The World of the End (42 page)
Ben tried to bring the godget to life and realized the actor was right. “So what do I do? I have to let someone know that she’s come.… I have to…”
“But I didn’t even hear her last name.… You do know that in terms of statistics and probability…?”
“No!” Ben insisted. “You’re right, but I know it’s her.”
“How do you know it’s her?” the actor asked, looking at him curiously.
“Because it’s the plot twist that’s waited for its diabolical moment, it’s the end I never considered; she died and arrived in this world while I’m stuck in a charging multi with no way to get out, and by the time I reach the seventeenth century and get back to the beginning of the twenty-first, I’ll find that she’s changed her address for some reason or another and I’ll keep looking for her for years, knowing that she’s here and that I have no way of getting in contact with her.”
“But with all due respect to your very convincing show of panic, you’re forgetting a small, encouraging detail.”
“What?” Ben snapped. “What detail am I forgetting?”
“That if it really is the woman you’re so intent on finding, doesn’t it follow that she’ll be equally intent on finding you?”
Ben looked past him to the window, a desolate expression on his face. “Nothing makes sense anymore,” he said.
33
The Mysterious Ways of the Alias
“Dear aliases, I wish we were convened here today in this forest clearing for far less distressing reasons; however, to my dismay, that is not the case. The first strokes of dawn have just appeared, and I’m sure you would all prefer to have another hour of precious sleep rather than gather here on such short notice. I do beg your pardon. As forest director I saw no other alternative. You’re looking at me with unbridled curiosity and wondering why the ado and the dramatic tone. I salute your aliastic innocence and request that you steer your concentration toward one specific alias. Noble tree uprooters, if you look around, you’ll notice the glaring absence of 57438291108, a worker in plot 2,605,327 for the past fourteen years. He always seemed an excellent uprooter and never drew any kind of undesirable suspicion. Unfortunately, the absent alias managed to pull the wool over his work partner’s eyes and vent his rage in the most heinous manner, one that every previous forest director had warned against time and again. Needless to mention, we have taken every precaution to avoid this type of scenario—patrols through the plots, a pair of sentinels at the entrances, and a battalion of guards around the forest. Each and every one of you here in this clearing is well aware of the chilling implications of a lowly act of revenge, and who among us has not conjured the ghastly sight of a human sneaking into the forest and settling old scores with the slightest tug of a branch? My predecessors certainly did well by forming the legion of loyal guards devoted to safekeeping the trees, but they failed to fathom that the danger could well up from within.
“We must not ignore the fact that we, too, are the products of mortal loins, and the full panoply of human frailties flows through our veins, as well. Of course we’ve been granted a comfortable existence, far more wonderful than that offered to the dwellers of their world, where colossal moral rectitude is needed to properly deal with the unpredictable shadows lurking beneath their innate survival instinct, a world complex and susceptible to corruptive capriciousness. I’ve also heard of cases where aliases have grown deeply forlorn after an encounter with a mortal. Innocently, I thought we were immune to such lethal bitterness, until I came across the uprooting dossier of the Mendelssohn family. Over the course of the last decade, the final eight offspring have come to our world with an eyebrow-raising rate of expiration, a fact that spurred me to consult with Billion, the former director of the forest. Billion asserted that from time to time regrettable mishaps do occur, and when I raised the issue of possible malice, he dismissed it with great certainty, allaying my fears.
“And now is the time to share an intimate detail that, under different circumstances, I would spare you. As many of you know, I met a woman ten days ago and we have fallen in love. A woman, not an alias. Sandrine Montesquieu. My partner shocked me when she asked me to clarify the inexplicable suddenness of her death. Much like you, I figured it was just another one of those accidents that happen when an uprooter breaks off a branch inadvertently. I examined the relevant tree and couldn’t ignore the unequivocal signs. In addition, I noted the strange coincidence—the tree was in the same plot as the Mendelssohns’. Still, I did not act. I knew that only when the pathology report landed on my desk could it verify or dispel my suspicions.
