Lester sobbed at my feet. His victims’ memory-selves had found the kitchen, and were setting the house on fire. Nothing was exempt from the blaze. All that hard work, too.
It was long past time to be done with this cretin. I leaned forward.
Inside him, a wet red clock kept steady time. But inside me, a hard white clock had begun to tick again. I took his heart in mine and brought our pulses together, gradually speeding up. The buzz of gears filled his brain. A second hand spinning and spinning and spinning.
Then, as one, we struck.
* * *
The moon hid itself behind the next hill as I made my way from the grave Lester had meant for me but now filled himself, staring vacantly upwards at the starless sky. I dipped into a gully filled with nothing but dark, which refreshed me immensely. Rattlesnakes rustled as they fled the sound of my steps. They knew their place on the food-chain too well for self-deception, and I respected that. Unlike humans, they understood that when two predators meet they must both turn away at once and go in opposite directions. Or one will die.
I carried my shoes under my arm, feet bare for better traction, and the desert slipped by in even strides. Sand filled my tracks.
So, my friends. Who, or what, am I anyway?
My name, as I have said, is Vassila. When I was thirteen, I died of a sudden fever. I clearly remember the acrid smell of my own vomit dispersing, with one sharp retch, all the comfort and familiarity of the other smells in our tiny wagon, like the lard simmering in the brass lamp, or the bitter black tea they forced between my lips. I lay without crying, drenched in sweat and stale urine, my muscles pulled taut and trembling. My last memory was of my mother’s hands—one passing over my cracked lip
s in silent benediction, the other offering me a tarnished cross to kiss.
The next time I died, it was from cold and starvation. I woke underground and climbed out just in time to see snow cover the trail of my caravan. The sun dazzled my weak eyes. I stumbled over the stones of my cairn as I struggled to follow, but frost settled deeper on me with each passing hour. My shroud cracked and fell away in rigid shards. My hair froze solid. My bare feet wore smooth on the wasteland, until bone gleamed through where the skin was thinnest. After fifty days, I could go no farther, so I fell on my face and died.
Later, the wolves found me.
The third time I died, I had settled in a tiny village along the foot of the Balkans. My new parents had found me on a high plateau and taken me in. She was a seamstress, he the local blacksmith. That winter was so harsh they could only raise a quarter of their expected crops. So when spring came, the Streltzy swept in like a killing wind and burned them out for failing to meet the Tsar’s taxes. I was caught in the village square as I ran for shelter and passed from horse to horse. The last soldier to use me, sated, turned my head to the east and slit my throat. They rode over my body where it fell, dissolving into the sun.
When I could breathe again, I rose and walked away.
My education was over, at least the essential part of it. There was little, as I had discovered, that could hurt me—and nothing that could kill me. I aged, but slowly. Soon I learned to turn my enemies’ power back upon them. I wandered. It was a long road, and the years went slowly. Many years, many deaths.
In Bruges they burned me as a witch. It took several months for my charred flesh to harden and heal.
In London I caught the Plague. Buboes swelled and burst inside my knees as I knelt to pray.
In Fiorenza, I drank poison and was thrown in the river. I woke to pallid fish grazing at my face, and waded hip-deep in trash to the nearest bank.
In Bogota I was lynched. My boat overturned while crossing from Calais to Dover and no one survived, yet I alone survived. In Paris I fell from a hotel window, crushing bones that knit badly, and the limp lasted twenty years.
There were some suicides as well. The weight of centuries pressed on me with a sullen, constant ache I frequently longed to end. In Brussels I slit my wrists and drowned, Roman-style, in a soft pink bath. In Singapore I opened the gas mains wide, and waited. In Saskatoon I was too thorough. They buried me, and I had to lie quiet while my embalmed organs renewed themselves from scratch.
Then and there, I decided not to try again. The growing threat of cremation was something to consider. But this choice was not made entirely out of fear.
After so much time, I had begun to dream again.
So I bought a ticket to America.
I mounted the next hill, scaring the moon, which shot up into the sky once more to hang above the broad, glittering highway.
America is such a wonderful country, I thought. So big. No borders to cross, no papers to show. Only the road. And the road goes on forever. Here I can be content, at last, no longer wondering what lies ahead or regretting what lies behind.
And if there is one thing I have learned, it is that there will always be another car.
Year Zero
And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.
—Ezekiel 6:16.
AT THE VERY HEIGHT of the French Revolution, after they killed the king and drank his blood, they started everything over: New calendar, new months, new history. Wind back the national clock and smash its guts to powder; wipe the slate clean, and crack it across your knee. A failed actor named Fabre d’Eglantine drew up the plans. He stretched each seven-day week to a ten-day decade, and recarved the months into a verdant litany of rural images: Fruit and flowers, wind and rain. The Guillotine’s red flash, masked in a mist of blistering, lobster-baked heat.