I ask Savion, one afternoon while I watch my damp sheets dangle on the line. On his end of the line, there comes the crackle of a distant bird call.
“No, he’s actually annoying,” Savion agrees. “And his emails are too fucking long.”
“I think his emoji usage is what gets me,” I say. “That, and his obsession with the banana display. Like, that shit was not going to save us. We couldn’t all have hidden behind it anyways.”
“It’s dumb,” he says. “But I guess we’re all entitled to our delusions.”
I am bound to these people. We can bitch about them all we like, and we do, but Savion and I have a similar clarity when it comes to picturing the rest of our lives. We will always be doing this: answering these emails, picking up those calls, sitting in parks and dragging tables together at fast food restaurants. These are not the people I would necessarily choose to be bound to, aside from Savion, but the binding is a fact. Whatever diverging paths we might have once taken have been replaced by the smooth parallel lines of a railyard. A terminus.
**
I am not supposed to ask questions outside of the scope of identification and transcription of last words. Nothing about the afterlife, about mechanisms of resurrection, about God or something else. There are research teams for such topics, managing their own testimonies, notating their own findings. We are being inundated, and there is no time for the metaphysical; thus, we are recording for the sake of recording. We are told that among the revived, it is unlikely that we will encounter someone we once knew. Statistics are not in our favor. Very rarely are the revived fully identified, anyways; our dead loved ones may be popping up at any number of respawn points, failing to answer questions for their allotted half hour on the surface of the earth, and then disappearing before they can remember the real meat of their identity. One says to me: on the horizon, there was a light like no other and I came toward it and then we were somewhere else. Another: we were hungry, that year without the sun. Okay, I say. Thank you.
When I finish my shifts, I walk home because the buses don’t run into the canyon. I climb the dirt path until it melds into sidewalk, tracking along a twisting chain link fence where the photos hang, pinned by the locals. Copies of daguerreotypes and iPhone camera prints hang side-by-side, ruffled by the breeze. I cast my eye on the faces, but there are too many of them to recall whether I’ve encountered any of these people in my day’s roster. I find it grim to imagine dying in this desert town only to pop up here again. Somersault out of a hole and right back into the glare of the sun. Death used to have a finality to it; those of us who spent time in the produce aisle are, of course, intimately acquainted with this fact. Such is the reason we have chosen this work. Indeed, I still hold some belief in our exceptionality: that we, having brushed up so close against it, have a special window into death and its mechanisms. That there are arcane rules of the motion of particles across the barrier between worlds that can only become clear when given time to ponder them in a pool of your own blood and that of others. Savion’s mother died, and then he and I lay there for some time, looking into each other’s faces, breathing breaths that rattled like porcelain into each other’s mouths. I saw the little diamond stud in his left ear and knew that little shine was what would shepherd us off, if we were to be shepherded.
But we were not, and he still wears the stud, and when I see it I feel comforted. The glimmer of it, when it takes us, will not dump me back here: into this dusty canyon, where I must traverse broken glass and clotted concrete ruins on my way back up into the city. Limping as I go, because the dryness of the air here has irritated the gnarled starburst of a scar that stretches across my thigh so that it rubs against my pant leg unpleasantly. Sometimes I notice that I am tired of this place.
To fill my days of waiting between shifts, and at the recommendation of Savion, I adopted a small dog upon arrival here—a toy breed, the kind that looks sort of wig-like when it lies in a heap on my rug. I’m calling her Taken, short for Taken By A Hawk, because of what I see as the risks inherent to a creature of her size. I will do my best to protect her, to love her, dutifully if not effusively. She’s from a shelter, of course, and in whatever previous life she had, she learned fear. She trembles at every gust of wind, every stomp of the upstairs neighbors. She has the sort of trauma response people often expect me to have to loud noises and sudden motions. I have, in fact, become a tranquil, slow-moving person, aided as I am by my persistent tinnitus. Much of the chaos of the world does not reach me. I think the revived, whom we have noticed are drawn to noise and light, find me difficult to parse—or perhaps just difficult to see. As if my stillness removes me from the visual spectrum. Taken, however, is lulled by me. She nods off in the crook of my elbow on the long afternoons we must fill, the ones in which I sit at the window and look. This habit too, I imagine, may be interpreted as proof of my fundamental brokenness: motion and stillness equally aberrant, equally uncanny. A titration I suspect I have never gotten right, and have no chance at achieving now. Maybe you will interpret this as the residue of my glance into that other world. Maybe I will interpret it that way as well and be, briefly, filled.
