—The Resurrected—

In a place without time, close to 2005 AD

He makes a telephone in another place ring. He waits. Someone picks up.

“Hello Jacob, it's good to hear your voice.”

Someone moves by, someone at a stage where it is hard to tell whether they are someone or something. It, whatever it is, wails and complains. He covers the mouthpiece of the receiver. Then continues.

“You sound tired, exhausted. I am sorry that I had to disturb you in your sleep.”

Another pause.

“What with my funeral, yes.”

The other end asks a question after a long silence.

“Not so good, Jacob. You have to help me. This place where I am has no sun.”

* * *

2005 AD

Jacob, awake in bed, panting heavily. He thought of Miriam's hand. Of the sweet taste in his mouth. He wiped the sweat from his face and went back to sleep.

* * *

In a place without time, close to 2005 AD

He rises through the layers, separates from the slipstream below that pulls those inside it along and returns to them, for a frightful quasi-moment, the concept of time. In the timeless stratosphere he rejoins the mass of disembodied ideas; he rejoined it, and he has already rejoined it, and he will still rejoin it, and forever be in the process of rejoining it, here, above time.

Another group of ideas was known, and is known, and will be known, by the name of Patrick. Maybe he has had a conversation with that set of ideas? Maybe they will forever be locked in that conversation?

A decision could not be formed. The decision must always have been there. Only when he dives down into the slipstream of near-time once more does he begin to remember time enough to think that he probably formed a decision to change something, in the light of his son's untimely demise.

Once more, he causes a telephone to ring.

“Jacob Lavalle, hello?”

“Itsallyourfaultitsallyourfaultitsallyour fault…” His voice trails of into the shrill screams of a wailing spirit. He feels the hurt he causes Jacob and once more assumes control of the set of ideas which maybe used to be, maybe still is, him.

Jacob gives no answer.

“I'm… sorry… Jacob. Listen.” The words echo, forever, the stream of time picking up this and that sound, bouncing it off here and there.

“I am here.” Jacob is terrified, even in his dream, now becoming aware of the fact that he is dreaming, and of the fact that he cannot will himself to wake up.

“I need… a favour,” the words spread impossibly on the canvas of near-time, “from you. Miriam…” This word echoes through the slipstream surrounding him, and bouncing off the soft margins, it becomes a set of tender fingers here and two figures cut out of a clothes magazine in a mock embrace glued onto a cardboard backdrop (black cardboard backdrop) there, it transforms into a peculiar pronunciation of “adore” there, and a rainy day in the middle of July spent having a dripping wet picnic as the only visitors of a large park who chose to ignore the deluge. The echoes contract, and once more they form the same word: “Miriam is alone. She needs someone, a friendly face, a comforting hand… Jacob, take her. Make her yours. (Make you... me). She will not let go of…” from a place above him, an idea trickles down into the slipstream and echoes into his speech, “the spectre of my absence out of her own volition. Make her happy.”

Jacob wants to say something else, but he wakes up.

He rises through the slipstream, screaming, until time falls back behind him, and he is once more alone in the multitude of disembodied ideas, there, in the sunless lands.

* * *

Jacob woke up. Outside, a storm thundered and flashed lightnings against the firmly closed blinds. He carefully got out of bed and unplugged the TV. An electrician once told him that this was no longer necessary, that there was a thing called surge protection in the wirings of his house. Jacob's father, however, had always unplugged the TV during a storm.

On the TV stood a picture of Paul and Jacob, hiking. Shaking his head dismissively, Jacob went back to bed.

The dream would come back the next night. And the night after that. Jacob's father had once told him what dreams were: an entirely random assemblage of pictures and thoughts the mind had half-thought or half-seen during the day; nothing else. On his way to the door one day, Jacob looked at the TV with the frown of doubt upon his forehead.

Later that day, he found himself visiting the cemetery for the first time since Paul's burial. Three days, Jacob told himself, was long enough; a visit was overdue. He set his briefcase down.

After a moment's pause, he knelt down, supporting himself with one hand. The brown imitation-leather glove came down on the grass next to Paul's grave. Jacob looked at the headstone and took off the glove from his left hand. He touched the fresh earth with his bare hand.

“I don't know why I'm here; this isn't me, and you know that.” A pause as the one addressed by these words remained silent.