“Yesterday, late in the evening, the report arrived. I won’t bore you with the details; I’ll merely state that the evidence of repeated criminal acts was irrefutable. The poor family’s tree suffered shocking abuse, systematic and intentional! I decided that my first task of the morning would be to confront the uprooter with the facts. I figured I’d be faced with vociferous resistance, overarching denial, or at the very least a great feigning of innocence. But I had no idea what would transpire before the first glint of dawn.
“Once again I must share a personal anecdote with you. Today, after not having seen each other for a year, my partner is to meet her best friend. They were to have met yesterday, but a certain hitch delayed the meeting and my partner had to wait on pins and needles until I could pull her friend’s faraway address from the central thumb directory. Last night, Sandrine couldn’t get to sleep and said she’d like to go out and clear her head. I asked where she’d like to go, and she giggled and said she’d been yearning to see her family tree, voicing a deep desire to witness her sap mark, where the branch had been severed. I explained that the rules forbid humans from entering and that even non-staff aliases are prohibited from going into the forest, but she had a hard time understanding me. At the end of a long argument, she convinced me to break the rules. ‘After all, you’re the forest director and you’ll be by my side,’ she said.
“And so it was. We reached the forest in the dead of night. Sandrine insisted that I tell her as much as possible—about the death crackles of the drooping branches, the fine threads strung by the Weavers, linking the crowns of the trees so that the binds of marriage could be accurately marked, and even about the gentle breeze that whistles slyly through the leaves. She was utterly enchanted by the forest and questioned me incessantly as I urged her toward the plot. I wanted to show her the mark and return home.
“When at long last we crossed into the desired plot and approached her family’s tree, Sandrine stopped me, said she thought there was someone there. We approached the tree with caution and could not believe our eyes. The criminal was in the midst of a wild attack, hanging at the two-point-oh-five-meter mark and ripping at branches as he spewed insults and invective. He didn’t notice us, and when I ordered him to cease and desist from his crazed behavior, he looked at me surprised and kept at it. Not left with much of a choice, I asked my partner to call the guards and I climbed after him, easily recognizing the criminal on the basis of his tattered boots, the footwear of an uprooter who spent much of his time brutally bashing the Mendelssohn trunk, as Billionandaquarter stated in his report. I grabbed his legs and pulled him down with all my might. He dropped wordlessly and, much to my surprise, passively. When I demanded an explanation for his actions, he started to warn me about my love: ‘You’ll see,’ he said, ‘she’ll do just what my alias did. She’s already made you violate the law.’ He got down on his knees and burst into tears. He told me that his beloved had left him again, that she had already left him twelve times, and that after each breakup he’d come to the plot to release his rage on the branches. This was the thirteenth and final time! He disclosed the whole truth as pertains to the Mendelssohns—seven detachments. As far as the tree’s final branch is concerned, he swears he was uninvolved. And in fact, an inspection of the dossier revealed a story of a meticulously planned suicide characteristic of natural withering, not malice. I asked him who the other four branches had been, and he said that three of them had fallen victim to the first three breakups. Turns out that as the uprooter’s modus operandi grew methodical, his confidence rose to levels that all of us combined would have a hard time attaining. The first three were ripped from random multi-limbed trees, but in the aftermath of the fourth breakup he focused, with parasitic criminality, on the aforementioned family. He explained that from the moment he happened upon their tree, the matter of choosing had been put to rest. An almost naked trunk, sporting eight final branches, a dynasty on the cusp of extinction. He didn’t grasp the paradox—on the contrary, he was sure that in this way he spared random branches and focused on one single tree, as though he were doing right by the rest of the plot when attacking the chosen tree. Once their tree was uprooted, a fresh victim in the form of my beloved’s tree was found, and in the aftermath of the twelfth breakup, he viciously severed the branch that brought her to my bosom. Surely the morbid and macabre interpretation of these events is that I should thank the murderer for his twelfth crime, but I refuse to accept that. The perpetrator of these crimes used his own lack of restraint and, instead of addressing his worsening problem, chose to draw malevolent strength from his “unpremeditated” murders. He claimed that he felt euphoric after the acts, as though his twisted soul had found solace.
