The bells ring for the twenty-fourth time and then give way to silence. The rain hisses on the leaves of the trees.
Today I am being hailed for my courage and dedication, for my valor and service to the State. It’s heavily featured in the Trusted Authority, in both the print and radio editions, early reports of the extraordinary valor of two Speculators, one of whom was injured, the other injured in the line of duty. More details to emerge in time. There will be a novel. I will be one of its heroes.
That word is wrong. It feels wrong. Hero.
Charlie carried himself like a hero long before he was one. When we were kids I would call him a hero, and he would tell me I was right. When in due time he became a hero for real, when they put the mantle on him, it fit perfectly and he wore it with ease, like his favorite jacket or his beat-up boots.
Me, though? The word hero sits heavily in my gut. It mewls and rolls. It disputes itself.
I spent the morning alone, staring out the window of my small house, trying to ignore the sour rolling in my stomach, the dark sense that any version of reality in which Laszlo Ratesic has become a hero, as a matter of Record, is a reality in which something is deeply fucked up.
My gut tried to convince me not to go to the funeral at all, to stay home and make myself frozen waffles and curl up in a corner and read the novel again: The Prisoner by Benjamin Wish.
But I had to come. I needed to, so I ignored my gut. I did make waffles, and I drowned them in syrup and ate them over the sink while I burned the novel in the toaster oven, and then I put on my black clothes. And now here I am, with rain dribbling into my beard, inside one of those moments when one’s inmost truth sits in uneasy disagreement with the acknowledged truth of the world.
Charlie was a hero. Aysa was a hero. I am a skulker, a pretender, a fool. I got lucky, I was dragged by Aysa Paige to the scene of my heroism and now I am standing at a respectful distance from the hole they dug for her, clutching my wounded shoulder, rain collecting in my collar and in my pockets, and she’s the one in the box.
The eulogies are short. Recitations of who Aysa was, where she came from. Among the speakers are a clutch of children. A small girl, holding a ragged teddy bear and blinking up at the microphone that has been angled down so she can reach it, has Aysa’s same neatly arranged curly hair and big, expressive sweetheart eyes. A teenage boy, reciting a comical anecdote from Aysa’s first day of high school, has her same proud chin and steel spine, her same way of becoming most upright and composed in the moment of highest distress.
There are captures even here, even among the headstones. Up in the trees, down in the bushes, pointing out from the dashboards of the cars parked in a ring around the site. A crew is out too, a three-person: main capture, aux capture, boom mic. The funeral is happening. Reality is in progress.
There’s a pretty young woman in black pants and a black top and stiff black shoes that look brand new, bought special for this miserable occasion. She looks stunned with grief, confused to find herself here, standing on the lip of a fresh-dug hole. I can’t remember the name. Do you have a sweetheart? I’d asked Aysa, none of my business, and I can’t even remember the name.
The main theme of all of the orations is that Aysa Paige was a clever and confident young woman, intuitive and direct, whose hard childhood blossomed into a promising adulthood when her gift was recognized and she determined to join the Service. There are glances stolen in my direction. Here I am, avatar of the Service, the culmination and embodiment of her dream fulfilled. I look down at my muddy black boots.
I cast my mind backward, backward to Petras’s house. To the swimming pool, the bullets from the second-floor window. Our Acknowledged Expert in the Enforcement of the Laws, frantic and cornered, brandishing the knife. How had I let it happen? How had I let the brief story of Aysa Paige end this way?
Backward, backward. The worst and most useless form of speculation. The sour mealy worm of speculation, crawling backward in search of better paths.
The last of the eulogists is a small and sturdy old darkskinned woman, and she, too, has Aysa in her face, in the flicker of wry humor that accompanies even the saddest movements of her speech. As she speaks, she never releases the arm of the equally ancient man who has helped her approach the microphone. The two of them are supporting each other through the ordeal of recalling the girl they raised.
Her parents are nowhere to be seen. Fuck my parents.
No one talks about what Aysa might have become one day. No one is going to dishonor the memory of the dead Speculator by speculating at her funeral.
But I do it in my mind. Nothing to stop me from standing and wondering. A glorious career, the heights of Service, the Arlo Vasouvian of her generation, or an early and sensible retirement, walking away while she could still walk on her own—a politician, an architect, an Expert. My pride in her will remain forever speculative. I can be proud of her in a thousand different alternate futures.
The machine makes a dull whirring sound as the coffin is levered downward into the greenery. It is the most hackneyed