“Is it you speaking to me? Is anyone…”

As if suddenly ashamed, Jacob looked left and right to see if anyone else was within earshot. He was unaware of the fact that a Muslim might have interpreted that gesture as greeting the angels.

Someone was standing behind Jacob. Jacob could not see that person. He turned his attention back to the grave.

“I don't know why I'm here, what I'm looking for. Maybe an answer, maybe a s…”

Miriam's hand came down on Jacob's shoulder. He did not flinch, showed no sign of surprise at all. He just waited, and after a while laid his dirtied hand upon the hand on his shoulder.

“Hello Jacob,” she said.

* * *

A week later, Miriam brought Jacob a new bottle of Amaretto. They drank it that night, and they cried, and spoke confessions, and every toast they made was to Paul. Jacob slept on the sofa, Miriam in Jacob's bed. The next morning, Miriam looked Jacob in the eyes for what felt like a century before leaving. He would not change the covers for four months.

One night soon after, Jacob awoke from the dream he still dreamt every night. Paul's voice echoing away in his mind, he smelt Miriam in his sheets. Jacob sat up and saw, through a half-opened window, the horizon lighting up ever so slightly in the distance.

Clad in bathrobe and slippers, he sat down at his desk and turned on a small lamp. As he noticed the warmth coming from the light bulb, he held his hands in the glow of it for some time. Then he took a piece of paper and did nothing for a while. He tapped his pen against his forehead, and after some more delay, started writing a list of items down. When the list was ten items long, he started connecting some of them, prefixing others with numbers. Finally, he drew a series of x's and slashes under the list, like this:

/  x  /  x  /  x  /  x

Very slowly and carefully, he penned seven words underneath those signs, looked at those words, frowning, and then recited them softly. After nodding in approval, he drew another line of signs, this time like this:

x  /  x  /  x  /  x  /

Another line of words followed a little swifter. Soon the first sheet of paper was filled, another followed, and yet another. At some point, he stopped drawing the slashes and x's, and his lines became more chaotic. The last few lines he wrote in a feverish haste. Then he stared into the light bulb and said “tulips”.

* * *

“No, I love tulips, really!” Miriam said, wiping the tears off her cheeks. “It's just that…”

Jacob nodded. “You don't like the colour,” he finished her sentence for her, a smile assuring Miriam that he understood. They reminded her of someone. They would not be the last thing that would remind her of Paul that day.

“Come in, come in!” She stepped aside.

“I'm sorry about the mess,” Miriam began. Not a grain of dust was displaced. “Had I expected you…”

Jacob said nothing, but sat down at the table uninvited. One elbow planted on the purple tablecloth, he supported his chin in that arm's hand and studied Miriam's face with a smile. On his lap, under the table, his other hand contracted and relaxed rhythmically.

“Would you like to drink something?”

“Oh yes, a glass of water would be nice,” he replied, in iambic pentameter. With Miriam out of the room, he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

“Miriam,” he said, before she had even set down the glass, “I need you to know something. I need you to know… know that I am not a poet.”

Miriam blinked, her hand still closed around the glass in front of Jacob. Slowly she sat down and looked at Jacob.

“No knight errant with horse and sword. All the poems I've ever spoken were penned by writers now long dead. What I now will tell you, show you, should feel quite wrong, you will agree.”

An eyebrow rose on Miriam's face.

“Fresh the grave and fresh our wounds are,” continued Jacob, looking at the table, and then made a little pause. Miriam could feel the goosebumps on her arms and closed her eyes.

“But wrong it doesn't feel to me. In sleep I saw my highest hopes, a future I dared not desire. We, the unthinkable, become non-unspeakable. My wildest dreams are you.”

Miriam opened her eyes again, a tear now glittering in one of them, not yet ready to fall.

“I had never time for love. Now I have no love for timetables and busy schedules and productive days; a haze of meaningless minutes and powerless hours my week has become when I'm not with someone—but you know who.”

Jacob looked up, into Miriam's eyes.

“Your happiness is mine; I find your smile shines from my face and no better ways of explaining us.”

“My reason, conspicuous by its common absence, senses defeat, signals surrender: oxygen is your perfume, you smile from my face, your happiness is mine.”