**
There is speculation about why they have come. Too many dead, too soon. The underworld at carrying capacity. A chance at a correction of the scales. Overpopulation above and below; leaks are bound to happen. There seems to be consensus that we are experiencing some kind of reckoning. The churches talk of a reverse rapture. The governmental response has been only semi-coordinated, prone to stoppage and dissolution. We, the volunteers, are infrequently paid the stipends promised. More than a year of revivals now and still the world roils in confusion, in grief. A precursor to the end, some say. The popular belief being that an armageddon will announce itself—a natural extension, perhaps, of the way people believe in their ability to presage tragedies on a more individual scale. I had a dream the night before the accident, they say. Waking up and knowing, even from a great distance, that something has just gone terribly wrong. Many versions of this story are told to me by the revived themselves. I told her I loved her, says one. I never say that, but that day I did.
I guess this is where I should say that no, I did not see it coming. I did not wake from dreams of the produce aisle until I’d already been there, felt what I felt, heard what I heard. Savion says he didn’t experience any premonitions either, though he does note this: that, in the parking lot beforehand, he’d parked his mother’s car neatly and turned off the engine and then they’d sat there for a long, strange beat, in a way he doesn’t recall them ever having done before. Saying nothing, breathing in the hot air as the AC dissipated. As though bracing themselves.
The revived say, We watched The Fisher King together and then I fell asleep on the couch. They say, We left the mouth of the river and on the horizon, whales breached and sang.
Still, I must confess that I have a fondness for this new world in which things, for once, are being put back, rather than taken away. How much time and energy in the history of human life has been devoted to that wish for just a few more minutes with a loved one—a last hug, a final conversation—and now the universe has heard those prayers and delivered this thin opportunity, wrapped in the kind of catch usually consigned to the realm of mythology or fable. Say goodbye to your mother, if you can find her in the hoards. If she remembers she was once your mother. How pleased I am that none of this is easy.
Once, Savion and I stayed up late playing Mario Kart in the house he’d once lived in with his parents and now occupied alone. He was in the process of a cautious redecoration of the living room, clearing an end table to house his collection of Gundam models. He was keeping intact the wall of family portraits, but adding a Hunter x Hunter poster he’d bought from an artist on Etsy over the mantle. He had not moved or removed any other furniture; there was an element to his habitation there that had a tentative quality to it, as if he just moved in or was on the verge of moving out. Neither of these were true: his grandparents had bought that house, and he was planning to live his entire life there. The shrine would be maintained.
It was a few weeks before the first trickle of revivals would begin; one of our last nights in the old world. Our knowledge, in those days, still seemed specialized; our closeness to the veil an aberration of experience, instead of the natural state of the planet. “When we die we’ll probably go back there,” I said that night, apropos of nothing. “To the produce aisle.”
Savion didn’t hesitate. “Yeah, probably. At least for a little while.”
It would certainly be the waiting room, I thought. The clearing house before the next thing. At the time, the next thing still felt distant; now I worry that it will look like that hole in the ground, this desert town, these empty foreign streets. That night, though, I said, “I’m not going back to college.”
“Oh, fuck yeah,” he said. “Let’s be bums together.”
He’d already given up on his Communications degree at that point. I’d been struggling through my engineering courses even before the produce aisle. Now, I was killing whole days at the window in the library, sitting very still in the window seat, watching the twitch and crawl of figures on the quad. Savion and I had never crossed paths there—we’d attended different campuses of the same state school, and thus never met before he’d ferried his mother to the grocery store that Tuesday afternoon—but I often imagined I saw him, moving swiftly between backpacks and bikes. Some other Savion, in some other timeline. In this desert city, I see him sometimes, too. I see him because I look for him.
That house of his is shut now, no doubt gathering dust while he finishes his stint in Yellowknife. In some other life, we’re still in it, and the dead are still in the ground, rather than leaping out of it. And in some life even further beneath that one, we never met at all. Or maybe we did, and chose each other, instead of Dan choosing us. I would’ve liked to have chosen Savion, rather than have him chosen for me. As it is now, the fact of this removal of autonomy means that we have no chance at what might have been: a bond and a breakage at once. He has never known me as I was, untampered, nor I him. Whoever he talks to is someone else. I approach the world now with a strangeness I notice but can’t interrupt. My thoughts twirl into riddles and move slowly. I watch carefully. My groceries are delivered. One critical deviation from normal life and now we’re both splintered, fighting through our own remnants toward each other, a destination at which we will never arrive. Which is to say, we are in love, and it doesn’t matter.
