Singing With All My Skin and Bone Read online

  It’s the spark. He can feel it. It warms him as he runs with the crowd down the muddy streets, as more shots and screams ring out, pain and anger, the sound of fighting. He looks behind and sees fallen bodies, clothes streaked with blood; he turns away again and keeps running.

  He has always been running, since he was set into motion. Now it ends.

  It comes to him that Baba Yaga has left the porch of her dacha and is on his back, riding him, beating him with her spoon like a horse. He goes where she points him, breaking away from the fleeing crowd, and isn’t surprised to find himself standing in front of the shop. Baba Yaga leaps up on his shoulders and shatters the glass of the front window with her spoon.

  The razor. The gloves. In a few seconds he has them, though now his arms are bleeding from stray shards. It feels like fair trade. If trade was even necessary; perhaps these things are his, his from the very birth of the world, like magical things waiting for him in a dragon’s cave.

  And to the dragon’s cave she is now driving him.

  He runs past the fleeing bodies in the streets, running against the flow. No one notices him or the things in his hands. Once he thinks he hears the cry of Big Mary rising over the shots and screams, and when he turns at the bottom of a little hill he sees her standing there above him, her arms raised and tears streaming down her face. She’s muddy, dirty, but somehow she is shining in the sun like a piece of cut anthracite. Their gazes meet and he knows that she sees him, and that she sees him for what he is. Their fundamental kinship.

  In this moment he has her blessing.

  Give it to the seam.

  He turns and runs again, and the shaft opens up like a mouth and swallows him.

  *

  It is so very much like a story. Baba Yaga has drawn him into it, him and his true self that waits for him in the shadows. She has spun it around herself like a cloak, from coal seams and fairy gold. This is his journey, from the green hills and forested mountains of his homeland to the coal and the black and the fire, and for once he feels that it is exactly as it should be.

  And here in the glittering dark anything might be possible.

  The line between truth and story is so thin, Baba Yaga whispers. Here, thinner still. You are a child of the story, dochka, half in and half out of the world. No one will tell your tale, but I will keep you safe and tell it to myself within the walls of my house; I will feed it to my oven and bake it in my black bread.

  Now give the fire to the seam and dance with me in the ashes.

  Iwan, Iwanka, Janus-faced and true to herself at last, presses her hands against the coal and finds a hard stone that holds a spark within its cold heart. She lifts the razor and strikes, and gives what lies inside to the seam that has run through her life and her world. She turns them both to ash and dust.

  *

  Wagons carry the dead into the lands beyond like fallen heroes. There are cries for vengeance. There are ordeals that are failed and others that are passed, there is condemnation and a trial, and in the end there is memory of a kind, though no one tells the story of Iwan-who-was-not-Iwan and who was no fool, and how he vanished into the dark after death came to Lattimer.

  But there is fire. There is fire that burns forever in that dark, and in the flames Iwanka dances with Baba Yaga and eats her black bread and her porridge of powdered bone and sweet milk. She dances in the arms of her parents and the other dead, and she dances all the way back to hory nashi, to the green and the trees, to the older fires and the memory that sits in the stones like glowing coals. She is with the scattered ones, even the ones who have been forgotten, and the great secret that Baba Yaga sings to those who can hear is that even they have a way of living forever, until, like wheat, they emerge from rich earth, green and new and reaching their arms toward a clear sky.

  Dispatches from a Hole in the World

  I’m standing in the elevator. The elevator isn’t moving. Neither am I. It seems, for the moment, like simply staring at what’s in front of me is the simplest and therefore the best immediate project. Far simpler than the dissertation that’s supposed to start here.

  But I can’t avoid it forever.

  I’m not sure what I expected, but the place is small. It’s tucked into three floors of a generic office building a few blocks from the Library of Congress. From the outside it doesn’t look like much of anything; they probably wanted it like that. But what I’m specifically staring at is what looks like the floor of a college library, one of those more industrial ones unconcerned with any popularly conceived aesthetic of Libraryness. White walls, recessed lighting, long desks divided into little cubicles, each equipped with a small, slim computer terminal.

  It’s empty.

  I take a breath, and I step out of the elevator and into an archive of three hundred thousand and seventy-six recorded suicides.

  *

  When it happened it was like a plague.

  No one was sure how it was spreading, or why, or who was going to be next. People feared for their loved ones, their friends and family. People feared for themselves. Pundits proclaimed doom with excited solemnity. Religious leaders got gleeful hard-ons for apocalypse. People blamed technology, peer pressure, the alienation of a generation raised in the midst of crushing debt and recession and increasingly extreme weather and constant war and a general sense of hopelessness.

  You know, kids today.

  But when that nightmare year was over and things finally began to taper off, all we were left with was questions.

  Everyone had at least a tenuous connection with someone who died. That’s what happens now—you know people who know people who know people, you follow people without ever actually speaking to them but you communicate in likes and retweets and reblogs. I’ve had entire friendships that were based around reposting the same series of makeup tutorials. The same collections of gifsets. So suddenly you’re watching them die. It scrolls past on your feed, on your dash. It felt like an attack. For a while people thought it was an attack. Yet another one, dudebros against the Social Justice Whatevers.

