“Lucy!” I screamed, but she was already out of the house wrestling my grandfather out of his chair to the ground. Her head dove down on my grandfather’s as she shoved the mask up his face, but before their mouths even met, my grandfather coughed, and Lucy fell back, sobbing, tugging the mask back into place.
My grandfather lay where he’d been thrown, a scatter of bones in the dirt. He didn’t open his eyes. The oxygen tank hissed, and the blue tube stretching to his mask filled with wet mist.
“How?” I whispered
Lucy swept tears from her eyes. “What?”
“He said he got shot in the head.” And even as I said that, I felt it for the first time, that cold slithering up my intestines into my stomach, then my throat.
“Stop it,” I said. But Lucy slid forward so that her knees were under my grandfather’s head and ignored me. Overhead, I saw the moon half-embedded in the ridged black of the sky like the lidded eye of a Gila monster. I stumbled around the side of the house and, without thinking about it, slipped into the hogan.
Once inside, I jerked the curtain down to block out the sight of Lucy and my grandfather and that moon, then drew my knees tight against my chest to pin that freezing feeling where it was. I stayed that way a long while, but whenever I closed my eyes, I saw people splitting open like peeled bananas, limbs strewn across bare, black ground like tree branches after a lightning storm, pits full of naked dead people.
I’d wished him dead, I realized. At the moment he tumbled forward in his chair, I’d hoped he was dead. And for what, exactly? For being in the camps? For telling me about it? For getting sick, and making me confront it?
But with astonishing, disturbing speed, the guilt over those thoughts passed. And when it was gone, I realized that the cold had seeped down my legs and up to my neck. It clogged my ears, coated my tongue like a paste, sealing the world out. All I could hear was my grandfather’s voice like blown sand against the inside of my skull. Life. He was inside me, I thought. He had erased me, taken my place. He was becoming me.
I threw my hands over my ears, which had no effect. My thoughts flashed through the last two days: the drumming and chanting; the dead bat in the paper bag; my father’s goodbye. All the while, that voice beat in my ears, attaching itself to my pulse. Life. And finally, I realized that I’d trapped myself. I was alone in the hogan in the dark. When I turned around, I would see the Dancing Man. It would be wiggling toward me with its mouth wide open. And it would be over, too late. It might already be.
Flinging my hands behind me, I grabbed the Dancing Man around its thin black neck. I could feel it bob on its wire, and I half-expected it to squirm as I fought to my feet. It didn’t, but its wooden skin gave where 1 pressed it like real skin. Inside my head, the new voice kept beating.
At my feet lay the matches that Lucy had used to light her ceremonial candles. I snatched up the matchbook, then threw the carved thing to the ground, where it smacked on its base and tipped over, face up, staring at me. I broke a match against the matchbox, then another. The third match lit.
For one moment, I held the flame over the Dancing Man. The heat felt wonderful crawling toward my fingers, a blazing, living thing chasing back the cold inside me. I dropped the match, and the Dancing Man disintegrated in a spasm of white-orange flame.
And then, abruptly, there was nothing to be done. The hogan was a dirt and wood shelter, the night outside the plain old desert night, the Dancing Man a puddle of red and black ash that I scattered with my foot. Still cold but mostly tired, I staggered outside, sat down hard against the side of the hogan and closed my eyes.
Footsteps woke me, and I sat up and found, to my amazement, that it was daylight. I waited, tense, afraid to look up, and then I did.
My father was kneeling beside me on the ground.
“You’re here already?” I asked.
“Your grandpa died, Seth,” he said, in his zombie-Dad voice, though he touched my hand the way a real father would. “I’ve come to take you home.”
The familiar commotion in the hallway of the pension alerted me that my students had returned. One of them, but only one, stopped outside my door. I waited, holding my breath, wishing I’d snapped out the light. But Penny didn’t knock, and after a few seconds, I heard her careful, precise footfall continuing toward her room. And so I was alone with my puppets and my memories and my horrible suspicions, the way I always have been.
I remember rousing myself out of the malaise I couldn’t quite seem to shake — have never, for one instant, shaken since — during that last ride home from my grandfather’s. “I killed him,” I told my father, and when he glanced at me, expressionless, I told him all of it, the Dancing Man and the ceremony and the thoughts I’d had.
My father didn’t laugh. He also didn’t touch me. All he said was, “That’s silly, Seth” And, for a while, I thought it was.
But today I am thinking of Rabbi Loew and his golem, the creature he infected with a sort of life. A creature that walked, talked, thought, saw, but couldn’t taste. Couldn’t feel. I’m thinking of my father, the way he always was. If I’m right, then of course it had been done to him, too. And I’m thinking of the way I only seem all the way real, even to me, when I see myself in the vividly reflective faces of my students.
It’s possible, I realize, that nothing happened to me those last few days. It could have happened years before I was born. The gypsy had offered what he offered, and my grandfather had accepted, and as a result become what he was. Might have been. If that’s true, then my father and I are unexceptional in a way. Natural progeny. We simply inherited our natures and our limitations, the way all earthly creatures do.
But I can’t help thinking about the graves I saw on this summer’s trip, and the millions of people in them, and the millions more without graves. The ones who are smoke.
And I find that I can feel it, at last. Or that I’ve always felt it, without knowing what it was: the Holocaust, roaring down the generations like a wave of radiation, eradicating, in everyone it touches, the ability to trust people, experience joy, fall in love, believe in love when you see it in others. And I wonder what difference it makes, in the end, whether it really was my grandfather, or the approximation of him that the gypsy made, who finally crawled out of the woods of Chelmno.
Neil Gaiman
Bitter Grounds
Neil Gaiman horror-hosted the Fox Channel’s 13 Nights of Fear during the fortnight before Halloween 2004 and got to introduce movies from inside a coffin. He thought it was cool.
His 2002 novel American Gods won science fiction’s Hugo Award and horror’s Bram Stoker Award, while Coraline, a dark fantasy for children which he had been writing for a decade, was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic and even managed to beat its predecessor in the awards stakes.
On the illustrated front, his first Sandman graphic novel in seven years, entitled Endless Nights, is published by DC Comics and illustrated by seven different artists; 1602 is a new alternate history miniseries from Marvel, and he has collaborated with artist Dave McKean on the children’s picture book The Wolves in the Walls.
As well as all the above, the New York Times bestselling author has somehow also found the time to make a short vampire film entitled A Short Film About John Bolton, and he has recently started writing a new novel, with the working title of Anansi Boys.