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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONWhat The Dead Know
MANUEL MARTINEZ’s fiction has appeared in the Quarterly and Blackbird. His dream is to live above a pizzeria so that he can fall asleep to the sound of hands slapping fat balls of dough. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.
IT BEGAN in the hospitals with what seemed to be an epidemic of miracles. The most recently dead came back first. People whose heartbeats had just flat-lined a second earlier suddenly sat upright on their gurneys and beds and looked into the confused faces of those around them.
“I was dead,” they would say, a statement we would soon grow tired of hearing. “I was dead, but not anymore.”
People with large holes in their chests, whose vital organs were unidentifiable masses of tissue and congealing blood, looked up into the faces of the doctors and nurses who had just given up hope.
“Sew me up, please,” they said politely. “I don’t want to make a mess.”
And the doctors obliged, even those doctors who, as a matter of principle, never do what a patient asks. They sewed up those who had suddenly and mysteriously come back from the dead and sent them out into the world with a ruptured heart or the merest suggestion of a liver, thinking that the patients would die within an hour or so, that this could all be explained medically, and why not let them have one last chance to walk among the living?
But they didn’t die. They walked out of the hospitals with their families and went to dinner. They went home and coaxed their spouses and lovers to bed. They told everyone that they had died and come back, that they had been given a second chance. They tried to explain that this was different from the type of near-death experience we hear so much about, when the heart stops beating and valiant surgeons are able to start it up again. They told us that this was true resurrection, but we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand.
Meanwhile, frail old women returned to houses that had already been cleaned out by vindictive and venal children. Men with prostates the size of baseballs came back and had instant erections. Children who before death had been too weak even to smile at the endless stream of cartoons and the sad, gentle caresses of their parents began to whine and complain about the tubes and wires that kept them confined to their beds. And their parents, who had been grieving, unhooked them and wept uncontrollably while their now-living children pestered them for toys and snacks. In maternity wards, women whose babies had been whisked away from them, whose screams of “What’s wrong?” had not been answered, watched the doctors’ and nurses’ backs for a clue and saw slumped shoulders and bowed heads as the doctors turned to tell them the news. These new mothers were as shocked as anyone else when they heard their babies’ healthy cries.
At first we didn’t care why it was happening. We were too grateful. But as more and more of the dead came back, we began to look for explanations — mostly religious ones, of course, even though the resurrected all vehemently denied the existence of a heaven or a hell.
The next wave of resurrections came in morgues and in the back rooms of funeral parlors, and were witnessed by professionals who specialize in death. Then the dead began to come back at funerals and wakes. While the mourners were trying to convince themselves that death is not the end, their tears evidence of their failure, a banging erupted from inside the coffin, or a hand reached over the side of an open casket. Those who had been presumed gone forever sat up and asked about lunch, wondered if there was corned beef, and if so, was it the good stuff; and when they found out that the lunch meat had all been bought at the supermarket, they began to rail against cheap, soulless food. There were more than a few cases of bereaved widows having heart attacks at the sight of their husbands sitting up in their coffins and saying to one of the mourners, “Willie, you bastard, you’ve got a lot of nerve showing up here and acting like you give a damn.” The dead widows could not be revived no matter how much they were prayed over. The husbands whose wives had died upon seeing them alive again mourned with a sincerity that many had been unable to muster before their deaths. They sat on the floor of the church or funeral home, cross-legged and weeping, holding their dead wives’ hands, saddened in a way that shocked their family and friends. Their grief was complete and deep and real, and those who had been dead were able to embrace their grief, to be pleased by it in a way that filled many of us with envy.
Many Christians assumed that this was the End of Days, and that Christ was coming back to judge them all and claim the virtuous. These believers began to gather into cults. In their single-minded devotion, no one in these cults paid attention to the news that, after the initial wave of resurrections, death was occurring normally again. Some of the cult leaders decided, as a demonstration for the skeptical, to kill themselves and thus prove that all death had been suspended. They ceremoniously stabbed or shot themselves in revival tents and on street corners, but they died just as the shocked widows had died, or else were critically injured and extremely embarrassed, and even though some followers prayed over the deceased until the bodies stank and the health department had to come and remove them by force, the newly dead stayed dead.