  But that wasn’t what was going on.

  So we watched. Some of us looked away. Some of us said they vomited, said they experienced panic attacks that lasted for hours. It’s very hard to explain what it was like for us, because we were there in a way our parents weren’t, and in a way our kids won’t be. You live through a terrorist attack, you live in it, you’re one of the shell-shocked survivors huddled in blankets, you’re brushing ashes and bone-dust out of your hair. Smoke in your eyes.

  We survived. We moved on, to the extent you ever can. Those of us academically inclined—who could find places in the decaying zombie corpse of academia—we did what we do. We over-analyze. So we wrote about it. Term papers. Research papers, self-reflective essays. Short stories, poems—for a while there the MFA programs got really morbid. We work out our demons however we can. We splash our trauma all over everything.

  But as far as I know, I’m the only one to ever take it this far. Because it means going back. Living it. All over again.

  My estimated time to completion for this project is two years.

  Two years in the Year of Suicide.

  *

  It’s a Vine, from back when Vine was still a thing. Dude put his phone down on a stand or propped it up some other way. He’s sitting in a blue beanbag chair. He’s white, dark-haired, maybe about fourteen. The room looks like your standard middle-class teenage boy’s room. If I looked at the dossier file all the pertinent information would be there, at least what could be collected without special permission from the family—which some gave and some didn’t.

  I’m not going to look at the file, because that’s not how I saw it. I didn’t even know it was coming. If I had my way I’d be looking at this in the dark at three in the morning with cold pizza and a bong.

  But I’m here. Watching this looping six seconds.

  The boy is looking straight at the camera. He has no discernable expression. He lifts one
hand; he holds a kitchen knife. He holds it to his throat and slashes his carotid artery. Blood jets to the side and gushes down his shirt. He slumps. Hand twitches and falls.

  Repeat.

  This boy takes six seconds to die. He dies over and over.

  As far as anyone has been able to determine, this is Patient Zero.

  *

  When I was thirteen I read about Jonestown.

  I was a morbid kid to begin with. I hated violence, actually—I was disturbed by gory TV and movies until I was almost in my twenties. Covered my eyes for the chest-burster scene in Alien. I was revolted by torture porn horror. I couldn’t handle watching animals in pain.

  But I was fascinated by history, and the history of murder on massive scales.

  So I read about Auschwitz. I read about Hiroshima. I devoured books on the Rwandan genocide. I was fascinated by the gruesomeness of it all, but even more I think I was fascinated by the extremity. What drives people to do things like this? What drives people to slaughter each other?

  What drives people to slaughter themselves?

  Jonestown was the worst. Because at least according to my understanding at the time, those people did it to themselves. I read about it and I imagined myself there in the pavilion with the rest of them, waiting in line for poison, watching people going into convulsions. I imagined watching mothers feeding it to their babies with syringes. I imagined what it would have been like after, sitting there and looking at the empty cup of your death, waiting to feel it and knowing there was nothing you could do. All those people—afraid, not afraid, just…in those moments of pre-oblivion.

  I imagined those moments as either utterly insane or marked by the most profound sanity a human being can experience. Except that’s wrong. Insanity isn’t so clear-cut. It isn’t so simple. Neither is suicide. What suicide means. It’s abhorrent to do that to a complex idea. To a lived fact.

  We understand that a lot better than we did.

  But that pavilion. Nine hundred and thirteen people. Those aerial photographs. I stared at them. For a long time.

  I thought, I am looking at a hole in the world.

  Then the Year. Three hundred thousand and seventy-six holes in the world, opening up one after the other after the other, like bullet holes, like mouths, like eyes.

  Except that number isn’t reliable. Those are only the ones we know about.

  Those are only the ones we saw.

  *

  The next one is a girl. Mid-teens, Hispanic, very pretty. Standing on a chair, rope around her neck. It appears to be nighttime; the lights in her bedroom are on. Stuffed animals just visible on the bed. Makeup scattered across the dresser like she was in the middle of messing with some eyeshadow when the idea occurred to her. She lifts her phone, stares expressionlessly into it as she adjusts the angle. The phone jerks. It’s clear that she kicked the chair away. The phone swings wildly and falls. You see a shot of her feet swinging. Then it cuts off.

  This one went up on YouTube. Within a couple of hours it had over twenty thousand views. You know how they say don’t read the comments? Oh my God, do not read the fucking comments.

  Those were archived along with the video. They’re part of the historical record.

  I watch it a couple of dozen times through, and halfway into those couple of dozen times I start going frame by frame, making notes. Of everything I can see. Of what I’m feeling. Part of the point of this project is self-reflexivity. I’ll code later. For now I just need to get down everything I can.

  *

  About a month into the Year people started asking a very obvious question. Not why, and not how, and not how in the hell is this spreading like a virus—and that was pretty hilarious. Whole new meaning to the term viral.

