Death in Her Hands

by Ottessa Moshfegh

Even just the slightest seed of life, a fertilized egg, took payment, an expert, a machine, and an industrial vacuum, I’d heard. Life was persistent. There it was, every day. Each morning it woke me up. It was loud and brash. A bully. A lounge singer in a garish sequin dress. A runaway truck. A jackhammer. A brush fire. A canker sore. Death was different. It was tender, a mystery. What was it, even? Why did anybody have to die? Walter, the Jews, how many innocent children . . . my thoughts lost their train. How did people go on with their lives as though death weren’t all around them? There were theories—heaven, hell, rebirth, and so forth. But did anybody really know? Was there an answer? How unfair it seemed to send the living off into death, into the unknown, so cold.

But I supposed it was indeed the job of the writer to belittle the miracles of this Earth, to separate one question out of the infinite mystery of life and answer it in some sniveling way.

The job of the sleuth was to narrow down potential realities into a single truth. A selected truth. It didn’t mean it was the only truth. The actual truth only existed in the past, I believed. It was in the future where things began to get messy.

Or maybe I was wrong. If there were infinite universes, with infinitely small discriminating details, then every hair on every beard was of some consequence. Didn’t every little thing count? I stared off, considering how I’d ever account for all the beards on Earth, and then on every Earth in the realm of possibilities. But I stopped myself. If there are infinite meanings, there is no meaning.

“When you pass from this Earth, you will know Him,” said Pastor Jimmy. I clucked my tongue. It was all nonsense, was it not? What was real was what was down here, on Earth. The world of nature and its miracles, that was God.

There is nothing more heartbreaking than a squandered opportunity, a missed chance. I knew about stuff like that. I’d been young once. So many dreams had been dashed. But I dashed them myself. I wanted to be safe, whole, have a future of certainty. One makes mistakes when there is confusion between having a future at all and having the future one wants.

And if anyone knew how to cover up a murder, it was a police officer.

I could see that they were connected to something that had immense power over them. This was what happened when the mindspace was the internet, I thought. One loses one’s sense of self. One’s mind can go anywhere.

I could go anywhere with my eyes closed, to the moon if I wanted, listen to the deafening echo of silence as it spun through space. That is the sound of silence, isn’t it? The sound of death? The sound of nonexistence? The friction of not being? Everyone on Earth had heard of death, from time to time. How many have fallen there! Others had lived and died before me.