“My partner lost control when she realized that he was responsible for her death and the wholly unnecessary deaths of two other family members, and she pounced on him, whipping his face with the generous help of the two downed branches. The task of disentangling them was not simple, especially considering that rather than express remorse, the idiot ranted about merely moving people from one world to another and that the latter was considered far superior anyway. I asked Sandrine to relax as I tried to convey to him the severity of his deeds. I explained that he had murdered fourteen innocent mortals, with only the abstract of motives. Much to the guards’ astonishment, he laughed and said he had no idea what all the fuss was about. In the end, all branches are severed. A moment before he was taken by the guards, he smiled and asked, ‘When a man raises a gun and shoots another man, and at exactly that same second an uprooter breaks off the victim’s branch, who is responsible? The one who pulled the trigger or the one who pulled the branch?’
“I wasn’t tripped up by his question, and I requested that he quit trying to avoid taking responsibility for his offenses. He glared at me with a pair of fossilized eyes and repeated the question in a toying voice. This time I didn’t relent and I said, ‘The one responsible for the death is the one who’s taken the life, and in the case you’ve described, there seems to be a random collaboration.’ ‘But how can I collaborate with someone I don’t even know?’ he asked, playing innocent. ‘The same way you can kill them,’ I responded, unwilling to listen to another word.
“Two hours later, in accordance with the Code of Unusual Criminal Offenses, I called the five former forest directors to my office in order to sentence the tree uprooter. The six of us unanimously decided that he was responsible for the deaths of fourteen innocent mortal beings, seven of them from the same family, and therefore will be punished with the utmost severity, with no extenuating circumstances. We brought the accused into the room and informed him we’d reached a decision. He thought, wrongly, that we’d suffice with ceremonial banishment from the forest and a request for him to return his uprooter’s boots. At that point I realized how right we were in our judgment, not least for his lack of contrition and comprehension. Billion asked to elucidate the linkage between the severing of branches and death.
“Allow me to quote from the protocol of Unusual Criminal Trials, 2001: ‘For those living in the previous world, death has no meaning beyond the negation of their existence. Many of them are albeit involved in the development of different and strange theories that help them contend with the fear of the unknown, but until they reach the Other World their anxiety is alive and well. They cling to their lives with all their might, resisting the end. Imagine, 57438291108, that one day you ceased to exist. Are you even able to envision such a terrifying notion? After all, even a seven over three pales in comparison to their understanding of the black hole that awaits them. Now that we’ve established the fear, let us turn to the element of danger. For the living human being, danger lurks at all times, in all places. He can cross the street and find himself under the wheels of a moving vehicle, he can frolic in a body of water and find himself pulled to the depths by a whirlpool, he can stand on a mountaintop in the middle of a summer hike and fall into an abyss, and he can, of course, fall victim to his own traitorous body. We are absolutely forbidden from intervening in any way! We are merely responsible for the documentation of the trees’ development, providing them with the best possible care. And not for naught do we guard the forest of family trees with such stridency. We, too, much like our friends from that other world, wish to protect them as much as possible from the many dangers that existence holds, and we, too, bow our heads in anguish when humanity brings awful calamities down upon itself or when nature strikes an unexpected blow. The devoted care we provide the trees is our effort to afford them a tranquil, storm-free existence, in the hope that in death the formerly living will arrive here with as light a load as possible. The uprooter’s job is to pick up the fallen branches and uproot the naked trees. When an uprooter takes the law into his own hands and maliciously tears branches away, he does not merely transfer an individual from one world to the other. With his own hands he uproots the living’s ability to survive in their danger-filled universe and seeds indescribable suffering among the loved ones left behind. Such a person hastens the end! I looked long and hard at the Mendelssohn family dossier and I am forced to conclude with frightful grief that each and every one of those eight family members fell prey to the type of circumstance that only strengthens my argument regarding the diversity of existential dangers.