Can you tell her that I saw her that day, in town? A dead man tells me, pressing my hand. He says, I saw her on the street and of course I didn’t say anything, but what a day, what a girl.
My shift ends and I call Savion and tell him we should watch The Fisher King together. There’s a pause while he Googles it. Then he says, “Wow, I really do not want to do that.”
**
I’ve recently been transferred to the night shift, which means feeling my way down the path into the canyon as the streetlights recede behind me. I hear the rush and flap of the posters on the fence but can’t make out any new faces. I descend into night smells—some of the dryness of the day recedes, pulls out a dampness from the ground as it goes. The air is something that bends around me like fabric. A few camping lanterns sit on the card tables beneath our canvas tent, the endless queue extending out of the pool of light and back into the dark, toward the skunk hole. There is, of course, an eldritch quality to this, more pronounced by the night, but the various postures of the revived as they wait mitigate some of the horror-movie imagery. They slouch and twitch in the line, pick at their fingernails. If they stood eerily still, I might be scared, and this realization is accompanied by a jolt: just the shadow of the feeling is enough to beat the gong inside of me, send a signal down a pathway that threatens to cascade.
A moment to reassemble myself and then I am sitting in front of a woman who is saying that, indeed, sheep that go unsheared tend to collapse in the heat. Afterwards, a man says, what do you think of that? Telling him off like I did?
“Seems to me he was out of line,” I say, taking notes.
And you, he says. What is it that you are?
“In what sense do you mean?”
But he’s distracted now, looking off into the night, as if the mass of crickets has become suddenly audible to him. What a warm night it is, he says. How lucky we are.
In the early hours of the morning, there is a tapering. The night shift veterans tell me this is normal: a slowdown and then a reset at four in the morning. Some deep internal mechanism grinding its backward spin to a halt, then spooling up again: a vibration in the earth, reverberating out from the hole, while this happens. And then I sit with a dead woman and she tells me, We’re over there. All of us. There’s where they put us.
I look off into the darkness, in the direction toward which she has casually flicked her wrist while speaking. “Where?” I ask, squinting at the outline of a copse of bushes, leaves twisting dryly in the breeze.
In the ground, she explains. They walked us all out there.
The feeling that flashes through me moves so swiftly that I almost can’t trace it as fear. It’s white hot; blocks sense, language, for just a moment, and then I swallow and ask, “And then what?”
She shrugs. We were in the ground. They put us there.
“Who?”
Another shrug, but this time impatient, as though this should be obvious to me. The ones who are doing the round-ups, she says. I saw my cousin. You know how it is, with everything going on right now.
“You knew they were coming?”
I thought I might negotiate, she says, eyes on the bushes where she’d pointed. And then I thought I might crawl out of the grave they dug, after it was over.
“But you didn’t.”
None of us did. But it’s not so bad in there.
Afterwards, when her time is up, I watch her to see where she goes: back to the official hole, dug by the skunk, or toward where she’d indicated her life had ended. I am lightheaded, breathing through my mouth, her retreating figure doubled in my swimming vision. Her body is slinking away into the darkness and I am losing my ability to track it, looking at her through a long and narrowing tube. To my colleague, Miranda, seated at my side, I say without preamble, “There’s a mass grave over there, apparently.”
She looks to where the woman has faded into the night. Her expression takes on an exhausted aspect, a kind of full-face droop. The queue for processing grows ever longer. “Jesus Christ,” she says. “What are we supposed to do with that?”
**
We have our monthly Zoom call and Ray talks for some time about his banana display theory and Jessie talks about all the questions he’s come up with for Dan—how did you choose which store to go to? Which guns to buy? Which one, in turn, to put to your own head at checkout #3?—and how he feels sure, based on vibes, that Dan will pop up at the respawn site outside of Callao where he’s been stationed. Between the two of them that takes up about forty-five minutes, and in the remaining fifteen we get to hear about Luz’s kids and dogs, and then a sentence or two from the ever-terse Diane about the land she’s just bought, where she’s planning to build an earthship house and disappear from this group forever, probably, though the latter part is just my extrapolation. A guess at what she wants, but I doubt she’ll achieve it. We sit here and have vaguely unpleasant discourse on a monthly basis but not one of us has missed a meeting yet. “You can check out but you can never leave the world’s shittiest support group,” Savion texts me, halfway through Ray’s monologue, and though I try to think of something clever to reply with, in the end that’s really all there is to it.
