Yr Dead

by Sam Sax

I’m twenty-seven and looking out through a curtain of flames. Twenty-seven and always cold. A lit match burning in the darkness of this mid-day city. I’m twenty-seven and walking slowly through a city I love that’s yet to love me back, watching people turn my way with expressions on their face that I’ve never seen before, that I’ll never be able to name—not horror or awe, but something far older and strange.

At first, all the past villages and townships come back in single charcoal lines. An outline, then a sketch. At the end of the world there is… In the end, the world is cream as clean paper, and then the walkways and porches shade in, shadows seep up as if the sheet of paper’s been set on something wet. Then all at once: brilliant color, color even Chagall couldn’t imagine. Realer than real, hyper-real. Everyone’s face is too bright, the sky a wild cerulean. I don’t know why we always think of our old countries only in sepia tones, wine-dark, all our ancestors in muted and mourning colors when it isn’t true.

Thus, the villages and cities are many trees and many of them are gone, felled by time and fire, but the root system spread across Yiddishland and Palestine and Egypt and France and Brazil and Argentina and here in America. When at last I die, my xylem floods with all these stories at once and I’m so full I break into scripture, into sweat, into four unique seasons.

😭😭😭😭😭😭

Every time I blink: a new synagogue. In each there is a man in robes speaking darkly. The congregants respond in Yiddish or Russian or Polish or French. Then it’s the same prayer, the congregants chant the Kaddish. Each grief-filled syllable lifts up from the dirt pointing heavenward and says nothing about death. I blink and there is a wailing coming from outside the building. Blink and a brick opens the stained glass. And then another brick. And then the night pours in.

There’s something about being around people dedicated and working desperately toward something, anything, that makes me feel as if it’s going to be alright, and if not alright, then, you know, manageable, and if not manageable, then at least something we’ll endure together. So I owe them my life, these people. What’s left of my life, I owe them.

What’s up with you, she asks, do you speak? Admittedly not the most welcoming address, and suddenly it’s as if I’m standing before a judge someplace I don’t speak the language. Uhh. Nothing. I mean, yes I do. I’m reading a book about mushrooms actually and, um, looking for a job.

The gas moves around us like new weather. Alone together and breathing in poison, all my language won’t be enough—only substitutions will do. My eyes are two sick onions. My eyes are goats slaughtered wrong. My eyes, twin libraries burning. May Day is, of course, also what the pilot says when the plane starts going down. A street medic finds me vomiting yellowish heat across the sidewalk. Wearing a red cross and a green mohawk, she stands over me and pours milk into the twin burning saucers of my eyes. In this way, I am welcomed, for a moment, into my new family.

Aarom and I bunk together, and some nights he lets me sleep in his bed so I can cuddle up next to him when it gets cold, which it does often in the desert. I don’t really understand why we’re here. Sure, it’s a beautiful country, I think, looking out over someone else’s desert—can someone even own a desert and, if so, how could it possibly be us?—so different from the astringent skyscrapers and fried drive-through windows I come from. It’s clear, being here, that neither here nor back home, with its strip-malls and what the strip-malls cover up, is my home. If anything, my home is the endless empty parking lot fields growing crops of trash and plastic tumble weed. My home is where my body breathes and nowhere else, where it’s going and where it’s been. Can someone just say a thing is theirs and it becomes so? Can you really go back to the neighborhood your great-great-great grandparents might have lived in and say, This is my house? Not caring who lives there? Years later, Aarom will return to this beautiful country and say just that. He will meet his wife, make a child, and learn to fire a gun.

In the car, Mom wears her hair up in a handkerchief like a Jewish Audrey Hepburn and Dad wears a Hawaiian shirt like some fat Jew in a Hawaiian shirt.

I end up taking a man because this is what is expected of me. Levi is fine. He’s the butcher’s son, which my sisters find very impressive, though, for me, he is just a man who always has to wash the blood off his hands. I take this man who was raised to look at an animal in pieces. And, sure, we get our fair share of good meat, but what is life to a man who sees the world this way—as a living thing waiting to be disassembled, one that can be separated by nothing but a blade? Levi is sweet to me, and I do my best to be acceptable. I do my wifely duties; I make his bed and his children. I hum as I pin up our laundry to the sky. I go cook with my sisters. I want more from this life, but the only example I see is the one the gentiles show us—the women, in their elaborate gowns, gorgeous women being pulled in carriages behind horses, so delicate they must be kept up above the mud. And maybe that’s a trap as well, isn’t it? To be a caged bird, so precious you don’t even know the dirt. When it comes time for it, how would you run?

All Jews are sad, she’d say; sadness, our birthright.

I imagine it’s lonely to have once been so praised only to now be almost entirely ignored. Are they better off, the ones who only ever had a small cadre of dedicated readers? Maybe it’s worse, having been loved?