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  They laughed until Shlomith noticed a bundle resembling a human figure lying somewhere in the distance, a figure who later turned out to be none other than Ulrike. When they set off, moving toward the bundle, they decided to try to satisfy the being, whether it was a woman or a man (of course, with a child they would have given up their plan). Shlomith, still excited about the pinching, came up with the idea, which almost all of the women thought was excellent, nourished as they were by their laughter. The women decided that Shlomith would lick and suck the erogenous zones of the being they found until it came, assuming it still had the ability to experience pleasure. It would be a double welcome gift, a gift to the new member of the group and a gift to them all: to see arousal, orgasm, sweat in the hollows of the knees, and remember, if only distantly.

  Thank you, Ulrike, Nina says and strokes her round belly. Thank you, Shlomith says. Thank you so very much, liebe Ulrike, Polina says tenderly. Obrigado! Rosa Imaculada says. Merrrrrci! Maimuna says, gaily rolling her R. Wlibgis smiles sadly, nods her bald head, and strokes the red artificial fire, her very own poor hair, which at least is permanent unlike some teenage girl’s orgasm—and a feeling resembling stale jealousy wells up in Wlibgis’s mind. No one had ever granted her pleasure. If she had ever panted—and she had, she had given birth to a son an eternity ago—she had gasped with pain and fear, she had panted from the agony, the tearing, and the blows, and after the blows she continued panting. More of them were to come, and she gasped over and over again out of sheer disbelief. How many times does a person have to be hit before she believes that she’s really being hit? That it isn’t a bad dream? The same boy who had ripped her open as he pushed his way out had hit her later in so many ways and in so many tender places that she had lost count. Gradually she had given in and allowed herself to become a woman to whom much evil had been done, who would receive atonement only at the Final Judgement. Was that where she was going now?

  Wlibgis’s fingers disappear into the wig. What did that little girl think she knew about life? Ha! But here she was too, beyond the reach of any aid. Gaunt, fleshless schadenfreude fills Wlibgis’s mind.

  There is other undeniable evidence for the death theory. Shlomith is doing quite well even though she, like Wlibgis, should be as dead as a doornail. So it’s just beyond dispute! Polina was completely sure and she had said so directly during the stage when only six of them were there, when Ulrike had yet to appear, before they had burst out laughing during the pinch test and Nina hadn’t had the idea about the campfire wig.

  It isn’t possible you’re alive, Shlomith, Polina had said. You aren’t morbidly thin; you’re something much worse.

  Of course that caused a fight. For Shlomith, thinness wasn’t “something much worse”: it was part of an experiment, an extreme yet controlled test that she had come out of as the conqueror. She had survived, she remembered, and the memory was as sharp as a postcard, a postcard crammed full of words in a fit of emotion. The applause in the auditorium of the Jewish Museum had begun cautiously, probingly, as people had glanced at each other in shock: is it even appropriate to clap now, or should we gather our things and leave quietly as one does after a church service, eyes meekly cast down? But then someone burst out in furious applause and someone else, a man, shouted a choked “Bravo! Bravissimo!” and suddenly the entire packed hall began to tremble at the joints as dozens and dozens of hands came together, sucking up the surrounding oxygen. The air turned thick, too overpowering. Shlomith retreated and sat on a wooden stool. The stool had been placed behind her on the stage as a precaution in case she was unable to stand after all. But it was now, as she accepted her ovation, that she needed the chair. She sat on it in a half-unconscious state. A red cushion had been placed on the stool so her hollow hindquarters would not be damaged by the hard wood (she already had enough bruises). Sitting on the red cushion wearing only panties, she had gulped in the plaudits, the dense, oppressive air that few people ever get to enjoy, and then her mummy-like, parchment-dry body began to react. A cramp doubled her over, and the cry that struggled out of her folded her against her knees, forcing her flat, body part against body part, face against knees, sharp nose between sharp kneecaps. It was no final aria rising from the base of her diaphragm. It was shriveling, huddling, and it had to happen. She had to collapse for all to see, and she allowed herself to finally collapse. Her hardness, the edge (which some have and others don’t) that she had developed over decades, began to crumble. And the more Shlomith crumbled, the more the audience cheered, because everyone in the auditorium knew that Shlomith’s life mission was now complete. Shlomith had said it herself a moment earlier: “This is the last performance I will give. When I recover, I will organize my archives and donate them to a museum. Initial discussions have already taken place. After that I will begin to enjoy life. In a healthy way.” The ambulance stood ready in front of the museum. A place had been reserved for Shlomith in a private hospital where she could gather her strength in peace and regain her lost weight. No calls, no emails, no visitors. She would cease to be an attraction. She would learn to be a human first, then a woman, and finally perhaps even a mother again.

  In that beautiful auditorium, in the building the rich Jewish widow Frieda Schiff Warburg had donated to the museum in the fateful year of 1944, Shlomith howled with her bone-hard nose between her bone-hard knees. For the first time in thirty years she shed great, hot tears that tasted the same as the tears in the Kibbutz Methuselah communal kitchen: salty, crushing, but still cautiously foreshadowing a new beginning. Shlomith crouched on the red cushion, amidst the ear-splitting storm of applause, as the waves of thirty years of sorrow and at least as great an amount of loneliness battered her, and not just her but also every soul who sat in the hall, nearly all of whom had now risen to their feet. For there is no creature alive who does not have a secret sorrow to mourn, no one who in her inner parts is not waiting for permission to release her cares.