  Everyone who documented their own deaths…They died. They were dead. Some of them could set things to share automatically and some of them appeared to have done so, but others…

  Who the fuck was uploading these things?

  Like I said. In the end all we had were questions.

  *

  Older girl, early twenties, black. Blank-faced. Messy college dorm room. Bottle of pills. She empties them into her mouth gulp by gulp and washes them down with vodka. This one goes on for a while. When she drops to the floor, she manages to prop her phone up where we can see at least part of her. Her face.

  This one isn’t gory, but it’s one of the uglier ones I watch.

  Five times, notes, then I need to quit for the night.

  *

  I expect to have nightmares. I’m ready for it. I wake up shivering and too hot and I spend a feverish few minutes on my phone, recording my thick, roaring dreams. I manage to fall back asleep. It takes a while. In the morning I save what I wrote for all that coding I intend to do later.

  *

  The archive was very controversial when it was first proposed, and the controversy hasn’t disappeared. A lot of people would just as soon forget that year.

  A lot of those people were parents. Adults. People protested, made petitions. But us…Even those of us who carried around all our mental scar tissue, stiff and raw, we didn’t want to let go. Even if we couldn’t look at it, couldn’t watch, couldn’t even think about it without fight-or-flight chemicals flooding into our blood, we wanted to keep it. The record of our Year.

  A lot of it is that this is what we do. We document. We display. It was real. It’s ours.

  But a lot of it is that, even if we didn’t and still don’t understand why, those people—our people—wanted to be seen. Wanted those final moments to be out there. Maybe they weren’t thinking straight, maybe they were just crazy, maybe something else was going on. Fuck, maybe it was demon possession. But they wanted it.

  Pics or it didn’t happen. Didn’t they used to say that? Maybe it was horrifying. Sure.

  But it was ours.

  *

  Ages of the victims range from ten to twenty-five, most of them on the lower end. There was something about puberty, went the theory, but of course no one ever verified that in any way aside from what people observed. People noted—repeatedly—the suspicious roundness of those numbers, but no one ever based any concrete conclusions on that either.

  For a while people were talking about a particular kind of parasite that infects the brains of insects and drives them to kill themselves. A specific kind of fungus that affects the behavior of ants in bizarre ways and then sprouts from the head, grows and releases spores. They did autopsies, and they found nothing.

  They found no drugs. No unusual substances.

  Some of the people who died had been exhibiting signs of depression and/or anxiety, sure. A fair number had difficult home lives. Plenty of them were queer, and a lot of those weren’t out to anyone but their friends online.

  Of course they were going through that shit. They were kids. We were kids, and being a kid is hell, and adults forget that.

  We didn’t want to forget.

  *

  I spend most of the next day going through more of it. Gifs, Vines, videos uploaded to various places. Still images, selfies; Instagram. Screenshots of Snapchats. Sometimes there’s sound and sometimes there isn’t, but the common thread running through it all is imagery.

  Another couple of clips of people cutting their own throats. I remember hanging being popular. A few people tying plastic bags over their heads. One especially industrious boy douses himself in gasoline in his driveway and lights a match.

  I wander outside to eat and get a tasteless hot dog at a lunch truck. I feel dazed. The color seems to be bleeding out of the world.

  I have two years of this to go.

  *

  I spend the rest of the week on a proposal for a dissertation grant I don’t expect to be awarded. This thing is too weird. It’s too disturbing. I don’t think the NSF is going to want to touch it with a thirty-foot pole. But I need the money, and I badly need something else to focus on.

  *

  I wasn’t going to read the dossier
s carefully until I finished preliminary data collection, but a couple of weeks later I start going through them. I expect it to afford me some distance, but it doesn’t. Maybe the information is dry and clinical, but one of the things that makes me good at this is an ability to consume dry, clinical information and translate it into something vital and real and immediate. Something bloody. I sit there in my carrel on the third floor with a pile of printouts—I wanted to work with paper for this, and in here I have to—and I make notes until my eyes hurt, and then I sit back and close them and think about how scared we were and how all we felt like we had was each other, except we didn’t know which one of us was going to be next.

  I used to wonder if, when my brain started trying to kill me, I would know what was happening.

  When I open my eyes it’s almost midnight and the woman from the front desk is shaking me. They need to close up. I need to go home.

  *

  I don’t go home. I wander around downtown until dawn. I look at the Capitol dome and I think about how none of those people in there have anything to do with us. About how, after the Year of Suicide, we all gave up. Voting rates for our generation are the lowest of any generation in history. They bemoan this, our apathy. How disappointing it is. How disappointing we all are.

  Look: don’t you judge us for opting out of a fucking lie. Don’t you ever do that.

  We went to war and a lot of us didn’t come home, and none of you ever noticed.

  *

  I get the grant.

  *

  In the end the thing that allowed the archive to exist was the decision that it would have no connection to any outside network. None. Security is unbelievably tight. We can’t bring in phones. We can’t bring in any kind of recording device whatsoever. We can bring in paper and pens and pencils and highlighters, and we can make printouts of text. No images. That’s it.