“Maybe it would be nice to know a motive,” Savion says to me on the phone, during our ritualistic post-meeting debrief. A support group for the support group. “I mean, it was probably fucking stupid, but maybe it would be satisfying to know what flavor of crazy Dan was.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Jessie’s obsession kind of puts me off. He clearly thinks it’s going to make some difference, which in my mind means it probably won’t. He’s still claiming that if he’d remembered his concealed carry that day, he could’ve taken out Dan with one shot. The whole thing just feels embarrassing.”
“Yeah, no chance,” Savion says. “When we played Call of Duty together that was some of the most pathetic shit I’ve ever seen. He’s got no instincts. Fruitloop level shit.”
“I still think it’s really sweet you played with him,” I say. “The way he keeps bringing it up is actually the most charming thing about him.”
He snorts. “Yeah, I’m a saint.”
“I really don’t think about Dan that much,” I say, after a moment. “Not as, like, a person. There’s just nothing there to work with.”
I can hear Savion nodding on the other end of the line, the brush of the braid above his ear against the phone. “Yeah, I think about us more often.”
“Us?”
“Like, who we might have been, if this hadn’t happened,” he says. There’s a long pause where I can feel him—the way his stomach muscles are tightening, his eyes blinking hard. Even across these vast distances, we are mirroring each other, our physiological responses in easy tandem. How hard we must always work to keep the rocks from breaking the surface of the water. “Don’t you ever wonder?”
It should be said here that I grew up happy, and that such a thing is indeed unforgivable. That I was born with many nice things in a perfectly nice place and that despite that I was still well on my way to thoroughly squandering such gifts by the time I arrived in the produce aisle. The world always squares accounts, one way or another. There is a quotient of misery allotted to each of us; a pitcher poured upon our heads, sometimes in drips and sometimes all at once. Regardless, the water. And maybe it’s a comfort, anyways, to knock it all out at once: to be able to point to the one thing that’s ruined me, instead of a field of possibilities. To be able to say: this is why I hurt. This is why none of it will ever work. Instead of everyone else’s more nebulous cloud of regrets and discontents, the slow accumulation, the rising tide.
To Savion, I say, “I wonder who you might have been, but I don’t wonder about myself.”
“I don’t know,” he says, sounding thoughtful. I imagine the expression on his face, the squint as he constructs some image: Savion, still in orbit. Savion, the pitcher still half-full. “Maybe we’d be the same. Maybe we’d be worse.”
“I probably wouldn’t be here,” I say, directing my gaze out the window, where the sky is a dull yellow-gray from an accrual of blowing dust. The distant sun has baked everything in my line of sight into a uniform brown.
“Well, there are worse places to be,” he says.
But maybe I’m not so sure. All these places, in the hole and out of the hole. No one’s getting out, because no one went in, and here we all are, still.
**
In the canyon, more revivals every minute. One says, I saw my daughter Rita when I was in the ICU in Duluth on September 8th. Another says: at home I left a candle burning.
Miranda tells me about a fling she had with a girl on a weekend trip to Oslo, once. How they had talked and talked; how it had almost scared her, the smoothness with which they discoursed on every topic, the way the need for sleep and food departed, the way it could have gone on forever. The burden of that kind of limitlessness.
The revived tell me, Yeah, it was just me and the goats for a while after he was gone. But I’ve always loved my goats. Top quality, best in the village, or the hills surrounding it.
But Miranda explains that it wasn’t meant to be. That the girl had a fiance, and no matter how much Miranda begged, she wouldn’t let them exchange numbers or emails or Instagrams. It had to be a one-time thing, she told Miranda. I’m sorry, but I can’t take the temptation. I made a promise and I’m going to keep it.
A dead woman says, the creek rose high that year. Water up to our knees, and still rising.
So Miranda went home, but of course couldn’t shake her. Carried this woman around in her head wherever she went. Conversed with her still in there, summoning the memory of her voice. Took refuge in that vestibule they had created, however briefly. In the next life, the girl had told her: I’ll come find you. We’ll get it right next time. “If I can avoid the skunk hole, I guess I have that to look forward to,” Miranda says. The kind of platitude that maybe even I can find some comfort in.