  The final, spontaneous and unscripted climax of Shlomith’s work, the cathartic mass weeping that had overtaken the crowd, which a few cynical head shakes and a couple of people marching out in open irritation could not repress, began to change shape after surging for some time. One after another people began to collect themselves when they noticed that Shlomith had lifted her head from her knees and raised her eyes. Someone stopped clapping and began to rustle his clothing as a sign he intended to move, and his neighbor did the same, and somewhere else in the auditorium someone else also started to move, and those around her did the same, and then the people next to them, and soon the whole hall was moving. But people did not press for the doors. Instead they formed a line before the artist just as spontaneously as they had burst into tears a moment ago. They wanted to hug her, each in his or her own way to say THANK YOU and to wish her a productive recovery. As they dried the corners of their eyes, one or two wondered to themselves how they would live without her. Who would channel their emotions after Shlomith had retired?

  So when Polina said to Shlomith, with Nina, Wlibgis, Maimuna, and Rosa listening, that she couldn’t be alive any more than Wlibgis could be alive, Shlomith became terribly angry. Even though Polina immediately added that by the same token she couldn’t be alive either, any more than Nina, Maimuna, or Rosa were alive, Shlomith began to rage. Polina’s claim was downright offensive. Of course she was alive! She was more alive than she had ever been. She had begun to recover. She knew it because she no longer felt pain. Her thoughts were clearer now than they’d been in many years, and the dead didn’t have thoughts anyway. How do you know? Polina asked. I know, replied Shlomith, because everyone knows that. Has someone come back from the dead to tell you? asked Polina. The dead don’t speak, Shlomith said angrily. The dead have no brain activity. But what if we don’t continue our existence as physical beings? Polina continued. What if that something in us that science can’t measure never dies? But here I am, and you and all of us, just as alive as can be. We can see it with our own eyes! Shlomith shouted. W
here the hell is “here”? Polina bellowed, spreading her arms theatrically. We aren’t anywhere! God help us, we aren’t anywhere or anything except this stupid fight and all these empty words!

  Polina could have continued to talk for much longer, because she had a dogmatic certainty about her cause. Talking doesn’t stop even when everything else stops. Laughing and quarreling don’t stop, even when the bodily functions stop, one by one, even as the senses fade by degrees. This is death, Polina would have liked to cry. Something larger than the person continues to operate, using the person’s shell, drawing power from the person’s empty gestures; that Something needs this delayed destruction for something. That Something places the helpless creature torn from its life to struggle in a small society, and that society is made up of similarly helpless creatures torn from their lives. Survival depends entirely on good will. Does that exist or doesn’t it? Yes or no?

  Polina had stopped arguing. They had to cooperate, they had to forget their dispute. Polina closed her eyes and swallowed what she had just meant to lob into the air: that they were the evidence of the existence of death, that this was the world no one had come to tell the living about, because the ones who have seen the light at the end of the tunnel, who have watched the sepia-toned filmstrip of their lives sped up in reverse in the waiting room of death, never make it this far.

  Polina leaned back, farther away from Shlomith’s threatening forefinger. She was just on the verge of understanding something that she would have immediately written down if she had had pen and paper:

  – THE HUMAN VOICE —> REACHES BEYOND DEATH

  – WE GRADUALLY LOSE THE ABILITY TO TOUCH, WE BEGIN TO DESTROY

  – SOCIETY IS ALWAYS IN DANGER!!!

  – SEIZE UPON THE LEAST COMMON DENOMINATOR WHEN EVERYTHING BEGINS TO FALL APART

  Dear God, they were right at the heart of things now, these women sitting in a ring gaping at each other! If she had known about the existence of this world earlier, back when she was still with her own . . . If she could have seen this in advance . . . If she could have known the right words to use . . .

  Polina stopped. This was pointless navel gazing. Her own only would have thought she was even more crazy. One of them in particular, Maruska, her coworker at Zlom, the Moscow Central Agency for the Dramatic Arts, who was always preened down to the last hair, would have been certain to call over her doctor husband at some opening night reception where, after a few drinks, Polina had perhaps built up the courage to share her insight: “Serjoža! Serjoža!” Maruska would have shouted and gesticulated, and Serjoža would have rushed over to them from the furthest corner of the hall. If they were one centimeter larger, his protruding ears would have flapped, and his tail, if he’d had one, would have wagged—a truncheon tail, like a Rottweiler's, that’s what he would have had: a stiff, black wagging tail. “Serjoža, my dear Serjoža, Polina is talking nonsense again. She thinks that we continue existing after death. In little groups! In emptiness! And we gradually lose our senses. But not our ability to communicate, especially not our ability to quarrel! I think Polina must have been reading some crazy philosopher’s books too much again . . .” That’s how Maruska would have chirped, and she wouldn’t have stopped until she had said, “Tell Polina about that patient you treated, the young man who thought he was dead. Go on! Polina likes macabre stories!”