A tear caressed the curve of Miriam's cheek with a swift movement and came to a rest on her chin.

“And if these words offend, lend mercy; I merely watched as my hand penned this confessional rant; I stood by as I committed this crime of information.”

“Your happiness is my magnetism, my smile but a compass.”

“Tell me where to go.”

She told him.

* * *

Patrick screams, not because of anger or pain, but because of an instinct telling him to scream. He needs to scream so that his weak lungs fill with oxygen for the first time. All this might be painful, but he has no concept of pain yet. He cannot associate the blurs of colours and shapes with doctors, or with the name Jacob. This does not strike him as odd either, since he is seeing  for the first time at this moment. Everything is odd and strange, and because of the absence of anything that is not odd, nothing is odd.

As the screaming infant is carried off by the nurses, Patrick observes through the cloth of Jacob's jacket that he is not carrying his organizer. Patrick observes this from another place, or maybe he will observe it from another place, or maybe forever enter and leave the state of observing this. The fact that he is, at the same time, dead and being born, the realization that the infant both is him and an entirely different person, all these contradictions mean nothing to him as he feels a distant echo of a concept he once knew (and that he will know, and does know) as happiness. Turning something that could not possibly be his head left he witnesses the same man, Jacob, throwing the shards of a vase from a small shovel against the wall, crying uncontrollably.

* * *

“Yes,” said Miriam.

“You may now kiss the bride,” said the priest.

Jacob kissed Miriam without hesitation. Under showers of rice and shouts of congratulation they left the church. With the last guest gone, a Chinese man emerged from a confessional stand, produced a dead goldfish from his coat pocket, and started singing a lullaby to the fish.

Later that day, dancing with his freshly wed wife, Jacob wondered why what he was doing did not feel wrong. He lost his train of thought in Miriam's eyes.

The Chinese man left the church that evening and caught Miguel Cartier on his way home from his first shift at the hospital. He stopped him on the street.

“Hi, mister. I have a something for you, mister.” He grinned at Miguel.

“Look, I don't have any money with me. And... I don't wanna buy drugs.”

The Chinese man reached into his coat and took out a little gold locket. “She wants to talk to you, mister. She's very beautiful, sometimes.”

Miguel hesitated for a moment, then took the locket from the strange man's hand. Opening it he found a coloured drawing of a woman that looked as though it had been done some time in the middle ages. One of her eyes was green, the other blue. The Chinese man turned around and walked away. Miguel threw the locket into a trash can.

“Let's retire to our rooms already,” Miriam urged Jacob.

“Why? We're married now. We don't have to sleep with each other anymore.”

“Oh, screw you!” she laughed in reply.

“Can't you do that for me?”

Still later that night, a dog found a discarded piece of meat in a trash can and ate it in greedy gulps. In fact, so greedy and careless was its manner of eating that it inadvertently swallowed the locket stuck to the meat as well.

That, in itself, was unlikely. Only the fact that it was Miguel's dog made it really odd and incredible. Within the next years, Miguel would discard and happen across the locket many more times until he just gave up throwing it away.

* * *

Patrick slept.

“It's been one year already?,” asked Miriam incredulously, still smiling at the bouquet of purple flowers Jacob held.

“Absolutely. For our first anniversary, I wanted to give you these flowers… and a confession.” Jacob smiled, seemingly secure in the knowledge that his confession would not bear any real weight.

“Hah! This had better be kinky.”

“Actually, it's rather spooky.”

Miriam took the flowers and put them into a vase.

“The ever-present, never-spoken question of us two has been 'Why does this feel right?' Our marriage came so soon and painless; we were both too close to you know who. And still I feel justified, we know that we are right. And I know why.”

Miriam frowned, reduced once more to passive victim of poetry. Her lips a smile, or a sketch thereof, her eyes in vague expectancy of another verse.

“He wanted us to be like this; he still wants us to live like this. I know; because he speaks to me.”

Two blue pools of non-water, cool, froze. Miriam's hazy ice showed no signs of reaction and thereby signalled clearly what she felt.

Jacob could not see this; his eyes were lost in tulips and his mind was making metre. He paid no heed to her.

