***
Deaths on Pangaea are handled similarly to how deaths on Earth were handled. Sort of. There is the option of burning or burial, but burial is done sans coffin so the body can nourish the Earth the way the Earth nourished the body, and burning is done on a funeral pyre, in front of the grieving relatives. Melinda had stated explicitly in her will that she wanted to be burned, and Eli said to me, somewhat bitterly, somewhat longingly, that she did that because she knew it would drive him almost to the brink of insanity, watching her go up in flames.
Embalming is not a custom on Pangaea, as embalming fluid is an artificial substance, and the body is meant to return to the Earth and air as clean and pure as it was made by the One God. Also, the dead are not made up to look their best selves, because, especially in times of war, it is important for the dead to proudly wear the scars, wounds, wears, and tears as they are covered in dirt or lit by flames. The worst part, in my opinion, was that the primary loved one—so a husband for a wife, or vice versa, or one parent for a child, usually the mother, as she was the one to bring the child into the world, so she would be the one to see him or her off out of the world—lit the flame or threw a few shovelfuls of dirt.
My hand was on Eli’s shoulder as we stood around the funeral pyre, and I couldn’t help thinking that it shouldn’t have been me there. It should have been John, the man who had taken up the role Eli’s father had vacated willingly all those years ago. It should have been Alice, who, even with her new coldness and distance from all those she proclaimed to love, always knew the right words to say. I didn’t have the slightest clue what to say to him, besides “I’m sorry,” and I had said that a thousand times already, and I knew better than anyone that it didn’t help a damn thing. People on the ship said they were sorry to hear about how my parents were slaughtered by Shadows, and it didn’t make even the slightest dent in the grief that had filled up the whole of my chest cavity like a lead balloon. People were telling me they were sorry to hear about mine and Alice’s relationship issues, and that just made me angry. So instead of telling Eli for the thousandth-and-first time that I was sorry, I just let go of his shoulder, watched as he took the torch from Don, at whom we both scowled darkly, and then diverted my eyes when he placed the flame onto the pyre that was made from weaved-together bark of the flare tree.
Half her face had been burnt away, and she had lost one of her legs and one of her arms. Her unburnt skin had been ghostly white, almost translucent, in the very few places where you could find white, unburnt skin. The fire had burned away most of her hair, and she died looking like exactly what she was: a casualty of war, and as per Pangaean customs, she had been laid out with her injuries displayed in full “glory.” I had been unable to look at her, and a sick thought crossed my mind. I distinctly thought, “She’ll look better once she’s all gone.” And what do you do when nasty thoughts like that come bursting seemingly out of nowhere? I wanted to punch myself. I did curse myself. But honestly, was I so wrong to think that once the fire finished its job, it would be easier to look at her? I wouldn’t be seeing her pain anymore, only her ashes. Somehow, that was better.
The flare tree-bark pyre does something amazing: it is so hot that it burns everything into ash, and then, the ash and leftover sap from the bark cement themselves to the ground so they cannot be blown away by the wind. It takes very little effort for human hands to gather the ashes, which are then put into an urn, and given to the primary relative, so after Melinda had burned away into ash, she was gathered up, put in an urn, and given to Eli.
“More than I got for any of my sisters or even Maura.” He told me that night as we sat around the fire in his backyard. I had had my fill of fire for the past few days, but whenever we drank, we did so at night, under the stars, around a bonfire. We passed a bottle back and forth, and once the first bottle was gone, we cracked open a second.
After a long drink of Salt Rum (which tastes as disgusting as it sounds, but gets you wasted fast), I looked at him across the flames. The urn was sitting next to him on the cushion of the wicker loveseat, and I couldn’t help thinking how macabre the sight of it was. I wished he would put her in the house. And how macabre is it even to say that? Put her in the house. She wasn’t ‘her’ anymore. She was just ash.
