YOU DIDN’T DECIDE ANYTHING.
I am deciding right now to keep walking. To keep living. I will ignore you forever, if I have to. I will learn to live with you, like a handicap. I will bear you like blindness. I will live my life.
IT IS NOT YOUR LIFE I AM INTERESTED IN.
Pea doesn’t really feel sad at all.
Last night when she realized she was never going to see her parents again, she had felt sad, but just for a little while.
Running away with Robert, slipping out the cracked window, leaving them behind. It was like she knew she was supposed to feel sad, so she did, but then she forgot she was supposed to, and she stopped.
By now they had really done it, and she didn’t feel anything. Running away didn’t matter. If she had stayed, she’d be saying goodbye to them anyway. If she’d stayed, waited for morning and the feast, she’d be dead too. She’d never see them—or anything—ever again.
Unless she believed what God said—unless she believed what they said that God said, since she had never heard him herself—unless she believed that they would be reunited on the other side.
She had never really believed it, though. Never in her heart. And now she is free.
She doesn’t feel sad at all.
The world is beautiful this morning, as she and Robert make their way from the fourth circle in to the third, back toward Building 49. The scattered leaning trees that line the sidewalks and the windows of the buildings and the tattered awnings. It is more than beautiful. It is like everything is washed in beauty. Varnished in it.
There are specific small things that Pea knows she will miss, that she sort of misses already. Her friend Jenna doesn’t like pudding and always saves hers for Pea, has been doing so since they were tiny kids. She and her cousin Ruth invented a language one summer; they would whisper-sing made-up words to each other during star-night, when the whole city gathered out on the big lawn, looking up at the distant planets—she and Ruth would lie with foreheads just barely touching, giggling secret silliness.
Jenna is dead now too, and Ruth too, and her parents. But Pea doesn’t feel sad at all.
She climbs the narrow stairwell of Building 49, pausing now and then to let Robert catch up. He’s a bit heavy, a bit out of shape. He huffs and puffs along behind her. Just the two of them! The thought sets loose a clamor of birds in her stomach. Just the two of them of all the people in the world!
On floor sixteen, Pea’s floor, they walk down the hallway. Every apartment has a glass window that lets out onto the corridor; that’s how they were built—more communal, more friendly.
Now, as they pass down the corridors, they see in each window a frozen picture of death.
Families seated in semi-circles around kitchen tables, slumped or staring, mouths open or closed, hands clutching hands, chins tilted at unnatural angles, drinks mostly finished or just started. On every table the joint of poisoned meat, mostly eaten. A few stray slices still clinging to the remains.
Pea knows all the people in all the windows. Her neighbors; her schoolmates; her friends. Arranged like dolls, frozen in place, suicides in the service of the Lord.
Like dioramas, Pea thinks. Like projects from school.
She slows her pace long enough to let Robert catch up, and she places a reassuring hand on the sweaty small of his back. He grins at her nervously, and they keep walking, abreast now, down the center of the hallway. It’s funny, about Robert. At school she barely knew him. But now she feels this responsibility, this burden. To make sure he’s OK. He seems so shaken—so pale. He is silent and his face is drawn.
“I don’t blame you,” she says to him suddenly, and takes one of his hands. His eyes widen in surprise, and she squeezes his hand. They have stopped now, where the hallway bends. Around the corner will be Pea’s apartment—and Pea’s own dead parents.
“You were right,” she tells him. “We did the right thing.”
“Yeah . . .” he says, and looks not at her but at the floor. “I know.”
But he doesn’t know. He doesn’t believe her, she can tell. He must be blaming himself. He’s wondering what they will do, how they will live. How the world will go on. We will handle it together, thinks Pea, and is pleased with herself, pleased at the maturity and the correctness of such a thought.
They will. They will handle everything together, for they will have no other choice.
“Come on,” she says, and takes Robert by the hand and they go around the corner.
This scene is like all the others: Pea’s mother and father are seated across from each other at the kitchen table, still and silent, eyes like the eyes of dolls. The third chair—Pea’s chair—is empty. The plate of meat is at the center of the table, very little left on it. The poisonous meat. The electric slicer with its curved end lies by her father’s still fingers. Does it still work, Pea wonders idly? Anything left in the battery? Or is that dead, now, too?
Only now, only looking into her mother’s empty eyes, does Pea feel a pang of grief. A momentary wash of sadness. Were they waiting for her to come back? Or did they assume that she had been found out? That someone from the Center had at the last minute discovered her family’s secret, their daughter’s deafness to the will of the Lord, and that she was therefore not permitted to go through?
Her mother would have been devastated, surely, to think the whole world was going on to gladness and permanent harmony, the whole world except for Pea. Surely her mother would protest—surely her mother, if she really believed they were going on to paradise, wouldn’t go without her daughter.
And yet here she is. Her thin arms lolling at her sides as if weighted. Here she is. She ate. She died.
Pea shakes her head tightly, back and forth. Never mind. Never mind.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says again to Robert. “One way or another, it’s going to be okay.”
Grief is gone again. There is no time for it. No time. What comes to Pea now is a sudden sense of mission. It’s as if a voice speaks in her head and tells her what to do: Bring them down. Bring them down.
But it is only as if a voice is speaking to her. No voice is really speaking. She hears no whisper of God, no echo of his voice, even now—even now her head is still and silent, and the voice that speaks clearly up from that stillness is her own, announcing calmly and with purpose what is to be done. She has spent her whole life waiting for God to give her instructions, and now she is not. She doesn’t need to be commanded. She knows what to do.
“Let’s get to work, Robert,” she says, and he looks up, startled, from his trancelike contemplation of her dead father and mother.
“Get to work?” He steps back from the table, trips on a chair leg and almost falls. “Doing—doing what?”
“We have to bring them down,” says Pea calmly. “We have to clear the bodies.”
“The . . .” He scratches the side of his head, squints at her through his glasses. It’s like he can’t hear. “The bodies?”
She nods. “We’re going to bring them down to the outskirts. We’ll start with these, but we need to do all of them. Get rid of them. It’ll take time. We have to.”
Robert gapes back at her, and she turns away, back to her parents. Pea is suddenly impatient. This is it. This is right. This is absolutely what must be done. The world has to begin again. The bodies must be gotten rid of. They will draw animals. Maggots. They will stink and spread disease. There will be many problems, but this is the first. It has to be dealt with, right away.
“Okay,” says Robert at last, slowly, uncertain. “Sure.” He pushes his glasses up on his nose and rolls up his sleeves.