“Paul told me all that I needed to know, concerning you; it's true. And now that what we have stands firm as it does, now that doubt or hesitation are concepts of a distant past, I offer you the last truth there is, because it is now that…” Paul stopped dead in his sentence when he looked up from the tulips into Miriam's face. She said nothing, but took the vase from the table and paced away from Jacob, who still sat unmoving. Then she spun around, her face violently changed from pale to violet; she flung the flowers at her husband.

The vase impacted into Jacob's body and made no sound save two soft thuds: one when it hit the unflinching body formerly inhabited by a concept eternally known as Jacob, and another when it hit the carpet, inhabited by nothing but mites.

Miriam finally produced an angry growl that slowly slid into a scream as she rushed toward the fallen floral offerings and threw the vase against the wall, where it finally and satisfyingly broke with a fitting sound.

Jacob's eyes and lips said 'but…', but his vocal chords were still cowering in a corner.

“I don't need favours from beyond the grave; he speaks to me too, Jacob, and I had thought it random pictures made up by my pathetically romantic mind at night. But, oh, this is all making sense now, and it… you are not Jacob anymore! I don't know what you did to him, what you told him promised him, but I don't want your… fucking favours from… wherever you are! You are dead!” she yelled at Jacob, who wished he was. “Just leave me alone!”

And with this she stormed out of her house. Jacob went to fetch a small broom and a shovel to remove the shards of the vase.

* * *

“If I stood in front of a different crowd, you'd all get a speech now.” Miriam took a sip from her coffee and stared her colleagues into the eyes.

“I know you all will agree that we have better things to waste our time on. Let's get going.”

* * *

Jacob moved back into his old apartment, which a surviving instinct of his old, planning self had decided not to sell quite yet. He continued to write poetry, but out of a cynic instinct, he started posting it on the internet. There was a certain alienation in the process; all kinds of strangers saying all kinds of wrong and well-meant things about his honest, private poetry helped him see these memories not as a part of himself but rather as some text he had learnt by heart.

Miriam decided to pursue her career in spite of the infant. Money was no real issue for her; she could easily make sure there would always be someone around to look after her son. Only she, the mother, was not around a whole lot. Even when she was at home, she spent long hours in her office, writing, reading, from time to time making research on the internet. One night she had a long conversation with herself concerning her usage of the internet. She argued that there might always be something she would not hear of through the usual venues, and that it would be good to check all possible sources for news pertaining to her cause. Then she argued against that: when had she ever found anything worth her time on the internet? Never.

One night she got very drunk and read a lot of poems on a site she normally consciously avoided. She started sobbing, then crying. Patrick joined in from his cradle. Miriam, reminded of everything, became a little louder. Patrick, unable to understand what was going on, got even louder. Mother and son contended for who would cry louder.

Miriam won.

* * *

2009 AD

A little girl looks at a man painting a little wood hut brown. Suddenly, Patrick takes her hand.

“Come!” he exclaims, “I show you something!”

They run to a tree close to the Kindergarten. The teacher overseeing the playtime gets up and walks over to the little crowd gathered in front of the tree.

Patrick pulls the girl by her hand, brutally.

It's a squirrel.

A dead squirrel.


When the girl starts screaming the teacher starts running. Reaching the children, she pulls them apart to find Patrick stomping on a dead squirrel.

* * *

2015 AD

“Can't we just pretend we've already had this conversation? Can't we just pretend that you pleaded and begged as you've done every year and that I've, as always, cold-heartedly turned you away? I really don't have time right now. We're working on something big.”

Jacob looked at Miriam with eyes tired beyond any amount of lacking sleep. He merely nodded defeat.

Patrick, holding his mother by the hand, pointed beyond the fence and said “elephants stink.”

* * *

2020 AD

“So let me get this straight, that woman's paying you 50 bucks so you're taking her brat to the museum? How does that make sense?”

“She thinks that he needs, like, culture.”

“Why doesn't she take him?”

“She's some sort of fucked up workaholic. Only reason she's carrying a picture of her son in her wallet is so she recognizes him when she comes home from work.”

“Susan! Help me with this!” Patrick complained, sitting on a chair facing the Blue Horse, his notebook across his lap.

“Patrick, you're not to bring your Maths homework to museum! We brought you here to show you some culture!”