I sound very insensitive, but as I am sure you have gathered, I was not good at comforting other people, and I could be pretty selfish when I was emotionally distraught. It’s not that all I could think of was Alice, though she was certainly right at the forefront of my mind. But every time I tried to focus all of my attention on Eli and his grief, I thought of her. I thought of how I would be just as devastated as Eli if something were to happen to her, if not more devastated. I couldn’t fathom it, and I wouldn’t. What I said earlier about Melinda looking better once she was all gone sounds insensitive, but I had seen so much death. I had attended so many Burning Rituals and Burial Rituals. I had seen so many mutilated or completely destroyed bodies being reduced to ash or buried. It never lost its edge, not completely, but it certainly got a little less shocking each time. What concerned me most was Eli’s grief. It was making sure my friend was going to be okay. I was not too worried, though; he had survived so much. His whole life had been one fight for survival after another, just like mine had been, and he always made it. But still, I thought to myself, every person has a breaking point, and Eli had lost his mother, his three sisters, the woman who had helped raise him, and his wife, not to mention the father he had known his whole life, because regardless of the fact that Daniel was a despicable bastard, he was still his father. All had died under violent circumstances. All had been taken from him. I had lost my parents all those years ago, and I had thought that there was no way any pain could be worse. There was no person in any life, on any planet, ever, in the history of existence, who could feel the guilt and grief that I had felt. But then I had watched Eli lose so many people he loved, seemingly all at once, and I had heard his regrets: He had never made things right with Brynna, and they had always been so close. He had been distant from Violet and Penny in the last year of their lives, because he had been wrapped up in Janna, and he had been angry at Brynna, and he had not liked how much Penny and Violet loved and relied upon James, because he felt like he should have been playing that role, the surrogate father role, and yet he did not want to. When Lara was taken, he had been right there, but her control over his mind stopped him from being able to keep her from walking right back into the hands of her captors. He knew that if she was alive, she was being treated brutally, so he wished she was dead, and that made him feel guilty, too.
More than many people who made that fateful trip from Earth to Pangaea, Eli had suffered. It was never-ending for him, it seemed, that suffering. No one gives him his due when they talk about the Oliviers. People brush over how for years, he watched his family dwindle away as each member fell. A quirky story about him that is often told, in oral histories and written in the books for the kiddies at school: Eli loved the book And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, which he found in his mother’s room in hers and John’s house in Luna Moors. I never understood why. I wouldn’t understand why it spoke to him in the way it did until later. I won’t spoil it now, but he and his mother saw some sick irony in it that they found morbidly funny and yet terribly sad. They both conflated that irony with the world in which we were living and fighting and dying, and to our makeshift family. Eli had murmured something when I had visited him earlier in the day, and I hadn’t known what he had said, but as I watched him sitting there, taking long pulls of the Salt Rum in rapid succession, I remembered, even though I had thought in the moment that I hadn’t heard him.
“And then there were four.” He had said, and God, he was right. It was scary, but he was right.
“What are you going to do with the ashes?” I asked him.
“Oh, she wanted them scattered in one of the big cities, but I’m not shipping out for three months, because I’m allegedly not fit for combat…
” He rolled his eyes, “Like Don Abba fuckin’ cares if I’m fit or not. I’m surprised he doesn’t just send me out. Things would be so much easier for him if in my grief, I didn’t tread carefully enough and got blown up on a landmine as a result.”
“He doesn’t know about your catlike grace, clearly. Even in grief, you’d still skip around like a little ballerina.”
He laughed at that, and I did, too.
“Am I a cat, or a ballerina?”
“You’re a Caterina.”
Call it a spit-take. Call it a party foul. Whatever the name, he was soon covered in Salt Rum that had spewed out of his mouth, and even though it was gross, I laughed as hard as he did.
“That wasn’t even funny.” He told me, “But I like it. Either way, she wanted me to go to the highest tower in one of the Free Cities, go up to the tippy top, and throw her ashes to the wind. Like I was scattering her to the horizon. Like I was showering the world with her soul. Really, though, all I would be doing is showering the people of one of the free cities with the ashes of my wife…” His voice cracked, and I thought he was faking it for comedic effect, which would have been totally inappropriate and therefore totally like Eli’s normal self, which then would have been an encouraging sign that he was going to be alright. Because I thought he was laughing, I laughed, and some Salt Rum dribbled out of my mouth. When I saw that he was actually crying, I cleared my throat uncomfortably and took another drink.
“Fuck, man… I’m…”
“I know. You’re sorry. Everyone’s sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that she jumped right into the fray, and took control, like she always did, and hauled all those people back to the Infirmary, and that she was there right at the minute it blew. But you know what I’m most sorry about, Quinn? I’m sorry I wasn’t in there with her.”
“Come on, man.” I leaned forward, and even though I was pretty drunk by then, I made my tongue that was swollen with all my excess spit, and from the drying effects of the Salt Rum, and from my sloppy drunkenness, deflate so I could speak normally. So I could speak to him firmly.
“Don’t talk like that, Eli.” I told him, “We are gonna end this thing. For Mel. For Brynn. For Violet, and Penny, and for your mom, man. I promise. You gotta stick this out until the end.”
“I know.” He replied begrudgingly, in irritation, “Come on, man, I know. Besides, I’m too pretty to die.”