Those who had risen from the dead instantly understood their situation in a way that we couldn’t. They all vigorously agreed that there was nothing supernatural about what was happening, but we largely ignored their testimony. They were too sure of themselves, too sanguine about the situation. In retrospect, though, they were the only ones who had a reasonable reaction.
Even though the newly dead did not come back, people who had died even longer ago continued to be resurrected. The dead arose in reverse chronological order, with the wave of resurrections moving back through time so regularly that it was possible to predict when certain people would arise. Throngs of cheering fans met celebrities at their grave sites, where, like all the other resurrected, the famously dead appeared whole, unmarred by the accidents or self-inflicted wounds that had killed them. A list of upcoming resurrections began appearing in newspapers right next to the list of notable birthdays. In any eleven-hour period (ten hours and fifty-three minutes, to be exact) a day’s worth of dead returned, meaning that during the total of twenty-seven months in which the dead were brought back to life, four and a half years’ worth came back. Still, this pace was too slow for some. We didn’t get to ask Amelia Earhart or Jimmy Hoffa about their mysterious demises; we wouldn’t be able to ask the Founding Fathers their opinions of what had become of the country they had established; neither Elvis nor John Lennon would perform again; and we would never get to meet Jesus.
IT WAS THE REGULAR RATE at which the dead returned that first alerted the physicists to the true cause of the resurrections. They ran some calculations and concluded that the phenomenon was the result of an experiment at the new particle accelerator, the largest one ever built. The experiment was supposed to answer the last remaining questions about the creation of the universe. Instead it provided a new set of questions that the physicists had not expected.
Not that the dead’s awakening had come as a complete surprise to them. During the planning stages for the experiment, when they were traveling to meetings and staying up late in their hotel rooms, poring over calculations in an atmosphere oddly reminiscent of a slumber party, saying whatever popped into their heads, someone said, “You know, if this goes wrong, we could possibly create a wave that reverses the direction of time.” And some of these normally serious scientists actually giggled mischievously at the idea, as they had when they were children and mixed together everything in their mother’s kitchen cabinets, hoping for an explosion. They calculated the probability of creating such a wave (some said it was more of a bubble, and a considerable amount of time was spent discussing its shape), and they figured out that if they had run the experiment once a second since the creation of the universe, there would be only a 20 percent chance of a wave having formed — a chance so small, they thought, that it wasn’t even worth mentioning in their funding proposals.
As the numbers of the previously dead grew, however, the physicists were pressured to rectify the situation quickly. There were concerns about the legal status of those who returned, questions about wills and insurance benefits, population issues about how the world would function with so many people. In democracies we debated what would happen if the resurrected were given the right to vote.
The physicists began to hold tense, secret meetings. They were interrupted by the arrival of a colleague, one of the architects of the accelerator experiment, who had died before it was actually carried out.
“Go home,” they told the formerly dead man. “Be with your family.”
But those who have experienced death cannot be pushed around. They know their minds too well. The dead physicist had been married to his work, and even though the meetings were concerned with how to stop the dead from coming back — and possibly even how to send back those who had already risen, himself included — the resurrected physicist found the challenge irresistible. Like many scientists, he was willing to participate in his own potential destruction. He offered a possible solution to the “problem,” as it were: a series of nuclear explosions, precisely timed and set off at the epicenter of the wave, could create another, faster temporal wave that would catch up to and negate the one that was causing the dead to rise. The once-dead physicist stood in what used to be his office, his elbow on a filing cabinet, a styrofoam coffee cup in his hand, and said with a playful half smile that if the explosions were not precisely timed or were a fraction of a percent too powerful, then the wave would grow too large and could possibly knock some of us into the future.
He sipped his coffee and allowed the implications to sink in. The other physicists were worn out by all of the late-night emergency meetings, but he was sharp and fresh, even though he never left the office, never trekked beyond those sterile, fluorescent-lit rooms to visit the home where his wife and daughters eagerly awaited his return. He had never felt useful at home, never felt as if he had any purpose there. His family loved him, but for some reason it had made him uncomfortable when his daughters would throw their arms around his neck while he was lost in thought. He loved them all, but he would rather think about them than actually be with them. He had known that in life but had never had the courage to act on it, to structure his life around what he really wanted. Now he did.
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