Susan's boyfriend put a hand on her shoulder and shook his head, indicating 'don't bother'. Patrick got up and walked away. He ran into a museum warden and asked him for help.

“What do these numbers have in common,” asked the piece of paper. The numbers were one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four.

* * *

2021 AD

Miriam comes home from university. She looks at her son watching TV, ignoring her. She asks him to turn off the TV, tells him she has something important to tell him. He says, in half an hour. No, now, she says. Remembers her manners. Please, she adds. Okay, he shrugs verbally, turns off the TV. I've done it, she says, it's all done. What's done, he asks, disinterested. AIDS, she says, I've cured it. Oh, he offers, waiting for more. That means I'm done working, she adds. Well, not quite, but soon. Cool, he observes. I'll always be here for you now, she pleads. Alright, he retaliates.

Silence for a moment.

Can I go back to my show now, he asks? Sure, she says, and slowly gets up. She walks into her office and calls Jacob. Jacob Lavalle, hello, he answers the phone. I just died, she says, and hangs up.

* * *

2030 AD

And Jacob died in a traffic accident in August 2030. He closed his eyes for a moment, overcome with reminiscence, while crossing a busy intersection. After the events of May 2005, and the burns he had sustained when the air-bag inflated in that traffic accident, he had made a point on de-activating the air-bag in any car he bought. He died instantly when his station wagon impacted into the armoured van.

* * *

Sep 14, 2030

I woke up with a certain feeling of expectancy this morning. Really, I don't know what this is. I don't normally get this kind of premonition or what you want to call it thing. I leave that up to people who have earned it for themselves in long hours of calculating their sun-horoscopes or whatever. But this morning I woke up and I knew, something was going to happen.

Something happened alright.

I took the bus to the old cemetery. Still trying to get that gate into a proper inking. Lydia proposed to get a photo of it, but it just doesn't feel right. I need to see it when I draw it. So I was sitting there on the bench, drawing and discarding like the happy chronically uncertain, faithless artist I am, when some guy walked through the gate. It took me all of two minutes to figure out he was a complete asshole. Just stood in front of me and read the newspaper on that annoying newsWall  thing behind me never even saying hi. I swear he consciously positioned himself to make sure that I could get a good view of his doubtlessly expensive belt with the silver ox-skull on the buckle. Then he sat down and winked at me, still waiting for me to start conversation.

So I did.

God damnit, why did I fall in love with that guy? I've left hopelessly falling for tough assholes behind in, I don't know, third grade. Plus I didn't do the years and years of cheerleading and fake tanning and hair-dying that would earn me such a boy.

We made a date for Kelly's Pub. At least he has good taste in pubs.

He said his mum cured AIDS. That must be the lamest line since 'my dad's a cop and he's going to arrest you.' I wonder what he was like in Kindergarten.

Oh God, you who don't exist, what am I getting myself into here?

* * *

“The last relationship of your life, that's what.” Jessica looked at the empty spot next to her in her bed.

“Sarah, please, I've got to sleep.”

“Jessica, you're crazy. This boy isn't only bad for you, he's bad news for the whole world. Mad masochism might justify your getting together with this dick, but… but think of the children! Think of the millions and millions of happy children out there who will never get to see a happy Jessica-face in the rest of their lives again, who will never play with your happy children, as fate had…”

“Sarah, go away. Seriously. I've had it. You've kept me from doing homework, you've made me laugh out loud in public, you've taken my concentration whenever I most needed it. What have you ever done for me? Just go away! Be silent! I don't want you in my head anymore.”

“Fine.”

That was the last word Sarah should ever say.

* * *

The lady behind the counter smiled radiantly at the two young people.

“Two times Die Hard 5,” Patrick demanded.

“… And Come Back With A Vengeance? What's that going to be? Did they resurrect Bruce Willis?”

Patrick gave no answer to Jessica. The lady still looked at them.

“We're also showing Titanic 2…”

“Yeah, or I could shoot myself into my foot. I might have to spin a coin to take that kind of a decision. Now would you please just give us our damn tickets.”

The lady's smile died down into a frown. She handed them two tickets and watched them climb the stairs. Jessica's hand sought Patrick's, found nothing.

“Something's wrong,” she mumbled. “This isn't right. This isn't how it ought to be. I know what it should be like. This isn't it!”