We both laughed at that, and he reached out for the bottle.
“We gotta solve this mystery of Don Abba. We gotta bust him being shady, and then, if he deserves it, we gotta kill him. Or we gotta throw him to the Old Spirits, and then someone else can take over. John or Allie. Or maybe both of them.”
“John would be good. He’s tall and menacing, and he gets shit done. Plus, he cares about other people’s problems. John would be good.”
“Allie would be good, too. I know you’re pissed at her, but you’ve gotta see that she’s a natural leader. Why do you think she rose up the ranks so fast? She knows how to talk to people. She knows how to get shit done.”
“Yeah.” I replied, and the alcohol brought all my bitterness to the surface, “Yeah, she knows how to handle everyone else on this planet but herself and me.”
“I don’t know, she seems to be handling herself pretty damn well, and you, too, for that matter. You just don’t like it because she’s standing up for what she wants, even though it’s not what you want.”
“What?! That is not even true.”
“It is true. She wants to be out there fighting, and you want her to be home, because you want to be home, so you’ve convinced yourself that you think it’s right for her, that it’s what she needs, when really, what she needs is to be doing whatever she wants to be doing.”
He got me. He had a point. But by the One God, the Old-World God, and every other God ever, I would never admit that to him.
“Well, maybe I’m pissed because I have always gone along with what she wants, and now, when I want something, she won’t go along with me. Instead of being understanding or open to at least considering it, she just gets all stubborn and starts acting like a fucking Commander, barking orders at me about how it’s going to be. And threatening me with divorce. Telling me she wants time apart. Well, bullshit! I don’t play that game.”
“Oh, two bulls locking horns. How I know the phenomenon well.” He had been rubbing his eyes, but he stopped and looked at me, “You and Allie. Me and Mel. Lara and John. Brynna and James. Tony and Tom. God, the only couple that don’t fit that bill were Rachel and Joe, who talked everything through before they got anywhere close to a fight, and Violet and Nick, who were so fucking young and innocent and idealistic and good that they never got like that.”
“They had their moments.”
“She was running around with Caspar Elohimson behind his back, and he knew about it, and did nothing!”
“First of all, ‘running around’ makes it sound like she was cheating on him, which she wasn’t, which you very well know, and if it was behind Nick’s back, he wouldn’t have known about it, dumbass.”
“Gee, sorry, Brynna, for not using words right while I’m drunk. Asshole. Either way, that’s what you and Allie are doing now. You’re locking horns, and you’re both stuck, see, ‘cuz you’re stubborn. The only way to get unstuck…” He pointed at me, “…is to compromise.”
“Thanks, Dr. Phil. I’ll keep that in mind when she comes home. But I’m not backing down on this one. I want to be home. We need to be home. We have been out fighting for years, and how close have we gotten to ending this war?”
“About as close as we are to Earth right now.”
“Exactly! It’s not doing any good, us being out there. It’s just driving us apart. It’s making her crazier, because she feels like no matter how much she gives this, it’s just not enough. It’s making me crazy, because I can’t give her what she wants, because what she wants is to be out there being Commander Kickass of the Red Anarchy, representing freedom and democracy and patriotism and shit, and any kind of life I try to give her that isn’t that life just isn’t going to be good enough. She’s too far gone, man. She’s one of those soldiers who has seen too much, and there’s no taking it back. She’s too far gone. ‘Nam’s got her. She’s fucking Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. ‘The horror, the horror…’”
“I don’t think she’s that at all.” He told me, “‘Cuz she hasn’t been beat yet. I don’t think she’ll ever be beat, not even if they kill her. She’ll always be one of us. She’ll always be a Red. They’ll never take that from her, no matter what they do. And she might be totally enmeshed in this thing, but so am I. So is John. You’re not, and you have your reasons. You’re tired. You see the reality of it that we all can’t face, and that reality is that it’s fucking useless to keep this up. It’s hopeless. The people we love are dead, they aren’t coming back no matter how many Old Spirits we torture and kill, and the torturing and killing doesn’t make knowing they are permanently, irreversibly gone from the world any less painful. So, yeah, she is far gone. We are all far gone. And it’s too late to turn back now.” He was lying back on the couch, “Nope. John, Allie, and me, we’re speeding ‘round the curves and up the long, endless highway going 120, and the tires are burning, and the engine’s smoking, but we just keep pushing the pedal down, pushing it down even though it’s got nowhere else to go.”
He yawned and closed his eyes.
“Sooner or later, we’ll crash, and that will be it. That’ll be all she wrote. Curtains drawn. Lights out. ‘And then there were none.’”