Don't Sleep with the Dead

by Nghi Vo

for unreliable narrators and the stories we tell

The good thing—the only good thing—about the worst finally happening is that it has happened. That was something the first sergeant said on the morning before the final push for Cantigny, when the sun unexpectedly rose up silver instead of gold. It was a bad omen—before the day was over, the worst came, and many men I knew did not survive it. With the situation in Europe, I found myself thinking more and more about the war, and what I came up with twenty years later and sometime after three in the morning on the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, was that the first sergeant had lied. The worst had happened, and there was nothing good about it.

The snow was falling harder now, thick wayward flakes that caught in my hair and my eyelashes without melting, but I didn’t feel it. Instead something from the fire, some ember, some spark, stayed with me, burning me up from the inside, and it whispered to me, telling me that I need never be cold again, if only I would let it burn.

It’s truly amazing sometimes, how well you can do if only you keep your idiocy to yourself.

Dead men weren’t free, but I wasn’t dead. Instead, I was made of paper, and I walked out into the winter day.

Two generations later, fate came calling again, and when beloved son Nicholas Carraway was called up for the first war to end all wars, this time it was my mother’s grandmother who stepped in. I remembered her, really remembered her, her bent back, her white hair and her old-fashioned dress. She was born in Bangkok, adopted or stolen by missionary parents just as Jordan had been, and the Carraways pretended so hard and so fervently that she was white that hardly anyone in St. Paul believed otherwise. They summoned her from her tiny apartment in Milwaukee, and even newly recovered from pneumonia, she came because what other family did she have? I imagine they must have hauled down Nick Carraway’s yearbook for her, got her a map of Minnesota and pictures of the clan all together in their Sunday best. Paper magic ran in her blood just as it does in Jordan’s, and she made me on the floor of the second-best parlor one Tuesday morning, her shears flashing in the weak spring light as she cut through newsprint and cardstock, snipping out hair and eyes, hands, and muscle and bone and wit.

One more try, Nick, and then I have to go back to packing.” “Packing?” I asked, stalling. “Where are you going?” “London first. And then Helsinki, where Tove has said I may have the rear bedroom until this all blows over.

TOVE OMG OMG OMG

“Oh dear, it sounds as if I really must go, but Nick, one more thing? Don’t sleep with the dead. You’re not one of them, after all.”

And for the readers, everyone’s telling you a story: everyone who loves you and everyone who hates you. You get to decide what you make of them.