Neither Patrick nor Jessica said a word during the film. When they walked out of the cinema, it was Patrick who started talking.

“I talked to Don about that job. You know, at his dad's office. Says you can take it like tomorrow if you want to.”

“Pat, we've talked this over. My studies really mean something to me!”

“Yeah, right. Philosophy. You know what that means when you're looking for a job? Fuck-all.”

“But…”

“You know if we're gonna live together, we'll do it the modern way. You'll have to like contribute too; I won't work my ass off for the rent and grocery money and all that other shit while you sit at home and watch soaps.”

“Patrick, you know what?”

“What?”

“I hate you. I really, honestly hate you. You're everything I've ever despised. You summarize it, no, you caricaturize it. You're a walking exaggeration. You don't even look good!”

Patrick stopped and looked at her. She continued.

“And still I can't help but love you. What the fuck is going on here? This doesn't make any fucking sense.”

Patrick grinned. “Story of my life, baby.”

“Don't call me baby! Please! Please?”

“I'll call you whatever the fuck I want. So, about that job?”

She sighed defeat. “I'll take it. I don't have a choice.”

* * *

She cleans his clothes, irons his shirts. Cooks his meals. Ignores the sexual advances the father of his best friend makes at work. And she cleans his clothes. And irons them. Cooks some more. She cleans. Cooks.

Nothing ever stops.

* * *

A church, not far away. A man singing.

“I don't need the flowers, the flowers alive and dead
I once held all the flowers, all the blossoms I had
When I looked into the eyes of…”

The dark-skinned man makes a deliberate pause.

“Your voice, enduring to the end
Eats through the eternal veil of yesterday
Say stay, and we will
Speak to us through raindrops, paint
Crops of random edibility on our fields
To your voice we
Listen as the birds sing an accidental chord
In accord with all you've planned and gambled for
You, inhuman, intoxicant…”

Another pause.

“Thing that even in times of antiquity steered and
Directed an arrow to a random heel, where it
The unlikely hero killed
We heard your silence when a child-god claimed the shot
As his own…”

He allows the last chords to echo away into the church.

“This is of course only a rough translation. The original was much more clever. If I told you what disasters the original document has lived through, you wouldn't believe a word. And maybe you shouldn't! After all, you're not listening now.”

The church is empty.

“And it's good that you're here again. We've come full circle. Time for a half-time debriefing. How are we doing? What's the status, what's the damage, what rhymes with damage?”

He pets a wooden bench in front of him.

“Many things happened, or could have happened, or near-happened. I don't know; have there been enough things? Is infinitely many things enough? Was I any happier when the robbery never happened and I had the millions? How the hell would I know. I know that this is right; I need no voice from beyond the grave to inform me that this is simply the way things were meant to be. I understand that I don't understand. You will never know how liberating this feels, or maybe you will, or maybe you have. In the end it's all a question of rats.”

He scratches his head with dirty fingernails poking through torn gloves. Then he rummages through his German army coat pockets for a moment.

“Cookie?” he asks you.

* * *

At a bookstore, Jessica found a book entitled “The Simplicity Of Love,” by S. J. Walker. She opened the book at a random page.

He lit the candle carefully, never taking his eyes of her.

“As long as this candle burns,” he said, the loveliest of smiles upon his face, “I'll think of you.”

“And what when it's burnt down?” she asked.

He lifted a plastic bag with a hundred candles in it. “Then I have these.”

Jessica felt goosebumps on her arms and a guilty pleasure in the pit of her stomach. She would never consider reading such a cheesy romance!

She bought it and put it into a brown paper bag.


* * *

“What's that?” Patrick asked, still chewing.

“That's the new Sarah J Walker novel.”

“Bullcrap. Why do you read that shit?”

“I don't know,” Jessica smiled. She looked back into the book. Her left hand unconsciously sought her husband's right hand, lying idly next to the unused knife. She caressed his hand, he pulled his hand away. She still smiled, reading another paragraph.

“You know what they say about butterflies?” she asked Patrick.

“I'm watching this,” he answered, pointing at the advertisement.

Still she smiled, a tear sitting in the corner of her eyes.

And she devoured the rest of the novel, never stopping, letters blurred by nothing but her tears. They were tears of happiness.