  DEATH REHEARSAL NUMBER 1 (COTARD’S DELUSION WITH A DASH OF TIBETAN BUDDHISM)

  Serjoža would have escorted Polina to the sofa group and offered her something to smoke. These stories were the kinds of stories you couldn’t listen to (let alone tell) without cognac and cherry cigars. Serjoža was happy to tell his friends stories about his clients (which is why people liked him). All of his patients, regardless of sex, were named Pyotr, and the most unbelievable things always happened to them. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been Serjoža’s clients.

  This specific Pyotr suffered from a very rare disease named Cotard’s Delusion. The name came from French neurologist Jules Cotard, who began his career under Professor Jean-Martin Charcot at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. In the 1870s, Cotard moved to a small city near Paris, Vanves, which nowadays is one of the most densely populated places in Europe, where he died fifteen years later from diphtheria acquired from his daughter.

  Cotard’s Delusion, which the neurologist described as a new form of melancholia comprising restlessness and agitation, saw the light of day in 1880. Its typical symptoms include “the delirium of negation” (délire des négations): depression accompanied by delusions related to one’s own body. Anxiety and guilt afflict some who suffer from the syndrome, along with hypochondria, auditory hallucinations, and, paradoxically enough, delusions of immortality.

  Serjoža’s Pyotr was a unique case in many regards. He had read a Russian translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead immediately prior to falling ill—this topic, death, had gripped him long before the appearance of his actual delusions. When he was brought to Serjoža’s clinic, he was convinced that his mother had failed miserably in her most important duty: she hadn’t known how to assist his consciousness to launch out of his body in the instant before his breathing stopped.

  Pyotr had a photographic memory of the situation in which he believed he died. Yes, a photographic memory: as if death hadn’t been enough, to top it all off he had separated from his body. He had watched events unfold from the ceiling, and now he gave Serjoža a voluminous account of what he had seen. So he lay lifeless in his bed. Before that he had pushed himself up on his elbows and shouted to his mother in terror as he felt his spirit leaving. He had hoped his mother would come in time to help him, that his mother would have a chance to read aloud certain important lines from a book that was on his nightstand. But when his mother arrived, it was too late. Pyotr had already managed to move, or rather had been dragged, up to the ceiling.

  The arrival at his lifeless body of his father and little sister, who had run in spurred by his mother’s cries, did not change the situation at all. And because his father’s bald head was right below him, so Pyotr had related to Serjoža, he thought he could take the grandfather clock weight from high atop the cabinet, where it had been placed to await the clocksmith, and drop it on his father’s head. He wanted to see his father’s skull break. He was convinced his father had slipped thallium into the water he had been drinking. Pyotr claimed that his father had long been looking for an opportunity to take his son’s life. That was why, for months, Pyotr had been buying his food and drink exclusively in cheap restaurants and refusing any family dinners, despite his mother’s beseeching and tears.

  But now his father had won. He had found the rucksack Pyotr had hidden under his bed and the unopened bottle of spring water in it. As he slept, his father had opened the top and crumbled a full gram of thallium powder into the water. And then Pyotr had unsuspectingly drunk the water in the morning. And now he had died, and all of his precautions had gone to waste.

  Serjoža didn’t ask whether Pyotr had experienced sudden stomach pains, diarrhea, and vomiting, which were the first symptoms of thallium poisoning. Instead he let Pyotr continue, and Pyotr pressed on, telling him that the clock weight hadn’t budged no matter how he tried to tug on it as he floated, stretched out horizontally. His father had disappeared from beneath him, leaving the room with a concerned sigh—faking, of course, Pyotr added—to call the doctor. His little sister had burst into tears, and all his mother could do was stroke poor Pyotr’s forehead as it cooled.

  Serjoža listened to his patient in all seriousness, not allowing even the hint of a smile to reach his lips. And he wouldn’t laugh when he passed the case on later. That was part of his professional ethic: seriousness no matter how insane the story might be, and no matter how his listeners might double over in laughter, holding their stomachs and drying tears of mirth.

  But there was one feature in Pyotr’s story that to his knowledge had received no mention in the literature on Cotard’s Delusion, and from which Serjoža might derive a
marvelous peer-reviewed article which could receive hundreds if not thousands of citations in the future. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The question of how a written work can influence the onset of delusions in a mind susceptible to delusions. Pyotr would be Serjoža’s key to international success!

  Pyotr sat slumped before Serjoža, overcome with grief. He hadn’t managed to tell his mother, whom he trusted implicitly and loved boundlessly, that at the moment when he felt his spirit leaving, she should have quickly picked up the book next to his bed on the nightstand, opened it at the bookmark to page fifty-six, and read:

  O child of noble family, Pyotr, the time has come for you to choose a path. After your breath stops, the basic luminosity of the first bardo, which your guru has already shown you, will appear to you. This is the dharmatā, empty and open like space, a luminous void, pure, naked mind with neither center nor circumference. Recognize then, and remain in that state, and I will show you at the same time.